400 Jahre Quebec: Kulturkontakte zwischen Konfrontation und Kooperation (review)

More than four hundred years ago, in 1608, Quebec was founded as a French colony, since when it has undergone a series of constitutional, political, and cultural changes. These are due mainly to the fact that French-speaking Quebec was from the beginning surrounded by different political, economic, and cultural centres of power almost wholly belonging to the Anglophone world. The present volume gathers together a series of studies by various experts on Quebec who are mostly associated with the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Augsburg; they focus on Franco-Canadian history, literature, the linguistic situation, society, and the conflict between competing cultures and various models of cohabitation. Ursula Reutner, the editor and principal author, coins an expression that captures very neatly the various types of confrontation, coexistence, and cooperation between mainly French-speaking Quebec and its multicultural (former) enemies, present-day neighbours, Anglophone residents, and partners: she calls this an oscillation between a ‘duo’ and a ‘duel’. An interdisciplinary approach is obviously the best way to study the interaction of linguistic, economic, and cultural elements of such a fascinating country, which has succeeded in finding a peaceful resolution of its conflicting interests only in recent years. What is particularly convincing about most of the studies here is their historical depth, without which one cannot appreciate the degree of appeasement that had to be achieved to arrive at the current level of acceptance of Quebec’s cultural identity and its sociolinguistic interculturality. And it is only from an historical perspective that one can evaluate the long and strenuous path that had to be travelled from the earliest moves towards the foundation of a French colony in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, to the Loi sur les langues officielles passed by the Canadian Government in 1969, and to today’s almost general acknowledgement and final discovery by the Québecois themselves of the enormous potential of their multicultural environment. The inclusion of maps depicting the various segmentations of Quebec in its multinational context would have been helpful, but the multilingual index of key words at the end of this well-edited book has been carefully compiled and is extremely useful in such a rich source of interdisciplinary knowledge.