Whiteness and Anti-Anti-Racism in Quebec (Online Talk)

CHAPTERS

Introduction to Series

Joshua Neves

Introduction of Speaker

Luca Caminati

Whiteness and Anti-Anti-Racism in Quebec (Talk)

Bruno Cornellier

Q&A 1

Topics: Homo Colonialism, Revisionist Perspectives, Interfacing of Race and Queerness, Claude Jutra.

Q&A 2

Topics: Conjuncture (Stuart Hall), 60’s to Now, how the text resonated then vs now.

Q&A 3

Topics: “Hiding in plain sight”, denying of perception of racial difference, the refusal of Quebec art community to criticism.

Q&A 4

Topics: “Double Negation”, Are there comparisons to Alt-Right rhetorical strategy?

Q&A 5

Topics: The relationship between the FLQ and the black writers congress in Montreal and related thoughts.

Comment - Luca Caminati

Language aspects and it’s uniqueness in the discussion.

Comment - Masha Salazkina

The praxis behind the use of the notion of race in the discourse.

Response - Bruno Cornellier 

Addressing to two previous comments.

Q&A 6

Topics: “The performativity of the Anti-Anti-Racism”, Quebec Studies, elements based around sovereignty.

Q&A 7+8

Topics: Strategies or tactics for dealing with the text, hostility of discussions of the text, results of “settler common sense”.

Outro of Event

Joshua Neves

DESCRIPTION

Link to original event post.

This presentation/conversation is concerned with the resistance against race (as a concept) and against anti-racism in Québec. I discuss ways in which various deflective gestures were deployed in Québec’s intellectual history in order to racialize language and depoliticize whiteness within a certain hegemonic historical template articulated to the minorityhood of a majority white francophone settler nationalism. To do so I return to some of my previous work on journalist and nationalist militant Pierre Vallières’s paradigmatic (and infamous) 1968 appropriation of African American struggle as a way to qualify a certain Québécois “off-whiteness,” which continues to orient today local brands of anti-anti-racism in both left-wing and right-wing nationalist discourses and politics. In the process, I hope to invite GEM members to reflect on how, in their own work, they could extend to film and media studies Corrie Scott’s oft-cited critique of the absence of race in Québec literary theory. Finally, I want to open my own work to criticism in light of recent critical and theoretical developments in (and across) Indigenous and Black Studies on Turtle Island.