The long-awaited biography Guy Rocher, volume 2 (1964-2020), written by the journalist Pierre Duchesne (Quebec America, November 2), is an event. Rocher, nonagenarian sociologist, craftsman of the Quiet Revolution, remains relevant today. In recent years, he has spoken out loudly for the secularism of the Quebec state and for the increased promotion of French. His dynamic intellectual life reflects our collective evolution.
This development is not immune to disagreement, as evidenced by Barbarian country, from Jérémie McEwen (Varia, September 25). The son of Quebec painter Jean McEwen (1923-1999), with innovative abstract paintings, criticizes paternal social conformism. Unlike the artist whom he admires despite everything, he has chosen engagement. The author campaigns for the independence of Quebec in 1995, against tuition fees in 2012. The Caquist conservatism reminds him of the lack of courage of his beloved father …
Like Jérémie McEwen, from the union of a Quebecer and a Latvian immigrant, the political scientist Sarah Martinez takes a fresh look at the question of identity and multiculturality. In An interior stranger, interviews with Frantz Voltaire (All in all, October 13), she introduced the cultural activist born in Haiti in 1948, imprisoned in Chile after the 1973 coup, then settled in Montreal, where he ran a documentation center on the West Indies and the African heritage.
For his part, Rachida Azdouz, born in Casablanca and today a psychologist specializing in intercultural relations at the University of Montreal, lifts the veil, in Heal the past, think about the future (Editorial, September 22), on the internal dissensions of the progressives. With as subtitle Racism and anti-racism, his book shows that great ideals often suffer from solution controversies and ego wars.
As for Auassat. In search of missing children, d’Anne Panasuk (Editorial, September 29), this essay by the former Radio-Canada television journalist, who began his career as an anthropologist with the Innu of the Lower North Shore, reveals that at the beginning of the 1970s indigenous children (auassat, “The children” in Innu) were hospitalized without their parents: some, declared dead, were adopted, others lost their lives without their families knowing.
This tragedy finds a symbolic extension in the collective work directed by young researchers Atdrey Deveault and Michael Lessard, Death, questions of transmission, 2 volumes (M Éditeur, October). It deals in particular with the hidden memory of missing indigenous girls, sometimes murdered, which mingles with the ghosts of our legends, with Alzheimer’s disease, often more terrible than death, with the secularization of funeral rites, a sign of death. cultural evolution …
How not to associate the experience of mourning with a reflection on the unconscious? The latter, the philosopher Alain Deneault the fact, in Psychic economy (Lux, September 9, 2021), analyzing the recovery of instinct by foreign forces in economics, marketing and management. The essay shows, according to the publisher, that “the former personality who felt perpetually indebted to society has given way to an individual who tends to believe that everything is due to him.”
From a perspective that many would consider more concrete, the journalist Gerald Fillion and the economist Francois Delorme publish What planet for our children? Towards a fair and sustainable economy (Editorial, November 17). They explain the urgency, to prepare for the future, of reconciling the remedy for the climate crisis and the remedy for economic inequalities. For example, the further electrification of transportation could protect nature while enriching a government corporation: Hydro-Québec.
For their part, the researchers Frédéric Legault, Alain Savard and Arnaud Theurillat-Cloutier, much more daring, propose For an ecology of 99% (Écosociété, September 21). They advocate, in opposition to the “pale green” consensus of enlightened capitalists, a lively green revolution, one might say, which would target the entire population, instead of just the ultra-rich. To achieve this goal, they argue that there are “20 myths about capitalism to be debunked”!
For who would see in this only a delirious utopianism, historians Marie Lavigne and Michèle Stanton-Jean give a lesson in patience, in Josephine Marchand and Raoul Dandurand. Love, politics and feminism (Boréal, September 28). From traditional, elitist and Catholic Quebec, Joséphine Marchand (1861-1925) and her husband Raoul Dandurand (1861-1942) were concerned about the slow progress of a predominantly poor, poorly educated society dominated by colonizing Europe.
Creator of the Work of Free Books, Joséphine fights for the education of women. Defender of Canada’s autonomy from the British Empire, Raoul became the father of Canadian diplomacy. The editor dares to assert: “Josephine was as diplomatic as Raoul was a feminist. Their astonishing progressivism in a Quebec with invading conservatism is not without announcing the curious, baroque eclecticism that we find among certain Quebec writers from the 1960s.
André Major (born in 1942) will be one of these. Historians of literature Michel Biron and Francois Dumont bring out the phenomenon in interviews with each other and with the writer under the title André Major (Boréal, September 14). The book shows that Major, despite being one of the co-founders of Bias, did not hesitate to approach writers of a very different sensibility, even antagonistic compared to the progressive journal, like Lionel Groulx and Félix-Antoine Savard.
It is as if Quebec remained viscerally incapable of shedding a deep internal duality which, for some, kills it, and, for others, gives it an irreplaceable tragic beauty.
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