Hemispheric American Literature and Quebec

I have enjoyed several essays in a 2010 collection entitled Canada and its Americas: Transnational Connections. The introduction reviews some of the arguments that I have heard about the "hemispheric turn" in American Studies, such as in the review essay by my friend Ralph Bauer in PMLA a few years back. Does this turn represent an admirable effort by heretofore monolingual and nationalist scholars to reach out and study other traditions? Or is it another instance of American imperialism, as U.S. American Studies scholars seek to become specialists in other national traditions? Why does the term "American" seem to be used as a synonym for United States? Editors Wilfried Siemerling and Sarah Philipps Casteel complain in the introduction that U.S. scholars who have become interested in Mexico show little interest in Canada.

An essay by Monica Giacoppe compares Chicano and Quebecois literature and culture. These arose in regions where Spain and France colonized for decades before "The vagaries of colonialism turned the tables on both the Spanish and the French colonizers: anglophone Protestants who saw their rise to power as proof of their superiority of their 'race' religion and culture displaced" the habitants (189) and peonized them. In both cases "the claiming of a privileged link to the land is a valuable move for budding nationalist movements, it is nevertheless a problematic gesture" because of the dispossessed native peoples (191).

Giacoppe even compares Gloria Anzaldua with Quebecoise writer Anne Hébert, for whom Hannah's primary school is named. In the latter's 1975 novel Les Enfants du sabbat overturns the gender politics of the traditional Catholic culture, as the protagonist is a practicing witch, who "offers her own daughter up to her husband for ritual sexual initiation into the cult" (194). Yikes, I hope they don't teach that book in her class in la quatrieme année!

But even more interesting, given my interest in Louis Riel, was the essay by Albert Braz, professor at U. of Alberta, who has also written The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Come quotations from Riel show how he defined Metis identity in a rather utopian and evangelical way. "l'expression anglaise correspondante, Halfbreed, fut a la première génération des mélanges des sangs...Le mot français, Métis, exprime l'idée de ce mélange d'une manière aussi satisfaisante que possible" In this sense the Métis were not the mixture of any particular bloods, but the mixture of all the world's races into one new one. It also suggested how Riel did not see himself as a Canadien Français, but as something new. And indeed, the Quebec francophone catholics did not look kindly on him.