Uncertain Relations

RACHEL KILLICK Introduction: Uncertain Relations My purpose in specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience. By exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.1 Defining francophonie is a notoriously slippery enterprise. The French language provides a central focus, but the places and circumstances where it is used, the degree to which it is used, and the linguistic and literary forms it assumes, represent such diverse historical and geo- graphical contexts and such varied political, economic and cultural investments, that uncertainty, not unity, and difference, not similarity, often seem the dominant features of the relationships of those countries and communities that have grouped themselves under the francophone umbrella. France continues to regard itself as the supreme centre of francophone reference, the defender of the norms of the French language and the arbiter of literary production in French but declines the francophone designation that it perceives as a threat to its linguistic and cultural authority. As a result francophone studies have evolved largely in isolation from cultural thinking in the metropole, and, focusing on France’s former colonies in the Maghreb, Africa, and the Caribbean, have been primarily shaped by postcolonial paradigms, as they have been developed by non-metropolitans, such as Albert 1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 178 and p. 39. Subsequent references are given as LC in the text. 10 Rachel Killick Memmi, Frantz Fanon, or Edouard Glissant, and by scholars of post- colonialism in the english-speaking world.2 This initial focus of francophone studies on former colonies of occupation has led to significant neglect of other important areas of francophonie, notably the settler colonies of French Canada, including Quebec, and the liminal francophone communities of Belgium and Switzerland. Like France itself, these areas where French is the vernacular and vehicular mother tongue, have been reluctant or slow to commit to the francophone enterprise, particularly as shaped by postcolonial theorizations. Post-1960s Quebec, with the defence of its historic position as one of the two founding nations of Canada constantly in mind, has preferred to downplay issues of colonization and colonialism to concentrate instead on the promotion of its status as an autonomous French nation in North America. In contrast, however, and as a result of Quebec’s independantist agenda, the frag- mented and isolated communities of the Quebec diaspora from Ontario through to West, as well as the Acadians in New Brunswick to the East, have become yet more acutely conscious of the fragility of pan-Canadian francophonie and consequently more receptive to the benefits of a broadly based theorization of their minority position. Meanwhile, back in Europe, the francophone communities of Belgium and Switzerland, often forgotten or sometimes specifically excluded from discussions of francophonie on the debatable grounds that as liminal groups they are in fact and always have been, culturally, part of ‘greater France’, have tended, like Quebec, to define themselves through polarities of imitation and resistance vis-à-vis the metropole, and to pay little attention to the potential of a broader francophone theorization that would take account of the hybridity of their cultural experience as liminal cultures in francophonie and minority cultures in their respective multilingual countries. 2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989), 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 8, distinguish between English (‘the language of the erstwhile imperial centre’) and ‘the linguistic code english, which has been transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world’. Uncertain Relations 11 With these different positions in mind, this collection of essays seeks to promote a more expansive understanding of francophone studies. In particular it aims to complement and extend the postcolonial emphasis of the critical theorization of francophone Africa and the francophone Caribbean by examining some aspects of francophone writing in the Americas and in Europe within the overarching framework of reflection provided by Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’. This concept is particularly helpful in providing an analytical tool taken from outside the diversity of nations and societies brought together by the use of French as a shared language and from outside their widely varying understandings and definitions of francophonie. It thus offers a means of impartially contesting the binary polarities and hierarchies of metropolitan centre versus the periphery, that remain so strongly characteristic of French/francophone relations. ‘Shift[ing] the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site’ (LC, 178), Bhabha crucially locates identity not as a fixed, immutable, and centrally determined given, but as a shifting and continual negotiation carried out, on equal terms, by a de-centred self with a similarly de-centred ‘other’. His insistence, moreover, on this ‘third space’ of identity and culture as a process of performative enunciation promotes a poetics that de-centres linguistic and cultural authority, challenging the notion of a single centrally agreed canon and recognizing the inventive creative vitality of the interstices and the margins. In line with this the essays are deliberately arranged to start not from Europe but from the Americas, and to conclude by returning from the Americas to Europe. This reversal of the traditional East-West direction of eurocentric influence highlights the changing focus of the ‘global’ text’ (LC, 27) and suggests how francophonie may provide a conceptual forum for a twenty-first- century valorization of identity and culture that encompasses, as world-wide anglophonie has done, liminal cultures, settler colonies, colonies of occupation, minority groups – and ultimately the metropole itself – within the richly productive uncertainties of a ‘third space’ of even-handed cultural exchange. The complex circumstances of the French Canadians – French settler colony, British colony of occupation, Canadian minority, francophone island in North America, and the largest population of 12 Rachel Killick French native speakers outside of France3 – provide a first example of the ways in which old polarities of connection and resistance to France and to England, determined by a local politics of defensive survival, are increasingly yielding, in Quebec as elsewhere, to a more positive sense of productive exchange between French, British, and North American cultures. Noël Audet, drawing on the paradigm of cultural cannibalism, evolved in the 1920s by the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade,4 emphasizes the need for Quebec’s élites to relinquish their inappropriate and ineffective nostalgia for the norms of the metropolitan academy. His essay points instead to the intermingling of French, Amerindian, and British cultures as expressively realized in popular language and culture in Quebec and argues the importance of embracing the rich originality of this linguistic and cultural métissage within a free-standing, self-confident literature of North America. Sophie Marcotte provides an analysis of the early stages of this process of differentiation and reshaping. Her discussion of the nine- teenth-century novel in Quebec reveals the extent to which fictional and historical writing in the period combined to construct a narrative of emerging French Canadian identity, that absorbed the documentary techniques of the bourgeois realist writers of France but diverted them to the promotion of a different, post-colonial, narrative, that of a predominantly agricultural settler society, striving to build itself as an autonomous francophone culture on the North American continent. The process is one of ‘colonial mimicry’, the desire, as Bhabha has it, ‘for a reformed, recognizable Other, as the subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite’ (LC, p. 86, Bhabha’s emphasis). A different cultural narrative, the anglophone-led narrative of California as the ultimate representation of New World dream is the focus of Jeanette den Toonder’s inquiry as she investigates the specificities of the Quebec/California relationship in four Québécois 3 According to the official figures of the Quebec Governement’s Secrétariat à la politique linguistique, in 1996 Canada had 6,713,163 mother tongue franco- phones, making up 23.5% of the Canadian population. Of these, 5,742,393 were concentrated in Quebec, making up 81.5% of the province’s population. 4 Reversing the East-West understanding of New World colonization, this sees New World cultures as radically absorbing and remodelling those of the European ‘colonizers’. Uncertain Relations 13 novels. In each text, an initial attraction, mapped predictively in some instances in the anglophone resonances of the protagonist’s name Gregory Francoeur, Jack Waterman) is typically followed, notwith- standing the anglophone connection, by protective retreat to the comforting cultural security and insularity of the francophone home- land. Nonetheless some of the protagonists do engage positively with the cross-cultural possibilities

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