Cedric May, québéciste et canadianiste: an introductory note

Cedric May, formerly of the University of Birmingham, has been a familiar figure and a familiar name for Canadianists in the UK since the founding of the British Association for Canadian Studies in 1975. He was a founder member and subsequently, over the next six years, secretary, secretary/ treasurer, vice president and convenor of three BACS conferences and president of the association. He brought to these positions not only a determined commitment to Canadian Studies but also a love of the French language inherited from his French mother and a unique experience of the changing world of twentieth-century Québec, that guaranteed from the start a lively Québécois and French Canadian presence within the young association. Cedric's essay fills an important gap in the early history of the BACS, providing an engaging account of his life in Montreal in the early 1960s and of his subsequent establishing of Québec Studies in Birmingham some ten years before the BACS came into being. It also offers his thoughts on multidisciplinarity as both a risk and an opportunity for the developing association, drawing attention in particular to the challenge, for the BACS, of Canada's exceptional position as a nation state with not one, but two founding languages, French as well as English.

In the latter regard, his essay is particularly opportune. In Canadian Studies, as in Canada itself, the French fact creates an awkwardness–not least in the UK, where English as the shared language of British Canadianists and their anglophone Canadian counterparts inevitably predominates in the activities of the British association. In reflection of this, plenary speakers from Québec have always addressed the BACS annual conference in English, a gesture that has been much appreciated. Meanwhile–in theory at least–there has always been a welcome for papers in French for the various panel sessions of the conference, as there has been for articles in French for the British Journal of Canadian Studies (BJCS) and its precursor the Bulletin of Canadian Studies. In practice, however, the panel sessions take place almost always in English, and Québécois and French Canadian content is, in general, very limited. Similarly, though Québec and French Canada have their place in a variety of disciplinary contexts in BJCS, the number of articles in French from francophone contributors is very small. The result for Canadian Studies in the UK, as represented by the BACS in its core activities, is a loss of visibility for the importance of Québec within the Canadian Federation and a tendency to relegate Québécois society and culture, along with that of Acadia and the wider francophone diaspora, to the outer fringes of the association's multidisciplinary framework as one of the remoter areas of arcane disciplinary interest. The situation is further complicated because, like Cedric May, UK canadianistes and québécistes are typically literary or linguistic specialists, for whom the French language is fundamental to their Canadian Studies interests.

In the days when the Canadian government still provided a modicum of funding for Canadian Studies abroad, Québec and French Canada maintained BACS visibility, albeit at one remove, through the conferences of the Groupe de recherches et d'études sur le Canada français (GRECF), one of a number of designated 'specialist groups' within the British association. Where some of the specialist groups came and went depending on changing disciplinary interests, the GRECF was a permanent fixture, as befitted the founding-nation status of French language and culture in Canada. Since the disappearance of federal support for the BACS and its specialist groups in 2008, the GRECF has transmuted itself into a more or less free-standing Centre for Québec and French-Canadian Studies (CQFCS), based in university environments in London. The survival of francophone Canadian Studies in the UK has thus been assured–at least for now–but the price has been a substantially increased drift away from the BACS and a significant further weakening of the Québec presence within the association. Yet the difference of Québec, and of French Canada...