The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative History (review)

Gérard Bouchard's The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World is an exercise in historiographical audacity. The book, which he calls an 'essay in comparative history' and 'macrohistory,' is framed around Bouchard's deep, perhaps unparalleled historical knowledge of Quebec. It opens with a series of chapters about Quebec and historical writing in and about Quebec, and in the process establishes a number of themes about Quebec's past as a settler culture (or, what the book insists on calling a 'new collectivity'). Especially provocative and enduring are the themes of rupture and continuity, memory and history, and origins and métissage. Seeking to cover hundreds of years, from first arrivals of Europeans to the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bouchard approaches each theme in its selective political, social, economic, and especially cultural manifestations. After unpacking their significance for Quebec, he then uses his themes as comparative threads through chapters on 'Mexico and Latin America,' Australia and, interestingly, 'Other Pathways: Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.' In the book's penultimate chapter, Bouchard draws on the elements of the previous chapters to proffer a model through which we can theorize the historical making of the New World.

Readers of this journal will want to read the book as much for how it is written as for what it is saying. Experienced scholars, senior undergraduates, and graduate students will no doubt savour the opening chapters that tackle head-on the challenges and opportunities of doing history in a post-foundational age of epistemology and knowledge-making. Even those less reflexive about method and theory will find these chapters provocative because of the ways that Bouchard relates his book and historiography more broadly to the political project of Quebec, both in the past and in the present. In his words, the book strives 'to set an intellectual stage from which Quebec can speak, and from which it can be heard and understood by other former colonizing or colonized nations. In other words, from which it can narrate to the world its own itinerary in the Americas' (ix). Whether one agrees with none, some, or most of Bouchard's arguments, all must agree that this is engaged scholarship, provocative and relentless in following through on its promises. Audacious almost seems too timid an adjective but, in the age of Obama, it also seems apt.

This 2008 publication is actually a translation of Bouchard's 2000 Governor–General's Literary Award–winning Genése des nations et cultures du nouveau monde, and in a short preface to this translation he acknowledges that the book would benefit from the near-decade of scholarship that has unfurled since its original publication. Most revealingly, perhaps, is the marginal place of postcolonial scholarship in the book's bibliography and language of analysis. Readers familiar with post-colonial scholarship will recognize many of the topics that Bouchard highlights. These include, among other things, the invention of tradition, cultural mimicry, the shift from cultural to biological definitions of 'race,' the landscaping of place, and the recurring efforts of settler cultures all over the New World to empty the nation's historical time and space of any traces of non-white aboriginality. These same readers will perhaps become frustrated, however, at Bouchard's essentializing of social categories such as 'White' and 'Black' and 'Native' and spatial categories such as 'nation' and 'province' and 'colony,' despite his being aware that such ordering was very much at the heart of the political project in all the colonial settings he considers. At the end of book, for example, Bouchard makes an interesting argument about how various subaltern peoples (Mexican Creoles and New Zealand Maori, in particular) were able to differentiate themselves from other subjugated peoples by being...