From Roots to Routes
Locating Montreal multilingual youth within Quebec’s hegemonic discourse
By Eva Gracia-Turgeon 10853553 Supervisors: Dr. Siniša Malešević University College Dublin
School of Sociology
Dr. Michael S. Merry Universitiet van Amsterdam
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
Dr. Aitor Ibarrola Universidad de Deusto
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas
2 Declaration
I, Eva Gracia-Turgeon, declare this thesis as my own and that it complies with the completion and assessment standards of the MISOCO Programme. This thesis was submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Masters of Sociology
in the Programme of
International Migration and Social Cohesion
May 4, 2016
Date Author’s name
3 Acknowledgment
Muchas gracias to all people I had the chance to meet along this journey, those who inspired me, those who supported me, those who confronted me.
4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgement………..……II
CHAPTER 1: Introducing the journey ………….………..………..…7
Bonjour/Hi: a question of position……….7
Mapping Montreal’s multilingualism………..…………..8
Setting this inquiry……….………9
Overview of the thesis………...….9
CHAPTER 2: The nation and its narration: Quebec’s national myth………....11
From French to Canadians……….…..11
The rise of nationalism………...…..14
Becoming Québécois: the institutionalization of a Francophone nation………...…..16
Montreal’s changing landscape: a tale of sound and vision………....22
En Français s.v.p……….….23
The visible………24
CHAPTER 3: LangCrit: at the intersection of the Heard and the Seen……….….27
Critical Sociolinguistics and language ideology………..…27
Situating languaging and language practices………...………29
Multilingualism………31
Multilingualism in Montreal………33
Intersecting the Self-as-Seen ………...…34
5
Speak White……….………38
Intersection of heard and seen: LangCrit……….………40
CHAPTER 4: Methodology and Research design………..……42
Research design……….….….….42
Generating ethnographic data………..…………43
Crystallization……….……….44 Getting in touch………...…….45 Setting criteria………..46 Interviews……….………47 Mapping………...…49 Self-interview………..…….49
Transcription and re-presentation………..………..50
Introducing my participants……….51 A. Baby Boomers……….………..51 B. Kids of Bill 101……….…..……..53 Coding……….….……57 Limitations……….……..58 A. Of the methods……….…….….58
B. Of the form and frame……….…….……..59
On ethics and being a “researcher”………..……59
CHAPTER 5: My voice with others’ words...62
Research questions………...………62
6
2. Establishing Quebequicité……….…..65
2.1 Through the audible……….……..65
2.2 Through the visible……….….…..67
3. Thinking and doing language………...……69
3.1 Language policy……….71
3.2 Views on translanguaging………..…………72
3.3 Translanguaging for the languagers………...………73
4. Montreality……….………..………77
4.1 "Another World"……….…….…..77
A. Baby Boomers………...…..77
B. Kids of Bill 101………..…….78
CHAPTER 6: of Fluidity and Multiplicity……….81
Thesis overview...81
Emerging discussions and limitations...…...………...…...…81
A. Methodological………..………….81
B. Theoretical………..……….82
C. Pedagogical………...…..83
Conclusion……….………..85
7
CHAPTER 1: Introducing the journey
“Everybody wants to be the empire state building, something bigger, no guys...” Mario
Bonjour/Hi: a question of position
Arriving in Montreal in 2013 was for me the beginning of a new relation to the English language. I first entered the customer service job market as a Francophone with basic English knowledge, working as a sale’s associate. Having to greet customers with the Bonjour/Hi formula was the constant reminder that I had entered a new linguistic territory, one that still held tensions towards linguistic boundaries. I learned pretty quickly about those boundaries as people’s reaction indicated which part of the Bonjour or the Hi did not feel like very welcoming to them. I also experienced frustration when realizing the proportion of people who did not identify to the first part of my greeting. On the other hand, I realized how those who did not speak French had limited access to the job market, the one I so easily entered. As my social circles changed and expanded so did my linguistic repertoire. As I began mixing and appropriating words, I started navigating languages and spaces through a flow that became my own personal voice and path. But as the power dynamics behind languages unraveled, that year in Montreal, so did my own positionality. My white upper middle class bubble was being challenged within this new reality, within this Montreal reality, Montreality. Mostly, I realized how, as a white Francophone who only knew Quebec’s reality post 1990’s, “I was taking up space because I was never not given space” (self-interview). Understanding myself differently, my power position and privilege leaded me to this inquiry: I wanted to understand what it meant to not be given space in the ways I had been, but mostly I wanted to know how one created space when relegated to the margins.
As I began seeing myself as a researcher, I struggled between the lines of academia and my own personal voice, and I struggled to locate myself within this inquiry. Using my positionality as part of this research project means acknowledging this is my personal narration of others (counter)narratives.
8
Along with my participants, I experienced this thesis process as an attempt to view and name ourselves in our own words, with our own voices.
Mapping Montreal’s multilingualism
French is the official language of Quebec. Since 1977 with the enactment of the Charter of French Language (also known as Bill 101), the French public school system became mandatory to all non-Canadian English speakers. Such measure, within Bill 101, was a direct response to the growing Anglicization of immigration in Montreal. For the “children of Bill 101” who were schooled through this French system, the classrooms became a smaller scale reflection of the growing diversity of the city, to which often teachers were not prepared (Crump, 2014a). Even if classes were given in French and students had to speak French in school, linguistic proximity of many various repertoire created new language mixtures and shaped new linguistic expressions crossing traditional linguistic boundaries. For decades, French and English borrowed vocabulary from one another, and with major coexistence of both languages arose what is called Franglais – switching between French and English in the same speech act (Mather, 2015) – what linguists refer to as code-switching, a common practice, especially among urban youth or multilingual groups (Rampton, 1995). But with growing multicultural youth, the phenomenon quickly extended and some new borrowed words appeared in youth repertoire (from Arabic, Haitian Creole, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, to name a few) further stretching Quebec’s monolinguistic conception of language (Heller, 2007; Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2009; Mather, 2015). In summer 2014 post-rap group Dead Obies were condemned by the media, for their extensive use of Franglais, which was identified in the media as French language “bastardization”, or some sort of linguistic sophistication of the colonized1 (Bock-Côté, 2014). Opponents stressed such “language” was a direct threat to French language. The debate was later brought back in October that year when young movie director Xavier Dolan portrayed his character using Franglais in his movie Mommy. Again,
9
journalists and so-called intellectuals denounced how “pure French” was on the verge of disappearing (Warren, 2014) as it was undergoing a “creolization” process that could be lethal for the future of Quebec's French language (Bock-Côté, 2014).
Setting this inquiry
Departing from these linguistic tensions I started asking myself: How does Montreal multilingual youth positions itself within Quebec’s hegemonic national narrative? In 2003, an inquiry on ethnic diversity in Canada revealed that discrimination on grounds of language -linguicism- was stronger in the case of “visible minorities” (Bourhis, Montreuil, Helly & Jantzen, 2007). Ethnicity being a proxy for race, I realized understanding the nature, the meaning and the effects of multilingual practices on languagers would not be complete if race was not part of the equation. In any space associated to a national context – structured by heterogeneity management policies controlled by an invisible (white) majority – regimes of exclusion, such as race and language, need to intersect in order to capture the wingspan of their impact on people. In the spirit of intersectionality, I based my theoretical framework on my adaptation of Alison Crump (2014 a) LangCrit's concept. LangCrit merges Critical Language and Race Theory in an attempt to address the experience of the self-as-heard and the self-as-seen (Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2007) for the case of Montreal’s multilingual youth. Throughout the inquiry I proceeded to follow a Critical Ethnographic research design: generating data through in-depth interviews and mappings, while reflecting on the whole project by a self-interview conducted at the inquiry's end.
Overview of the thesis
I first introduced you to the journey behind this thesis in this first of six chapters. The next chapter consists of a detailed account of the becoming of the Quebecois nation as known today, the deconstruction of its construction through the past 400 years. Further, chapter three explores the literature that inspired this inquiry, from Critical Sociolinguistics to Critical White Studies (CWS) and
10
the theoretical concepts behind my choice of words. Chapter four takes a look at Critical Ethnographic methods and documents all steps constituting the research design of this thesis. The analysis of the data generated throughout my research will be presented in chapter five under four main themes respectively: the hegemonic discourse; Quebequicité through the audible and visible self; the thinking and doing of language; and the sense of place and self attached to Montreal. Finally, chapter six concludes with emerging discussions and limitations.
11
CHAPTER 2: The nation and its narration: Quebec's national myth
Myth acts as a charter for the present-day social order; it supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief, the function of which is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events.
Malinowski in Bhabha, 2013:44 With this chapter, I intend to set the scene for an understanding of the Quebecois nation's myth over time. By going through a version of the Quebecois’ nation HIStory2 I want to unravel it's knowledge production process into discourses of legitimation and domination. Nations as discursive formations are ones that “lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizon in the mind’s eye” (Bhabha, 2013: 1). Hence, understanding the construction process behind Quebec’s imagined community (Anderson, 2006) is a first step towards deconstructing its hegemonic discourse about language. This chapter starts by exploring the different discursive phases that pace the French settler’s occupation of today's Quebec territory, followed by a specific look at contemporary changes that affected Montreal.
From French to French Canadian
French settler's HIStory in Canada starts in 1534 with Jacques Cartier's arrival and appropriation in the name of the King of France, on what was later called New-France. For many years, little effort is put forth by the French metropole to establish colonies on the territory: it is too demanding economically and what seems to be of major interest at the time- fur trade- doesn't demand any elaborated occupation of the territory. Opposed to the populous and wealthy settlements of the English, French colonies
2 From a feminist point of view history is not simply history; it was always a man’s tale, explaining the usage of HIStory from now on.
12
survived for a long time due to trade routes and of the establishment of Catholic missions that aimed to “civilize” the indigenous populations present on the land long before any settler colony.
In 1700 the French colony was 15, 000 people who lived mainly from agriculture (Dumont, 1973). With England winning the Seven Year War against France in 1759, New-France colony is yield to the English. The French elite left around 65 000 settlers – peasants, merchants, voyageurs, coureurs des bois (literally meaning runner of the woods), and members of the Catholic Church in charge of health and education- to the new power ruled by a small English elite (Heller, 2007). Much discussion takes place among the new rulers to determine the ways in which a French majority can be managed when so clearly “ethnically” different. In 1774, after various attempts, the British pass the Act of Quebec which allows French Canadians (no longer French) to practice their catholic religion, keep their land division regime and their Civic Code of law. Hence, those dispositions indirectly preserved the French language (Crump, 2014b). From that moment on, English and French became different ethnic entities with systems and infrastructures that often operated in parallel, creating a constitutive social stratification (Heller, 2007). Identified as a “traditional society” (Dumont, 1973), the French Canadian population at the time is poorly educated and depicted as suited for physical work, attached to the land and with little concern for capital or ambition to gain any (Durham report in Dumont, 1973). In contrast, English elites arrive with capital and education and aims to extend the economical market. The only educated French Canadians are members of the Catholic Church whom are mediating power between the British rulers and the population (Dumont, 1973). This structure grew stronger over the end of the 18th century, creating an alliance of counterrevolutionary elites: one side was the Catholic Church opposed to the ideas of the French Revolution and on the other side, the British rulers and the loyalist exiles that just fled from the American War of Independence (Heller, 2007).
Within this context a new bourgeoisie slowly emerges, a French Canadian one, composed of liberals who saw in the new constitutional system brought by the British rulers an opportunity to get the
13
political representation they never had. In parliament, French Canadians were trying empower themselves while reinforcing their agrarian based system, but for the English the whole traditional society was structurally inadequate for economic growth. What became clear to this new Francophone elite was the need to create a legitimate and unifying ideology against the British in order to obtain more rights and possibilities according to their ways. However, the republican ideas of this bourgeoisie did not fit the Catholic moral values and conceptions of the traditional society, which resulted in little support from the population for most of the 19th century to the bourgeoisie's claims. Patriot uprising (1837), which, according to most contemporary textbooks was a popular uprising (Garneau, 1859), had shown to be pushed by the bourgeoisie and done with little support from the populace (Dumont, 1973). Indeed how could a population almost entirely devoted to agriculture (90%) have the time to support the small injustices of an emerging bourgeoisie?
This failed attempt created a state of despair among the French Canadian bourgeoisie: the elders started to be pessimistic about change while youth were confronted by the lack of opportunity due to the saturation of educated young men in a system still structured to sustain agriculture. For them, the failure of 1837 is seen as a betrayal from external economic interests, mostly associated to British whom control most of capital at the time. With feelings resentment and dislocation, many chose to return to the land, and to turn to a more traditional lifestyle (Dumont, 1973). Rural areas were the gauges of an authenticity they never really lived, one that contrasted with the false pretense of the cosmopolite city they could not access without controlling the capital (King in Bhabha, 2013). Through nostalgia about the folklore a new phenomenon emerges. A corpus of romantic literature is brought to life, in Edward Said's words; we assist to the rise of nationalism “heroic narratives”: epics allegorizing an old national past, with a clear aversion for capital and modernity. It is “the emergence of the political 'rationality' of the nation as a form of narrative — textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and figurative stratagems —” (Bhabha, 2013: 2). This romantic turn served as the baseline to
14
the first nationalist ideology for French Canadian, identified by Heller (2007) as the “traditionalist” nationalism.
The rise of nationalism
One of the more influential pieces that appeared from the romantic literature corpus at the time was François-Xavier Garneau l'Histoire du Canada (1852). Depicting the British conquest as the most tragic moment in French Canadian HIStory, Garneau like many of his time, participated in the discursive shift behind the rise of traditional nationalism. For Dumont (1973), Garneau contributes greatly to the historical conscience of his time and for those to come. He does so, in an exercise of transposition: from a class ideology (that of the bourgeoisie at the time) he created a popular conscience: traditional nationalism. Garneau takes part in a discursive shift that moves away from political and constitutional freedom to popular freedom. The population is a racial (linguistic) one, the French Canadian, and its freedom now lies in the imagination of a nation. This new romantic discourse about a collective community gathered under the same language, religion and race (la foi, la race, la langue) and is not tied to any political territory, it is a nation that exist in an exclusive social space, a space understood as “natural” land (Heller, 2007: 14). By giving a new cohesive sense to the past, Garneau gave tools and reasons for the people to “continue the fight” (Dumont, 1973), a fight to free the people from English domination.
Traditional nationalism grew stronger mostly because class position remained very unequal, heightened by religious differences. Even during the industrial revolution, French Canadians were the working force, the cheap labor available to the English industries and companies. As Heller (2007) observes, the radicalization of labor hierarchies is common to colonial regimes; what is particular to the case of Canada is the incorporation of one of the colonial settlers' group under the subordination of the other.
15
As in many colonial regimes, indigenous populations were out of the equation since most were eliminated or extremely marginalized relegated outside society through the violence of settler colonialism3. Hence, because class stratification overlapped ethnolinguistic categories, the class dimension was quickly incorporated into ethnolinguistic distinction. “If francophone were poor and badly educated, it was because (in the English view) their Roman Catholic religion led them to have too many children and prevented them from access the Enlightenment knowledge (or, in the French view, because their spiritual values were superior to the mercenary ones of the English)” (Heller, 2007: 16). During the period known as the great darkness (1939-1959) ruled by conservative Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis and the Catholic Church, traditionalist nationalism discourse was very much alive (Zubrzycki, 2013). Its political slogan “Heaven is blue; Hell is red” was highly symbolic: red always symbolized the English, and at that time represented the Liberal Party, and blue which historically was tied to the French, represented the Union Party (Conservative Party). Duplessis' era was characterized by the political and religious ideology of la survivance (Iacovino, 2015). This ideology was intended to ensure the cultural survival of French Canadian and its rural “purity” by avoiding its proximity to urban Anglophones (Levine, 1990 in Crump, 2014b). Following the spirit of traditional nationalism, agrarianism was crucial for la survivance, which promoted, at the same time, a total rejection of capitalist values (Crump, 2014b).
Thus, since the very beginning, the co-existence of “two solitudes” was characterized by parallel systems of education, health (both religious institutions) and social institutions (Larrivée, 2003). This long lasting ethno-linguistic-religious dichotomy allowed for (implicit) language rights for both French and English, keeping language away from the political arena until the Quiet Revolution. However, up until 1960, little had changed in the labor hierarchy dominated by the English economic minority. The disparities were even clearer in Montreal, where in 1961, wages for Francophones were less than half
3 For Indigenous scholars on Indigenousness, historical erasure and decolonization see Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff Corntassel,
16
of those of the Anglophones (Levine, 1990) and around the same time, 80% of the enterprises were Anglophone owned (The Canadian Encyclopedia). Further, if both languages were present in the landscape, they did uniquely: “Anglophones used monolingualism as a mode of domination […]: for Anglophones, monolingualism was normal; for Francophones, it was a deficit” (Heller, 2007: 31). Hence, English, not French, was the language of business and upward mobility (Bourhis, 2000).
Already, Montreal had received several waves of new migrants, first Jews, than Italians and after WWII major immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (Levine, 1990). Newcomers, who at first were outside the Francophone/Anglophone dichotomy, were somehow going to be assigned a side. As mentioned earlier, schools were confessional, and the Catholic schools continued to push forward la survivance ideology, often translated in a refusal to admit migrant children to their schools, regardless of their religious beliefs. Moreover, many migrants often chose to school their children through Protestant schools because English language was more valuable in the labor market and because Anglo-Protestant schools received more funding and thus appeared to guarantee a better education. This led to a massive Anglicization of Quebec immigration and accentuated the linguistic isolation of Francophones. Religion, which tended to be the strongest identity marker distinguishing both groups in Quebec, did not allow for incorporation of other Catholic newcomers (Italians, Polish, Irish) with Francophones because the conservative survivance vision was driven by race purity and its maintenance. Only, after Duplessis' death in 1959, did French Canadians start to see how the Catholic Church forced them into becoming withdrawn (Zubrzycki, 2013). This marks the beginning of the Quiet Revolution.
Becoming Québécois: the institutionalization of a Francophone nation
Hobsbawm explains how the rise of bourgeoisie is tied to the construction of national state market, how their control is legitimized through the ideology of the nation (Hobsbawm, 1990 in Heller, 2007).
17
Traditional nationalism in Quebec rejected the idea of the nation state tied to a national market – explaining why it failed in maintaining its small bourgeoisie- but such was not the case of modernist nationalism (Heller, 2007). The Quiet Revolution was the takeover of the political, economic and social structure from Francophones. Under Jean Lesage's liberal party and famous slogan “Maitres chez nous” (Master in our own house), Francophones dismantled the two biggest regimes of domination that previously controlled them: the Church ruled society; and the English ruled economy. In a decade, Francophones operated a collective rattrapage (catching up) through the entire rebuilding of the national welfare state. Through secularization, the Church was removed from all institutions, at the same time losing its power over Francophones who drastically stopped practicing. With new lows of people participating in religious practice, birth rates plummeted. From an average of 4 children in 1959 (the highest in Canada), the woman in Quebec decreased to 2.09 children in 1972 hitting the lowest birth rate in the country (Zubrzycki, 2013).
Along with other liberation movements occurring at the same time around the world, Quebec's Quiet Revolution and its modern nationalist discourse followed the anti-colonialist movement, where the Canadian state was understood to be the representation of the British Empire and the colonial power (Heller, 2007). Paradoxically, and like other anti-colonist movement before, the Francophone “take over” did not contest the notion of nation-state as constructed by the English, rather it aimed for a control of its access, a privilege they were until then, denied. “In that sense, although it was undertaken in the name of political and economic liberation of a marginalized group […]: its objective was the creation of a regional market to be controlled by Francophones, in order to increase their chance of social mobility, as Francophones” (Heller, 2007: 22). Indeed, for the emerging Francophone middle class, the Quiet Revolution was an opportunity to assert their hold on the economy and to maintain their position and cultural capital through institutions within a welfare state. But preserving the benefits of mobilization also meant maintaining the idea of the Francophone as a nation; its cohesion was thus
18
crucial to the project undertaken by the Quiet Revolution. As life conditions improved, a growing pride of ‘being Francophone’ emerged in Quebec, a new modern identity, not French, nor Canadian; Quebecois. In the wake of that Quebecitude, the English were viewed as a threat to Quebecois culture (Levine, 1990). After losing one of the more cohesive elements of the French Canadian identity under la survivance (e.g. religion) the nationalist (now modernist) discourse needed something else. French language was seen as a cohesive element of the lived experience of Francophones that still opposed to the English. As such French became the first marker of this new Quebecitude, one theoretically more inclusive. Indeed, anyone can learn a language. The French language grew stronger with the Quiet Revolution, through institutions that maintained and fixed its position. First, came the Office de la Langue Française (OLF) in 1961, the organization was given the task to guarantee quality and status of French language in Quebec. For Lesage's liberals “bien parler, c'est se respecter” (to speak well is to respect oneself) (The Canadian Encyclopedia). Five years later the OLF presented a white paper to the government stating the importance of making French language the main language in Quebec. While the proposition did not directly lead to a policy, this was its premise and very first attempt to design a linguistic policy (Crump, 2014b ; Levine, 1990).
Quebecois nationalism and its affirmation took different shapes but its shift from the previous French Canadian identity created a separation from other Francophones in Canada (Crump, 2014b; Heller, 2007). One the most radical groups, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a left-wing separatist organization started targeting symbols of the English establishment. From small acts of disobedience, or sabotage, to bombs in mailboxes (the post is a federal jurisdiction) they became more violent and orchestrated a double kidnapping. With a British diplomat and one of its ministers taken hostage, Quebec's Prime minister at the time, Robert Bourassa, asked the Canadian government for help. Implementing War measures, the Federal government brought the army to patrol Montreal city, arresting without warrant anyone suspected of affiliation to the nationalist cause. The October Crisis of
19
1970 culminated with the liberation of British diplomat James Cross and the death of Minister Pierre Laporte, found in a car trunk by the police. Generally, the population did not support the violent turn taken by the FLQ, but that did not stop nationalism from getting more support (Levine, 1990). The growing influx of immigrants to Montreal and their subsequent Anglicization coupled with the backlash of birth rates- also due to the feminist movement and the popularization of birth control methods- brought language issues to the front stage (Crump, 2014b). In Montreal, the language polemic began with the Saint Leonard crisis. For the first time, freedom of choice in language of education got to the public’s attention and was made one of the bigger issues in the political landscape.
Up until 1955, Saint Leonard was a Francophone municipality of Montreal. With the highway construction, many Italians established themselves in Saint Leonard. As a result, the Catholic school board decided to open bilingual elementary schools to encourage Francization. While Italians started sending their children to the Catholic schools, children still mostly entered English secondary schools. The school board quickly understood that Anglicization was not going to slow down. Consequently, in 1968, the school board decided to cut the project declaring that French was going to be the language of instruction in all elementary schools of Saint Léonard (Levine, 1990). Parents were furious, they threatened to remove their children from schools and withhold school taxes. As the crisis gained more attention from the public and the media, it became clear that language policies needed to be clarified and managed by the government.
To overcome the crisis, the government drafted the first language policy in Quebec: Bill 85. This piece of legislation required that everyone who graduated in the province did so with a “working knowledge” of French (The Canadian Encyclopedia) but did not touch on the choice of educational language. Strongly decried by Francophones, because it would maintain the status quo on the choice of educational language, Bill 85 was rejected. This situation led to the creation of the Gendron
20
Commission, mandated to study the language challenge in Quebec. After the first recommendations in 1969, a second attempt from the government materialized with Bill 63, which was aimed at the promotion of French – without stating how exactly – leaving room for freedom of choice regarding educational language. Bill 63 was adopted despite Francophone pressure to do more for French language protection. The legislation put an end to the Saint Leonard crisis, but only postponed Quebec's linguistic issue.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Canada, the rise of Quebec's nationalism started to be seen as a serious threat to Canadian unity. Until 1962, Canada’s immigration policy was highly discriminatory based on migrant’s race and/or country of origin. This was later replaced by framing immigration in capitalistic terms, were migrants were valued regarding their individual “skills” and knowledge (education). Elected in 1968, Trudeau wanted to bring a sense of pride, of canadianness. Nevertheless, he still “needed to find a way to maintain its [Canada] White-settler identity with racialized ‘Others’ placed lower on the hierarchy, but without an explicit race-based discourse” (Crump, 2014b: 38). Just as in Quebec, Canada chose to express difference with language and culture through a modernized discourse that only disguised the old racial associations (Haque, 2012). Indeed, culture as presented within liberal multiculturalism is reified, as it is associated to a community's internal homogeneity denying “similarities between cultures as well as differences within cultures” (Benhabib in Dhamoon, 2006). The Languages Act in 1969 officialized bilingualism, making it one of its the distinctive features based on a “partnership” of the two founding races (e.g. the White settlers: French and English). This was later followed by the Multiculturalism Policy (1971), also known as the melting pot or mosaic approach, in trying to promote “unity in diversity” (Heller, 2007).
In Quebec, Robert Bourassa's Liberal government, following Gendron Commission recommendations passed Bill 22, the Official Language Act (1974) making French the sole language of the province.
21
Practically, French was to be the language of the provincial government, administration, services, labor, and public signs, but no clear rule framed its application. Intentionally ambiguous, yet constituting a bigger step then previous attempts, Bill 22 placed French as the language of education, requiring a proficiency test to access English schooling in order to determine the students “sufficient knowledge of English”. Anglophones felt restrained in their freedom of choice and Allophones (literally all ‘Others’ whose mother tongue is not French or English) worried of the pressure it posed for children wanting to enter the English school system. Francophones wanted more guarantees for French language, as its application remained unset. Nonetheless, Bill 22 started to change the linguistic “face” of Quebec, and more intensively in Montreal's case (Crump, 2014b). These frustrations led to the liberal defeat in the following provincial elections and nationalism rose in the political arena.
During the Saint Léonard crisis nationalists started organizing, creating various groups, to later merge together (1968) under the first separatist party, the Parti Québécois (PQ). Six years later, the PQ, won its first provincial elections. Led by former liberal minister of natural resources, René Lévesque, the first mandate of the PQ was greater affirmation of what was previously initiated by the liberal governments, only this time French was given a place de choix. A year after their election, PQ enacted Bill 101 also known as the Charte de la Langue Française, an ambitious piece of law that completely reversed Quebec's linguistic situation (Lamarre, 2013). The Bill aimed to secure the French language in the public sphere and beyond. French became the language of “Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business” (Government of Quebec, 2014). Public and commercial signs ought to be French, but more importantly school was now a universal public French system4. For legislators, Bill 101 was a stepping stone of the Quiet Revolution, in affirming the place French was denied for so long and in ensuring it's maintenance
4 Exemptions were given to the historical English community, and Canadian Anglophones. All those whose parents had gone through English school system.
22
in such position. For Levine (1990) it was a way for Francophones to solidify a “sense of their identity, and bring the English speaking community ‘to its real proportions’” (p.113). Enacted right before the new school year, Bill 101 forced Catholic schools, which once massively denied enrollment to all non-white Francophones Quebecers, to open their institutions to everyone almost overnight. The transition was to be done through special “welcome classes” (classes d'accueil) of intensive French immersion. Such classes were designed to “quickly integrate this new population of students into the mainstream classes” (Crump, 2014b: 41). This mass movement of children leaving for French schools coupled with an exodus of Anglophones from the province left the English school practically empty. Clearly, Bill 101 did not anticipate all aspects of such drastic incorporation within a predominantly white Francophone Catholic school system (and society). The consequences arising from Bill 101, implementation for both the new majority and the transposed minorities was still unclear.
Montreal's changing landscape: a tale of sound and vision
Montreal is often shown as an example of linguistic shift as a result of concerted effort and mobilization from a specific group (Francophones) implemented through policies (Bourhis, 2001, Lamarre, 2013). In the 1960s, many believed Montreal was well on its way to becoming a multicultural English-speaking city (Levine, 1990). Montreal, post Bill 101, did look Francophone: signs were predominantly French and French was establishing itself as the language of work, of school (elementary school and high school), and of the public sphere. While Anglicization among migrants became less of a concern, migrant's incorporation into the Quebecois society through Bill 101 created a major unexpected consequence: multilingualism. Indeed, Montreal never became a homogenous unilingual French city; instead it shifted into a multiracial/multilingual hub.
23 En Français s.v.p.5
Since the industrial revolution Montreal was geographically segregated between the Francophones living in the lower East side and the Anglophones living on the upper West side, divided in the middle by St-Laurent street. However, consistent immigration from so-called “developing” (non-white) countries to the city blurred the existing segregation by creating new ones. This new reality challenged the Francophone structure that was still insecure in its new identity. The first crucial step of the incorporation of migrants was to be done through the French intensive teaching classes d'accueil. Once students were considered ready to access the mainstream educational system because of their sufficient level of French, they were removed from the classes d'accueil and incorporated through the national educational system. Initially conceived to last around ten month, the immersion often lasted longer, alienating non-French speakers to French language and Quebec’s linguistic requirements. These classes mostly isolated newcomers from the realm of society widening the segregation (Allen, 2006). Some also observed segregation increased in higher educational institutions (Cegep), when those were Francophone. Anglophone institutions often promoted and actively encouraged the creation of minority groups' organizations (Lamarre et al., 2004) whereas for Francophones institutions, such promotion was against the protection of French language and thus Québécois culture. Further, educational institutions served as a vehicle to foster the official hegemonic discourse on French language (Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2009).
Despite the fact that policy makers officialized the quality and the maintenance of standard French in Quebec (through the OLF), the relationship Quebecers had to their language was still filled with insecurity. Indeed, vernacular French (Joual), seen for a long time as despicable and dirty, only gained social value with the rise of Quebecitude in the late 1960s, seen with an element of pride although/even if its use outside informal settings remained disputed until the 1980s (Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2009).
24 The visible
Shifting from religion to language was only made possible because both concepts were strongly tied to ethnicity/race, but the changing situation of Montreal could no longer be sustained in such a way. A “growing tension began to emerge around the contradiction between the focus on language skills (as opposed to ethno-national group membership) in official discourse (as in Bill 101), and the real-life salience of ethnicity in organizing access to advantageous positions in reshaped markets” (Heller, 2007: 91). Levine (1990) observed how immigration in Montreal triggered a “U.S. style racial inequality and discrimination” (p.219). Culture serving as a proxy to race in Quebec, became “the functional equivalent of racism” coined as culturism (Schinkel, 2013: 1145). Quebec's discourse disguised race through culture putting pressure on migrants to become Quebecois while they would never be fully recognized as such either due to their skin color and accents (Bourhis, Montreuil, Helly & Jantzen, 2007; Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2007). “Once seen as a threat to French language because they were too Anglicized, Allophones and immigrants have again been positioned as a threat, not to French language, but to Quebec culture and values” (Crump, 2014b: 45).
Quebec’s culturism burst in 2006 over the reasonable accommodation debate. The issue began when a Montreal school forbade a Sikh child to enter school wearing his kirpan (a small ceremonial knife). The parents contested the school in 2004 and finally succeeded with the Supreme Court of Canada overturning the school’s decision (Myles, 2006). In 2006, Hasidic Jews (members of the Yetev Lev synagogue) paid to replace the window facade of one of Montreal YMCA fitness facilities for tinted windows to avoid the views of woman working out in revealing outfits (Peritz, 2007). A petition took off at the YMCA, objecting the replacement of the windows and creating a polemic around what was reasonable accommodation towards a minority community and what was not. As a result, a small rural town, Hérouxville adopted a set of Standards of Conduct (2007) aiming to “help” immigrants know
25
what kind behaviors were allowed in the town (Patriquin, 2013). This Standard of Conduct quickly made the news, as it was clearly a racist prescriptive manifesto intent on invisibilizing visible minorities. Religious questions became the new locus of cultural discrimination. Quebecers regarded their nation as a secular one because of its removal of religion from the political sphere, ignoring the ways its society remained tied to Catholic values and tradition. Their rejection of the Catholic dogmatic institution of Church was now being projected on non-secular ‘Others’ stating they were going against the secular Quebec culture.
This clearly showed that speaking French was not a gauge of belonging to the Québécois society, albeit, it made clear that religious, cultural or linguistic motives where just a front to cover the racial/ethnic discrimination that was coming from both official discourse and white Francophone majority (re)producing it. The issue was again brought to the spotlight when PQ government drafted Bill 60 (2013) knows as The Charter of Secular Values. The Bill wanted to protect Quebec secular values in terms of religious neutrality and gender equality but aimed to do so in banning from public work market any overt religious symbols (e.g. hijab, turban, kirpan) while opposing to remove the crucifix (still in place today) in the Assembly chamber (Patriquin, 2013). Although the Bill was not supported by most of the population (the PQ lost the next election), as it was part of a clear political agenda to marginalize immigrants, it increased the tension regarding so-called cultural differences. Hence, visibilizing the increasing separation between the cosmopolitism of Montreal and the rest of Quebec still very white and Francophone (Patriquin, 2013). Further, the same year the Quebec Association of Soccer banned Aneel Samra, a young Sikh, from playing soccer while wearing his turban supposedly for security reasons. Summoned by the Canadian Soccer Federation and FIFA to change their ruling, they complied some weeks later (Shingler, 2014). Altogether, these reactions to minorities in Quebec show the fragility of white Francophone self-perception of their culture and values. Quebec’s hegemonic narrative on race and ethnicity were never explicit but served “legitimating stories
26
propagated for the specific political purpose to manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideals” (Giroux, 1996: 2).
Within the context of globalization, Quebec's struggle is one of definition of the local over the global, one of maintenance of boundaries in an increasing fluctuating world. The continuous effort to present the nation “as a continuous narrative of national progress” (Bhabha, 2013: 1) only helps the interest of those who got to define the lines of its HIStory. Remaining too attached to the homogenizing narrative does not leave room for discussion and often translates into fear of the ‘Other’ as previously exemplified. Having explored the rise and shifts of nationalist discourse gave the opportunity to understanding the power relation at play in Quebec between identity, race and language.
27
CHAPTER 3: LangCrit: at the intersection of the Heard and the Seen
"The accent is the mark of an immigrant, It's a ruler with mile-long increments that measures the distance away
from home."
George Masao Yamazawa
As explained in chapter two, Quebec's HIStory with French language, reveals more than a simple equation of nation and language. I have shown that linguistic categories are set and used to differentiate within the population between: old stock Quebecois associated with Francophones; Anglophones, the historical second peuple fondateur; and the marginalized ‘Other’, associated to the “all encompassing” category of Allophones. Hence, it was evident to me that I needed a framework to distinguish language from race since official categories do not address them separately. As a result, I will use the framework established by Crump (2014a) coined as LangCrit, Critical language and Race Theory merged as one, to the distinction that I will be using a younger branch of Critical Race Theory (CRT) called Critical White Studies (CWS). In this chapter, I first introduce the works of Critical Sociolinguistics on language and multilingualism, followed by an introduction to CWS to expose the power dynamics at play in the process of race-making. Ultimately, I will merge the literature at the intersections of the Heard and the Seen paying particular attention to the concept of identity.
Critical Sociolinguistics and language ideology
Languages have been constructed to reflect modern societies and are one of the many constructions inherited from the colonial era (Busch, 2012; Creese & Blackledge, 2011; Crump, 2014a; Hill, 2009; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007). In Bourdieu's words, it is a structure that structures and is structured simultaneously. A system of semiotic meaning that has been shaped and negotiated since the formation of the nation (Heller, 2011). This is to say that language as a practice consists in creating and maintaining boundaries between people, naming and differentiating them, and allowing access or not to
28
certain resources. As a process, language is embedded in the power relations that shape and are shaped by our societies (Bourdieu, 1991).
Between language practices and social context, there is ideology (Crump, 2014b). Language ideologies are a kind of interpretive filter that reflects society within linguistic frames. It can be seen through policies and political trends on language or societal beliefs towards language. Language ideologies create norms, thus are normative. Hence they draw a line between what is good, or acceptable, and what is not. One example can be found with the one nation-one language ideology (Creese & Blackledge, 2011; Crump, 2014b; Heller, 2007) that links, in an almost sacred bond, language to the nation. This strong belief is reflected in some minority contexts such as Quebec, where the specificity of the nation comes from its distinct linguistic character, bonding through language, its imaginary community (Anderson, 2006). This ideology normally goes hand in hand with the idea of purity of language and the clear delimitation of a language (Creese & Blackledge, 2011).
Standard language ideology is all about correctness; language is a thing within prescribed boundaries and remains as it is through grammatical rules; language needs protection and maintenance; language needs to be learned and constantly improved; language becomes an external entity that does not come from the people who speak it. Standard or legitimized language turns into this semi-artificial, archaic and objectified vehicle sustained by a permanent effort of correction and control. For post-structuralists such as Derrida (1998), this explains why language is not entirely someone's expression, it is rather a translation of it, within a framework called “French”, or “English”. Within the standard language ideology also lies the conception of hierarchy among languages, in which consists of valuing some languages or practices of language as inherently better than others, an example can be found in the differentiation drawn between languages, dialects, or patois.
29
On the other hand, the monolingual ideology posits that language practices need to be neatly separated in order to be individually maintained. In “le monolinguism de l'autre” Derrida (1998) describes French language as a “monoculturalist homo-hegemony”. Hence, crucial to this monolingual ideology is homogeneity of any linguistic structure as “one language”, or “a language” (Heller, 2007). In education it is referred as first language and second language. Such ideology can be found in Quebec, and Canada, where first and second language learning are separated as if one could contaminate the other. Many scholars have consistently advocated for multilingual education (Creese & Blackledge, 2011; Crump, 2014b; Garcia, 2009; Low, B. Sarkar, M. & Winer, L, 2009), opposing the widespread belief within the schooling system that being multilingual means not mastering any language perfectly, just mixing a bunch together (Wharton, 1996). Scholars have shown that multilingual individuals are able to separate and speak languages fluently without mixing them if needed, moreover, having to cope with a different language at home benefices and solidifies language learning generally (Creese & Blackledge, 2011)
Situating languaging and language practices
With globalization boundaries are brought into question, as do languages in their fixity. For critical sociolinguists, it is crucial to understand and view language as more than a hegemonic semiotic scheme and rather as a “set of resources called into play by social actors, under social and historical conditions which both constrain and make possible the social reproduction of existing conventions and relations, as well as the production of new ones” (Heller, 2007: 15). For Bakhtin (1981), an early post-structuralist, languages are not exclusive, they mix and intersect with each other, and thus one cannot identify an origin, an original entity. He rather refers to the concept of heteroglossia consisting in a simultaneous use of various signs and forms (Creese & Blackledge, 2011). For that reason, scholars have argued for the terminology of “language practices” and “languaging” referring to the “doing of language as social activity, regulated as much by social contexts as by underlying systems” rather than
30
talking of the entity of language (Pennycook, 2010:9 in Crump, 2014b:73).
Yet, another debate about language practices is that they are often reduced to merely a personal skill or competence: “the standard conception of linguistic competence is about potential, it is a theoretical construct about the knowledge attributed to an ideal speaker-hearer in a homogeneous speech community” (Chomsky, 1965 in Blommaert et al., 2005: 211). Such idealization and simplification of what languaging implies, denies power dynamics at play within everyone's positionality. Bourdieu (1991) came to see languaging as linguistic capital that distinguishes people from one another. Languaging is a way to get upward mobility, a resource, but one that obeys scarcity rules through standardization of language as a mean of control from the dominant class (Heller, 2009; 2011). In the symbolic interaction that Bourdieu explains as linguistic exchange, not only does an individual have a certain expertise at languaging in prescribed languages (Rampton, 1995), but he also has the expertise of understanding the different ways of doing language in different contexts. The former is normally what is intended when talking about language practices; the latter is a specific ajout from Bourdieu’s conceptualization of “linguistic practices” as “linguistic exchanges” in the context of class’ (I would add here race, gender and age) power dynamics. What is stressed by Bourdieu is the different ways of doing language which can be associated in sociolinguists to the concept of variation within a linguistic repertoire (Labov, 1972). In other words, individual agency for Bourdieu lies in the fact that they can consciously use linguistic variations to their advantage when they possess6 that expertise, what Bourdieu calls linguistic capital (included within cultural capital). An example of this could be an individual's conscious choice of changing their language practices from an informal setting (e.g. with friends) v.s. a formal setting (e.g. a job interview) using different words or accents in each setting.
6 This is a process of possible accumulation. Only possible because to appropriate cultural capital, one has to “internalize
the necessary schemes of appreciation and understanding” - schemes the development presupposes the distance from economic necessity”(Brubacker, 1985: 751)- which brings us back to the vicious circle of privileged class and its
membership as a consequence of this privilege. It is then possible to accumulate cultural capital, but the lowest your cultural capital is the harder it is to accumulate any.
31
Space itself is a crucial element in the doing of language, as individuals constantly negotiate their practices as they move and evolve in different environments. When observing spaces of multilingualism, Blommaert's research assistant, fluent in English, French and Dutch entered a local Turkish café in Ghent where he was received by an old Bulgarian Woman who waved him to come in. The scene did not imply any linguistic interaction, in the “words” of the researcher: the lady “spoke no language”. What is interesting here, as Blommaert points out, is that the lady did speak languages (Bulgarian, probably Turkish and most likely Russian), however, they did not match with the researcher, so none of them could participate in languaging because they did not share the same multilingual repertoire. This perfectly exemplifies the spatial or contextual aspect of languaging from a perspective of heteroglossia, what I will later identify as multilingualism: it is “a matter of conditioned resources as well as interactionally framed practices […] [it is] what the environment […] enables and disables” (Blommaert et al., 2005: 197).
Multilingualism
In an attempt to move away from terms implying singleness and fixity, many scholars within critical post structuralist sociolinguistics question the use of the term multilingualism – as in many different and separated language practices – (Bloomaert, 2006; Blommaert et al, 2005; Busch, 2012; Crump, 2014b; Heller, 2007; García, 2007). In order to go against the “pluralization of singular and distinct entities” (Crump, 2014b: 74) different theoretical positions emerged on how to define people, groups or societies in their multilingual practices. Some coined it as polylingualism or polylingual languaging (Jørgensen, 2008); plurilingualism (Moore & Gajo, 2009); metrolingualism- in the optic of the city or metropolis- (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010); and yet others maintained the usage of multilingualism while defining it accordingly (Blommaert et al., 2005; Heller, 2007; Lamarre, 2013; Sarkar, 2008). For the purpose of this thesis I will maintain the term multilingualism because that is how I referred to the
32
heteroglossic language practices of my participants and by acknowledging the pitfalls of the traditional conception of this term, I believe I can still contribute to critical sociolinguistic research on multilingualism (Bloomaert et al., 2005; Crump, 2014b; Lamarre, 2013; Lamarre & Lamarre, 2009; Lamarre et al., 2002; Sarkar, 2008).
Most empirical researches in the field of multilingualism in the last twenty years have mainly been interested in linguistic practices, but more specifically among urban youth (Busch, 2012). In Great Britain, Rampton (1995) first coined the term language crossing when observing “code alternation by people who are not accepted members of a group associated with the second language that they are using” (Rampton 1995: 485). Traditionally called code-switching, except the switching occurring in this case is done into varieties that would not be generally associated as belonging to the observed speakers. Approaching the phenomenon within the concept of heteroglossia, García (2007) referred to that speech act as translanguaging. Where code-switching or language crossing refer to the mechanics of languaging (when does someone switches and how often?) and assumes “languages” to be distinct codes, translanguaging focuses on the languager, and on what the meaning or the purpose to such action is, from the languager's perspective (Crump, 2014b: 76). In shifting the focus, the concept of translanguaging allows for individual agency in this constant negotiation between linguistic boundaries implied. For Li Wei, translanguaging allows the creation of a space “by bringing together different dimensions of [the languagers] […] personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity” (Li Wei, 2011: 1223 in Busch, 2012: 4). For the purpose of this thesis, I will follow García (2007) and Crump (2014b) using the term translanguaging for each time that languagers will be crossing those “perceived to be” boundaries between what I have earlier defined as “languages”. Translanguaging will represent the act behind multilingual practices.
33 Multilingualism in Montreal
Montreal, the major hub of Quebec's province, receives around 85 % of the provincial immigration ratio (Statistics Canada, 2011), becoming within the last 30 years, the North American city with the highest rates of trilingualism (Lamarre & Dagenais, 2004). Within the boundaries of Bill 101 and its French institutional schooling, its youth has evolved into a mix of complex linguistic and racial/ethnic diversity, hence creating a fertile ground for researches on multilingualism (Boberg, 2014; Crump, 2014b; Meintel & Fortin, 2002; Meitel, 1992; Lamarre & Lamarre, 2009; Lamarre, 2013). Most Sociolinguistic research in Quebec tends to study linguistic vitality, in order to gain information about the survival of French within Canada (Bourhis, 2001) or that of English within Quebec (Landry, 2008). Since the multilingual reality is still quite new in Montreal (Lamarre, 2013), little research has been done on its presence and implications. However, multilingual practices have been observed mostly among youth and young children in various settings. Some researches focused on elementary schools as a site of linguistic negotiation (Maguire & Curdt-Christiansen, 2007) or Colleges7 (Lamarre et al., 2004) while others looked at settings outside formal schooling (Meintel & Fortin, 2002; Lamarre et al., 2002; Lamarre & Lamarre, 2009;Low & Sarkar, 2012; Low, Sarkar, Winer, 2009; Sarkar, 2008; Sarkar & Allen, 2007). The former research found that children are extremely aware of the shifting nature of linguistic practices, practices they adapt to the environment and to whom they address. Similarly, while following multilingual youth in their every-day-life, Lamarre et al., 2002; Lamarre & Lamarre, 2009 and Lamarre, 2013, found that this new “francophonie” (Low, Sarkar, Winer, 2009) was characterized by “flexible multilingualism” (Lamarre, 2013: 55) as they did not consistently obey the set linguistic boundaries. Rather, they negotiate them depending on the linguistic resources available to people they interact with, within geographical linguistic spaces, to which, they fluidly adapted. Even the linguistic physical boundaries that remain present in Montreal tend to be increasingly changing (Lamarre, 2013),
7 In Quebec, due to the province specific educational system, colleges are referred as Cégeps, which is situated between
34
as is the linguistic face of the city (Crump, 2014b). However, in all cases, it seems that language policies alone, although they are considerably more important when looking at formal settings (Lamarre et al., 2004), are not the more influential aspect in terms of linguistic choices and practices among youth and young children. The trend among the “children of Bill 101” (Crump, 2014b; Lamarre et al., 2004; Sarkar, 2008; Sarkar & Allen, 2007) is clearly towards multilingual translanguaging. As many are a living proof of the obsoleteness of traditional linguistic categories (Francophones, Anglophones and Allophones), some also use this heteroglossic repertoire as modes of expression, and attempts to challenge the monolingual French system in Quebec (Low & Sarkar, 2012; Low, Sarkar and Winer, 2009; Sarkar & Allen, 2007; Sarkar, 2008). That is what Sarkar concluded in much of her hiphopographic (Low & Sarkar, 2012) research projects. Sarkar and her various colleagues, found that the Montreal hip-hop community creates and uses heteroglossic repertoire as an identity marker and as a way to challenge the dominant French structure that obeys the ideology of one-language-one-nation. In her view, and her participants' views, talking about language practices was not enough when trying to understand that gap between the lived experience of the hip-hop community and the official hegemonic discourse. Unlike any of the previous research on multilingualism and identity, Sarkar understood that language and race needed to be bridged and studied as two distinct and crucial aspects in the making of the self. Later, followed by Crump (2014a) who – also a critical sociolinguist – integrated Critical Race Theory (CRT) to her analysis, a theoretical framework she named LangCrit.
Intersecting the Self-as-Seen
When looking at the literature on multilingualism, race is rarely mentioned. Maybe unconsciously, maybe under fears of falling into racism (Crump, 2014a), or maybe because academia is after all a very white (male) dominated world (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008), (and maybe partially all of these answers at the same time), but somehow, few sociolinguists have actually integrated race to their identity analysis (Crump, 2014a; Low, Sarkar & Winer, 2007; 2009). What I want to underline here is
35
the many ways in which linguistic identities intersect with racialized ones (Hill, 1998). Race needs to be included when talking about identity, as both are constructed between the everyday interactions and the social context, and consequently affect all aspects of each and everyone’s lived experience.
Race or rather the process of race-making is another way to differentiate from different social status, its purpose is to maintain a hierarchy. Racism, is accordingly, “the dominant racial ideology of the social system” (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008: 14). With race-making, both categorizations their attributes are social constructs. In other words, “if race is a social myth sustained in political landscape […], it cannot also be a real set of social distinctions animated by lives and people to whom it refers” (Bonnett 1996:151 in Knowles, 2003: 29). However being aware of the construction behind individual and structural reproduction of race does not mean its effects on everyday lives are not tangible. What makes race real is its visibility through the body, and the discrimination often related to that bodily-imbedded construction.
Historically, the concept of race served (and still serves) to maintain and justify systems of domination (slavery, colonialism, capitalism, neocolonialism), grounded in the claim that there were natural racial differences between one another implying more than only physical characteristics – such as skin color, hair texture or facial features. Those seen-to-be biological facts were used to explain what was then understood as “absolute moral and cultural differences” (Knowles & Alexander, 2005:10). That first conception of race made external differences a site of justification for internal characteristics; ways or beliefs that were seen to be fixed and stable. The biologization of race, the essentialized version of the racial term, corresponds to the white supremacist tradition, as it is a white construction.
In the wide corpus on racism, CRT scholars have started to notice the imbalance produced by work on racism that could not capture the complexity of the ever changing phenomenon (Feldman, 2006;
36
Knowles, 2003). Constant figurations of racism start from the assumption of black and white dualism. This in terms, not only removes any possibility of exploring the many different layers of whiteness but it also contributes to establish ‘otherness’ as blackness, homogenizing the experience of racial and ethnic othering (Feldman, 2006). Ultimately, the “visible Other” is exposed as being outside the realm of society, a trend often observed in migration and integration. Such reification of the ethnic ‘Other’ contributed to polarization, on the one hand the majority seen as de-racialized vs. the over visible minority (Nayak, 2003). It is that de-racialized (white) majority in Quebec that is often seen as Quebecois or Francophones since both words are used as proxies informally. Understanding that if you identify somebody as black, brown, or yellow, it also means that white is a category. It may seem obvious in theory, but it is hardly acknowledged in practice, or at least in the case of Quebec. CWS emerged because they posit that race-making is white making, and thus it is a white problem (Knowles, 2003; Knowles & Alexander, 2005). For CWS, there is an urgent need for whites to acknowledge whiteness and the privileges that come with it in order to challenge its pre-established (and maintained) dynamic (Knowles, 2003).
Whiteness
Bonilla-Silva aptly captured the problem: “When whiteness becomes normative, it works like God, in mysterious ways” (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008: 13). To be white is to be human (Dyer, 1997 in Knowles, 2003: 175), just human. This monopolization of normality and universality from whites is problematic because it is mostly unacknowledged, it is central and yet invisible as if it was just neutral. The gaze from where whiteness stands is very clearly marked by its own assumption of “normality” and the unconsciousness of its own privilege. This comes to a question of power over the years and whose imagery has been more powerful in order to be reproduced and maintained.
