Tai ngay!!! Ban co the xoa dong chu Paths to Post-Nationalism OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS General Editors: Nikolas Coupland Adam Jaworski Cardiff University Recently Published in the Series: Talking about Treatment: Recommendations for Breast Cancer Adjuvant Treatment Felicia D. Roberts Language in Time: The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction Peter Auer, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Frank Müller Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse Maryann Overstreet A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar Julie Lindquist Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections Edited by Carmen Fought Prescribing under Pressure: Parent-Physician Conversations and Antibiotics Tanya Stivers Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis Theo van Leeuwen Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America Edited by Angela Reyes and Adrienne Lo Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives Edited by Alexandra Jaffe Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting Nancy C. Dorian Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study Kay Richardson Language without Rights Lionel Wee Paths to Post-Nationalism Monica Heller Paths to Post-Nationalism A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity Monica Heller 2011 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heller, Monica. Paths to post-nationalism : a critical ethnography of language and identity / Monica Heller. — (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. French language—Political aspects—Canada.
French language—Social aspects—Ontario. French-Canadians—Language.44′90971—dc22 2010007439 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Nik Coupland and Adam Jaworski, for inciting me to write this book and for their support and guidance. The research I draw on here was supported by the following agencies: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Transcoop Fund of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Germany), the Ontario Ministry of Education, the Multiculturalism Directorate, Secretary of State (Canada), le Conseil international d’études canadiennes and l’Office de la langue française, Gouvernement du Québec. The research would not have been possible without the involvement of my colleagues and our students (and students who became col- leagues): Jean-Paul Bartholomot, Maurice Beaudin, Lindsay Bell, Annette Boudreau, Gabriele Budach, Mark Campbell, Phyllis Dalley, Michelle Daveluy, Gabriella Djerrahian, Lise Dubois, Alexandre Duchêne, Jürgen Erfurt, Stéphane Guitard, Philippe Hambye, Emmanuel Kahn, Nor- mand Labrie, Patricia Lamarre, Stéphanie Lamarre, Matthieu LeBlanc, Mélanie Le Blanc, Darryl Leroux, Florian Levesque, Laurette Lévy, Josée Makropoulos, Sonya Malaborza, Mireille McLaughlin, Deirdre Meintel, Claudine Moïse, Hubert Noël, Luc Ostiguy, Donna Patrick, Joan Pujolar, Carsten Quell, Mary Richards, Sylvie Roy, Emanuel da Silva, Chantal White, Maia Yarymowich, and Natalie Zur Nedden.
The book has benefited greatly from the close reading, information gathering, connection making, and intellectual exploration provided by Mireille McLaughlin, Kyoko Motobayashi, and Jeremy Paltiel, who accom- panied me at every step of the writing project and read every word (often more than once), and if they got tired of talking about the questions the book raised, they never let on. Patricia Lamarre, Matthieu LeBlanc, Candida Paltiel, and Joan Pujolar provided keys at crucial moments. Thanks to Meaghan Hoyle and Natalie Kaiser for the maps. Two anony- mous reviewers provided thought-provoking, helpful comments.
I am most indebted to the people who taught me what I learned in thirty years of conversations across francophone Canada and beyond. They may not all agree with the story I tell here, but they have always been willing to talk. v This page intentionally left blank Contents 1 Sociolinguistics as Social Practice, 3 1.1 A Story for Our Times, 3 1.2 A Brief Consideration of Sociolinguistics and the Nation-State, 7 1.3 Toward a Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics, 9 1.4 Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Francophone Canada, 12 1.5 From Traditionalist to Modernizing to Post-Nationalist Discourse of the Francophone Nation, 21 2 Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics, 31 2.2 Critique and Ontology, 34 2.5 Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics and the Globalized New Economy: From Workforce to Wordforce, 50 3 La foi, la race, la langue: Catholic Ethnonationalism in Francophone Canada (1926–1965, with an Interjection from 2000), 52 3.1 Discursive and Institutional Change, 52 3.2 L’Ordre de Jacques Cartier, 53 3.3 A Secret Society Seen from Below, 55 3.4 The OJC, Modernity, and Traditional Ideologies of Language and Identity, 61 3.5 The Dissolution and Its Aftermath, 65 4 Brewing Trouble: Language, the State, and Modernity in Industrial Beer Production (Montreal, 1978–1980), 74 4.1 Investigating Modernizing Nationalism: Sociolinguistics in the Brewery, 74 4.2 The Ethnolinguistic Organization of Expansion and Technologization, 79 4.3 Position and Interest in the Francization of the Brewery, 81 vii viii Contents 4.4 The Interactional Accomplishment of Francophonization, 84 4.5 Discursive Shift and Political Economic Change, 90 4.6 And What Is a Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics Here? 92 5 From Identity to Commodity: Schooling, Social Selection, and Social Reproduction (Toronto, 1983–1996), 94 5.1 If They Are Québécois, Who Are We? 94 5.2 Education and Institutional Territorial Nationalism, 96 5.3 Constructing an “Oasis”, 101 5.4 Identities and Commodities, 109 5.5 Crawling to Neoliberalism, 113 6 Neoliberalism and La cause: Modernizing Nationalism at Its Limits (Lelac, 1997–2004), 114 6.1 The Milieu associatif as Discursive Space, 114 6.2 From Rights to Profits: Canada’s Neoliberal Turn, 116 6.3 Lelac: Potatoes, Milk, Trees, Tourists, and the Highway, 121 6.4 From Cultural Survival to Added Value, 124 6.5 Le Festival du Village, 128 7 Selling the Nation, Saving the Market (All Over the Place, 2001–Present), 145 7.1 Authenticity and Language in the New Economy, 145 7.2 Tourism, Terroir, and the Performance of Identity, 151 7.3 Bounding Francophone Space, 162 7.4 Problems of Linguistic Commodification, 164 7.5 Paradoxes and Potentials, 170 8 Paths to Post-Nationalism, 173 8.1 Leaking Meta-Commentary, 173 8.2 The Poster Boys of Post-Nationalism, 184 8.3 Cool Irony, High Anxiety? 189 8.4 Ethnographies of Discursive Shifts, 192 8.5 Epilogue, 193 Notes, 195 Bibliography, 201 Index, 217 Canada: Provinces and Territories Courtesy Meaghan Hoyle and Natalie Kaiser Eastern Canada Courtesy Meaghan Hoyle and Natalie Kaiser Paths to Post-Nationalism This page intentionally left blank 1 Sociolinguistics as Social Practice 1.1 A STORY FOR OUR TIMES A number of years ago, I got a phone call from a friend and colleague in France. She wanted some advice on how to handle what appeared to her (and to me) to be a rather unusual request.
The day before, someone from the police station in a nearby city had called her, asking her to act as a consultant on a case. They had a tape from a wiretap on a suspected drug dealer, but they were having a hard time understanding what was said. The reason, they said, was that the suspect, a man originally from Senegal now living in France, was speaking Canadian French to his contacts, who, at the time of the recorded conversation, were apparently somewhere in northern Ontario. The police decided they needed a linguist with knowl- edge of Canadian French, contacted the nearest university, and somehow found my friend.
A number of things about this story are important for any reflection about sociolinguistics and sociolinguists today. The first has to do with the apparent facts of the case. Our discipline has been based on ideas about language and society that take as a baseline a stable connection between speakers, places, times, and social position, and then tries to get a handle on how variability is built around that. Here we have a number of things that are out of place and out of time.
How do police in France end up having to figure out what a person from Senegal speaking Canadian French is saying? The answer seems to rest with the ways the gray- and black-economy dimensions of the globalized economy work (Castells 2000). The illegal drug market requires managing a worldwide flow of resources distributed through complex and widely distributed networks; as resources move around, so do the people involved (Appadurai 1996). But managing that flow, and dealing with the many problems of state surveillance that come with the territory (so to speak) of working in cross-border illicit activity requires an ability to mobilize communicative resources and to turn in communicative performances that allow the flow to go on uninterrupted. So an African meets up with Canadians in Central America (or so the police claimed) and, for reasons and in ways we will never be able to fully describe or explain, is able to appropriate their linguistic resources and 3 4 Paths to Post-Nationalism use them in ways which, we know minimally, at least confound some agents of state surveillance.
Certainly people have been moving around, crossing boundaries, and learning languages for a long time, but sociolin- guistics is only now confronting what it means to put this phenomenon at the center of its concerns. So the first thing I explore in this book is what it means to take seriously the possibility that maybe the baseline is not a baseline at all, but rather mobility (Sheller and Urry 2006) and multiplicity. The second has to do with what my friend was doing in this situation. She learned her Canadian French as a doctoral candidate in linguistics, doing what in many ways is a classic thing for a sociolinguist to do.
She got on a plane, and then a bus, and got off in northern Ontario. What is a nice girl from southern France doing in Sudbury? It turns out she was not particularly interested in describing the features of the French spoken there (although many other people have been), but rather in what this language meant to its speakers, a relevant question to ask in a place where people are always talking about language and judging other people on the basis of it. Nonetheless, this was not what the police were interested in, not in the least. They wanted an expert, someone who could be constructed as having irrefutable claims to knowing what the suspect and his interlocutors were saying.
The place to find a language expert, of course (of course?), is a university. Hence my friend’s call to me: she knew she was being constructed as a holder of objective truths, while she under- stands herself as a producer of situated knowledge—an interpreter, not a transmitter. The final element of the story (no, I have no idea what happened to the suspect, or to the alleged drugs, for that matter) is what she did. She went, listened, and found the sound quality too poor to be able to make out much of anything.
My point is simply that she chose to be in the conversation, knowing that whatever she did she would be mak- ing a choice about her actions in a situation complicated by issues having to do with globalization, post-colonialism, migration, and state regulation of goods and people; she also knew that she had limited control over how others would construct her, her knowledge and her actions. While this story struck both me and my friend as intriguing at the time, it stayed with me as a precursor of things that seem to pop up more and more since then, with such regularity that it is hard to know where to store all the examples.