Oldal 174 [174]
DERVILA COOKE
at current or former high school students in Québec (Montreal), who are
either immigrants or of immigrant extraction and who attend or attended
multicultural schools with few if any Québécois classmates. He gives a key
place in the film to four thirty-something figures who have negotiated the
system and become politically or socially engaged adults. Solidarity with
Québec as a culturally vulnerable minority emerges as a point of discussion,
as does the question of Québec “values”, to which there is both responsiveness
and resistance. Some of the former students of immigrant origin or extraction
have come to understand Québec’s marginal position in North America
because of their own transition through cultural and linguistic marginality.
Others have a more ambivalent or instrumentalist attitude to French and
“integration” into Québécois culture. This ambivalence is echoed by some
of the current students in the Godbout film, although several others are very
vocal about their wish to understand Québec. This article explores a range
of such attitudes, reflecting on the dynamics of interconnection but also
sometimes of segregation in Québec between the Francophone majority and
people of immigrant origin or descent. I argue that the film both highlights
and questions the notion of integration of immigrants in Québec society.
It is important to note the film’s strong focus on the multicultural districts
of Montreal’s Cöte-des-neiges and Notre-Dame-de-Grace and the lack of
Québécois students from the majority population attending the schools of
those districts, which sometimes engenders a mindset of “them and us”.
MINORITIES, VULNERABILITIES, AND RECIPROCAL EMPATHY
Québec is of course a minority within Canada and perceives itself as
culturally and linguistically vulnerable. Francophone Quebecers experienced
two centuries of political and economic domination by Anglophone Canada,
including in their own province, and now they fear the diminishment of
their language and heritage through cultural colonization from the modern
Anglophone world, often understandably so. Marie McAndrew, a leading
sociologist of education in Québec, has analysed Québec’s socio-cultural
context as that of a “fragile majority”, in her 2010 monograph of the same
name. Her term is well chosen, if we consider the province’s status as
a largely but not exclusively French-speaking enclave located between
Anglophone Canada and the USA, as well as the phenomenon of globalization
in English and the diverse immigrant population in the province. Concerns
about the encroachment of English in Québec are sometimes valid. For
3 Marie McAndrew, Les Minorités fragiles et l'éducation: Belgique, Catalogne, Irlande du
nord, Québec, Montreal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2010.
* 172 +