Quebec separatism in Canadian utopian fiction and the quest for a postcolonial future

Cet essai traite du rôle des auteurs de fiction spéculative dans l’élaboration d’une identité politique particulière au Québec. Au fil des ans, les conflits politiques ont, au Canada, inspiré un grand nombre de nouvelles et de romans portant sur les conséquences de la dissolution de la Confédération qui, pour la plupart, évoquent le morcellement du pays suite au succès politique des mouvements séparatistes. Les utopies à la recherche d’un avenir où les différents groupes culturels vivent en parfaite symbiose dans une société démocratique sont rares cependant. Cet article propose une lecture de The Underdogs (1979), une satire politique de William Weintraub, qui permet de démontrer le sens des fictions moins impliquées dans la poursuite d’allégories englobantes d’une identité nationale que dans la célébration d’une diversité culturelle et sociale propre à un contexte multiculturel. Dans The Underdogs, Weintraub valorise une culture politique plus « intégrée » et a foi dans un avenir où une coexistence harmonieuse des différents groupes, pour peu qu’ils réussissent à se défaire de la rigueur des catégories linguistiques et des croyances dans des absolus culturels tels que la race, la nation et l’identité. Comme le spécifie cet article, le roman devrait se lire comme un compte rendu majeur sur la crise culturelle québécoise des années 1970, un mélange de perceptions régionales liées à un concept plus large d’affiliation et d’échange cross-culturels

George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”

This essay argues that Orwell’s representation of animals as companion species offers a strikingly new, as-yet largely neglected view of animal agency and interiority in his work. In “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”, the writer’s focus on the social reject is supplemented by a marked sense of community implying human tragedy yet framing it within precariously situated human-animal, colonial or urban-imperial transitions that visualise animals as agents of change and co-shaping species interdependent with the lives of the humans that utilize and domineer them. Animals are required whenever Orwell aspires to shift from isolation to communality, from the self-conscious outsider to the larger realm of ideas framing the world in which his characters strive to overstep the accepted lines of social performance and conformity. Read in and around disciplinary structures of rationalization, Orwell’s animals appear to secure themselves, quite paradoxically, a place within the normative anthropocentric framework excluding them. They extend beyond anthropomorphising or allegorical modes of description and open up bio-political perspectives within and across regimes of knowledge and empathy. Orwell’s writings thus present a challenge to the culturally accredited fantasy of human exceptionalism, collapsing any epistemic space between humans and animals and burying the idea of sustaining radical species distinction

Views of Canadian Cultures

When a German thinks of Canada, his or her image of this country is strongly determined by hetero-stereotypes. A survey which I conducted at the University of Würzburg in 2004 shows that German students of English know very little about Canadian literature, about Canadian geography and about Canadian society. What they do know best are preconceived images which reveal a Eurocentric view of the country. Among the few features of this image the most prominent are ‘the noble savage,’ ‘the lumberjack,’ ‘the mountie,’ ‘the sheer endless woods,’ ‘the moose,’ and ‘the beaver’. This romanticized image corresponds to a large extent to the image of Canada presented in 18th-century and 19th-century travel and exploration literature as well as in modern tourist brochures and travel guides which try to provide the traveller with a survival knowledge based on facts, figures and photographs