Celine Cooper is a Montrealer and a PhD candidate in sociology and equity studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
There is little question that the student demonstrations rocking Quebec have evolved into a powerful social movement. It has been transformed into much more than a protest against the university tuition hike; it has become, at its core, a movement about Quebec.
Despite the cleavages starting to emerge in the wake of increasingly violent demonstration tactics, those who wear the carré rouge continue to identify themselves and the movement they represent with a broader struggle for education, solidarity, justice, democracy and social equity.
But as time goes on it’s starting to seem like this movement is more precisely about positioning these issues within a particular Quebec nationalist history. It’s because of this shift that I think we need to start looking at things from another angle and asking different kinds of questions.
I have been struck by how certain types of nationalist symbolism from the Quiet Revolution are being imported into this movement with virtually no critical debate about what they may or may not mean in today’s context.
This pattern became clear to me when I watched an online video of students first occupying, then trashing, Pavillon Roger-Gaury at the Université de Montréal while hoisting red placards with the slogan “Maîtres chez nous.” I am interested to know what this statement means to Quebec students today. Who gets to lay claim to that slogan in 2012? Who are the “maîtres”? Who are the “nous”?
I was captivated by the Speak Red video by Catherine Côté-Ostiguy circulating on YouTube. Inspired by Michèle Lalonde’s iconic 1968 poem Speak White, the video features an exclusively white cast of speakers urging protesters to, among other things, stand up for “nos. valuers” – to Speak Red “dans la langue douce de Molière/ mais avec l’accent de Miron” and saying things like “Nous sommes le Québec,” all in the name of education, democracy and justice. Again, who are the “nous” being referenced here, and how are they being represented (or not)?
Côté-Ostiguy has acknowledged that the lack of diversity in the video is a problem, but has argued that participants were working within tight time constraints, with no casting call. This is valid to a point. But to my mind, if you are drawing on such a loaded piece of nationalist history to create your own political statement about social equity, you must be prepared to justify on what grounds it is acceptable to align the fight for accessible education with Lalonde’s highly charged incantation – one rife with connotations of race, class, language, colonialism and revolution. Don’t you have to address how the social, economic, political and cultural contexts have changed (or not) in the last four decades?
On that note, what does it mean when a group of white university students don blackface and pull along a huge pappier-mâche head of Jean Charest, anglicized as “Sir John James Charest”? This happened during the first major protest after the budget release, with mind-blowingly little controversy. (A McGill law student named Anthony Morgan published a good article at Huffington Post Quebec about it.) What message was this supposed to send, and to whom?
The reference, of course, is to Pierre Vallières’s 1967 manifesto Nègres blancs d’Amérique, in which he draws comparisons between the social and economic exploitation of French Canadians by the English capitalist elite and that of black slaves by white imperialists in the United States.
To be fair, the original analysis emerged out of an oppressive period in Quebec where, as political scientist Reginald Whitaker once observed, capital spoke English and labour spoke French. Vallières’s call for the organization of an all-male (the book oozes misogyny) anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist armed war to combat these injustices was a powerful one. But his argument was also founded on a total erasure of (among other things) the history of colonialism and slavery in Nouvelle France. As Quebec historian Marcel Trudel and others have since documented, both French and English colonists had African and aboriginal slaves, and traded them as property until the early 19th century. I trust this very important part of Quebec’s history is being taught to students in our schools, yes? Yet I have to wonder.
The fact that there has been no outrage over these happenings is astonishing, in part because this movement is being spearheaded by university students who should – presumably – be the ones with the analytic tools to recognize and think critically about these things.
Whether you wear a carré rouge or not, it is time to carve out and occupy a more thoughtful, less reactionary space for debate about what is being said and done in the name of social equity and education in Quebec.