Seite 174 [174]
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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 +
