Les Rapports culturels entre le Québec et les Etats-Unis, and: Possibles (review)

HUMANITIES 235 Les Rllpports culturels entre Ie Quebec et les Etats-Unis, sous la direction de Claude Savary Institut qu~becois de recherche sur la culture 1984. 353 Possibles, 8:4 (Ete 1984), 'L'Amerique inavouable.' 185. Intellectual interest in cultural relations between francophone Quebec and the United States has been evident recently in the creation of the Association quebecoise d'etudes americaines, in the colloquium 'QuebedusA,' sponsored by the Academie canadienne-fran~aise in the fall of '985, and in the two publications under review. The first is also the result of a 198) conference held in Trois-Rivieres, and hosted by the Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture and the Universite du Quebec aTrois-Rivieres. Les Rapports culturels ... is a weighty volume and, as befits an academic gathering, is replete with endnotes and commentaries on the papers presented. The special issue of Possibles contains more'subjective' texts, which are only occasionally annotated. There is, however, a considerable degree of convergence in the preoccupations of the contributors to both, as seen in the shared interest in the relations between Quebec and (the) America(s) and between Quebec and Europe, the fear of cultural 'nivellement' under the us steamroller, and a generally negative reaction to Pierre Vadeboncoeur's 198) book, Trois essais sur l'insignifiance. In his preface to Les Rapports culturels ... , Claude Savary sets out that 'culture' was understood at the colloquium in its global'sens anthropologique ,' and this, too, is a common point between the two publications. The aim ofthe event, he pointed out, was'de faire un bilande la recherche sur ces questions et ces problemes, et de proposer des avenues pour de futures recherches.' The areas treated - far-ranging, and grouped under two main headings, 'Perspectives historiques, des origines ala Deuxieme Guerre mondiale' and 'Problemes d'aujourd'hui' - includeda studyof the various colonial empiresin the Americas, Quebec and us ideologies in the nineteenth century, francophone emigration to the United States, literary relations between the two communities, the counter- and 'new' cultures, and the media and the industrialization of culture. Historian Jean-Paul Bernard stresses that in the studies to date on the topic under consideration, emphasis has been on economic history with little consideration of more cultural and ideological concerns. He shows how the ideas of the Patriotes were strongly influenced by us thinkers, and that the declaration of independence of Lower Canada in 18)8 exhibited 'une rhetorique qui s'inspire largement des Etats-Unis: including the very text of us nationhood. Interestingly, he sheds new light on Lord Durham's much-quoted characterization ofthe French Canadians as a 'people without a history' by pointing out that in terms of the period, and like Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Engels, the British official used the phrase to mean 'bien plus sans Etat et sans avenir que sans passe ou sans passeecri!.' Bernard sums up the intellectual debates on the importanceof liberalism in nineteenth-century French-Canadian thought (in which he has been a prime player) as still unresolved. His commentator, Andre Vachet, insists on going beyond the concept of Weltanschauung in any consideration of ideology, for 'une definition de J'ideologie la renvoie ii. une force sociale presente ou passee qu'elle exprime et justifie.' Under the general heading 'Les relations litteraires QuebeclEtats-Unis au dix-neuvieme siecle: Guildo Rousseau considers a rather heterogeneous mixture of subjects: the role of newspapers, travel and literary exchanges, translations and adaptations, theatre and us roadshows. He shows that there were, in fact, two conceptions of the United States in the 'imaginaire quebecois': that of the elites, who constantly feared the inroads of 'une Amerique protestante ". et sacrilege: and that of 'Ie peuple: attracted by economic advancement, sunny southern climes, exotic milieus. Rousseau poses anew historian Gustave Lanctot's 1937 questions on the effects of us media penetration of Quebec through news agencies, photo services, magazines, radio programmes, films, etc, only to point out that little, in fact, is known about the specifics of such mass cultural penetration and its impact on the minds of the Quebecois. He points to his own research on the Institut canadien de Montreal, which subscribed to some twenty us newspapers in 1850, but...