What is Québécois Literature? Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada par by Rosemary Chapman (review)

Reviews 213 d’essais francophones tout en leur faisant de l’ombre, Brozgal met en lumière les différentes postures: tout se passe comme si Sartre se voulait l’intermédiaire entre le lecteur français et les poèmes de l’Anthologie de Senghor et solidaire à l’appel à la libération des Damnés de la terre de Fanon, mais que sa préface au Portrait du colonisé de Memmi (qui est en fait un compte rendu d’abord paru dans Les Temps modernes) n’était qu’un prétexte à sa propre critique de la colonisation. Consacré au Portrait du colonisé et au Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres, le quatrième chapitre se penche sur un changement considérable: en tant que Tunisien de confession juive, Memmi se situait dans son premier essai à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur du groupe des colonisés, position ambivalente lui permettant de saisir la complexité des rapports coloniaux, alors qu’il se distancie manifestement des décolonisés dans son dernier essai. À cet égard, il a confié à Brozgal être devenu un “écrivain occidental” (151). Quelle que soit l’appellation, Memmi a incontestablement marqué l’univers postcolonial , ce que rappelle pertinemment cet ouvrage cohérent et nuancé, qui convoque diverses assises théoriques sans par ailleurs étouffer la voix critique et juste de l’auteure. University of Vermont Ching Selao Chapman, Rosemary. What is Québécois Literature? Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. ISBN 978-184 -631973-0. Pp. ix + 292. £70. The tension between the title and the subtitle of this thoughtful book is deliberate. For Chapman, the question of what Québécois literature is cannot be divorced from the ways its history has been written within and against other literary histories. In a series of densely-packed chapters, the author discusses literary history manuals and their organizing narratives, from Huston’s mid-nineteenth century Répertoire national to the 2007 Histoire de la littérature québécoise of Biron, Dumont, and Nardout-Lafarge (with W.H. New’s History of Canadian Literature as a point of comparison); shifts in the provincial school curricula of Quebec and of other provinces; and the changes in literary anthologies over the years.Anyone interested in the relation between literature and nation will find Chapman’s conceptualization of her project a valuable contribution . Canada’s history of multiple linguistic, literary, and national identities enjoying (or demanding) institutional recognition makes it a paradigmatic case for “post-national”literary studies.Despite the efforts of Quebec and Canadian nationalists to impose an ordered set of categories within their territories, these identities continue to overlap as well as compete. If the Francophone population has suffered from Anglophone“colonial”superiority, they themselves are the descendants of colonizers. Chapman is sympathetic to Quebec’s desire to construct a literature of its own but is always aware of the contingent choices made in the process.With admirable rigor, she examines how the Quebec-centric materials incorporate, exclude, or ignore other Francophone writing in Canada: that of the country’s French colonial past, and that of Francophone communities across Canada whose distinct identities have been more recently articulated, often in response to Quebec’s self-assertion. She also notes the extent to which indigenous (and Anglophone Quebec) writing is included—if at all— in these materials. Progress is uneven. The 2007 edition of Michel Laurin’s school anthology was the first to include an aboriginal writer, but in the HLQ, published that same year, indigenous peoples appear only in the section devoted to New France. That same work, however, discusses“la littérature anglo-québécoise,”whereas the editors of the Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec, a multi-volume work begun three decades earlier, took its limitation to French-language works for granted. New panCanadian history, on the other hand, is criticized for projecting a too cozy form of multiculturalism, in which no conflict arises because there is no mutual engagement or critique. Chapman’s research into the history of school curricula, already evident in her earlier book on Gabrielle Roy’s...