University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Colonial ventures: the poetics of migration, colonization, and labor in francophone North America

(USC Thesis Other)

Colonial ventures: the poetics of migration, colonization, and labor in francophone North America

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content COLONIAL VENTURES
THE POETICS OF MIGRATION, COLONIZATION, AND LABOR IN FRANCOPHONE
NORTH AMERICA
by
Alvin Y Chuan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
MAY 2023
Copyright 2023 Alvin Y Chuan

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This undertaking would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of all my
professors and dear mentors in the USC Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program
and the Department of French and Italian, or without their esteemed staff. I am sincerely thankful
that they made it possible to pursue and share my interests, while tendering helpful advice and
financial backing during the process. During my enrollment here, I am extremely grateful to have
been under the tutelage of my advisor, Lydie Moudileno, who always provided helpful and
reassuring feedback, all the while coaching me for success in my professional life. Many thanks
are also necessary for the other members of my committee: John Rowe and Olivia Harrison, who
both honored me with their insight and advocacy.

A portion of my project was realized due to the generosity of Caroline Desbiens of the
Department of Geography at the Université Laval in Québec City. Her sponsorship of my
research internship at her institution provided me the opportunity to conduct research for this
title; my second chapter would not have been possible if not for her suggestions the day we met.
This formative experience was not only supported by my wonderful home and host departments,
but also by the Association internationale des études québécoises, which provided a grant for my
internship; special thanks go to Ms Suzie Beaulieu for the attention that she gave my file and for
looking out for my best interests vis-à-vis opportunities from her organization.

Also important to recognize were my wonderful French and English professors from my
undergraduate institution, UC San Diego, who all inspired me to do my PhD. My intellectual
trajectory is particularly indebted to Catherine Ploye who fostered my fascination with literature
and media from Québec. Many ideas were inspired by my independent study under her, during
which she shared her expertise. I consider both the first and fourth chapters to be the
culminations of our many insightful discussions during that significant Fall semester of my
senior year.

My academic ambitions would not have materialized at all if not for my high school French
teacher, Anthony “Bougie” Tietz. I thank him for helping to bring me out of my shell, for
teaching me the sense of “vouloir, c’est pouvoir,” and for giving me the occasion to work with
some of his brightest students during the summers of my undergrad years. Some of these bright
students are to be thanked as well, especially the many cohorts of students-turned-assistants
whose brilliance and motivation were nothing short of inspiring.

Finally, I want to acknowledge my entire family and all my friends. Above all, I thank my father,
for always supporting my dreams, and my mother, for keeping me grounded; Miranda, for her
patient love, aide, and companionship; my cousin Cinthia and her husband Edward Chow for
providing a home away from home during my stays in Canada; my godmother Cherries,
godfather Kar Ling, and godsister Gladys for looking out for my happiness; Edward Chen, for
being a model of confidence; Janet, for her inquisitiveness, thoughtfulness, and willingness to
help; and Vince and Alice, for keeping life enjoyable these last few years of writing and other
tribulations.

Rocky and Hudson good boys.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................................................... ii
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................vi
INTRODUCTION: COLONIAL VISIONS OF POWER AND MIGRATION ..................................................... 7
MIGRATING THROUGH COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHIES ................................................................................................. 8
Defining Movements .......................................................................................................................................... 10
The Americanness of Transnational Movement? ............................................................................................... 12
Americanité à la québécoise .............................................................................................................................. 13
Expanding the Limits of Migrancy ..................................................................................................................... 16
COLONIZATION: THE SAME STORY EVERY CENTURY ............................................................................................. 18
VENTURING OUT ..................................................................................................................................................... 27
PART ONE – COLLISION: MIGRANT ACTORS IN THE COLONIAL RANGE ................................................................... 28
Chapter I – The Returns of the Roman de la terre ............................................................................................. 28
Chapter II : Innu Literary Migrants : the Anti-Colonial Writing of An Antane Kapesh and Naomi Fontaine .. 29
PART TWO – AMERICA DREAMING .......................................................................................................................... 30
Chapter III - Uneasy Roads: Colonization and Emigration in Franco-Amérique ............................................. 30
Chapter IV: New Arrivals, Different American Dreams .................................................................................... 33
THE ROAD FORWARD .............................................................................................................................................. 35
Inundating Migration ......................................................................................................................................... 36
On est des franco... ............................................................................................................................................. 38
The Polemics of Language ................................................................................................................................. 39
Migrant Aesthetics and Imaginaries .................................................................................................................. 41
A Transnational Cartography as New Corpus ................................................................................................... 42
Meanderings ...................................................................................................................................................... 43

Part One - Collision: Migrant Actors in the Colonial Range…………………………………
CHAPTER I—THE RETURNS OF THE ROMAN DE LA TERRE ................................................................... 44
The Land We Speak Of ....................................................................................................................................... 46
Making Land ...................................................................................................................................................... 48
The Migrant Factor of Settling Québec ............................................................................................................. 49
A Colonial Battlefield ......................................................................................................................................... 51
MARIA CHAPDELAINE, MIGRANT AVANT LA LETTRE ............................................................................................... 53
Clearing the Land .............................................................................................................................................. 55
Le bois sauvage .................................................................................................................................................. 60
Pas très Canadien, ça ........................................................................................................................................ 64
Colonial Returns on Migration .......................................................................................................................... 67
JEAN RIVARD : THE SETTLER-COLONIAL IDEAL ...................................................................................................... 68
Where There’s Land, There’s Cash .................................................................................................................... 70
Wrong Way! ....................................................................................................................................................... 73
An Economy of Migrant Resistance ................................................................................................................... 76
CHAQUE LUNDI SOIR A 21H SUR LES ONDES… ......................................................................................................... 77
The Song Remains the Same .............................................................................................................................. 79
“On encercle les Anglais” ................................................................................................................................. 81
THE MIGRANT TENDENCIES OF SETTLER COLONIALISM.......................................................................................... 83
MIGRATION AND THE TERROIR IN THE 21
ST
CENTURY ............................................................................................. 85
CHAPTER II—INNU LITERARY MIGRANTS: THE ANTI-COLONIAL WRITING OF AN ANTANE
KAPESH AND NAOMI FONTAINE ...................................................................................................................... 87
Studying Indigenous Migrancy .......................................................................................................................... 89
Writing of Innu Colonized Life ........................................................................................................................... 91
Migration and the Trope of Writing ................................................................................................................... 94

iv

UNWILLING LITERARY MIGRANT ............................................................................................................................ 96
When Mobility Isn’t Mobility ............................................................................................................................. 99
The Restraints of Salaried Life ......................................................................................................................... 102
Forced to Write ................................................................................................................................................ 104
The Colonial Nexus of Migration, Economics, and Writing ............................................................................ 106
NAOMI FONTAINE’S VISION OF NOMADIC MIGRANCY .......................................................................................... 107
To Understand Colonial Migrancy .................................................................................................................. 109
Instinct de nomade ........................................................................................................................................... 113
Nomadic Counter-Colonialism ........................................................................................................................ 114
Circuits of Colonial Aesthetics ......................................................................................................................... 118
BEYOND AN INNU LITERATURE OF MIGRATION ..................................................................................................... 119
A Literature of Migration, Rather Than Migrant Literature ............................................................................ 120
Transnational Exchanges and Indigenous Writing .......................................................................................... 121

Part Two - America Dreaming………………………………………………………………...
CHAPTER III—UNEASY ROADS: COLONIZATION AND IMMIGRATION IN
FRANCO-AMÉRIQUE .......................................................................................................................................... 123
Canadien or Franco-American? ...................................................................................................................... 124
The Franco-American Road ............................................................................................................................. 126
THE ROADS OUT OF LOWELL ................................................................................................................................. 131
Franco Identity at Home and on the Road ....................................................................................................... 133
La migrance béate ............................................................................................................................................ 135
De la terre à la route ........................................................................................................................................ 139
The Travaux of Vagabondage .......................................................................................................................... 141
Les tristes travaux de l’écrivain ....................................................................................................................... 143
Travaux en famille ........................................................................................................................................... 148
Big American Author ....................................................................................................................................... 149
Arduous Beatitude ............................................................................................................................................ 152
COLONIAL BLUES .................................................................................................................................................. 155
In Kerouac’s Footsteps .................................................................................................................................... 158
Voyageur et bum .............................................................................................................................................. 160
American Paradise Lost ................................................................................................................................... 162
DISENCHANTMENT ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD ................................................................................................. 169
A Francophone Dream ..................................................................................................................................... 172
CHAPTER IV—NEW ARRIVALS, DIFFERENT AMERICAN DREAMS ..................................................... 174
Québec/Amérique ............................................................................................................................................. 176
(UN)SETTLING AMERICA ....................................................................................................................................... 180
Comment peut-on être américain ? .................................................................................................................. 181
Une promenade éternelle ................................................................................................................................. 187
AN ALTERNATE AMERICAN DREAMSCAPE ............................................................................................................ 191
At the Crossroads of Nationality ...................................................................................................................... 193
Dreams that Change ........................................................................................................................................ 194
Changing Dreams ............................................................................................................................................ 196
Un pays sans nation ......................................................................................................................................... 199
REWRITING CONQUEST .......................................................................................................................................... 199
The limits of Laferrière’s conquests ................................................................................................................. 200
Reclaiming America ......................................................................................................................................... 205
Poetic Dreams of Américanité ......................................................................................................................... 210
Notre Amérique migrante ................................................................................................................................. 211
AMERICANS SANS THE UNITED STATES .................................................................................................................. 212
CONCLUSION: MIGRANT BOUNDS ................................................................................................................. 215
AESTHETICS, DISCOURSE, AND GENRE .................................................................................................................. 218

v

A Cross-national Identarian (Sub)genre .......................................................................................................... 218
A Poetics of Colonial Discourse ...................................................................................................................... 221
COLONIAL STRUCTURE, MIGRATION, AND IMMIGRATION ..................................................................................... 224
THE COLONIAL RANGE TODAY ............................................................................................................................. 226
BUT WHAT OF LITERATURE AND ART? ................................................................................................................. 228
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................................... 230

vi

ABSTRACT

This dissertation addresses an underrepresented area in the field of Francophone Studies
in the United States: Québec and Franco-American literature and culture. Examining narratives
of migration from these geographical contexts, I argue that in Québec and the Francophone U.S.,
the narrativization of migration is marked with a tendency to discursively reckon with
colonization and labor; because of this, the aestheticization of migration is often accompanied
with images of colonization and labor. To demonstrate the inextricability of these three
processes, I engage with what I term migrant cultural productions—creative works of all sorts
(e.g. writing, film, and televised series) that narrativize movements of people. The productions I
chose to analyze each represent a particular monumental moment in the migratory history of
Francophone North America from the 19th century to the present day—moments that, I show,
bear ties to colonial undertakings. My analyses are grounded in current trends of scholarship in
migration studies and draws from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In sum,
Colonial Ventures strives to be a contribution to the expanding critical corpus that studies
migration and how its transnational tendencies undermine fixed notions of nation; my project
brings to this discussion the poetics of migration and labor, raising the question of their
commitments and engagements with colonial power.

Introduction
7

INTRODUCTION: COLONIAL VISIONS OF POWER AND MIGRATION

Human migration is a longstanding theme in French-language cultural productions from
across North America. Engaging with this plethora of works from the Québécois and Franco-
American contexts, this study is spurred by an elementary remark: narratives of migration from
these areas are often narratives that reckon with colonization and labor—frequently both at the
same time. The interrelatedness of these tropes raises a question regarding the aesthetic mode of
Francophone North American migration narratives: what exactly is the role of this apparent
hyperconsciousness
1
of colonization and labor in the poeticization of human movement? Given
the existence of such a thematic nexus, how does an analysis of these discursive tendencies
facilitate the study of migration narratives from elsewhere? To answer these questions, this title,
Colonial Ventures, explores what I term migrant cultural productions: creative works—
including, but not limited to, writing, televised series, and film—that derive from the practice of
migration, narrativizes it, and/or capitalizes on it.
2
Studying these convergent aesthetic forms
will clarify a way which in which one may conceptualize a transnational body of migrant
productions; this corpus would not only transcend rigid geopolitical and mediatic boundaries, but
also allow us to interrogate such a genre’s penetration by colonial history and influences. A
recognition of this imperial penetration lays the necessary groundwork for an important social
critique: the denouncement of alienation suffered by migrant peoples from across the world who
have traversed and labored across the Americas. At its most basic, this project functions as a

1
This is inspired by literary critic Lise Gauvin’s term surconscience de la langue [hyperconsciousness of
language]—or, what she sees as Francophone authors’ tendency to interrogate their relationship with the French
language. See introduction subsection, “The Road Forward: The Polemics of Language.”
2
I borrow this definition from literary scholar Subha Xavier and her study, The Migrant Text: Making and
Marketing a Global French Literature (2016). In it she proposes the concept of “migrant text” as a “mode for
studying literary texts that derives from and capitalizes on the experience of immigration (12).” Adding to this
definition, I insist on the property of these works to narrativize migration as well. The other shortcomings of her
model will be addressed further on in this chapter.
Introduction
8

study of power, as well as the lack thereof, as it is conceptualized in French-language migration
narratives. To this end, I examine how authors and artists creatively mobilize migration to
express such notions of societal power—power that I show is extracted through labor and indeed
colonization.

MIGRATING THROUGH COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHIES

This examination comes at a time in which the question of migration and so-called
migrant literature occupy the forefront of critical inquiry in Québec studies and in many other
academic areas. Contributing to this critical corpus, Colonial Ventures aims to address lacunae in
existing literary and cultural scholarship. Critics Robert Dion and Andrée Mercier note in the
introduction of their edited book, Que devient la littérature québécoise (2017, 12), that since the
heralding of écritures migrantes in academic criticism, the study of cultural hybridity and
heterogeneity has become the dominant paradigm in Québécois critical tendencies. However,
such a fixation garners criticism from scholars such as poet-scholar Simon Harel (Carrière and
Khordoc 2008, 5), who characterizes this paradigm as an, “often simplistic discourse
surrounding concepts of plurality, hybridity and métissage which sings the praises of cultural
diversity without considering some of the difficult questions relating to migration, displacement,
exile, identity, and belonging.” Fittingly, I am not so much interested in debates surrounding
hybridity and the dialectics of “original” and “adopted” cultures. Rather, while thinking through
images and discursive tropes that are recurrent in many narratives of migration, my analyses
question the socio-political and economic materialities to which these aesthetic forms respond
and even at times help shape.
3

3
In geographer Caroline Desbiens’ reading of Edward Said’s work, she proposes that the Saidian model of the
“materiality of culture” treats, “culture not as a superficial aspect of social life, nor as a screen for supposedly more
Introduction
9

Critic Subha Xavier produces a similar study in that regard, in which she studies the
market forces that contributed to the creation of what she calls a “Global French Literature.” Her
title, The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (2016, 72), examines
both Québécois and French migrant literary works and the commitments of its authors to
globalized market relations. Xavier is largely occupied with how migrant writing is produced
within the parameters of capitalism; however, she does not particularly address the
representation of economic processes—which by extension, as I argue, indicate colonial
processes—in the works themselves (5). In this and other ways, my study steps in where
Xavier’s analysis leaves open. As the critic herself admits in her conclusion, Xavier’s
monograph lacks in two particular areas: 1) she does not apply her “migrant mode”
4
on works by
authors who are not considered migrants; 2) she does not take into consideration media other
than writing, “that deliberately muddle national, cultural, and linguistic lines while exploiting the
realities of market capitalism and resisting its homogenizing tendencies at the same time (193).”
Xavier’s statements echo the assertion of scholar of migrant writing Catherine Khordoc (2016,
2), who critiques the exoticization of migrant authors, a practice that excludes such artists from
dominant literary corpuses; Khordoc’s solution to this is the analysis of, “immigrant and non-
immigrant works together, rather than isolating works of écriture migrante from the Québécois
canon.” Effectively pressing on Xavier and Khordoc’s points, I ask: how may we conceive of a
category of “migrant” creative productions that not only includes works by migrant authors, but
also any creative production that reckons with the issue of migration? What might such a project

fundamental political-relations…culture is not a mere reflection of the world… Said viewed culture as a series of
representations, practices, and performances that enter fully into the constitution of the world (12).” Though
Colonial Ventures is predominantly occupied with creative representations and aesthetics, it is also conscious of the
fact that these poetics are couched in socio-political and economic relations that structure them, and at times even
have hand in manipulating these relations.
4
Xavier’s designation for her methodology of “tying new literary trends to the transatlantic politics of mass
migration and accelerated globalization (13).”
Introduction
10

look like in practice? Can an undertaking like this be axed on the analysis of colonial tropes and
representations of labor?
Defining Movements
To answer these queries, one cannot proceed without a reckoning of terminology such as
imperialism, colonialism, migration, aesthetics, and trope. While noting that oftentimes,
imperialism and colonization are conflated, literary scholar and postcolonial thinker Ania
Loomba draws this important distinction: while “colonialism” implied the systemic domination
of the land of others (2015, 20), “imperialism” is, “the phenomenon that originates in the
metropolis, the process which leads to domination and control. Its result, or what happens in the
colonies as a consequence of imperial domination, is colonialism or neo-colonialism (28).”
Effectively, because of this relationship, Colonial Ventures, despite its concern with colonialism
and its material fruits (colonization in North America), cannot avoid an engagement with
imperial thought by virtue of the latter’s status as a driving force of colonization. Furthermore,
for the purposes of my project, it is productive to examine more closely Loomba’s particular
conception of colonialism. What is compelling is her description of colonialism as, “an
encounter between peoples, or of conquest and domination” which implies the subjugation and
dispossession of an autochthonous people at the hands of the colonizer.
5
While Loomba places
emphasis on this violent clash of different peoples, I draw attention to her usage of the word
“encounter,” which seems to bear a migratory dimension. The migratory implication of
colonialism becomes more apparent when considering the type of human mobility that

5
Loomba expands on this, writing that, “the process of forming a new land necessarily meant un-forming or re-
forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade,
settlement, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, and enslavement (20).” Large portions of Colonial Ventures
(namely chapters beyond the first) reckon with these violent aspects and aftereffects of colonization in Francophone
North America.
Introduction
11

characterized the conquest of the Americas: settler colonialism, or the colonizer’s population of
annexed territory. A central idea of this project is thus the indissolubility of colonialism and
migration as the former is mediated by the latter.
I therefore understand “migration” to signify the movement of peoples—or as the Oxford
English Dictionary (“Migration, n.” n.d.) describes as both, “the movement of a person or people
or people from one country, locality, place of residence, etc. to settle in another;” as well as the
“seasonal movement or temporary removal of a person, people, social group, etc., from one place
to another.” But as my analyses show, the migration that colonialism encompasses is not simply
limited to the movement of the colonizer to the colonized’s established lands. This violent
movement often entails the coerced migration—or displacement—of the colonized, as well as
the introduction of other migrant subjects into the colonized space. Colonization is thus a
phenomenon in which migration is not only pervasive but also multivalent.
This multivalence of migration is accordingly perceptible in cultural productions that
narrativize colonization and its constituent labor processes. The goal of my investigation is thus
an analysis of such colonial imagery and thought. For this reason, “trope” here refers to
metaphors, motifs, themes—any “rhetorical or figurative device (J.A Cuddon 1999, 949),” that is
poetically and narratively mobilized to effectuate colonial and/or anti-colonial discourse. These
tropes are the basic units through which aestheticization, or poetic rendering, is mediated. In the
specific migrant cultural productions of my study, the very notions of “migration,” “labor,” and
“colonization” are even deployed as aesthetic devices; these tropes are then mobilized to
discursively commentate their referents: the plethora of social issues arising from Francophone
North America that are steeped in migrant and colonial enterprises.
Introduction
12

The Americanness of Transnational Movement?
These convergent colonial tropes span artistic productions from not only Québec but also
from Francophone areas of the U.S. The tropes that interest me are effectively imagined and
articulated not just by Quebecers who are descended from French colonists; but also, by minority
groups and Indigenous peoples in the province; as well as by Franco-Americans in the States.
The thematic convergence of works from these disparate geographical and social contexts
suggests the productiveness of imagining a broad narrative genre that is grounded not on the
basis of shared authorial ethnicity or nationality, but rather on a common discursive and aesthetic
propensity. It is such a liberal treatment of a text’s supposed identification to a certain nation that
allows me to also examine productions not only from the rest of Francophone Canada beyond
Québec, but also from the Francophone U.S.
It by this logic that Colonial Ventures calls to question the transnational character of its
proposed grouping of creative works—a corpus that comprises the productions of various artists
from distinct backgrounds and localities, yet whose works all bear discursive and aesthetic and
narrative similarities. At its most basic, “transnational” denotes, “human activities and social
institutions that extend across national borders (Bauböck 2003, 701).” Philosopher Laura Doyle
(2009, 1) admits that some transnational frameworks place less emphasis on the movements of
people, and focus rather on “the other-oriented interactions between and among nations, making
them mutually shaping and mutually contingent phenomena.” Yet, Doyle’s statement far from
denies the plausibility of transnational thought in the context of migration; effectively, in
defining “transnational” as cross-border human activities, political theorist Rainer Bauböck
(2003, 704) delineates the reach of transnational frameworks in migration studies—migration
being a change of residences that is undertaken by non-state migrant actors across national
Introduction
13

borders.
6
However the question remains: what is the significance of transnational studies, not just
in migration, but furthermore in the context of migrant literary and mediatic studies? Literary
scholar Oliver Scheiding, via the work of Americanists Caroline Levander and Robert Levine
(Scheiding 2019, 42; Levander and Levine 2011, 1), provides a possible answer, suggesting that
in today’s globalized world, the literary scholar’s preoccupation with “genre, period, and author”
which is all “predicated by nation,” might be replaced by the concepts of “forms, spaces, and
practices.”
7
This concern with forms, spaces, and practices describes my critical modality, which
strives to place less emphasis on the national origin and/or identity of the author, and more on
convergent discursive and aesthetic practices. Colonial Venture’s corpus of works can thus be
characterized as a transnational one, in such that it puts diverse productions together in
conversation without much attachment to geopolitical boundaries. Its argument is that across the
borders that separate Québec, Canada, and the rest of North America, one might find similar
migration narratives that share a common thematic propensity: the thinking through of
colonization and labor. This propensity might thus be conceived of as a transnational aesthetic
practice—or, in other words, a discursive and narrative form that transcends reductive notions of
genre and national literature.
Americanité à la québécoise
Accordingly, any mention of “America” in this project refers to a continental sense of the
word, an aspect that facilitates the transnational linking of productions across national
boundaries in this shared landmass. In an attempt to draw similarities between the province and

6
Bauböck explains, "transnational activities are initiated and sustained by non-institutional actors across national
borders.” This definition seems to adequately describe certain forms of migration: extra-national emigration.
7
Levander and Levine propose an examination of all American literature along this bent—one that is oriented
towards form, spaces, and practices.
Introduction
14

its neighbors, Québec’s relationship with the United States and the rest of the continent has long
been philosophized by scholars. Québec’s supposed américanité [Americanness]—or its
attributes that are similar to those of the U.S. and/or the rest of the continent—may in fact
provide useful tools with which to study artistic and literary conceptions of migration and
colonization in all North America. For example, consider critic and author Jean-François
Chassay (2017, 280) who asserts that, “on a souvent considéré la dimension américaine (états-
unienne) et la littérature québécoise à l’aune de ce critère : la traversée [my emphasis] des
espaces territoriaux, de la grande ville aux déserts en passant par les routes qui défilent, selon le
modèle du roadbook.” In other words, on the level of aesthetic style, many critics have hitherto
metonymized Americanness as a certain consciousness of space within Québécois works.
Chassay elaborates on this model, demonstrating that américanité can be characterized as a
fixation on “confined” space—or space without a “referent to history,” which speaks to the
malleability of attachment to a certain nation, a malleability further evident by Québec’s
association with a feature supposedly definitive of the United States. But if these features
manifest also in Québec creative productions, how can we simply affirm that it is simply a U.S.
American characteristic? Can Americanness be understood more productively in a continental
sense, rather than as an attribute that is attached to U.S. national identity? The key to these
questions may lie in a neglected dimension of the paradigm that Chassay describes: if indeed
Americanness functioned on a certain passage-through-space, it would mean that there is an
implicit migratory dynamic within this aesthetic mode. Such conceptions of ‘Americanness’
must therefore not only be unexclusive to the United States—of which Québec is categorically
not a part—but rather refer to a migrant/migratory tendency in narrative practices. Americanité
may therefore function as a floating signifier that simply refers to the depiction of migrancy, or
Introduction
15

one’s state of migrant movement. Exploring all possible conceptions of this migrant
Americanness, I understand this construct in several ways: 1) as the narrativization of movement
that occurs amidst the historic and aesthetic backdrop of colonized North America; 2) as this
very notion of américanité which at times appears as an object of critique in the inherent
discourse of migrant productions. While examining this, Colonial Ventures proposes that another
layer of this continental creative americanité is its disposition to aestheticize colonization
because of this latter phenomenon’s relationship to migration.
This insistence on the continental sense of the American is reminiscent of the tendency in
transnational American studies to decenter the United States—an action that my proposition of
americanité illustrates by denying the U.S. exclusive rights to the demonym. Scholars of
American Literature Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruez (2011, 229) explore this idea,
attaching it to the definition of transnational; employing the compass as metaphor for
comparison—a practice that to them seems to necessitate the problematic fixing of a central
vantage point [read: the United States] in order to perceive the other; they propose that, “a
transnational analysis would draw multiple circles, replanting the foot of the drawing-compass in
different, central points, moving across different scales of observation.” In other words, to
circumvent the problematic reinforcement of a singular perpetual center, a remedy would thus
entail a reorientation of the compass—to shift it to new positions in such that the so-called
periphery was now one possible center point of many, and that the U.S. (or the previous center),
occupies a location on the margins. It is in this way that the notion of America might then be
viewed from a non-U.S. centric perspective. My argument is that this decentering of the U.S.
from Americanness can be realized through the treatment of non-U.S. Francophone artists and
their migration narratives from across the continent. Their migrant productions offer an
Introduction
16

alternative view of the land that they equally share with other peoples. Through their
conceptualization of migration across the American continent, not just the United States, the
works of these artists allows us to imagine a broad aesthetic Americanness: a poetic mode that is
indicative of shared creative propensities that span the space of this continent without any regard
for national or regional limitations. And while the U.S. and the concept of America may be
objects of critique of the works in my corpus, they in no way reinforce notions of U.S. primacy
and exceptionalism, but rather decenter them—forcing an observation of “America” in all senses
of the word from its supposed periphery and margins. Of course, for the purposes of my study,
this periphery and margin are represented by migrant Francophone communities in North
America. Their “marginality” rests not only in their oft-mobile geographical positions outside of
the U.S. (for example Québec) or of other “centers” (such as other Franco-Canadien and
Francophone Indigenous populations in relation to Québec); but also at times in their minority
status within the States (Franco-Americans). What can perhaps be said of these groups is that
they all decenter notions of américanité through the practice and conceptualization of migration,
an idea that might be reinforced through the study of their stories.
Expanding the Limits of Migrancy
Returning to the notion of migrancy, my transnational interpretation of américanité and
its migratory dynamics effectively builds on a notion that asserts Québécois literature from the
1960s onward is marked by a tendency to imagine wandering and movement; as Pierre Nepveu
(1999, 200) writes, “l’imaginaire québécois lui-même s’est largement défini, depuis les années
soixante, sous le signe de l’exil (psychique, fictif), du manque, du pays absent ou inachevé et, du
milieu même de cette négativité, s’est constitué en imaginaire migrant, pluriel, souvent
cosmopolite.” This leads him to suggest that works by major Québécois authors—productions
Introduction
17

not generally recognized as “migrant”—also bear so-called migrant attributes.
8
I argue in turn
that this is not just restricted to a specific post-1960 period of Québec literary productions; as I
will demonstrate, this migrant aspect can be discerned in earlier literary works, in narrative
works expressed in mediums other than writing, and most importantly, in works arising beyond
the Québec context in the rest of the continent. Drawing connections between these works and
the debates surrounding américanité, my line of questioning can be summarized as follows: how
might my conception of denationalized artistic Americanness elucidate the commonalities of
creative works from across Francophone North America in their aestheticization of migration,
colonization, and labor? At its most basic level, Colonial Ventures asks how one may read
notions of colonization, migration, and work in creative productions from Francophone North
America, while attempting to discern the relationship between those three thematic and poetic
variables.
To arrive at an answer to these questions, this project will study a varied sample of
migrant cultural producrtions from the Québécois, Canadian, and Franco-American contexts,
comparing and juxtaposing them. Because of its intent, the analyses of this project are not
restricted to “migrant literature” typically identified as such in the Québécois literary sphere—
such as, for example, the novels of Régine Robin and Ying Chen. It is also interested in
“reading” migration as it appears in other genres and media, such as in the roman de la terre
[Québec farm novels] and its televised adaptations; in road novels from the Franco-American
context that idealize nomadism; and in protest writing from Canadian First peoples—

8
Nepveu cites several examples, “chez Aquin, Godbout, Ducharme, Basile, pour ne citer que les plus importants,
l’espace québécois se découvre à la fois comme excentré et excentrique, mais aussi comme implosif et inclusif:
espace-déversoir, comme la Suisse Allégorique de Prochain Épisode, culture pour laquelle il ne s’agit pas seulement
d’accéder à l’universel en assumant et traversant ses particularités, mais qui se voit plutôt investie, habitée par la
diversité des cultures, des noms, des références.” Destabilizing the very notion of “migrant”, this chapter will
explain below my usage of the term.
Introduction
18

demonstrating that all of these works indeed narrativize and critique colonial iterations of
migration and work.
I do not purport that my hypotheses can only be tested on my chosen primary sources; my
frame and findings may very well be exported to understand creative productions from other
contexts. As one will discover, thinking through notions of migration and of Americanness in
creative productions inevitably leads to many other pertinent questions regarding constructions
of race, class, and space, all the while bringing to surface the dynamics of Euro-Canadian and
American imperialisms that continue to haunt our contemporary times. Indeed, one of the
catalysts for this study is very much what appears to be the persistent specter of settle
colonialism in Québec’s public discourse today—manifesting not only in news media and
political debates, but also in popular culture.

COLONIZATION: THE SAME STORY EVERY CENTURY
According to literary scholars Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc (2008, 7),
researchers have long drawn the connection between migration in North America and paradigms
of (post)coloniality—this being especially true in the context of anglophone scholarship.
However, some have begun to question the usefulness of such frameworks; Xavier for example
even goes as far as to assert that in what she identifies as “migrant texts,”
Economic and political exploitation figures prominently as does the clash of languages
and cultures. Of courses this textuality does not exist in a historical vacuum, and the
ghosts of colonialism certainly hover close behind, but it is no longer fruitful to rehash
the texts of immigration through theories of postcolonialism that posit the migrant as an
ideal of hybrid culture…rather than the complex and contradictory reality that it
embodies today (20).

As mentioned earlier, I too am wary of focusing specifically on the migrant as an idealized figure
of hybridity and heterogeneity, not only because of the overabundant usage of such models, but
Introduction
19

also because of its limitations; despite this, “postcolonial theories” certainly has many other uses
in our day and age in understanding “economic and political exploitation.” As political theorist
Glen Coulthard (2014, 14) reminds us, it is “beyond question” that capitalism plays a vital role in
ongoing settler-colonial schemes in Canada and that, “it is necessary to recognize that it only
does so in relation to or in concert with axes of exploitation and domination configured along
racial, gender and state lines.”
9
Colonial Ventures acknowledges that colonialism in our
contemporary times is an ever present fact of life and asserts that it continues to form a nexus
that implicates the issue of migration, class, and marginalization among many others.
Understanding that “postcoloniality” also signifies a general oppositionality to imperialist,
colonial, and quasi-colonial practices—and not just encompassing questions regarding
subjectivity after the colonial experience (Randall 2003, 78)
10
—my project will show that there
is ample room for additional critique of colonial dynamics that surround the political and socio-
economic dimensions of migrant creative works, not only from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, but even in our contemporary times.
As an example of how certain colonial dynamics still permeate current-day events in the
twentieth century—which therefore need to be considered when engaging with contemporary
migrant narratives—let us consider the plethora of rhetoric and narratives surrounding the
October 2018 Quebec General Election, during which commentators rightfully described
immigration as the central issue (Schué and Donahue 2018).
11
This election saw a new
government formed by the political party Coalition Avenir Québec with François Legault as the

9
The specific settler-colonial project that Glen Coulthard references is the “ongoing dispossession of Indigenous
peoples in Canada,” which he outlines in his 2014 title, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition.
10
I owe literary critic Marilyn Randall for this definition, found in her essay, “National identity in French Canada”,
in which she cites Jorge de Alva via Ania Loomba.
11
According to a September 2018 Radio-Canada article, then incumbent premier Phillippe Couillard judged it as
such.
Introduction
20

new premier; liberally conservative, nationalist, yet federalist—that is, he does not advocate for
the secession of Québec from Canada—Legault campaigned and won on an platform that was
skeptical of immigration; he promised to lower the province’s immigration quota as well as to
test new arrivals on their knowledge of so-called “Québec values and language” as a condition
for remaining (Bélair-Cirino and Sioui 2018).
12
Such stances come at time during the highest
wave of forced displacement since the Second World War, described as such by the United
Nations Refugee Agency (Edwards 2017); as an aside, almost undoubtedly reactionary to this is
the surge across the world of right wing populist tendencies that all too often embrace
xenophobic sentiments including, among others, Trumpism in the United States, rise of the far-
right in France, and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. Uncannily, soon after Legault
was elected, it became apparent that his skepticism’s towards immigration appealed to racist
elements in Québec Nationalism; though reasoning that Québec’s previous immigration policy
resulted in “failed integration” of many new arrivals—often people of color—and their
incompatibility with Québec “values,” he nonetheless stressed the need to welcome more
“qualified” immigrants from France and other European states to support Québec’s economic
goals (Patriquin 2019; Rioux 2019).
13
Putting aside for the moment this particularly racialized
xenophobic impulse, let us turn our attention to how immigration seems to function as equally as

12
See the September 2018 news article “Test de valeurs : il faudrait être de « mauvaise foi » pour échouer, plaide
François Legault” in Le Devoir.
13
Winning this election, Legault effectively symbolized, among other things, the dwindling of both Québec
Separatism and the Left—the latter of which having dominated the province since the 1960s; the rise of right-wing
populism; and also, a surge of xenophobic sentiment in a nationalistic framework once touted for its so-called
“color-blind” character. In an editorial piece written for the Canadian Broadcast Company, political commentator
Patriquin suggests that it may be true that the first Parti Québécois—a Québec nationalist and seperatist party—
Minister of Immigration in the 1960s, Gérald Godin, recognized the importance of Québec being “colour and
country-blind” in its recruitment of “Neo-Québécois” immigrants from Algeria, Haiti, and other non-European
States; however, with Legault’s election in the current day, much of Québec’s nationalists claims of racial
inclusiveness become even more unconvincing.
Introduction
21

a tool to prop up the province’s economic schemes and how these schemes recall the province’s
colonial legacy.
Legault and the CAQ’s skeptical stance towards immigration marked a radical shift in
attitudes prevalent in Québec since the 1960s that overcast enthusiastic government support for
French-speaking migrants from postcolonial localities—such as Haiti, Algeria, and the states of
the former French Indochina—in a bid to bolster the province’s workforce (Brière 2005, 153).
14

In particular, one way the CAQ’s stance is reactionary is its direct opposition to the policies of
the previous ruling government under premier Phillipe Couillard, of the Québec Liberal Party,
who oversaw what journalists describe as “unprecedented” investment in the area of immigration
during the 2018-19 fiscal years (Porter 2018).
15
Backtracking to Couillard’s term as prime
minister, his government’s elevated spending on immigration came at a time when the “pénurie
de main-d’œuvre” [workforce shortage] frequently made headlines in Québec (Sampson 2018).
16

In March 2018, just weeks before the 2018-19 liberal budget was passed, the Féderation
canadienne de l’entreprise indépendante reported that the number of vacant work positions in
Canada reached a new high in the last quarter of the 2017 fiscal year; in particular, the FCEI
report reaffirms that since the latter part of 2016, the percentage of job vacancies in Québec
radically superseded the rate found in rest of the country (“Postes à Pourvoir : Postes Vacants
Dans Le Secteur Privé, T4 2017 | FCEI” n.d.).
17
The Québec Liberal Party’s investment in

14
See critic Eloise Brière’s essay, “Québec and France: La Francophonie in a Comparative Postcolonial Frame.”
15
The majority of the 190 million dollars poured by liberal politicians into immigration were directed to promote
the acquisition of so-called “skilled workers,” whereas 40 million was dedicated to the francization services for
immigrants. See journalist Isabel Porter’s March 2018 article in Le Devoir, “L’immigration en région en attente
d’une nouvelle direction.
16
Sampson’s 2018 news article cites Féderation canadienne de l’entreprise indépendante statistics that show the
rate of job vacancies to have doubled since 2004.
17
In the province there are 94,700 unfilled posts—or 3.4% of the total positions in the province. Though it does not
provide statistics for Québec in particular, in their report, the Canadian Information, Arts and Leisure sectors are
shown to be some of the many industries confronting this decrease of human capital.
Introduction
22

immigration was ostensibly passed to alleviate this shortage of labor, with portions of the fund
earmarked to introduce immigrants to employers, many of whom are located in the régions—
areas of Québec outside the large urban centers where the labor shortage is most pronounced,
and where immigrants were least likely to settle.
18
However, it does not seem that the poor
retention of workers is only because of problems in immigrant integration, as suggested by
François Legault and the CAQ; coinciding with these trending reports of job vacancies and
immigration funding was news that francophone Québecers are rapidly leaving for other
provinces in the country (Gravel 2017).
19
Making sense of these contemporaneous reports, one
may conjecture that the government promotion of migration is symptomatic of a crisis of
depopulation that hinders quasi-colonial
20
(Killick 2006, 185) projects to settle and economically
exploit rural areas of the province. What is sure is that these contemporary anxieties of
depopulation, migration, and labor eerily recall an earlier period of elevated migration in French
Canadian and French American history during the long nineteenth century, which helps shine
light on the colonial dimension of the migrant situation in current day Québec.
Indeed, in the context of French-speaking Canada, these anxieties vis-à-vis labor and
migration are nothing new and carries with it in fact historical baggage. Though many periods of
inflated migratory influxes marks the province’s past, one—crystalized in the province’s
imaginary thanks to countless novels, films, and TV series that describe it—is named by scholars
as the l’Exode [the Exodus]; though precise statistics are lacking, Jack Kerouac scholar Jean-

18
Definition taken from the “Banque de dépannage linguistique.” In Québec, this is equivalent to the French term
« en province ».
19
Statistique Canada shows that from 2001 to 2006, Québec saw a net loss of 11,650 inhabitants, a loss that jumped
to nearly 37,000 for the period from 2011 to 2016. In a 2017 interview Jack Jedwab, a historian with the Association
for Canadian Studies, is quoted saying, “en termes de chiffres, la perte des francophones n’est pas énorme, mais
symboliquement, je trouve que c’est important. Ça veut dire qu’en raison d’économies plus fortes, les autres
provinces attirent les gens (Gravel).”
20
I borrow this term from postcolonial scholar of Québec, Rachel Killick and her essay, “In the Fold?
Postcolonialism and Quebec” (189).
Introduction
23

Christophe Cloutier claim that these are the years between 1840 and 1930 that saw Québec’s
Francophone population decrease by half—that is, in comparison to levels around 1850 (Kerouac
2016, 10). With the end of Mercantilist economic policies within the British Empire, and the
integration of its colonies into a global free market trade system, Québec found itself unable to
compete in the trade of timber, its most lucrative export. The French-Canadian petty bourgeoisie
and peasants slipped into poverty, causing a period of elevated migration away from the
province. At this time, French Canadians left rural Québec for the large industrial centers of
Anglophone-dominated North America in the rest of Canada and the United States.
21
Historians
estimate that at least 500,000 French Canadians left Québec for the United States just in the
period from 1861 to 1901 (Hamelin 1978, 395).This exodus was, in turn, met with intense
counter-initiatives to encourage Québec’s French Canadians to settle and agriculturally exploit
instead the Laurentians—mountainous areas of Québec north of the St. Lawrence River. At the
center of these schemes were politicians and clergymen, often in partnership, who saw this
combat against depopulation as a struggle against not only a decrease of economic output, but
also the very erosion of the French-Canadian race and of its Catholic and French-speaking
identity (401).
One particularity of those provincial politiques de colonisation [policies of
settlement/colonization], is that they received backing from the Roman Catholic Church in
Québec who, in support of those policies, patronized so-called romans de la terre—farm novels
manipulated at times to idealize the agriculturalist way of life.
22
The narratives found therein
aimed to incite French-Canadians, with idyllic portraits of rural life, to settle so-called

21
Sizeable communities of French Canadians also emerged in the prairies and the Canadian West.
22
Manipulated because in some cases these texts painted an unflattering picture rural life but were censored, edited,
and republished by Catholic Clergy and publishers to advance colonial goals. The most notable example of this is
also probably the most iconic roman de la terre—Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1913).
Introduction
24

undeveloped land in the Québec North in order to preserve their national identity. It is in this
way that cultural productions found themselves implicated in the complex dynamics of politics
and economics; these works were effectively mobilized as ideological crutches in an attempt to
advance the French-Canadian national project of migration and colonization.
Recent scholarship on these farm novels can therefore help us raise many pertinent lines
of inquiry on the role of creative productions in colonial schemes that implicate the movement of
human and economic capital; however, these studies are not without their blind spots. For
example, literary comparist Florian Freitag (2013, 5) claims that, “far from merely portraying
agriculture as an economic venture or a way of life—which they also do—farm novels dramatize
the relationship between farming and constructing the nation and depict farming as a social
practice that has helped to articulate the nation.”
23
While I agree that nationalistic themes are
central to those texts, one of the implications of Freitag’s treatment is that the significance of the
novels’ political motivations outweighs its economic ones, when in reality the political and the
economic in these contexts are imbricated one on another. Human geographer Caroline Desbiens
(2013, 10) does study how the Québec roman de la terre and other rhetorical forms, such as
political discourse and other media, helped lay out, “paths of economic development in Northern
Quebec,” using the symbolic power of art and communication to generate both electric and
politico-economic power. However, she, like Freitag, does not put emphasis on an important
aspect of these farm novels; while these works do encourage a certain anchoring to the national
soil to facilitate its exploitation, they are in many occasions also narratives of migratory
movements—the roman de la terre may often be understood as a roman de la migration.
24
This

23
In brief, he identifies nation building as a unifying trope that approximates farm novels from different North
American contexts, including those from Québec.
24
Desbiens talks about subgenres within the roman de la terre. The one she studies in particular is the roman de la
colonisation, or, the novel of settlement/colonization, and proposes its reconfiguration in twenty-first century
Introduction
25

also serves as a reminder that though not all migration is colonial, “settler identity—regardless of
race—is predicated on the intentionality of migration (Day 2016, 20).”
25
Desbiens does reference
that, “the construction of identity through a dialectical movement between rooting and mobility
is a fundamental aspect of Québécois territoriality and the integration of the North into the
francophone geographical imagination (67);” however, given her geographer’s bent, her study is
principally concerned with the poetics behind the construction of space and territory. She, along
with Freitag, nonetheless clear the way for us to interrogate how literary productions from the
Exode may be mobilized to engage in discourses of migration and economic extraction—or, in
other words, labor—not only during the time of their publication, but also in other contemporary
contexts (Desbiens 2013, 92).
26
Developing this, I go on to interrogate how these migrant
narratives of labor may be (re)appropriated in later periods of time by subsequent colonial
projects; also, I ask how other cultural forms and narrative genres continue in their tradition and
participate in the debates surrounding migration, labor, and the inherent imperial tendencies of
these two processes.
To summarize, Colonial Ventures uses these farm novels, and their associated
scholarship, as a springboard in these two ways. My analysis will focus first on the questions of
transgeographical mobility contained in those settler-colonial productions; I will draw attention
to their depiction of migration as a modality of both colonization and labor. Also, it will
interrogate how later migrant productions also contain tropes that are similar to those found in
the romans de la terre. In sum, the goal is to study how these different genres of migrant

Québec public discourse as the roman de resource [the romance of resource extraction]. Staying within the domain
of literature and creative media, I call to question the possibility of another categorization: the roman de la
migration.
25
Critic Iyko Day outlines here the debates sounding the migrant dimension of settler colonialism.
26
She only briefly mentions popular music, specifically the neo-folk ban Mes Aïeux in her re-reading of the roman
de la terre as the roman des ressources.
Introduction
26

narratives converge in their representations of labor, colonialism, and migrancy—a leitmotif of
tropes that span genres from the Rural Exodus of the long nineteenth century to contemporary
times.
In addition, as we saw in my brief non-exhaustive historical survey, it would be folly to
understand the concept of “migration” one-dimensionally as simply the arrival and settling of
immigrants, like it seems to be in the predominant trends of migration studies (Carrière and
Khordoc 2008; Dahab 2009; Harel 2005; Xavier 2016).
27
Migration constitutes a nexus that not
only implicates other macroeconomic issues, such as those of depopulation and human capital,
but also raises pertinent questions about their relationships with instigating forces such as settler-
colonial ambition and exploitative capitalism. As such relationships suggest, a study of migration
in Québec cannot just be centered on immigrants to the province as they also raise the question
of both emigrants who have left the province, as well as of Indigenous peoples who have been
there since the beginning (“Développement social” 2014).
28
The unconsidered histories and
subjectivities of all these groups need to be acknowledged, and studying them will produce new
understandings of how migration and labor are conceived and conceptualized within a colonial
frame. Creative works are the sources and storehouses of many of these obfuscated histories—of
narrativized colonial ventures—and it is for this reason literature and other cultural productions
are worthy of critical scrutiny.

27
The monograph of critic F. Elizabeth Dahab is a particular exemplar, as while it superficially presents itself to be
a broad study of “Exile in Canadian Francophone literature,” it appears to be rather concentrated on the works of
Arab-Canadian authors.
28
In the ongoing Québec government initiative to exploit mineral resources in the province’s north, the Plan Nord
outlines under its goals of “Social Development” the desire to train the Indigenous population and to integrate them
into the workforce.
Introduction
27

VENTURING OUT
The works examined in this project will be divided into two parts, each part composing of
two chapters. Part One—"Collison: Migrant Actors in the Colonial Range”—will interrogate the
migratory dimensions in settler-colonial farm narratives (Chapter 1 : The Returns of the Roman
de la Terre); as a counter balance, it will also raise the issue of the Indigenous voices that are
ignored by Québec settler initiatives (Chapter 2: Innu literary migrants : the Anti-Colonial
writing of An Antane Kapesh and Naomi Fontaine). Part One details thus two migrant dynamics
that are at odds with one another: the violent movement of the colonizer onto the colonized’s
land, as well as the colonized’s subsequent mobility in the face of this domination.
Part Two—"America Dreaming”—will then address movements of other Francophones
in and out of the colonial range of Québec; it first examines the depiction of Franco-Americans
in the U.S. (Chapter 3 : Uneasy Roads : Colonization and Emigration in Franco-Amérique) and
then contemporary Post-War immigrants to Québec (Chapter 4 : New Arrivals, Different
American Dreams). This portion reveals that the imagining [read: dreaming] of this continent
often implies a reckoning with labor and colonization qua migration—an idea encapsulated by
the ideological construct of the American dream and by the artists’ transnational, anti-colonial,
reworking of this concept.
As is evident, Colonial Ventures strives to directs attention to oft-neglected perspectives
and imaginaries deriving from these periods as well as from successive timeframes. As this
project is a study of significant migrant phenomena, its chapters are primarily organized
according to the historical events that serve as the referents of my productions. Yet, the
organizational logic of my chapters may be understood in another way: each section also
functions as an investigation of a particular colonial dynamic at play.
Introduction
28

PART ONE – COLLISION: MIGRANT ACTORS IN THE COLONIAL RANGE

Chapter I – The Returns of the Roman de la terre
The first chapter will return to those settler-colonial romans de la terre—of which Louis
Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine is emblematic. It will then study the returns of these novels in
recent years—that term signifying not only the economic and cultural value constructed and
mediated by its stories, but also the reconfiguration of its tropes in newer works. Objects of study
include Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard duology (1874,1876)
29
and the Radio-Canada
televised series, Les Pays d’en Haut (2016-2021), the latter being effectively a rehash of a 1960s
soap opera, Les Belles Histoires des Pays d’en Haut (1956-1970)—both televised series being
loosely based on Claude-Henri Grignon’s farm novel, Un homme et son péché (1933, 1933). Just
like its romantic predecessors, the 2016 series depicts migration to the north in the wake of
L’Exode, as well as its colonization, as grueling yet essential practices to guarantee the survival
of the French-Canadian race; as such, these productions frequently reference migration to the
United States, which serves as a sort of foil to settler-colonial ambitions in the Québécois
territory. Furthermore, the political backdrop of the new series’ temporality proves to be of great
interest. Compounded by the recent political economic factors outlined earlier in the chapter, in
2014 the Québec Liberal Party government had just revived the Plan nord—a economic scheme
to exploit the mineral resources of the province’s north. Recalling the specter of those nineteenth
and early twentieth century politiques de colonisation—in which farm novels served as
ideological supports—I speculate how the recent return(s) of those roman de la terre may be

29
Jean Rivard, le défricheur was published in 1874 whereas its sequel, Jean Rivard, économiste was released in
1876.
Introduction
29

reacting to internal and transnational migratory movements outside of the series’ narrative space
in the twenty-first century; studying how former ideations of settler colonialism are projected
and reconjured in contemporary Québec’s colonial exploits, this chapter thus tracks the
development of these tropes from the l’Exode to our contemporary times.
Chapter II : Innu Literary Migrants : the Anti-Colonial Writing of An Antane Kapesh and Naomi
Fontaine
A blind spot of many settler-colonial tales is the recognition of the fact that this
colonization functioned with respect to the alienation and coerced migration of the Inuit and First
Nations. Indeed, in each of the previously described moments of migration, by dint of their
association with settler colonialism, the obfuscated narratives of these Indigenous peoples come
to question. Critics have begun to make in-roads, relating Indigenous creative media to Migrant
Studies; scholar of Anglophone literatures Angeline O’Neill (2008, 271) even goes as far as
saying that, “First Nations, Métis, and Inuit writers must, in many respects, be the yardstick
against which the relationship between literature and migration in Canada is measured... Their
literatures...are inevitably concerned with issues of migration: the migration of other peoples into
and within Canada.” My second chapter thus investigates the prevalence of these Indigenous
narratives in the Francophone context and how they engage with colonial constructs of power
and territory that are imposed upon them—structures that remain “abstract” to many of them.
30

To this end, chapter two turns to two essayists from the Innu Nation: An Antane Kapesh
(1926-2004), and Naomi Fontaine (1987-). The Innu’s ancestral territories span vast areas of the
Québec North and Labrador. The two authors write to protest against settler-colonial schemes

30
“Abstract” signifying that colonial mechanisms such as borders and state apparatuses were very much alien to
Indigenous people before the colonization of their lands by Whites—an alienation accentuated by the violent
imposition of these mechanisms on colonized autochthonous subjects.
Introduction
30

that penetrate their lands; this chapter analyzes in particular Antane Kapesh’s French-Innu
bilingual title, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse /Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu (1976);
and Fontaine’s Kuessipan : à toi (2011), Manikanetish : Petite Marguerite (2014), and Shuni :
Ce que tu dois savoir, Julie (2019). These essays demonstrate that the colonizer’s movement in
their territories have in many ways infringed on the agency and mobility of colonized First
Peoples; however, at the same time, the essays serve also as proof that Indigenous artists and
leaders have resisted/and continue to resist imperial domination through the persistent practice of
migration—a migrancy that takes the forms of both their pre-colonized nomadic customs, as well
as of their present vocations as mobile transnational writers.

PART TWO – AMERICA DREAMING
Chapter III - Uneasy Roads: Colonization and Emigration in Franco-Amérique
Exiting the colonial range of Québec appropriated space, I then investigate another
dimension of the rural exodus frequently omitted by critics: the consideration of those migrants
who have departed Francophone Canada during that period, forming exclaves in the United
States. During that time, about 24 percent of the total French Canadian population resided in
New England, compared with 55 percent in Québec, and the rest in other parts of both Canada
and the United States; New England was often denominated “le Québec d’en bas” [Lower
Québec] (Melehy 2016, 13). The question of Franco-America is becoming more and more
common in the area of Québec Studies and is even linked to the issue of américanité, as critic
Jonathan Gosnell (2018, 56) aptly summarizes,
today, cultural elites in Québec bicker over American cultural identity (américanité) and
whether it is indeed possible to be “American” in French Canada without losing one’s
linguistic and cultural compass to the predominant Anglophone Culture. French and
American have long appeared to be mutually exclusive forces despite similar global
Introduction
31

trajectories, yet the possibility exists for an often forbidden métissage between French
and English,

this métissage referring to the “dual identity” of French-Canadian immigrants and their
descendants in the States—or in other words, Franco-Americans. However, I ask if it is possible
to depart from what seem to be Québec centric models in understanding Franco-American
identity and cultural practices, while respecting the link between the two communities. The
answer to this lies in the transnationality of these immigrant subjects, who though they do not
reject senses of ethnic and national origins all together, nonetheless trouble static identifications
through their cross-continental mobility. This idea will be explored through the reading of
migrant narratives from two authors: Franco-American Jack Kerouac and Québecois Jacques
Poulin—both celebrated writers of road novels that not only contain musings on this “original”
canadienité, but also tracks avatars of this identity across all of Franco-Amérique.
I turn first to the patron saint of the beatnik movement, Jack Kerouac. Frequently alluding
to himself as French Canadian in his writings, he also wrote extensively, yet privately, in French.
In 2007 approximately 200 pages of his writings in a phonetic Québec French—reminiscent of
Joual
31
—was discovered in his archives; critic Jean-Christophe Cloutier has published this
collection of texts as La vie est d’hommage (2016) with Québec publishing house Boréal. In this
collection one can even discover an early manuscript of his magnum opus On the Road (1957),
entitled “Su l’chemin.” Hassan Melehy argues in his study of Kerouac: Language Poetics and
Territory (2016, 2), that the “the thematic of much if not all of (Kerouac’s) writing...concerns the
travel, migration, and mixing of populations, in other words movement between cultures and
territories.” Developing these ideas, I thus ask how Kerouac’s notions of travel, migration, and

31
The sociolect of the Montreal working class, during the 1960s authors started to phonetically write in this register
as a means to critique the servile social position of Québecers in Canada.
Introduction
32

his immigrant Franco-American identity are imbricated one on the other and is even connected to
his labor as a mobile writer of road stories. His vocation as a wandering author, I show, is tied to
his status as an impoverished minority in the United States—a poverty that raises questions on
the status of Franco-Americans as quasi-colonized subjects in their adopted country.
Furthermore, Kerouac biographer Joyce Johnson alludes to the influence of romans de la
terre, in particular Maria Chapdelaine, in Kerouac’s writing (Melehy 63). Investigating this, I
will study specifically how common motifs in the farm novels have migrated to the road novel,
revealing a crossroads between the two genres in their treatment of mobility, colonization, and
work.
In addition, studying Kerouac will inevitably lead to the many other authors of road
novels in the Québec literary sphere, writers who cite Kerouac as an influence. In this chapter, I
will only concentrate on one: Jacques Poulin, celebrated Québec author of Volkswagen Blues
(1984)—a road novel that frequently addresses the position of French settlers and their
descendants in the history of the North American continent. The triple themes of migration,
colonization, and labor are equally shown to be interrelated in Volkswagen Blues, as the novel
offers a critique of Francophone colonial undertakings in Canada and the United States.
This chapter thus demonstrates the way in which road novels from this continental
context is engaged in commentaries of colonization through its imagination of movement and
labor. Both road authors effectively relate the nexus of those three tropes to notions of Franco-
Americanness and to the American dream—this migrant’s dream for social and economic capital
that is often tinted with imperialist attitudes. However, Volkswagen Blues differs from Jack
Kerouac’s French writings in one central aspect. On one hand, Kerouac depicts the dispossession
of Franco-Americans as internally colonized subjects—or, an othered population within a
Introduction
33

country that are subordinated by dominant hegemonic forces (Pinderhughes 2011, 236; Blauner
1987, 242); in contrast, Volkswagen Blues reminds us of the role of French settlers who,
equipped with their imperial vision of the continent, have been active in the violent colonization
of the Americas. This ultimately speaks to what scholar Marilyn Randall (2003, 78) characterizes
as the double status of Québec, and perhaps by extension of all North American descendants of
French-settlers—actors that can be understood as both colonizers of Indigenous lands as well as
colonized subjects of Anglo-Canadian imperial regimes.
Similar to Chapter Two, here I will study a different kind of migration—a nomadic
wandering of the sort characterized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux
(2013, 2:443) as an undermining of fixed, hegemonic state apparatuses. The nomadism
conceptualized in and by the road novels may very much idealize one’s being in the exterior of
the dominant economic systems; however, I interrogate how one may understand these ideals
when considering the settler-colonial histories that parameterize them.
Chapter IV: New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
After l’exode, whose end is typically identified as the end of the Second World War,
Québec saw a different wave of migration after the Quiet Revolution [“La Révolution
tranquille”] of the 1960s. This largely non-violent revolution saw the devolution of powers held
by the Canadian federal government to the provincial Québec government, coinciding with an
increase of nationalistic and sovereigntist sentiment in the province. On the political and
economic plane, the province asserted itself in many ways; not only did they nationalize Hydro-
Québec—which was formerly a privately owned hydroelectric company—but they also managed
to gain the status of government within the francophone international Agence de Coopération
Culturelle et Technique [Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation] (Brière 2005, 153).
Introduction
34

Along with these feats, the province also acquired more control over their immigration policy
and Québec post-1968 saw more migrants coming from francophone areas. These new
immigrants arrived during a period in which Quebecers started to assert, along with their
nationhood, their economic and political agency; politicians of the sovereigntist Parti québécois
even saw those immigrant, yet Francophone, “communautés culturelles” [“cultural
communities”] as essential to the survival of a distinctly French-speaking Québec society (Brière
155).
By the 1980s, the literature of Québec started reflecting this migratory influx; it was
during this time the large body of “migrant literature,” recognized as such by literary scholars,
first emerged. It is true that one of the aims of Colonial Ventures is to reconsider narrow
designations of “migrant texts” that seemed to only signify works by new immigrants to Québec;
yet I do not reject the importance of relating such immigrant works to the other migrant
narratives considered in my project. Chapter IV will thus turn to the works of these new arrivals,
specifically those of Asian-Canadians Ying Chen (1961-) and Kim Thuy (1968-); and Haitian-
Québécois Dany Laferrière (1953-) and Rodney Saint-Éloi (1963-). One particularity that marks
this group of literary works is the frequent trope of le rêve américain [the American dream].
Note that the American Dream often refers to an immigrant’s dream for elevated socio-economic
class and power. Despite taking place in Québec, new immigrant authors seem to consistently
project this cliché of American exceptionalism onto the province. However, what is the effect of
deterritorializing this U.S. imperialist construct to Francophone Québec? By doing so are they
not conflating, and subsuming Québec’s specificity in American culture? Or could they be
performing, through this gesture, a critique of American imperialism and (neo)colonialism both
in their countries of birth and in Canada? Answering these queries, I demonstrate in this fourth
Introduction
35

chapiter that these immigrant authors undertake a critique of quasi-colonial chauvinism that
disparages migrant minority populations across North America. To accomplish this, these
immigrant authors reappropriate colonial constructs of migration such as the American dream,
parodying them, and remobilizing them to instead critique colonialism—reimagining America as
a terre d’accueil that is inclusive of all, including Francophones and the colonized downtrodden.

THE ROAD FORWARD
To be precise, my analyses do not just interrogate how narratives of migration document
colonial and economic processes that serve as the parameters of human movement and
displacement. A thread that sutures my primary sources together is the question of how these
narrative imaginaries can be mobilized to function as powerful critiques of political-economic
hegemony—though at times recognizing such critiques may have shortcomings. Each of my
chapters will render apparent that it is because of North America’s colonial past that migration is
often levelled with notions of colonization and labor, which occurs across different locales and
social milieus. Therefore, if we hold that the poetics of migration demonstrate a certain
américanité, this aesthetic Americanness must also imply a poetics of colonization and labor.
Operating as a mise en abyme, the aesthetic attributes of migrant narratives demonstrate so-called
“American attributes” in its association of migration with laborious colonization; at the same
time, they also conceptualize and commentate this interpretation of Americanness qua migrancy
that is seethed in imperial attitudes, and that arose from the historic colonization of this continent
by mobile settlers.
Introduction
36

Inundating Migration
I reach my conclusions by historically contextualizing my cultural productions in the
socio-political circumstances from which they arise, and to which they respond. My
methodology is inspired by postcolonial critic Masood Raja’s theorization of inundation (2019,
1:04);
32
Raja (2010, 1) proposes:
inundation suggests a technique of reading texts to allow the critic to add silenced
knowledge—historical and theoretical—hence complicating any reductive readings of the
texts… An inundated text would therefore take us beyond the burden of representation
while also ensuring that it cannot no longer be read to enforce or advance one particular
agenda, especially any attempts at making the text speak for empire.

Like what I have already done in this introductory chapter, each of my segments will breathe
historical insight into my chosen cultural productions in order to expose the colonial
underpinnings of aestheticized migration therein. Not only so, but my analyses will also entail
the inundation of texts from a particular established genre with those of another, broadening our
understanding of them, and remarking the similar colonial-migrant themes that connect them.
These thematic and discursive similarities perhaps represent the “theoretical” dimension that
Raja proposes, as these cultural productions are rife with the ideas and theorizations of the artists
who produce them. This inundation will, for certain texts, undermine the discursive integrity of
certain texts (e.g. exposing the problematic features of settler colonialism in the farm novel by
considering Indigenous perspectives of settler colonialism), while for others it will facilitate an
acknowledgement of obfuscated voices. However, the comprehensive conclusion of the entirety
of my analyses can be condensed to one idea: that inundating migration in the Francophone

32
Raja notes that this term was inspired by his years as an infantry officer in the Pakistani army. In a 2019 Youtube
video, Raja describes the origins of inundation as a military tactic which involved the breaking of dams to slow the
movement of tanks.
Introduction
37

North American context will expose its catalyst in colonial undertakings that have hitherto
marked the land.
To achieve a more complete picture of migrancy, it is therefore important to place
importance on ignored voices and on overshadowed perspectives from those who bear witness to
the effects of colonialism—obfuscated views that are not only due to the particular authors’
social marginalization, but also due to the medium of their presentation. For this reason, Colonial
Ventures will emphasize the ideas found in the primary sources rather than uniquely forcing their
interpretation through the ideas of other theorists and thinkers. Such a predisposition is inspired
by Huron-Wedat philosopher and historian Georges E. Sioui (1999, 52), and his thoughts on the
need for an autohistoire amérindienne [Amerindian Autohistory]—or, a critical tendency in
which an non-Indigenous scholar of autochthonous social practices predominately occupies the
role of presenter who emphasizes Indigenous self-interpretation of their own traditions and
history.
33
This method valorizes Indigenous thinkers as authoritative “theorists” of their own
culture, and seems to also implicitly regard Indigenous primary sources (oral history, literature)
as reservoirs of interpretive commentary. Despite the fact that Sioui’s notion of autohistory is
grounded in the critique of “Amerindian” history, this idea seems to be useful in critiques of
colonialism elsewhere, particularly in the domain of creative narratives—of colonial (hi)stories.
As I will show through my analyses, the narrative artists studied in this investigation are very
much engaged themselves in a commentary and critique of colonialism in a similar vein to
academic critics and theorists. One of my objectives is therefore to bring to light these artists’
insights on migration and colonialism, and these two phenomena’s effect on issues such as land
exploitation, social class, labor, and national identity.

33
This idea will be studied more extensively in Chapter II: “Innu Literary Migrants.”
Introduction
38

On est des franco...
Elvis Gratton : Moé chus un Canadien québécois. Un Français…canadien français. Un Américain du nord français,
un Francophone québécois canadien. Un Québécois d’expression canadienne-française française. On
est des Canadiens, Américains, Francophones d’Amérique du nord... des Franco-québécois…

Linda Gratton : On est des franco-canadiens du Québec—des Québécois-Canadiens.

Elvis Gratton: le king des kings (1985), Pierre Faladeau.

In a scene from Québec nationalist filmmaker Pierre Falardeau’s Elvis Gratton: Le king
des kings, the eponymous character and his wife depart on a plane for a Caribbean vacation;
upon conversing aloud in the cabin, a speaker of European French immediately notices their
accent and queries if they are Canadian. The Grattons respond with the iconic quote in the
epigraph of this chapter segment; effectively, through it, Falardeau mocks what he saw as the
pained self-nomination of Québecers caused by their colonized mentality and lack of a sovereign
nation. Indeed, since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s in Québec, the subject of demonym has
become a contentious issue, with the qualifier Canadien français even taking on at times a
derogatory connotation. Remembering that the term Québécois came into popular usage during
the Quiet Revolution to describe the French Canadian population in Québec, one should note that
this now standard designation for all francophone Quebecers can be understood as “a cultural,
political and territorial specificity freed from reference to two colonizing ‘others’: France and
Canada (Randall 2003, 77).” Nonetheless, Québécois obviously cannot be understood as a catch-
all designation for all Francophones in North America, even though many—especially
descendants of French colonists—can discover family links to the area of contemporary Québec.
Many Francophones do live outside of the province, forming communities and identifying
Introduction
39

themselves with their residence—for example, Acadians in New Brunswick and the eastern
reaches of Québec, Franco-Ontarians in Ontario, Cajuns in Louisiana, and Franco-Americans in
New England, among many others. This does not include relatively recent French-speaking
immigrants to North America from across the world who all actively contribute to an articulation
of a new continental American Francophone identity.
34
The analytical trajectory of Colonial
Ventures effectively involves sifting through this plethora of national and ethnic demonyms,
while trying to understand each how each artist conceives of such identarian labels. In sum, my
analysis will use these demonyms situationally, though not without critique, as they appear in a
particular production; in cases where this is not possible, historical, geographical, and political
positionalities will be considered.
An examination of these demonyms will bring to the fore questions on their coherence
and of their fluidity. As other scholars of migration have encountered, migration is a social
practice that challenges and even destabilizes the uniqueness and fixity of such ethno-nationalist
demonyms (Pask 2009, 302).
35
One of my aims is to demonstrate exactly how migration
accentuates this instability in the very language of the artworks in question.

The Polemics of Language
If it is troubling to group my primary sources along traditionalist conceptions of national
demonyms, one possible unifying aspect will be that of language. In geographical contexts with

34
This question is tackled in Chapter IV: “New Arrivals, Different American Dreams.”
35
Literary scholar Kevin Pask remarks how this is a symptom of what he terms “Late Nationalism,” a form of
nationalism given the parameters of the globalized world. He writes, “The power of nationalism once relied on the
“natural” order of unique citizenship. This order, however, is no longer guaranteed by the serialization of nation-
states; it is perhaps even undermined by that product of classical nationalism—the ongoing multiplication and
elaboration of national identities—in a world where global migrations make it increasingly possible to “collect”
citizenships.
Introduction
40

which I engage, the French language was historically a language that symbolized a particular
deprivation of economic, cultural, and social capital—a poverty which symbolized Anglo-
American political and economic domination. Because Colonial Ventures very much studies the
works of a linguistic minority in the context of the American continent at large, the polemic of
language cannot be ignored. Indeed, a motivating factor of my project is the desire to understand
how the very language of creative works reflects, and even indicates, the (dis)possession of
economic and political power and its colonial underpinnings. Here Jacques Derrida’s
Monolinguisme de l’autre (2016, 56) comes to mind, a reflection on coloniality in which he
describes the alienating idiom of the colonial master as the language of the masters, capital, and
the machines [“le langage des maîtres, du capital, et des machines”]—a language that is
inaccessible to, yet imposed on, the colonized subject, exemplifying his inferior economic class
as well as the unstable proprietorship of a national idiom and national identity. The question thus
arises of how colonial notions of linguistic proprietorship—and by extension, proprietorship of
power tout court—persist in literature and other creative works to this day. As such, I will
consider language not only as an idiom proper to an ethno-linguistic cultural group, but also as
the expressive medium of creative productions. I seek to expand literary critic Lise Gauvin’s
assertion (2000, 11) that Francophone writers are afflicted with a linguistic hyperconsciousness,
la surconscience linguistique qui affecte l’écrivain francophone—et qu’il partage avec
d’autres minoritaires—l’installe encore davantage dans l’univers du relative, de l’a-
normatif. Ici, rien ne va de soi. La langue, pour lui, est sans cesse à (re)conquerir. Partagé
entre la défense et l’illustration, il doit négocier son rapport avec la langue française. Que
celle-ci soit maternelle ou non.
36

36
“The hyperconsciousness of language that affects francophone writers—along with other minority authors—
installs them in the universe of the relative, of the a-normative. Here, nothing comes naturally. For them, language is
to be constantly (re)conquered. Split between its defense and its illustration, they must negotiate their relationship
with the French language. Whether it is their maternal language or not [translation my own].”
Introduction
41

I demonstrate that this tendency to “think through language” [“penser la langue”] is not exclusive
to the idiom of French, or even to writing and literature—this tendency manifesting itself in all
linguistic expressions of imagination. In addition, I will also examine how this
hyperconsciousness of language may often translate into a hyperconsciousness of those triple
tropes: migrancy, colonization, and labor.
Migrant Aesthetics and Imaginaries
By the 1980s, literary critics started to become more conscious of the migratory dynamics
in Québec Literature; remarking this, poet and literary theorist Pierre Nepveu dedicates a chapter
on “Écritures Migrantes” [“Migrant Writings”] in his study, L’Écologie du reel: mort et
naissance de la littérature Québécoise contemporaine [The Ecology of the Real: The Death and
Birth of Contemporary Québec Literature] (1999, 197). Like him, I use the term “migrant”
instead of “immigrant” because the latter seems to emphasize the arrival and the lived
experience in the host country; migrant rather, “insiste davantage sur le movement, la dérive, les
croisements multiples que suscite l’expérience de l’exil… ‘Migrante’ a l’avantage de pointer
déjà vers une pratique esthétique, dimension évidemment fondamentale pour la littérature
actuelle (234).” Indeed, I am interested perhaps, not entirely in settlement, but more precisely in
movement. In other words, like Nepveu, I am intrigued by how these migrant artists imagine,
and elaborate an aesthetics of displacement, wandering, and unfixity. However, it seems that the
theorist primarily uses the term migrant to characterize writing by authors who have immigrated
to Québec. Critic Kevin Pask, citing sociologist Fernand Dumont, (2009, 299) maintains that
migratory dynamics in Québec are largely confined within the province, and “migration between
cities” is even the most common form of movement among “new generations”: “Montreal
remains the “natural” limit of all such migrations in the Québécois nationalist imaginary.”
Introduction
42

Taking this model further and applying it on creative productions, I will not only interrogate how
narratives that depict—and at times even encourage—internal migration are also migrant; I will
also ask what is at stake when correlating them with the works of immigrant artists. A priori, my
definition of migrant will broadly describe the aestheticized imaginaries of both migration and
migrants; whatever the case may be in the end, my point will be to examine how these mobile
imaginaries and poetics may both have commitments to colonial and economic relations that
encase them.
Further developing Nepveu’s ideas, I will be dealing with migrant imaginaries at broad,
not just imaginaries articulated by writing as he does.
37
Here I draw from political theorist
Charles Taylor’s (2004, 23) conception of the social imaginary; he describes social imaginaries
as being, “the way ordinary people imagine their surroundings…often not expressed in
theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends... the social imaginary is that
common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of
legitimacy.” It is according to this logic, that I will scrutinize migration as it manifests in other
linguistic reservoirs of aestheticized images, stories, and legends—including, but not limited to
film, televised series, music, and news media.
A Transnational Cartography as New Corpus
In the end, Colonial Ventures can be understood as a sort of cartography of migration—
of how imaginings of this practice converge in different moments and geographical milieus. It
attempts to clear one path of many in understanding how migration in the North American

37
Nepveu writes that, “l’imaginaire migrant se donne essentiellement comme brouillé, écartelé entre des
contradictions impossibles à résoudre (199).” To him migrant writing is a sign of postmodernity, as well as of a
postquébécitude, troubling the very notion of Québec literature as a coherent category. I ask how this manifests
outside of literature in other cultural productions.

Introduction
43

context figures in narratives of French expression. The narratives I study not only arise from
different generic, literary, and mediatic traditions, but also from a multiplicity of social and
geographic areas; though my corpus might be considered heterogenous in this regard, my point is
to demonstrate that all these varied migrant productions intersect in their aesthetic and discursive
tendencies—in their poeticization and commentary of colonialism and labor. Not only do these
works trigger a rethinking of established genre and literary form, they also transnationally
reconfigure the boundaries that supposedly separate people and creative works.
Meanderings
Perhaps such a mode of understanding will allow us to better navigate the migrant
rhetoric and narratives that inundate the mediatic sphere at the time of this title’s writing, not
only in the domain of art, but also in news media and in political discourse across Francophone
North America; at the end of this study, we will return to the migratory situation in present times
with a fresh eye. While contemplating these questions, let us first begin by expanding what we
understand as “migrant narratives” and reveal the scope of its socio-economic and political
commitments—a task that shall be achieved by inundating settler colonialism with a migrant-
sensitive perspective.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
44

CHAPTER I—THE RETURNS OF THE ROMAN DE LA TERRE
Maria Chapdelaine (1911) opens with the eponymous protagonist and her father in
movement. Setting the bearings of this emblematic roman de la terre, the reader effectively
follows Maria and the patriarch of her défricheur
38
family to the colonial periphery, where the
Chapdelaines are actively clearing woodland, breaking the soil, and paving the way for
agricultural exploitation and Canadien settlement.
39
In this way, the novel’s introduction alludes
to the migratory dynamics that underscore not only this and other romans de la terre, but also the
very historical events they aestheticize: the colonization and economic exploitation of the St.
Lawrence Valley during the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
Acknowledging these underlying migrant dimensions may permit a reconfiguration of
what we understand as romans de la terre. Variously referred to as ‘romans du territoire’, or the
‘roman paysan,’ these novels are considered to be an inaugural genre of the Québec literary
canon. The rural narratives and images in these texts participated in the articulation of what
literary historian Dorothee Scholl would call the mythe du terroir, that is, “the mythologizing of
the soil as the site of French-Canadian national identity (2008, 103).” As Scholl explains, this
genre first emerged after the failed Lower Canada Rebellion (1837-38) as intellectuals aimed to
create a national literature that both defended conservative values, and constructs, “a socially,
religiously, and linguistically homogenous collective identity.” Patrice Lacombe’s La terre
paternelle (1846) is typically cited as the first example of these rural works, which is later joined
by novels such as, but not limited to, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard series (1862, 1864),
Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché (1933), Ringuet’s Trente arpents (1938), in

38
Derived from the French verb “défricher,” or, to clear land for preparation of agriculture. A défricheur is one who
practices défrichement.
39
This geographical terminology is inspired by Luc Bureau’s reading of Maria Chapdelaine in Entre l’éden et
l’utopie (1984).
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
45

addition to Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine.
40
At the time of their first publication, these
novels enjoyed the patronage of both intellectuals and clergy; these elites popularized the romans
de la terre not only to promote “traditional,” catholic agrarian values, but also to support
nationalist ambitions to colonize unexploited regions of the Québec north (Kirsch 2008, 138).
Since then, a sizeable body of critique has examined how the agriculturalist ideology
expressed through these novels helped reify notions of Franco-Canadien and Québécois identity
and territoriality. Today, some critics have begun to diverge from the agriculturalist and colonial
debate—for example, Sudarsan Rangarajan (2010, 767) who does so to link Louis Hémon’s
Maria Chapdelaine, an emblematic roman de la terre, with the contemporaneously popular
roman d’aventures;
41
yet, I maintain that work remains to be done in complicating the novels’
agriculturalist fixation on land, in particular by reckoning with the settler-colonial implications
of this discourse. Before me, geographer Caroline Desbiens (2013, 120) demonstrates how
romans de la terre (oftentimes romans de la colonization) extol the economic mobilization of
newly cleared land, paving the way for what she calls the roman des ressources—the
contemporary story of Québec’s nation-building through natural resource extraction in its
northernmost territories [read: Indigenous lands].
42
However, calling attention to the migrant
themes underlining both the economic and geographical discourses found in these texts—and in
related narratives found in other media—I ask how these rural narratives may instead be read as
economic récits de la migration [migrant narratives]. Doing so will demonstrate the place of
migration in the Canadien settler-colonial imaginaries of the past, which continue to shape
contemporary Québécois attitudes toward land.

40
Desbiens even includes such works such as Les anciens canadiens (1863) and L’Appel de la race (1922).
41
Rangarajan notes that Hémon read Ruyard Kipling and R.K. Stevenson.
42
Desbiens also examines Maria Chapdelaine, among others.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
46

These Québec rural novels were written in a period of particularly elevated human
migration, a fact that seems to be understated in existing scholarship. As literary circles in
Québec deliberated on the construction of a national literature after the rebellions of 1837 and
1838, the province was experiencing what historian Jean Hamelin calls, “un courant irresistible
d’émigration (1978, 395).” Not only does he estimate that 500,000 French Canadians left Québec
for the United States between 1861 and 1901, but he also asserts that the urban populations in
Québec City and Montreal swelled from 22.8% to 39.6% around the same time (400);
43
the
common denominator of both these migrant phenomena is the rural flight of francophone
Canadiens who abandoned agrarian life en masse. For the clergy and political elite, this exodus
represented the erosion of the French-Canadian race and its concurrent assimilation into Anglo-
Saxon culture. In response, they subsequently propagandized the colonization of the Laurentides
north of Montréal, and the new regions of Gaspésie, Eastern Townships, l’Outaouais, and
Saguenay-Lac Saint-Jean.
The Land We Speak Of
While the specific details of each of these regions’ demographic histories varied, what
can be said for all of them, is that they were all originally populated by various Indigenous
peoples (Goulet 2016, 23). Despite their presence, since the establishment of the French colonial
regime, the Indigenous were thought to possess no rights to the land, and that it summarily
belonged to the Crown by right of discovery and conquest; this idea that all of the province’s
land is Crown land, and needs no treaty with First Nations in order to appropriate it, persisted
after the 1760 conquest—when the area of current day Québec became part of British North
America, which eventually evolved into the modern state of Canada in 1867 (Crown-Indigenous

43
Precisely, it was from 1871 to 1901 that the urban population saw this increase.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
47

Relations and Northern Affairs Canada 2008).
44
The crown proprietorship of Québec land
conforms with the “Royal Proclamation of 1763,” which did not recognize the province’s
territories as part of the Indian Reserve (Clark 1990, 87),
45
allowing it to be freely settled by both
White settlers and First Peoples (Hamley 1993, 96).
To accommodate this appropriation of land, when the “Constitutional Act of 1791”
(1828, Art. XIV) renamed Québec as Lower Canada, it also gave the new province power to
divide its territory into townships [cantons]—administrative divisions that served as the vehicle
through which land was sold, facilitating the population of the province’s territory [read:
colonization]. The new settlements narrativized in the romans de la terre occurred within the
boundaries of these colonial townships that functioned as the most basic administrative divisions
of the province. Some of these new settlements actually developed from Catholic parochial
holdings that the Church employed to evangelize the First Peoples—for example, Sainte-Adèle,
whose settlement was depicted in Grignon’s novella and its rehashes, was purportedly a mission.
Others, such as Saguenay, were swaths of trapping grounds that were originally rented to Fur
Trading companies;
46
under the stewardship of these corporations, these lands saw a decline in
its populations of First Peoples—a domination that was first instigated during the French regime
(Cavanagh 2014).
47
Though now primed for settlement, it was only towards the mid-eighteen

44
The names of this province varied throughout history. As a portion of British North America, it was first known as
Québec (1764-1791) and Lower Canada (1791-1841), before it was conglomerated with Ontario to form the United
Province of Canada (1841-1867). After Canadian Confederation in 1867, this area was separated from Ontario and
its name reverted to Québec.
45
This proclamation, “recognized the existence of an Indian territory without a non-Indian civil government,
extending indeterminately westward beyond the borders of the American seaboard colonies and Québec,” though
without a doubt many pockets of French-Canadian settlement had been and continued to be established in the
boundaries of the Reserve. For more on the legal issues surrounding these settlements in the Indian Reserve, and on
the legislative history surrounding Indigenous land rights and colonization, see Clark’s monograph.
46
The most notable of which being the Hudson’s Bay Company.
47
For a brief overview of the many ways the Indigenous Peoples were deprived of their land in these regions, and
the French colonial attitude towards Aboriginal occupancy, see Edward Cavanagh’s article.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
48

hundreds that the provincial government started opening up these former hunting grounds for
settlers, paving the legal pathways for the colonization immortalized by Québec rural narratives
(Pouyez, Lavoie, and Bouchard 1983, 125).
Making Land
During this period, settler-colonial initiatives effectively popularized the term “faire de la
terre” [making land] to characterize their efforts, a terminology that has since been enshrined in
the national imagination. This so-called making of land, or clearing and agriculturally exploiting
land, was seen as the solution to enlarging and preserving Québec and French-Canadian
territorial and cultural relevance (Hamelin 1978, 401).
48
Despite the fact that the land already
existed, containing occupants who utilized its resources and space—and whose existence were
threatened by these new settlements
49
—the call to “faire de la terre,” and its nation-building
ethos, resonated loudly and widely during the Exode, which can be deduced from the many
creative productions concerning this era.
This zeal to “faire de la terre” was met with the support of government economic
programs. Unemployed colonists in danger of migrating to urban centers and the States were
accordingly granted subsidies from the government in the form of price ceilings and fixed
interest rates to buy land, on the condition that the lot was eventually cleared and primed for
planting (Hamelin and Roby 1971, 175). As I demonstrate in this chapter, the narratives found in
the roman de la terre very much reflect, commentate, and represent the historical movements of

48
Hamelin notes that though these efforts hardly put any dent in the exodus of French Canadians, they nonetheless
resulted in a population boom in those new regions.
49
Here I think of the too often phantasmatic presence of Indigenous peoples in this history of this colonization, a
question to which I will return at the end of the chapter, in its pivot into the next. Chapter II: Innu Literary Migrants
will begin with the legacy of this nineteenth century colonization of the province’s north, and its connection with the
oppression of First Nations in the mid-twentieth century and onwards.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
49

colonists and other migrants that take place in Québec during l’Exode; these stories effectively
narrativize the labor and economic conditions in these colonial circumstances. My argument is
that it is because of this discursive tendency that these novels, and their creative successors,
might be read as economic narratives of migration and labor.
The Migrant Factor of Settling Québec
This chapter therefore scrutinizes the narrative rendering of these colonists’ laborious
insertion into “new” lands.
50
In simplest terms, I study colonial migration in its capacity as a
literary trope in romans de la terre. While I am uninterested in a violent recasting of romans de
la terre as “migrant” writing,
51
my preoccupation is admittedly inspired by poet-critic Pierre
Nepveu’s essay on neo-Québécois immigrant texts in L’écologie du reel (1999, 233); to reiterate,
Nepveu writes of the potential in employing the qualifier “migrant” to characterize writing by
immigrants, as the term, “a l’avantage de pointer… vers une pratique esthétique,” while
underlining the multiplicity of migratory movements that exceed immigration. His idea seems to
point to a general study of the aesthetics of migrancy that omits consideration of a particular
artist’s migrant status—which I undertake in this chapter. To further complicate this task, my
subject matter brings to the surface this glaring question: what must one consider when engaging
with tales of rural colonial life—and implicitly with settler-colonial imagination tout court—as
narratives of migration? To answer this, I examine how such settler-colonial rural narratives
from the Québec context are veritable reservoirs of migrant discourses—or, ideations and

50
This chapter owes much to Desbiens’ historical contextualization of the roman de la terre genre. My study partly
responds to her following description of these texts: “displaying a rich vocabulary and set of images that revolve
around the idea of terroir, this literary genre opened an important discursive space where the social and economic
life of Canadiens, as well as their cultural relationship to the land, could be signified…the roman de la terre contains
the traces of the French’s insertion into a new space and, through that process of ethnogenesis into history (2013,
93).”
51
In its current usage, this qualifier seems to refer specifically to writing by immigrant authors. For an in-depth
explanation of this term see the conclusion of Chapter 2: “Innu Literary Migrants.”
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
50

conceptualizations of human migratory movements, as well as the description of migrant
struggles (Martínez Guillem 2015, 1).
52
In the end, my analysis of these discourses of migration
will clearly demonstrate the particular relationship between settler colonialism and the nationalist
drive to manipulate human movement and labor.
Accordingly, I analyze récits [narratives] rather than romans [novels], which will reveal
the scope of migrant motifs, showing that they are not only limited to the traditional mediatic
confines of the genre. To this end, I begin my study with Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, perhaps
the most well-known, archetypical roman de la terre; calling attention to its implicit migrant
dimension, I examine several settler-colonial types that figure in this text—figures common to all
Québéc récits de la terre—arguing that they function as economic and migrant types as well. To
show the pervasiveness of similar migrant elements in other works of this colonial genre, I then
turn to earlier works by author Antoine Gérin-Lajoie. One does not need to look far in Gérin-
Lajoie’s Jean Rivard duology to find descriptions of economic and migratory practices that are
associated with a particular national identity. Effectively, conceptions of migrancy and economic
viability manifest as national stereotypes; these clichés posit mobile Canadien and Américain
figures as the stereotypical proprietors of a particular type of infrastructure and/or wealth.
Departing from Jean Rivard, I will show then that the colonial-economic types found in this
novel continue to resonate in the 21
st
century; to demonstrate this, I will show that rural themes
remain ever so popular, as all too similar tropes and tales continue to seduce the contemporary
television spectator through the 2016-2021 Radio-Canada serial Les pays d’en haut—a remake
of the téléroman Les belles histoires des pays d’en haut (1956-1970), that is inspired by Claude
Henri-Grignon’s farm novella Un homme et son péché (1933, 1933). An analysis of this last

52
I borrow this term from communication and critical discourse studies. Cultural critic Susana Martinez Guillem
defines the concept loosely as the set of communicative practices that accompany the phenomenon of migration.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
51

production raises important questions regarding the longevity of the rural narrative in our
(post)colonial world, especially as Québec returns its colonial gaze towards its northern most
territories in our contemporary times. Regarding the migrant discourse in these texts, I advance
the following theses. Given the historical contexts from which the narratives of these works
arise, migrant discourses in Québec récits de la terre manifest as both economic and colonial
discourses, in such that conceptions of migration in these works are formulated to respond to
colonial ideologies regarding the exploitation of land and labor. These discourses may variedly
manifest as both pro-migration and anti-migration discourses who have one common
denominator: the idealization of French-Canadian expansion and agricultural labor within the
confines of Québec and/or Canadian territory. In this—the former French-Canadian, and
current day Québécois, national project—colonial mastery over migration is depicted to be a
vital form of anti-colonial resistance against assimilation into Anglo-American societies, which
ironically is achieved through the realization of another form of colonization: settler
colonialism.
A Colonial Battlefield
While undeniably the subject matter of farm novels orients this chapter towards an
examination of settler colonialism, one of my central ideas is that the settler-migrant dynamics in
these farm narratives are in fact more complicated than they appear and are in fact responses to
other colonial phenomena—here namely, assimilation and acculturation. In the context of
Canada at large, the line between colonizer and colonized is blurred; as critics Marie Carrière
and Catherine Khordoc (2008, 9) remind us, to reckon with colonialism and its aftermath (or,
postcolonialism) is to reckon with, “ un concept double – le Canada étant à la fois historiquement
assujetti au pouvoir impérial de l’Angleterre ainsi que l’agent même de ce pouvoir." This notion
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
52

is further complicated when considering the fact that the francophone Canadiens occupied an
even more complex position in this coloniality, as they were not only colonisateurs but also
colonisés, not only in relation to Great Britain, but also to Canadian Anglophones and Americans
(Randall 2003, 78). These complicated and overlapping statuses of colonial actors and subjects
reflect the complexity of colonial phenomena, which sometimes cannot be clearly
compartmentalized as distinctly colonial or anti-colonial. My argument is that such an idea
becomes clear when inundating these colonial dynamics with an examination of migrancy; doing
so not only reveals the multiplicity of different migrant movements that shaped the rural exodus
in Québec, but also demonstrates that these movements function as colonial-migrant
occurrences—or migratory patterns that act as responses to a colonial undertaking, whether in a
positive or negative way. In less abstract terms, the particular migrancies represented in these
farm narratives paint Canadiens as both colonizer and colonized, and such movements are thus
discursively mobilized as both anti-colonial critiques and settler-colonial incitation. This dual
colonial status, I hold, can de deduced by the aforementioned migrant types that are evoked in
récits de la terre.
In these farm narratives, migrancy and its representations manifest as aesthetic types—as
metonyms of entire nations and of particular (un)desirable traits. One would encounter in these
stories not only mobile settlers, but also their foils: stationary farmers, wandering woodsmen,
Aboriginal traders, city folk, and emigrants. All of these types and figures all seem to be pitted
against each other not just in a narrative struggle, but also in a discursive and ideological one
over the manipulation of migrancy—of the migratory habits of Franco-Canadiens and their
others. In effect, the migrant dimension of these productions constitutes a gauntlet through which
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
53

an age-old tension between migrant mobility and colonial settlement plays out, a tension
exemplified in the first text studied in this chapter: Maria Chapdelaine.

MARIA CHAPDELAINE, MIGRANT AVANT LA LETTRE

Migration in Maria Chapdelaine
53
exists, in fact, on several levels. For one, one must
not forget that this classic of Québec literature, and former bestseller, was written by a French
immigrant to Canada and was even published first in France (Deschamps, Héroux, and
Villeneuve 1980, 71). Despite the author’s status as a foreigner and the publication history of the
novel, Hémon’s title has been cited by many critics as a foundational text in the Québec literary
corpus, though not with mixed reactions (Larue 1996, 12); however, what is interesting for the
purposes of my study is precisely the “foreign” and migrant elements of this rural novel. Far
from purporting that Hémon’s status as a foreigner in Canada is what solely defines his novel as
a migrant production, this fact nonetheless raises productive lines of enquiry regarding the
writer’s imagination of migration and the implications of this vision in his works. Some critics,
for example Jean Morency (1994, 115), have claimed that while Hémon’s position allowed him a
certain objectivity in describing French Canadian cultural practices and geography, this
perspective is certainly not free, however, of commitments to longstanding French attitudes vis-
à-vis “le grand mythe continental” of the Americas—which can be understood as the narratives
and histories of metamorphoses, transformation, and rebirth produced by the “rencontre
singulière de l’homme et du Nouveau Monde.
54
” Accordingly, I, like critic Rosemary Chapman

53
Exploring migration in this novel, a redacted version of this section has appeared in the journal Contemporary
French and Francophone Studies: SITES, titled, “The Returns of the Roman de la terre: Défricheurs and Other
Migrants in the Canadien Colonial imaginary”(Chuan 2021).
54
Much can be said about how this assertion may be problematic. Such an argument not only obfuscates feminine
subjectivities in the colonization of the Americas, but also the subjectivities of non-white others vis-à-vis this myth.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
54

(2000, 26), believe that this French migrant’s vision of the Americas figures largely as a colonial
vision: “in his encounter with Quebec, the territory is conceived in terms of the necessary and
salutary ‘mission civilisatrice’ of the European.”
55
This colonial vision, as I will show, is
reflected not only by Hémon’s personal writings and by the landscapes in Maria Chapdelaine—
which Chapman shows—but also in the novel’s migrant discourses.
56

Just like their relationship with the territory they settle, the colonists’ relationship with
migration in Hémon’s novel is complex, ambiguous, and conditional to geographical place. The
colonization and agricultural exploitation of the Québec wilds by Canadien
57
settlers are
described as practices that heavily rely on the practice of human movement—settler-colonial
migrations that are largely valorized in the text. However, that is not to say that all sorts of
migratory movement are equal in this colonial conception; vagabondage and wandering—à la fur
traders and woodsmen—as well as Canadien emigration away from the province, are all depicted
in a negative light for running contrary to the colonial enterprise. This settler-colonial conception
of migrancy can be demonstrated by the eponymous Maria’s three love interests who, I argue,
each represent distinct, “conflicting” (Chapman 2000, 81),
58
migrant types in the Canadien
colonial imaginary: Eutrope Gagnon the défricheur [agricultural laborer], François Paradis the
coureur des bois [woodsman-trader], and Lorenzo Surprenant the citadin [urbanite]. Each of
these suitors are not just positioned as symbols of, “place-based identities whose mere

55
At this stage in his encounter with Quebec, the territory is conceived in terms of the necessary and salutary
‘mission civilisatrice’ of the European, the native Indian population being represented as a relic of a pre-civilized
state (‘rien que les tentes de peau des derniers Indiens’) which will disappear as urbanization/civilization eventually
gets the better of this “pays à peine entamé, encore vide et sauvage (26).”
56
Chapman’s project aims to show how “rural space serves a different function, represents a different value, and is
inscribed into the text in different ways (81).”
57
Given the temporal and narrative context of Maria Chapdelaine, I will refer to those identified as descendants of
French colonists in Québec variably as French Canadian, or Canadien. As Hémon himself writes in his novel,
“ lorsque les Canadiens français parlent d’eux-mêmes ils disent « Canadiens », sans plus (60)."
58
Rosemary Chapman’s study of these types is concerned with their spatial relationships.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
55

geographical location is all that is necessary to identify their stance on the French Canadian
[agriculturalist] cause (Freitag 2013, 170).”
59
Rather, their stances can be nuanced by the
particular migrant modalities that each figure practices. As a counterpoint to critical trends
highlighting Canadien settlers in Maria Chapdelaine as colonisés (Deschamps 1980, 13), I
effectively examine how they also figure as mobile colonisateurs who are inscribed, along with
other types, in a sort of settler-colonial system of values.
Clearing the Land

Fig : Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Edwige Légaré s'attaquant à une souche. Illustration pour « Maria Chapdelaine » de
Louis Hémon, 1916. Charcoal on Paper, 31.2 x 48.6 cm. Collection du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Purchased
in 1927 (1934.86). Photographer: MNBAQ, Idra Labrie. Public Domain.

Arguably, the most celebrated figure in the novel is the défricheur—the agricultural
laborer who acts as the agent of colonization in the field, converting woodland into arable land.

59
Both Chapman (40) and Freitag (171) each provide thorough onomastic readings of each of the suitor’s names.
“François Paradis” evokes images of paradise lost and the French association of this myth with the Americas.
“Lorenzo Surprenant” refers to otherness with respect to the Canadien family he left behind. While “Eutrope
Gagnon” etymologically evokes good [eu] land [tropos], as well as the fact that he is the ultimate winner [le
gagnant] of Maria’s hand.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
56

This colonial type is reminiscent of Albert Memmi’s quintessential colonizer (1985, 29) who
leans on his shovel, gazing towards the periphery of his land as he assiduously tames nature and
spreads culture.
60
In the Québec context, a similar colonial dimension characterized the
défricheur, a notion especially evident when considering the terminology these laborers affix to
their work—faire de la terre, or as the novel’s narrator explains, “la forte expression du pays, qui
exprime tout ce qui gît de travail terrible entre la pauvreté du bois et la fertilité finale des champs
labourés et semés (27)." In Maria Chapdelaine it is all but suggested that the importance of these
pioneers lies in their “creation” of land for imperial appropriation and exploitation. This
centrality of the défricheurs’ labor is demonstrated by the constant praise they attract in the
novel; take for example this description of Mother Chapdelaine, who daydreams about the labor
of her husband and sons: “quand l’idée du coin de terre déblayé, magnifiquement nu, enfin prêt
pour la culture, eut pénétré son esprit, elle montra une sorte d’extase mystique (48).”
Fitting this description, Maria’s suitor—and fiancé by the end of the novel—Eutrope
Gagnon, lives only two miles away from the Chapdelaines in their remote corner of Québec,
frequently visiting the family because of his infatuation with Maria (24). In the novel’s
conclusion, when Eutrope finally proposes to Maria, the narrator accordingly notes, “c’était cela
tout ce qu’Eutrope Gagnon avait à lui offrir : attendre un an et puis devenir sa femme et
continuer la vie d’à présent dans une autre maison de bois, sur une autre terre mi-
défrichée…(149)." In brief, a life with Eutrope signifies a continuation of the status quo for
Maria, as her father practices the same profession as one of these mobile colonists. To clarify the

60
Memmi’s Portrait du colonisateur describes, “un homme de grande taille…appuyé sur une pelle—car il ne
dédaigne pas de mettre la main à l’ouvrage, fixant son regard au loin sur l’horizon de ses terres ; entre deux actions
contre la nature, il se prodigue aux hommes…et répand la culture, un noble aventurier.” Note here the polysemy of
culture, able to signify both social behaviors as well as agriculture.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
57

migrant implications of this choice, let us look at the narrator’s description of défrichement as
practiced by Father Chapdelaine :
Une passion d’homme fait pour le défrichement plutôt que pour la culture. Cinq fois déjà
depuis sa jeunesse il avait pris une concession, bâti une maison, une étable et une grange,
taillé en plein bois un bien prospère ; et cinq fois il avait vendu ce bien pour s’en aller
recommencer plus loin vers le nord, découragé tout à coup, perdant tout intérêt et toute
ardeur une fois le premier labeur rude fini, dès que les voisins arrivaient nombreux et que
le pays commençait à se peupler et à s’ouvrir (27).
61

The défricheur lifestyle, in the manner practiced by the Chapdelaines, is thus described not only
as one demanding backbreaking labor, but also one that implicates progressive displacement into
the wilderness. Therefore, défrichement in Maria Chapdelaine cannot be understood as a
colonial practice that just involves the acquisition and settling of new lands; it is also a migratory
one that requires the movement of colonists.
The migrant dimension of défrichement is constantly illustrated by the frequent
displacement of the Chapdelaine family. This is implied upfront in Chapter I whose entirety
follows Maria and her father’s return to the family homestead, which can only be accomplished
by traversing miles upon miles of dangerous and desolate terrain:
Samuel Chapdelaine et Maria allèrent diner avec leur parent Azalma Larouche(10)…Ils
partirent presque de suite après la fin du repas (12)… Au bout de deux milles, le chemin
escalada une côte abrupte et entra en plein bois. Les maisons qui depuis le village
s’espaçaient dans la plaine s’évanouirent d’un seul coup, et la perspective ne fut plus
qu’une cité de troncs nus sortant du sol blanc (15)… Quelques milles encore, et le bois
s’ouvrit de nouveau pour laisser reparaître la rivière…Sur un mille de berge montante
trois maisons s’espaçaient ; mais celles-là étaient bien plus primitives encore que les
maisons du village, et derrière elles on ne voyait presque aucun champ défriché, presque
aucune trace des cultures de l’été (16)…Bientôt après ils quittèrent le grand chemin
pour un autre chemin qui s’enfonçait dans les bois… et bientôt les voyageurs perçurent à
la fois un espace de terre défriché, une fumée qui montait, les jappements d’un chien
[emphases my own] (18).

61
In the Canadien context, défrichement is frequently referred to as the act of “faire de la terre” or “making land.”
To make land is to transform land—it is the process that imbues so-called raw and wild woodland with a social
aspect, transforming it into a social good for the agriculturalist’ exploitation.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
58

Note here the succession of the human constructions that appear in this chapter. Starting from the
village, the Chapdelaine duo navigate through dangerous terrain away from established Canadien
settlements. As they progress, they find homesteads that are increasingly “primitive” [“trois
maisons … bien… primitives”] and less and less uncleared land [“aucun champ défriché]. This
chapter uses these markers to emphasis the idea that this défricheur family occupy the very
fringes of the colonial range, which implicates the necessity of movement and travel.
Accordingly, the abundance of prepositional phrases, coupled with verbs of movement, drag the
chapter onward while underscoring the migrant tendencies of the défricheurs. The défricheur
family’s way of life is depicted as one that implicates movement over expansive spaces, and it is
implied that this movement constitutes an intrinsic part of their very identity as settlers on the
fringes of civilization who are moving to enlarge the empire.
This relationship with movement is confirmed but complicated in the next chapter when
one of the characters critique the défricheur lifestyle. As Maria describes her trip away from
home, Mother Chapdelaine reminisces about villages she had visited in the past, lamenting,
[St-Prime] C’est une belle paroisse, et qui m’aurait bien adonné ; du beau terrain planche
aussi loin qu’on peut voir, pas de crans ni de bois, rien que des champs carrés avec de
bonne clôtures droites, de la terre forte … … C’est peut-être péché de le dire ; mais tout
mon règne, j’aurai du regret que ton père ait eu le gôut de mouver si souvent et de
pousser plus loin et toujours plus loin dans le bois, au lieu de prendre une terre dans une
des vieilles paroisses (20).

Just like in the scene in which Father Chapdelaine’s profession is described, in this passage an
interesting distinction is drawn between défrichement and planting, each of whose desirability
exists as a function with respect to mobility. While it is preferable to retain a piece of land that is
already cleared and ready for agriculture, continued défrichement, which involves a certain
instability as well as constant moving further into the woods, is somewhat regrettable. Here we
see a manifestation of that longstanding tension between mobility and stasis that marked the
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
59

Franco-Canadian experience of colonization in the Americas. The migrant implications of
défrichement shows this practice to be steeped in two oppositional forces that may very well be
characterized as the tension within the logic of settler colonialism in the Québec context: though
the fruit of migration and of mobile colonizers, in the end of the day this framework idealizes the
migrant’s establishment of roots on traversed, cleared, and conquered land.
Settler-colonial ideology in Maria Chapdelaine thus celebrates a sort of constrained
migration that is dependent on the migrant colonists’ final anchoring on their plot of land. This
relationship between migration and anchoring is observed more clearly in the penultimate
chapter; though Maria silently rejected life with Eutrope at first (150),
62
the protagonist hears a
voice in her head while ruminating about her mother’s death:
La voix du pays de Québec, qui était à moitié un chant de femme et à moitié un sermon
de prêtre. Elle disait :
« Nous sommes venus il y a trois cents ans, et nous sommes restés…Nous avions apporté
d’outre-mer nos prières et nos chansons : elles sont toujours les mêmes. Nous avions
apporté dans nos poitrines le cœur des hommes de notre pays, vaillant et vif, aussi prompt
à la pitié qu’au rire, le cœur le plus humain de tous les cœurs humains : il n’a pas changé.
Nous avons marqué un pan de continent nouveau, de Gaspé à Montréal, de Saint-Jean-
d’Iberville à l’Ungava, en disant : Ici toutes les choses que nous avons apportées avec
nous notre culte, notre langue, nos vertus et jusqu’à nos faiblesses deviennent des choses
sacrées, intangibles et qui devront demeurer jusqu’à la fin.

Autour de nous des étrangers sont venus, qu’il nous plaît d’appeler des barbares ; ils ont
pris presque tout le pouvoir ; ils ont acquis presque tout l’argent ; mais au pays de
Québec rien n’a changé. Rien ne changera, parce que nous sommes un témoignage…

This infamous passage of the nation’s voice interpellating Maria in the Althusserian sense
(Althusser 2001, 118)
63
—fixing her as a subject of the Canadien agriculturalist national ideology
by hailing her—unambiguously raises to the surface the settler-colonial dimensions of Maria’s

62
The narrator muses extradigetically that, “non, elle ne voulait pas vivre comme cela.”
63
Althusser describes how in a way, subjects receive and accept ideology through the means of what he calls
interpellation, or hailing. He illustrates this concept with the image of a police officer who hails suspects with a
“hey, you there!” establishing such persons as those who are subjected to the rule of law, or, an ideological
apparatus.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
60

choice to stay in Québec. In this explicit ideological declaration within the novel’s narrative,
migration is mobilized in two ways. It is at first a testimony of survivance, of how their
ancestors’ painstaking migrations have engrained Canadien cultural practices on the very
geography of the continent—a feat that must be preserved, according to the voice. Also, on a
xenophobic impulse, the voice evokes the other “foreign” [étrangers] migrants that are
encroaching on Canadien space, a likely reference to Québec’s British and American neighbors
as well as to the many anglophone communities in the province.
64
Reeling all of this in, the voice
proclaims in the end,
C’est pourquoi il faut rester dans la province où nos pères sont restés, et vivre comme ils
ont vécu, pour obéir au commandement inexprimé qui s’est formé dans leurs cœurs, qui a
passé dans les nôtres et que nous devrons transmettre à notre tour à de nombreux enfants :
Au pays de Québec rien ne doit mourir et rien ne doit changer… » (198).

It is all but suggested that the colonists’ migration is what claims the land as theirs and, because
of this, other migrants may have no hold over these territories. Eutrope Gagnon by dint of his
association with the défricheur thus represents a positionality that not only celebrates migration
qua colonization, but also demands that the movement of both Canadien and non-Canadien
peoples be constrained and limited. Maria’s final choice of Eutrope as her husband therefore
amounts to an affirmation of this colonial vision of Canadien migration in which movement
must create the terroir.
Le bois sauvage
On the other hand, unconstrained movement that does not result in one’s anchoring to the
land is described as a tragic idealism. Exemplifying this is the figure of the coureur des bois, the
iconic Franco-Canadian woodsman from the days of New France who made their living from

64
In my analysis of Jean Rivard later on in the chapter, I will show that American immigrants to Québec are indeed
a common trope in the roman de la terre.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
61

hunting, trapping, trading with First Peoples and colonists, and guiding (Podruchny 2006, xi).
65

This figure is romanticized in the Québec imaginary as a vagabond because of its adventurous
activities in the wilds. As their lifestyle recalls those of some nomadic Autochthonous nations,
and involves building relationships with such First Peoples, the coureur des bois has also been
racialized as an Aboriginal-like other—“des indiens blancs” as contemporary journalist Georges-
Hébert Germain and historian Jean-Pierre Hardy (Germain and Hardy 2007; Wysote and Morton
2019, 500) have dubbed. This association of nomadic and Indigenous attributes with the coureur
des bois is longstanding, stretching back to the early modern period. Eighteenth century French
philosopher, Victor de Riquetti de Mirabeau, for example, lamented how Indigenous nations
managed to “barbarize” [sauvagiser] young French colonists by introducing them to the
profession of the coureur des bois, seeing this trend as an impediment to the subordination of
First Nations and thus to the prosperity of the colonies (253).
66
Upon examining Maria
Chapdelaine, a similar stigma seems to be attached to its contemporary incarnation of the
coureur des bois. Because of his savage and Indigenous migrant tendencies, Hémon’s vagabond
figure is untenable in the settler-colonial project which requires him to anchor himself on
farmland. The coureur des bois type is posited as the antithesis of the colonial enterprise; not
only is he a metaphor for the conquered land and its colonized Indigenous subjects, he also
represents the unproductive migrancies that tangentially wanders the territory rather than help
create it.

65
Historian Carolyn Podruchny explains that coureur des bois from this period designates, “independent traders,
including those who traded illegally without licenses.”
66
Riquetti de Mirabeau writes, “bien peu d’entre ces nations [amérindiennes] nous sont utiles, le reste a fondu
comme la neige au soleil, et cependant au-lieu de franciser les Sauvages, ceux-ci ont sauvagisé les François et
accoûtumé notre jeunesse au métier de coureur de bois, épidémie qui la détruit et la rend incapable de cette
subordination [des autochtones] qui est l’ame des colonies."
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
62

This migrant type is represented by Maria’s initial choice of lover, François Paradis,
whose activities in the novel conjure images of these woodsmen. Consider this passage in which
he explains to the Chapdelaines both his passion for wandering the land, as well as his objection
to working on his family farm:
J’ai tout vendu. Je n’ai jamais été bien bon de la terre, vous savez. Travailler dans les
chantiers, faire la chasse, gagner un peu d’argent de temps en temps à server de guide ou
à commercer avec les sauvages, ça c’est mon plaisir mais gratter toujours le même
morceau de terre, d’année en année, et rester là, je n’aurais jamais pu faire ça tout mon
règne : il m’aurait semblé être attaché comme un animal à un pieu (34).

Contrary to the défricheur, François’s character represents a sort of boundless movement that has
no attachment to a particular plot of farmland. Accentuating his migrant tendencies, what he
idealizes instead is not stable agricultural work, but rather a bricolage of adventurous odd jobs
involving movement—shifting between logging, hunting, guiding, and trading with First Peoples
in the remote north. Though the character himself others the “sauvages,” the description of his
lifestyle renders François as a splitting image of those coureurs des bois of old, associating him
with the traversing of unconquered land as well as with the nomadic First Peoples therein.
François’ unconstrained movement across a multiplicity of geographical locales and
occupations undoubtedly attracts aversion, an antipathy that is expressed by emphasizing his
mobile “savagery.” In the novel, the narrator explicitly contrasts the lifestyle of this
contemporary coureur des bois with that of the défricheur Chapdelaine family,
C’était l’éternel malentendu des deux races : les pionniers et les sédentaires, les paysans
venus de France qui avaient continué sur le sol nouveau leur idéal d’ordre et de paix
immobile, et ces autres paysans en qui le vaste pays sauvage avait réveillé un atavisme
lointain de vagabondage et d’aventure (35).

The nomadic pionniers—who in this example signify the coureur des bois—symbolize a
deplorable unfixity that does not adhere to the colonial vision of socio-economic order:
sedentarizing oneself to a newly cleared piece of land. Compounding the undesirable movement
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
63

practiced by coureurs des bois, racial terminology is employed to illustrate this migrant type’s
deviant vagabondage, suggesting it to be catalyzed by a barbarous, untamed landscape. This
notion also appears elsewhere in a description of François,
Il semblait apporté avec lui quelque chose de la nature sauvage—« en haut des
rivières »—où les Indiens et les grands animaux se sont enfoncées comme dans une
retraite sûre. Et Maria, que sa vie rendait incapable de comprendre la beauté de cette
nature-là, parce qu’elle était si près d’elle, sentait pourtant qu’une magie s’était mise à
l’œuvre et lui envoyait la griserie de ses philtres dans les narines (64).

This is the same diction used to describe the savage woods [“bois sauvage” (27)] that défricheurs
fight [“se battent” ( 26)] in order to covert farmland into woods. François, and his so-called
savage wandering is thus positioned as a foil to the Canadien colonial project of défrichement.
The coureur des bois’ movement depicts itself as the colonial project’s enemy other: the wilds
that are to be conquered by the défricheur, and perhaps even certain nomadic Indigenous peoples
who live in these “untamed” lands. Though défrichement itself, as I showed, does encapsulate an
important migrant dimension, emphasis is above all placed on how it contrasts with the coureur
des bois—this woodsman being a subject who does not reign in his barbarous mobility, and who
perhaps functions as a metaphor for the collapse of Canadien civilization and its assimilation
into barbarity.
In the end, despite Maria’s evident fascination and infatuation for the “savage”
wandering woodsman, the novel kills her first choice of husband off with the winter. Travelling
alone in a violent snowstorm, François loses his way trying to reach the Chapdeleine home and
succumbs to the harsh environment; as a testament to his complete erasure, the only description
of his death comes from Maria’s imagination, “comme il a dû pâtir là-bas dans la neige! … Les
souffrances que François a peut-être endurés, avant de s’abandonner sur le sol blanc, défilent
dans sa pensée à elle comme une procession sinistre (117)." This coureur des bois’ death occurs
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
64

both in the harshness of untamed nature, and as he was practicing his particular migrant
modality: navigating harsh untamed terrain. With François’s death, the nomadic vagabondage of
the coureur des bois is sealed as the representation of rampant migrancy—a migrant modality
that is practiced by “uncivilized” colonized subjects, which renders it incompatible with settler-
colonial exigences.
Pas très Canadien, ça
It is with François’ death that Eutrope the défricheur—and implicitly the Québec settler-
colonial project—saw its opportunity to win Maria. However, he was not the only one to take
this chance; as Eutrope himself explains, “j’avais deviné que c’était François Paradis que vous
aimiez le mieux. Mais puisqu’il est mort maintenant et que cet autre garcon des États est après
vous, je me suis dit que moi aussi je pourrais essayer ma chance… (148)." This "gars des États"
is of course a reference to Lorenzo Surpenant: a city dwelling economic migrant who left
Québec for the industrial centers of Massachusetts. It is notable that he is the only one of Maria’s
suitors who exits Québec altogether. Lorenzo Surprenant, le citadin, can thus be read as an
alternative migrant modality to the défricheur/coureur des bois colonial struggle over Québec
territory.
The figure of the citadin does not seem to participate in the mobility/fixity debate like the
coureur des bois and the défricheur. From the start of the chapter, it was clear that Lorenzo’s
migrant status was mainly conceptualized as an economic positionality that runs outside the
bounds of the settler-colonial project in Québec. In a quasi-sociographical manner, Mother
Chapdelaine’s character explained the phenomenon of Canadien emigration to the States,
du temps que j’étais fille, c’était quasiment tout un chacun qui partait pour les États. La
culture ne payait pas comme à cette heure, les prix étaient bas, on entendait parler des
grosses gages qui se gagnaient là-bas dans les manufactures, et tous les ans c’étaient des
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
65

familles et des familles qui vendaient leur terre presque pour rien et qui partaient du
Canada. Il y en a qui ont gagné gros d’argent, c’est certain, surtout les familles où il y
avait beaucoup de filles ; mais à cette heure les choses ont changé et on n’en voit plus
tant qui s’en vont (59).

Nonetheless, Lorenzo frequently and proudly proclaims, “je gagne de bonnes gages,” to validate
the selling of his father’s plot of land in Québec (59); his working in the factories near Boston
(141); and his viability as Maria’s potential husband (143). Migration to the United States is
therefore posited as the profitable, money-oriented, alternative to both wandering and settling
Québec space. In Lorenzo’s marriage proposal, he claims,
Icitte… Ce n’est pas une place pour vous, Maria. Le pays est trop dur, et le travail est dur
aussi ; on se fait mourir rien que pour gagner son pain. Là-bas, dans les manufactures,
fine et forte comme vous êtes, vous auriez vite fait de gagner quasiment autant comme
moi ; mais si vous étiez ma femme vous n’auriez pas besoin de travailler. Je gagne assez
pour deux, nous nous ferions une belle vie : des toilettes propres, un joli plain-pied dans
une maison en briques, avec le gaz, l’eau chaude, toutes sortes d’affaires dont vous
n’avez pas d’idée et qui vous épargnent du trouble et de la misère à chaque instant.

Maria’s potential emigration is justified by the promise of ease and economic privilege, which is
expressed through images of a clean urban dwelling with modern amenities such as gas and hot
water. Mobility, when associated with the United States, thus places emphasis on the pecuniary
value and comfort that can be extracted from the migrant modality of emigration. Lorenzo
therefore symbolizes Maria’s possible escape from the harshness of life in the Canadien colonial
range.
That is not to say Lorenzo is the only migrant type to represent an economic positionality.
As one may recall, François the coureur des bois traded with the Indigenous, worked from time
to time in the lumber fields, and acted as a guide in the wilds (34). However, this latter figure’s
economic feasibility is depicted to be just as unstable as the défricheur who refuses to be rooted
in place; the coureur des bois may perhaps be compared with the antiquated figure of the nomad,
“a social (dis)arrangement and a subjective (dis)order on the fringes of empire, as a regime of
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
66

technological, social, and conceptual innovation that is fundamentally opposed to empire, but
that can also serve as a repository of resources on which empire can draw for its own
perpetuation (Noyes 2004, 161).” Just like the nomad, the coureur des bois symbolizes an extra-
colonial economic type that wanders in the periphery of the Québec settler-colonial state, a
mobile labor force that imperial hegemony tries to contain; not to mention, this figure
represented the land and cultural practices of those Aboriginal colonized subjects that the
imperial project sought to profit from. Reflecting this framework, François is killed off because
he represents uncivilized uncontrollable fixity. As for Maria, the protagonist conforms with the
settler-colonial desire for fixity and controlled movement, and subsequently chooses Eutrope’s
humble offer: “je ne suis pas riche, bien sûr; mais j’ai deux lots à moi, tout payés, et vous savez
que c’est de la bonne terre. Je vais travailler dessus tout le printemps, dessoucher le grand
morceau en bas du cran, faire de bonnes clôtures, et quand mai viendra j’en aurai grand prêt à
être semé (149)." Unsurprisingly, the settler-colonial system values the colonial reification of
Québec territory over nomadic wandering at the fringes of established empire (which does not
maintain empire’s hold on territory) as well as over ex-Canadien subjects who rejects existence
in the colonial range altogether.
67
So while each migrant type also represents an economic
positionality vis-à-vis the colonial project—with Lorenzo as the ultimate symbol of economic
power—the novel privileges rather migrant types that conform to the demand of fixity in the
colonial range.

67
The “agriculturalist system of values” is inspired by Freitag (157-8). See the conclusion of this chapter subsection:
“Colonial Returns on Migration”.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
67

Colonial Returns on Migration
The migrant and economic characteristics of Maria’s suitors complicate established
understandings of these figures as simple expressions of place-based geographical positionalities.
Geographical positionalities in Maria Chapdelaine also function as migrant and socio-economic
ones that engage with the Québec colonial project. In the colonial conception of migration, any
movement of the Canadien subject is largely shunned unless it results in the settling of the
Québec countryside. This aversion towards boundless movement becomes more apparent when
considering the figure of the coureur des bois (who represents a racialized unfixed movement
par excellence, and by extension barbarization) as well as that of the citadin (whose emigration
rejects the pecuniary poverty of the Québec colonial project). The particular migrancy of these
figures can therefore be just as telling of their supposed value in the settler-colonial system;
Freitag’s statement may therefore easily be reformulated to state that the characters’ migrancies
are all that is needed to identify their stances in the agriculturalist cause. Let it be clear, this value
is not a monetary conception of wealth; it is one that is conditional to settler-colonial ideals of
agricultural exploitation. The worth of the défricheur, coureur des bois, and the citadin is
determined by the colonial “returns” (Miller 2008, 54–61)
68
of their migrancy—the ability of
their movement to not just generate riches, but specifically riches from Canadien-appropriated
land in the targeted colonial range
It is perhaps because of this narrative rendering of a colonial hierarchy of values—in
which défrichement holds a privileged position, and other forms of migrancies are shunned—that

68
This diction is inspired by critic Christopher Miller who reflects on the polysemy of “retour(s)” with regard to the
Atlantic Slave Trade. The significations of “return(s)” in romans de la terre evoke different senses, yet is similarly
multifold, describing dynamics of movement, the political-economic “benefits” extracted from colonization, and
perhaps the remobilization of its tropes in the twenty-first century (see chapter sections: “The Migrant Tendancies of
Settler-Colonialism,” and “Migration and the Terroir in the 21
st
century”).
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
68

made Maria Chapdelaine such an attractive ideological vehicle for Québec colonial projects
during the rural exodus, notwithstanding the at-times unflattering portraits of défricheur life
(Deschamps 1988, vii).
69
Though défrichement is not described to be categorically good, what is
clear is that a consideration of a particular défricheur character’s migrancy—e.g. whether or not
the mobile défricheur ends by rooting himself in the soil—permits us to clarify his rank in the
settler-colonial system of values; this rank is determined by the potential usefulness of his
mobility and his ability to be mobilized as a pro-colonial rhetorical device. Nonetheless, despite
the ambivalence of the défricheur and its various avatars, Maria Chapdelaine contains powerful
evocations of nation building that are coupled with warnings of looming existential threats—
threats that are narratively rendered as other mobile figures, such as the “savage” vagabond
woodsman and the “American” city dwelling other; all of this lends Hémon’s novel, and its
various migrant types, to be easily appropriated by colonial ideologues who value above all the
conversion of wilderness into Québec’s own national soil. All in all, Maria Chapdelaine’s love
quadrangle reveals itself to constitute a veritable proving ground in which the clash between
Franco-Canadien and American colonial and economic influences are aestheticized—a conflict
that is just as apparent in Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard duology.

JEAN RIVARD : THE SETTLER-COLONIAL IDEAL

The significance of the rural migration narrative’s economic dimension is more
pronounced in the two Jean Rivard novels by Gérin-Lajoie. Though they have not attracted the
same amount of attention from critics as Maria Chapelaine, these novels were published around
half a century before Hémon’s novel— the first book, Jean Rivard, le défricheur in 1862, and its

69
The first edition of this novel was, according to Hémon scholar Nicole Deschamps, heavily censured from being a
“conte de neige et d’absence” into an “allégorie triomphaliste.”
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
69

sequel, Jean Rivard, économiste in 1864.
70
Their relative obscurity might be due to the fact that
were judged by some as failed works. Even in literary scholar Robert Major’s book-long study of
these two thesis novels (1996, 13), the critic outright describes them as terrible—making
comments about the boring plot and one-dimensional characters—though nonetheless arguing
for a sociocritique of these texts. Indeed, what is interesting are the theses presented in these
texts, which recount the foundation of an agricultural settlement in what is today Québec’s
Eastern Townships; couched in the pained narrative are passages on passages of political
musings, critiquing and defending the project of défrichement in Québec during the mid-19
th

century. Caroline Desbiens, agreeing with Major on the socio-political significance of Jean
Rivard, asserts that these novels encapsulate a utopic vision of resource exploitation and
development of the Québec North, embodied by the near flawless main character who manages
to turn profit from défrichement and agriculture (115).
71
As I show, this utopic and idealized
vision of défrichement materializes as an economic message whose persuasiveness functions in
part thanks to supporting migrant discourses—discourses that flatly vilify both emigration away
from Québec territory as well as American immigration to the province. However, what is
interesting—though not surprising given Gérin-Lajoie’s fascination with the U.S. and its
culture
72
—is the frequency of references to U.S. American economic and cultural practices that
are related to territorial expansion and migration. Straggling between admiration and animosity,
Gérin-Lajoie consistently evokes migrant Americans as foils of Canadien colonists in Jean
Rivard, positing the former as a rival contender for both Québec’s wealth and territory. Here

70
In my study I mainly engage with the 1862 novel, referring to it simply as Jean Rivard.
71
Desbiens expands on Jean Rivard’s fixation on natural resources noting that, “from the contemporary vantage
point of northern development, the rural novel that best captures Québécois identity and territoriality is not Maria
Chapdelaine but Jean Rivard… The novel contains elements of an environmental philosophy that are not found in
other examples of the rural genre.”
72
For more, see the first chapter of Robert Major’s book, “The Genesis of a Discourse. Gérin-Lajoie and the United
States: Biographical and Historical Indicators.”
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
70

effectively Gérin-Lajoie aestheticizes Americans and Franco-Canadiens generally as distinct,
conflicting, migrant types, who both contend for economic mastery of Québec space through
their migrancy.
Where There’s Land, There’s Cash
True to the novel’s many evocations of François Fénélon and his Aventures de
Télémaque (1689), Jean Rivard contains unequivocal defenses of the agriculturalist way of life
and of its exclusive economic and political viability. The following dilemma instigates the
novel’s plotline: Jean Rivard has reached 19 years of age and must thus choose a profession;
unable to decide, he decides to consult the priest—not an insignificant choice given the
prominent role of Catholic clergy in Québec colonization schemes at the time—who gives him
this reply,
Je vous dirai que le grand nombre de jeunes gens qui sortent chaque année de nos
collèges m’inspirent la plus profonde compassion. Au point où nous en sommes rendus,
si par un moyen ou par un autre on n’ouvre avant peu à notre jeunesse de nouvelles
carrières, les professions libérales vont s’encombrer d’une manière alarmante, le nombre
de têtes inoccupées ira chaque jour grossissant et finira par produire quelque explosion
fatale… Si vous me demandez d’indiquer un remède à cet état de choses, je serai bien
obligé de confesser mon impuissance (1862, 27).

Here the priest laments the growth of so-called “professions libérales” [skilled professions] that
he describes to be “weighing down” abled bodied Canadiens (Kirsch 2008, 140).
73
This new
tendency to seek professionalization in untraditional work is presented as a dilemma that
necessitates a remedy. This attitude is consistent with the prevailing idea of the period that
French-Canadian, Catholic, way of life was ideally an agricultural one that avoided the

73
This seems to be an extension of the French-Canadian agriculturalist project’s resistance against industrialization
and urbanization, which both engulfed Québec in the late 1800s. See Kirsch.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
71

sinfulness of living and working in Anglo-Saxon dominated urban areas. This idea is echoed in
the following passage, when the Priest proclaims to Jean Rivard,
Néanmoins, après y avoir mûrement réfléchi… j’en suis venu à la conclusion que le
moyen le plus naturel et le plus efficace, sinon d’arrêter tout-à-fait le mal, au moins de le
neutraliser jusqu’à un certain point, c’est d’encourager de toutes manières et par tous
moyens la jeunesse instruite de nos campagnes à embrasser la carrière agricole…

Agriculture, here defined as working the soil in Québec rural areas, is thus positioned as the most
“natural” and “efficient” occupation that offsets the sickness and evil of learned professions in
non-Québec rural space.
What is also interesting is that the priest justifies his idealization of agriculture by
evoking its economic potentiality. He continues to argue,
Consultez un moment les savants qui se sont occupées de rechercher les causes de la
prospérité des nations, et vous verrez que tous s’accordent à dire que l’agriculture est la
première source d’une richesse durable, qu’elle offre plus d’avantages que tous les autres
emplois ; qu’elle favorise le développement de l’intelligence plus que toute autre
industrie ; que c’est elle qui donne naissance aux manufactures de toutes sortes ; enfin
qu’elle est la mère de la prospérité nationale.

In a physiocratic manner (Vardi 2012, 3),
74
agriculture is praised as a bountiful, sustainable,
source of wealth that produces riches, not only through its production of crops, but also by
fostering intellect among the population, and by extension eventual industrialization. In this way,
Gérin-Lajoie defends the project of défrichement by articulating it as an economically viable and
profitable venture that also functions as an alternative to disdainful “professions libérales.”
Gérin-Lajoie spares no detail in insisting on the economic viability of agriculture—and
implicitly, settler-colonial défrichement. The author showcases Jean Rivard’s harvest—after the

74
The 18
th
century French physiocrats such as Joseph Quesnel and Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau (discussed briefly in
section on the coureur des bois in Maria Chapdelaine) were some of the first thinkers to be recognized as modern
economists, and who largely saw agriculture as the only renewable source of wealth and thus the key to a nation’s
wealth.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
72

character has established his new settlement of Louiseville—by presenting an elaborate in-text
profit table for the crops that his fictional character produces, concluding for the reader,
Je me contenterai de dire que, après avoir calculé l’accroissement de valeur donnée à sa
propriété par ses travaux de défrichement, après avoir supputé le prix de ses animaux,
ustensiles, articles d’ameublement, puis les produits de sa récolte et de sa potasserie, et en
avoir déduit les chiffres des dépenses, y compris les gages de ses deux hommes, il se
trouvait, dès la première année, avoir augmenté sa richesse d’une somme d’au moins
quatre-vingts louis. N’est-ce pas là un fait encourageant (192)?

This roman de la terre, who argues for the exceptionalism of rural life, supports its thesis by the
narrativization of bookkeeping, an economic and financial practice. It is partly with a dry, data-
driven, articulation of the economic viability of agriculture that Gérin-Lajoie defends
défrichement. Furthermore, therein lies the differences between the economic narratives of
Maria Chapdelaine and Jean Rivard. While in Maria Chapdelaine farmland is certainly
aestheticized in a manner to imply its fertility and potential wealth, in the end—as implied by
Eutrope’s marriage proposal in which he claims not to be wealthy but hardworking—wealth
seems to remain just that: a potentiality. However, in Jean Rivard, wealth is materialized in part
within the confines of the narrative in a blunt, statistical, manner. It is this feature that constitutes
the author’s attempt to rhetorically valorize the colonial ideal of défrichement through the
poeticization of pecuniary wealth and financials.
Monetary viability is but one of the many dimensions associated with défrichement.
Other aspects of this practice are also emphasized to promote settler-colonial migrancy; for
example, the economic discourses that support défrichement are also accompanied with a heavy-
handed nationalist rhetoric. As readers of Jean Rivard would see, nationalism figures largely as a
ideology that not only celebrates the Québec soil, but also opposes Canadien emigration away
from Québec. One example of this is found in the chapter that recounts Jean’s decision process
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
73

in becoming a défricheur; Jean’s initial resistance to this fate was swiftly met with nationalist
guilt,
parfois le découragement s’emparait de son âme et l’avenir s’offrait à ses regards sous les
couleurs les plus ombres. Eh quoi ! se disait-il, serai-je condamnée à travailler comme
journalier, comme homme de peine, dans les lieux mêmes où mon père cultivait pour son
propre compte ? La pensée d’émigrer, de s’expatrier, lui venait bien quelque fois, mais il
la repoussait aussitôt comme anti-patriotique, anti-nationale (30).

Here an opposition is established; whereas défrichement and agriculture are performed by proud
Canadiens, the act of emigrating away from the terroir is seen as the antithesis of the former
patriotic practices. The only migrant modality that Jean may acceptably practice is one that is
limited by patriotic stasis in the Québec terroir.
Wrong Way!
Of course, there is also a xenophobic impulse that is embedded within this settler-colonial
economic nationalism. While Jean makes his career decision, the narrator interrupts with a
pastoral eloge of the Canadien agriculturalist’s fertile birthright:
Ajoutons à cela que le sol y est partout d’une fertilité remarquable, que le ciel y est clair
et le climat salubre, que toutes les choses nécessaires à la nourriture de l’homme, poisson,
gibier, fruits, s’y trouvent en abondance, et l’on s’étonnera sans doute que cette partie du
Canada n’ait été peuplée plus tôt (32).

With vivid imagery, Canada is patriotically depicted as an idyllic paradise whose beauty is
attributed to its fertility and bountifulness. However, this romantic scene of a resource rich
country is disturbed by the arrival of outsiders, described several lines below: “Ce n’est que vers
la fin du dernier siècle que trente familles américaines traversèrent la frontière pour venir
s’établir dans le canton de Stanstead et les environs.” A new migrant figure enters the fray in
Gérin-Lajoie’s discourse against Canadien emigration: American immigrants. Effectively, this
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
74

marks the heralding of another migrant type that is depicted to be competing for Québec’s
resources.
These Americans are posited as a migrant other who are outstepping the Canadiens in the
exploitation of their own province. In effect, frequently contrasting with the images of
unpatriotic Canadiens abandoning the campagne, are those of American immigrants capitalizing
on Québec’s wealth. Though Americans are somewhat admired in the text for their shrewdness
in business—with Jean even entering a deal with an American potash trader while building his
new settlement (80)—the encroachment of these immigrants in his homeland is unacceptable for
Gérin-Lajoie and his défricheur protagonist. It is this thought of the encroaching outsider
exploiting his land that pushes Jean to espouse défrichement, an act that functions equally as a
rejection of emigration away from Québec:
Je demeure dans le pays qui m’a vu naître, je veux contribuer à exploiter les ressources
naturelles dont la nature l’a si abondamment pourvu…Devons-nous attendre que les
habitants d’un autre hémisphère viennent, sous nos yeux, s’emparer de nos forêts, qu’ils
viennent choisir parmi les immenses étendues de terre qui restent encore à défricheur les
régions les plus fertiles, les plus riches puis nous contenter ensuite de leurs rebuts ?
Devons-nous attendre que ces étrangers nous engagent à leur service (34) ?

In this declaration to his mother, Jean ties together the themes of resource exploitation, economic
development, and anti-immigrant/anti-emigration sentiment. The Canadien leaving the province
is implied to be ceding to the enemy migrant who would exploit both Québec’s resources and its
remaining Francophone inhabitants. Such an intolerable possibility provokes a visceral reaction
in Rivard, who exclaims, “Ah ! à cette pensée, ma mère, je sens mes muscles se roidir et tout
mon sang circuler avec force…Si le succès ne couronne pas mes efforts, je me rendrai au moins
le bon témoignage d’avoir fait mon devoir." This devoir of course refers to Jean’s patriotic
decision to clear the land, an action that implies his resistance against two demonized migration
modalities: Canadien emigration and American immigration. American immigration to Québec
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
75

and Canadien emigration to the US are thus suggested to occupy different sides of the same coin,
both of which are argued to be existential threats to the economic prosperity and national identity
of the Canadien.
Gérin-Lajoie all but implies that the success of the Québec colonial project depends on
mastery over the migratory flows of the province. This is particularly evident in the chapter
titled, “Les voies de communication” in which the author laments the inadequate infrastructure in
the province. Hammering in the idea that, “le bien-être du people et la prospérité du pays
regardent avec raison la colonisation des terres incultes comme le moyen le plus direct et le plus
sûr de parvenir à l’accomplissement de leurs vœux (150)," he goes on to propose what he
believes to be the simplest way for colonization to be realized :
La confection de chemins publics à travers les forêts. Ce qui prouve cela de la manière la
plus évidente, c’est que partout où l’on établit de bonnes voies de communication, les
routes se bordent aussitôt d’habitations, et qu’au bout de quelques mois l’épi doré
remplace les arbrisseaux naissants et les chênes séculaires.

This passage encapsulates the interplay of migration, infrastructure, economy, and settler
colonialism—a system whose very name implies the objective of establishing new habitation.
Migration, and the facilitation of this movement—via the images of roads—are identified as the
genesis of settlements in the coveted colonial range. Further commenting this necessity for
transportation infrastructure, Gérin-Lajoie explains,
Si ce moyen si rationnel eût été adopté et mis en pratique, sur une grande échelle, il y a
cinquante ans, la face du pays serait entièrement changée ; ces milliers de Canadiens qui
ont enrichi de leur travail les États limitrophes de l’Union américaine se seraient établis
parmi nous, et auraient contribué, dans la mesure de leur nombre et de leurs forces, à
développer les ressources du pays et en accroître la population (151).

In Gérin-Lajoie’s eyes, this lack of infrastructure results in a misdirected Canadien migration—
an act that results in a misplacement of labor and of its potential returns. Rather than benefiting
lands in the Québec colonial range, the movement of labor is shown to enrich the lands of the
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
76

enemy American other. This insistence on the development of road infrastructure is thus shown
to be rooted in settler-colonial ambition that seeks to reap economic and political returns
generated by migratory movement. Of course, this project is not mediated by any migrant
modality tout court, but specifically by the controlled internal movement of its preferred
colonisateurs, who must remain within the boundaries of empire in order to extract wealth from
the soil.
An Economy of Migrant Resistance
As I have shown, the migrant discourse in Jean Rivard mainly figures as discourse of
migratory skepticism. Gérin-Lajoie’s conception of migration mainly places emphasis on two
particular migrant dynamics occurring in Québec during the time of its publication: the
emigration of Canadiens away from Québec and the influx of Americans into the province. As
such, in Jean Rivard, Canadien and Américain function not only as national demonyms, but also
as migrant ones as well, as both are depicted as migratory figures. Similar to what we saw in
Maria Chapdelaine, in Jean Rivard the Canadien colonization of terroir is idealized and is the
main economic and political goal in Gerin-Lajoie’s call for défrichement. What he effectively
advocates for, is a controlled migration that must be contained within the boundaries of Québec
colonial space. Figures of mobile Americans are themselves mobilized to incite nationalist
sentiments in support of the politico-economic project of colonial défrichement—a project that
does not just demand mastery over land and resources, but over the very mobility of colonizing
migrant subjects.
This appearance of the American other, however, does call attention to another important
colonial dimension that subsumes the Canadien project of populating Québec’s regions. The
intermittent anxiety that Gérin-Lajoie and his protagonist express towards American immigrants,
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
77

and towards the economic power of the United States, reminds us that those migrant défricheurs
were not just one-dimensional colonizers. Their settler actions arose as a response to their own
colonized condition—as francophone Canadiens during this period who are under the threat of
assimilation. Echoing Carrière and Khordoc’s earlier suggestions that their colonial status
functions as a “double concept,” Gérin-Lajoie’s text portrays the narrator and protagonist to be
uneasy towards the exploitative Américains and the prosperity of the States—all of which hinting
at the economic exploitation and colonization of Franco-Canadiens. In effect, the promotion of
the internal colonization of Québec’s north was seen as a form of anti-colonial resistance—an
idea repeated in the Québec imaginary even now in contemporary times, as demonstrated by the
TV series, Les pays d’en haut.

CHAQUE LUNDI SOIR A 21H SUR LES ONDES…

The characters and narratives found in romans de la terre such as Maria Chadelaine and
Jean Rivard have become veritable fixtures in the Québec cultural imagination. One of the
greatest examples of this is perhaps Claude Henri-Grignon’s 1933 novella, Un homme et son
péché and its many creative spin-offs. The short novella has spawned a radio drama that aired
under the same name from 1939 to 1962, as well as inspiring the soap opera, Les Belles Histoires
des pays d’en haut (1956-1970) and numerous films.
75
Outside the narrative sphere, this family
of works has left their mark on the very cartography of Québec; for example, the municipality of
Pays-d’en-haut came to be named after the soap opera.
76

75
Films include Paul Gury’s Un homme et son péché (1949) and Séraphin (1950), and Charles Binamé’s very
original and cleverly titled readaptation, Séraphin : un homme et son péché (2002).
76
This region contains the village that serves as the setting for Grignon’s narratives: Saint-Adèle. See Desbiens (92).
Note that, “Pays-d’en-haut” itself was taken from the name of a historical administrative division of colonial New
France that included most of the Great Lakes region.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
78

The most recent incarnation of Grignon’s tale comes in the form of a five-season
televised series: Les pays d’en haut (2016), directed by Gilles Desjardins and Sylvain
Archambault. The stated purpose of yet another rehash of Grignon’s work has been described as
a desire to restore a certain authenticity in the representation of colonization during the rural
exodus; as the general director of Radio-Canada explained to the public in an early press release,
“ce qui nous a séduits dans l’adaptation proposée, c’est son regard inedit sur l’époque, liberé des
interdits de l’après-guerre.”
77
While I am not interested in an evaluation of the series’ success in
achieving this goal, what is worth remarking is that the new televised series completely diverges
from the original Un homme et son péché novella in plot and thematics. Grignon’s novella was
distinguished from the romans de la terre previously examined in this chapter, as its main
message is composed of a moralistic warning against greed, rather than of a celebration of
agricultural exploitation.
78
The only aspect of the 2010s televised adaptation that resembles
Grignon’s novella are the names of some core characters (the scrooge-like character Séraphin
Poudrier and his wife Donalda Laloge) as well as the incorporation of some historical figures
(such as le curé Antoine Labelle, Arthur Buies, and Honoré Mercier.
79
) Therefore, on the plane
of themes and narrative, Archambault and Desjardin’s series appears to be more similar to novels
of colonization such as Maria Chapdelaine and Jean Rivard, rather than to Grignon’s novella.
Nonetheless, this contemporary nostalgia for Grignon’s work, as well as the desire for authentic
representation, seems to translate to a nostalgia for the colonial past; specifically, this nostalgia

77
As cited from a April 2015 article from the Presse canadienne (La Presse Canadienne 2015).
78
Grignon’s text revolves around a scrooge-like figure, the now immortalized Séraphin Poudrier, who allows his
relatively young wife Donalda Laloge to die from an illness because of his refusal to pay for the services of a doctor;
ultimately Séraphin’s avarice leads to his own end, as after escaping a house fire, he runs back into the flames in an
attempt to retrieve his cache of gold.
79
The TV series diverges from Grignon’s model by also incorporating fictional renderings of historical, real world,
advocates of colonization such as the priest Antoine Labelle (1833-1891), pamphleteer Arthur Buies (1840 -1901),
and the 9
th
premier of Québec Honoré Mercier (1840-1894).
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
79

manifests as a desire to participate in the imagination and articulation of coloniality. As I show
below, the coloniality narrativized and reimagined in Les pays d’en haut emerges with an equal
abundance of migrant discourses that recall those found in precedent récits de la terre. In its
portrayal of colonization qua anti-colonial resistance, Desjardins and Archambault elaborate a
migrant discourse through the representation of similar settler-colonial migrant types
(woodsmen, lumberjacks, défricheurs, and the like), as well as of familiar extracolonial localities
(such as the city and the United States).
The Song Remains the Same
Just like in Maria Chapdelaine and Jean Rivard, the historical frame for the televised
series is posited as a migratory dilemma amid a national economic crisis. At the beginning of the
serial, in the first episode of Season One, Donalda is not yet married to Séraphin, but is being
courted by her cousin, Alexis Labranche—an incarnation of the coureur des bois—who is
working as a lumberjack. Alexis’s relationship with Donalda is strained right from the beginning
of the series, as she forbids him from returning to the yard after learning of the dismemberment
of one of Alexis’ colleagues; Alexis objects, explaining,
Alexis Labranche : Si je retournes pas, je ne me trouverai plus jamais de job.

Donalda Laloge : Bien t’auras pas besoin si tu défriches ton lot.

AL : J’sus pas capable de m’arracher les mains là-dessus, moi. Tant qu’à
faire on serait mieux de s’installer aux États.

DL : Jamais j’vas partir d’ici. Ici c’est chez nous.

AL : Il y a plein de factories qui engage juste de l’autre bord des lignes.

Just like in its romanesque predecessors, the story remains the same in Les pays d’en haut: the
adventurous coureur des bois disdains the idea of working on his plot of land and seeks what he
sees as more profitable, migrant, ventures. In this televised series, the viewer sees a familiar
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
80

opposition that constrasts défrichement with other migrant modalities—such as seasonal work as
a mobile lumberjack, as well as emigration to the States. What is peculiar here is that this
coureur des bois also seems to be attracted to the migrant modality of the citadin—somewhat
levelling the two nominally distinct figures in Les pays d’en haut. What is certain is that all of
Alexis’ anti-défricheur whims are categorically denounced; Donalda admonishes Alexis,
explaining:
DL : Tous mes frères puis mes sœurs sont déjà aux États, ils sont pas
plus heureux

AL : J’sus pas fait pour vivre sur une terre, encore moins une terre de
roches

DL : Tu m’aimes pas assez pour défricher cinq acres, c’est ça ?

AL : Seul, ça avance pas. Ça finit plus. C’est toujours à recommencer.

DL : Y’en a plein d’autres qui l’ont fait avant toi. Puis à c’t’heure ils ont
leur bout de terre à eux autres. (00 :10 :17)

Alexis Labranche, this contemporary representation of the coureur des bois, is critiqued to be
doubly reprehensible; not only does he refuse the colonial objective of cultivating his land, but
he also expresses the desire to abandon his nation for the United States. Donalda’s demands are
thus tinted with a settler-colonial idealism: Alexis’s true love for Donalda can only be expressed
with his anchoring in the Québec terroir, which implies the rejection of both coureur des bois
and citadin migrant modes.
80

80
As the series progress, it is not so much working the land that is valued but rather staying in it. The economic
success of the characters in the spaces is idealized, but the means vary. In the same episode Donalda is shown to be
making a profit off of potash production. In other seasons, she is seen pressing her husband Séraphin to allow butter
production at home. Alexis goes on to own a lumber mill on which the infrastructure of the new Canadien
settlements depends. Father Labelle becomes overjoyed at the discovery of gold in these new regions.
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
81

Donalda’s condemnation of Alexis’ migrant tendencies and desires is propped up with
unflattering images of the United States. Trying to undermine Alexis’s idealization of the
prosperity of the States, Donalda argues:
AB : Je veux te rendre heureuse, moi. Pas te faire vivre dans la misère.

DL : Ah parce que travailler 16h par jour dans une factorie payé deux
piastres par semaine c’est pas de la misère, ça ? T’aimes mieux
aller quêter de l’ouvrage à tes boss qui vont te traiter en esclave
parce que tu parles français ? T’aimes mieux que nos petits
grandissent entassés dans un taudis en ville qu’on ait rien à leur
donner quand on va mourir ? Même pas un petit bout de terre ?
T’as pas de cœur, Alexis.

Through Donalda, the discourse of this particular rural narrative directly troubles the economic
validly of emigration to the States. There, among his anglophone neighbors, the Canadien is
described to be subjected to a sort of internal colonization—that is, economic
disenfranchisement—on the basis of their race. The series’ implicit colonial discourse, which
surfaces through Donalda’s demands, becomes clear: colonize and settle Québec land or be
colonized as an economically exploited immigrant in the U.S.
“On encercle les Anglais”
Like in Jean Rivard and in Maria Chapdelaine, mastery over migration is depicted to be
the key to success in Québec colonization, whose end goal is the conservation of Franco-
Canadien agency. In a memorable scene from the pilot episode, Father Antoine Labelle [le gros
curé Labelle] and Arthur Buies propose to the recently elected Québec premier Honoré Mercier
the construction of a railroad—the advocation for which constitutes the main plot line of the
series up until the end of Season 4 with the death of the gros curé. Similar to its conception in
Jean Rivard, the railroad, and by extension transport infrastructure, is idealized as capital: a
generator of returns and wealth,
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
82

Le curé Labelle : Avec mon chemin de fer on peut construire des villes jusqu’à la
Baie d’Hudson. Puis après, on continue les tracks mais vers l’ouest
jusqu’au Manitoba.

Arthur Buies : Là où il y a juste des Canadiens-français.
CL : Vous comprenez ? ... On entoure l’Ontario. Tous les
territoires puis les ressources au nord de l’Ontario vont être à nous
autres (00 :18 :43).

Here, the characters imagine the expansion of the colonial range and of resource extraction,
which are both realized through the conglomeration of Canadien settlements not only in Québec,
but also those across Anglophone dominated areas in the rest of Canada. The building of rail
infrastructure, and thus control of the means of migration, is equivalated with the augmentation
of both Francophone Canadien territory and economic power. Furthermore, the multiple colonial
dimensions of this project become evident as the scene progresses,
AB : On encercle les Anglais.

CL : Puis on les étouffe

Honoré Mercier : Pas très chrétien, ça, curé.

CL : Conquérir le conquérant.

AB : Y’a pas d’autre solution, Honoré.

CL : Avec mon chemin de fer, c’est l’avenir du Québec qui se joue.

Note here the violent diction used to describe the construction of transportation, thereby linking
it to colonialism; the building of a railroad is described as an imperial practice that is produced as
a reaction to another colonizer—here, the “Anglais.” Effectively, the characters of this televised
roman de la terre subscribe to an ideology that sees controlled internal migration as a weapon of
resistance; this weapon allows Canadiens to colonize in order to prevent their own
colonization—to, in le Curé Labelle’s words, “conquérir le conquérant.” Colonization,
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
83

migration, infrastructure, and resource exploitation are all shown to form a nexus that must be
weaponized in order to assure the survival of the French-Canadian race.
Speaking to the malleability of fiction, the settler-colonial migrant tropes found in rural
works prove themselves to remain seductive across different media and in different
temporalities—as evidenced by this new rendition of Grignon’s novella. However, the migration
of these discourses from text to television—and from l’Exode to contemporary times—raises
some important questions on the implications of this renewed colonial nostalgia. Postcolonial
critics Étienne Achille and Lydie Moudileno (2018, 39) remind us, via the work of sociologist
Eric Macé, that television constitutes a veritable performative stage on which the configuration
of identities and collective representation play out under the regime of “postcolonialité
glocalisée.”
81
The continued apparition of the récits de la terre in twenty-first century popular
media thus raises concerns about the persistence of colonial attitudes towards migration in
contemporary Québec society.
82

THE MIGRANT TENDENCIES OF SETTLER COLONIALISM

To summarize, this chapter isolated the migrant discourses found in popular romans de la
terre and their creative successors. Not surprising due to the historical circumstances of their
publication, these works depicting colonization are reservoirs of discourses that describe,
idealize, and critique the migration of French-Canadian colonists. At the same time, Canadien
mobility is hierarchized according to the settler-colonial returns that a particular migrant

81
Achille and Moudileno reach this conclusion by examining the resurgence of rural motifs in television and their
link to colonial aphasia—or, the phenomenon of ignoring colonialism in state expressions of national history (43).
Though they focus on the French context, it is apparent that their findings also resonate in the context of Québec
rural narratives.
82
See chapter conclusion: "Migration and the Terroir in the 21
st
century.”
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
84

modality yields. In the end, I do not deny the importance of geographical place in the discourses
projected by récits de la terre—settler colonialism is after all the system through which land and
space are appropriated. Nevertheless, Maria Chapdelaine, Jean Rivard, and Les pays d’en haut
serve as reminders of how this form of colonization also values mastery over the migratory flows
and economic circuits of its agents and subjects. This inextricability of colonialism and migration
functions thus as the fulcrum that permits these Québec rural tales, and possibly other works, to
be read as economic narratives of migration and labor.
It must be clearly noted that in this study I do not deal with the sort of postcolonial
migration that emerges in the globalized world of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries—
this temporality that serves as the critical frame for productions commonly characterized as
“migrant literature,” the thematics of which generally touching on questions of, “identity
formation across national boundaries and ethnic lines (Xavier 2016, 10).” While it is evident that
Franco-Canadian récits de la terre display migrant attributes due to the orientation of their
content, the migratory dynamics in these productions figure rather as colonial constructs—
conceptions of colonial migrancy that are mobilized to participate in the political and economic
exploitation of land, subjects, and culture in the Québec geopolitical context. As I showed, the
Canadien imaginary of the terroir is rife with migrant types that all serve to affirm the Québec
colonial project. These migrant types are joined with images of the United States, a nation state
that often functions as a foil to French Canadian colonial ambitions. The récits de la terre all
point to the idea that in the Canadien colonial conception, mastery over migration was seen as
the key to survivance, speaking to the double nature of the colonial/colonized status of
Francophone Canada; these productions valorize a sort of anticolonial resistance that involves a
migrant colonization of their own. Studying migration in the roman de la terre and its creative
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
85

successors thus proves itself useful in challenging current understandings of the qualifier
“migrant” and of its place in the context of contemporary (post)colonial studies. At the very
least, it beckons a re-evaluation of the historical antecedents that contextualize contemporary
forms of settler-colonial exploitation—exploitation that is taking place as I write, and which
occurs in the wake of contemporary globalization and the proliferation of transnational
movement.

MIGRATION AND THE TERROIR IN THE 21
ST
CENTURY

Effectively, my chapter leads to yet another question: what is the currency of this
rereading in contemporary Québec? Though Maria Chapdelaine and other farm novels fell out
of vogue by the 1940s, the popularity of similar rural themes and motifs in other genres and
media manifests even today in the twenty-first century; this is evident by the plethora of cultural
productions that seem to play on settler-colonial nostalgia: from the lyrics of neo-traditional folk
musicians such as Mes Aïeux and Les Cowboys fringants, to the numerous adaptations of the
roman de la terre in film and television—Les pays d’en haut only representing one among many.
This nostalgia persists as the provincial government returns its gaze to its régions, evoking
(im)migration as a possible means to remedy the labor shortage (Porter 2018), as well as to aid in
the expansion of resource extraction under the Plan Nord (Govt of Québec 24, 37; Desbiens 208;
Girardcatherine).
83
In light of these new colonial projects, the question of which migration
narratives are mobilized by hegemonic forces in their service is as pertinent as ever. However, it
cannot uniquely be the question of how those with power today depict their relationship with

83
The PN aims to attract a skilled workforce to the targeted northern regions. Girardcatherine’s blogpost on Journal
Métro suggests this recruitment is scaffolded by an imaginary in which Quebecers, “ont une psyché de défricheurs,”
innately responding to “l’appel du Nord.”
(I) The Returns of the Roman de la Terre
86

land and migration; we must also uncover and interrogate other imaginaries of those integrated
and exploited in the province’s colonial and migratory circuits—the socio-economically
marginalized, immigrants from across the world, and especially the Indigenous peoples whose
lands are threatened by those ongoing economic schemes (Lévesque 2011; Kapesh 1976)
84
—
who all speak of the land they now share.

84
Many Innus oppose the PN; see Lévesque. Relevantly, former Innu chief An Antane Kapesh (1926-2004) wrote
vehemently against colonial-economic initiatives in the Québec North preluding the PN; see her 1976 manifesto, Je
suis une maudite sauvagesse, which will be studied the next chapter: “Innu Literary Migrants.”
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
87

CHAPTER II—INNU LITERARY MIGRANTS: THE ANTI-COLONIAL WRITING OF AN ANTANE
KAPESH AND NAOMI FONTAINE

- Si tu as envie de retourner là d’où tu viens, tu n’as qu’à y retourner ou alors veux-tu que ce soit moi qui t’y
ramène?

Cette phrase du Polichinelle
85
fournit à l’enfant l’occasion de lui parler. C’est la première fois qu’il va
parler pour vrai. Il ne craint rien quand vient pour lui le moment de prendre la parole. Il dit au Polichinelle :

- Es-tu fou, toi de dire une chose pareille? Moi-même, je ne sais pas d’où je viens. Est-ce toi qui le saurais?
Quand vous m’avez demandé de me joindre à vous, vous m’avez rudement forcé et je suis allé avec vous.
Mais depuis que vous êtes mes voisins, vous m’avez parfois choqué; à certains moments, vous avez
presque réussi à me décourager pour de bon et à d’autres, vos agissements et vos mensonges envers moi
m’ont bien fait rire.
- An Antane Kapesh, Qu’as-tu fait de mon pays (1979, 75)

As we saw in the previous chapter, Canadien settlement in “new” territories was often
metonymized with the image of railroads, this colonial infrastructure that enabled facile
migration to uncolonized localities. Accordingly, the train and the railroad are pervasive as
symbols in colonial narratives of migration. As the present chapter will show, the railroad does
not just figure in celebrations of colonization, serving uniquely to metaphorize the assurance of
Canadien survivance and the supposed expansion of civilization. In contrast, Indigenous anti-
colonial narratives represent railroads, and more generally the coming of White settlers, as the
harbingers of upheaval who modify longstanding pre-colonial customs and lifestyles. This dark
side of the tracks, and its multiplicity of familiar yet reimagined colonial figures and types—as
well as new ones that emerge from the colonized Indigenous imagination—are described in the
works of two authors from the Innu nation in Québec who are the focus of this chapter: An
Antane Kapesh (1926-2004) and Naomi Fontaine (1987- ).

85
“Stupid One,” Innu writer An Antane Kapesh’s denonym for the Euro-Canadian colonizer in her second
publication, and only novel, Qu’as-tu fait de mon pays. This passage is striking as it signals the Indigenous
colonized subject’s decision to speak out against the self-indigenizing colonizer, after being confronted with the
latter’s xenophobic characterizations of First Nations peoples as immigrants on their own land. This chapter
explores Kapesh’s own inaugural prise de parole, the manifesto Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976),
interrogating the colonial undercurrents of migration that pushed the former chief to speak out and write.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
88

Both authors hail from the nomadic Innu nation—the second largest Indigenous group in
Québec after the Mohawk—whose traditional territory of Nitassinan [“Our land”] covers a large
area of what is today Labrador and the northern Québec regions of Côte-Nord and Saguenay-
Lac-St-Jean. Attentive readers would remark that this latter area encompasses part of the same
range that were targeted by Canadien settlers during l’Exode—Lac-St-Jean, for example, serves
as the setting of Maria Chapdelaine.
While Kapesh and Fontaine’s works are not contemporary with the rural novels’ original
publication dates, their histories are still nonetheless intertwined. The Innu and the mythic
défricheurs can perhaps be thought of as occupying opposing sides in the clash between
colonizer and colonized. The colonization of Québec’s remote regions during the Exode
coincided with the Innu’s dispossession of their hunting grounds and nomadic ways of life—a
nomadism that anthropologist Annalisa D’orsi (2013, 70) describes to be conflated with notions
of traditional lifestyle among many Innu. The massive invasion of Euro-Canadian lumberjacks
and planters into their lands put strain on their traditional nomadic lifestyle as it resulted in the
exhaustion of fauna in these territories; in response to Innu complaints, the provincial
government at that time conceived of schemes—which culminated in the 1851 “Act to Authorize
the Setting Apart of Lands for the Use of Certain Indian Tribes in Lower Canada”—to not only
allot land to various Indigenous peoples, but also put them under the supervision of catholic
missionaries in the goal of sedentarizing them, introducing them to a new agricultural lifestyle
and thereby anchoring them onto their reserves (Fortin and Frenette 1989, 32). The history and
stories of Canadien défricheurs and their exploits in the province’s northernmost regions are thus
inextricable with the début of state-sanctioned constraint of Indigenous mobility.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
89

The establishment of Autochthonous reserves persisted into the very end stages of the
rural exodus of the long nineteenth century. The second wave of reserves unfurled after the 1922
and 1941 amendments of the “Loi des terres et forêts,” resulting in the creation of 27 reserves;
86

notably, it is after the passage of these laws that the provincial government started to prioritize
the education of Indigenous children, which in turn lead to the creation of the first Indigenous
boarding schools in Québec (Goulet 2016, 27–28). The reserves and boarding schools
[pensionnats] are the primary colonial structures of subjugation that Kapesh and Fontaine
critique in their works, exposing the damage that these mechanisms of control inflicted on the
Innu’s previous nomadic customs. This chapter will thus show how their analyses of the reserves
and boarding schools depict these structures as negative migrant phenomena—as inhibitions of
Innu migrancy. As already stated, in their narratives one would find similar migrant images and
types as those found in romans de la terre, unsurprisingly due to their entwined history;
however, these tropes will be reworked instead to critique settler colonialism. More importantly,
the essays of these Innu writers will evoke the oft forgotten First Nations mobile subjects that
became ensnared by Québec and Canadian settler-colonial migrant schemes, recounting not only
their people’s subjugation but also how they adapt to their new colonized reality.
Studying Indigenous Migrancy
What contributions might a reading of Kapesh and Fontaine’s works bring to the broader
study of migration? Critics from across Canadian and Québec studies have begun to interrogate
how First Nations writing might fit in a discussion about literature and its relationship with
migration. Though oftentimes containing many convergent themes with so-called migrant

86
Reserves were mainly established for the Innu and the Algonquins during the 1950s-60s, and also for the Cree of
James Bay in the 1970s. For a list, see historian Henri Goulet’s Histoire des pensionnats indiens catholiques au
Québec (26).
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
90

writing [écriture migrante]—such as those of exile, integration, and clashing cultures—scholars
have largely reserved this term to designate writing from immigrant authors (Carrière and
Khordoc 2008, 6). Nonetheless, works of Québec Indigenous literature are rife with
representations of migration and reflections on migrancy, and while they might not constitute a
body of “migrant writing,” they contain an abundance of narratives of migration that are worthy
of scrutiny. This plethora of migrant themes should not be surprising as many of the province’s
Indigenous nations are traditionally nomadic—for example, the Innu and the Inuit who
seasonally migrate from place to place in their hunting grounds.
87
Furthermore, with the
deployment of French, British, Canadian, and Québec imperialisms, the Indigenous peoples of
Québec have seen themselves stripped of their traditional lands, relocated to reserves, and
integrated in the market economy of the Euro-Canadian colonizer; concomitantly, the pre-
colonial migrant practices of some of the province’s Indigenous peoples have forever been
altered. Pertinent questions therefore arise of how their migratory modalities—what I call the
migrant customs and practices of a certain socio-cultural group—have changed, and not to
mention, of how the literary realm addresses and narrativize these changes.
Scholar of Canadian and Aboriginal literatures Kate Higginson (2008, 256) stipulates that
migration in the context of Indigenous writing, “denotes the cyclical seasonal movement of a
group from one place to another and the movement of a people to a new locality (often within a
familiar territory) to settle; in this instance, migration does not encompass moving to another
country or changing national alliance.” Higginson argues that the advent of Euro-Canadian
colonization has since pushed notable First Nations authors—namely Anglophone authors,
88
but

87
Though it is true that not all of Québec’s Aboriginal groups are traditionally nomadic—the Huron-Wendat being
sedentary and agricultural (Sioui 21).
88
Anglophone authors Higginson includes in her survey are Annamarie Beckel, Kimberly Blaeser, Joseph Boyden,
Garry Gottfriedson, Louise Bernice Halfe, Rita Joe, Thomas King, Harry Robinson, Shirley Sterling, and Peter
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
91

also the Francophone writer of Le Saga des Béothuks (1996), Bernard Assiniwi (1935-2000)—to
testify to what the critic calls the “coerced migrations” of Indigenous peoples, migratory
movements that partially took place in the form of transatlantic kidnappings as well as in the
confinement of Aboriginal children in the Indigenous boarding school system. Building on this
basic depiction of Autochtonous migrancy in the age of colonization, this chapter elaborates on
the scope of colonialism’s effects on migration, providing a fuller picture of how First Nations
literatures from Québec engage with these issues. I show that given the parameters of
colonialism, Indigenous reckonings of migration do not simply address the forced movements, or
even the congruent restriction of movement, of the colonized Aboriginal; First Nations writings
also describe in equal detail the devastating effects of the Euro-Canadian Colonizer’s migration
into their traditional lands—the implementation of what Jean-Paul Sartre famously characterized
as a “Roman style” settler colonialism (2001, 129).
89
Furthermore, forcibly integrated into the
colonizer’s economic and literary networks, Québec Aboriginal peoples have since begun to
undertake novel forms of transgeographical movement, including interurban and transnational
travel—migrancies of the colonial era that are all thematized in the works of Kapesh and
Fontaine.
Writing of Innu Colonized Life
An Antane Kapesh expounds on what she sees as the colonial encroachment on her
people’s traditional nomadic lifestyle in her first publication, the Innu-French bilingual essay,

Such. Noting that this corpus narrowly focuses on Anglophone texts, my chapter will thus interrogate how
Francophone writers may enter the debate.
89
Sartre contrasts settler-colonialism with what he terms “new colonialism”, or the metropole’s mercantilistic
subjugation of a foreign country. He uses the French colonization of Algeria as an example of this new colonialism
under which colonizer seeks to create a market for its goods among the colonized, rather than focusing on the
settlement of Indigenous land by peoples from the metropole.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
92

Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu / Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976).
90
A former chief
from Schefferville [Matimekosh] in Northeastern Québec—close to the province’s border with
Labrador—Kapesh recounts from her perspective, in her inaugural publication, the economic
domination of the Innu people and their lands at the hands of Canadian and Québécois colonists;
at the same time, her autobiographical essay contains broad commentary on issues such as
historiography, narrativity, culture, education, language, and of course migration. A veritable
treatise of political reflection, I argue that its inherent migrant discourses, coupled with its
commentary on Indigenous writing, lay a framework for the study of Québec First Nations
writing—a framework that obliges the critic to consider the imposition of Euro-Canadian
colonial practices and market economics on the Innu people. This groundbreaking and
monumental essay has left a profound mark in the domain of Indigenous writing, its
monumentality due not only to Kapesh’s frequently cited status as the first Innu author (Fontaine
2019a; D’Orsi 2013, 76); the publication of her essay, has led to a proliferation of Innu writing,
whose authors heeded Kapesh’s call for more Indigenous writers. One material example of this is
the oeuvre of emerging Innu writer Naomi Fontaine, who frequently makes references to Kapesh
in her own writings, citing the essayist as an inspiration.
91
Born in Uashat, a reserve adjacent to
the city of Sept-Îles in the Côte-Nord region in Québec, Fontaine has since the publication of her
first book, Kuessipan : à toi (2011), written two others: Manikanetish: Petite Marguerite (2017),
and Shuni : Ce que tu dois savoir Julie (2019b). Shuni demonstrates an intertextuality with

90
A forthcoming translation by Sarah Henzi renders Kapesh’s title as I Am a Damn Savage, appearing in Spring
2020 on the Wilfrid Laurier University Press. For simplicity’s sake, and because of my own linguistic limitations,
my analysis works solely on the French portion of Je suis une maudite sauvagesse and I will refer to Kapesh’s book
by its French title.
91
Fontaine was also the editor of the 2019 re-edition of Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, contributing also its
foreword.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
93

Kapesh’s landmark essay, a discursive linkage alluded to by Fontaine’s choice of epigram,
92
as
well by a chapter in which Fontaine comments Québec literature and its relationship with writing
by the province’s Indigenous peoples (141). Therefore, in addition to studying the depictions of
nomadism in Kuessipan, my analysis will pay particular attention to Shuni because of its implicit
dialogue with Kapesh, as well as because of this latter work’s extended commentary on both
colonialism and Indigenous nomadic lifestyles. My analysis outlines ways in which Fontaine’s
work can represent a continuation of Kapesh’s struggle in reckoning with devastating colonial
effects on Indigenous migrant modalities.
As Yellowknife Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard’s remarks (2014, 14), colonialism
is an ever-present fact of life for Indigenous peoples in Canada. Affirming this idea, the creative
oeuvres of Kapesh and Fontaine raise the question of how First Nations migratory practices
continue to be mired in ongoing Euro-Canadian colonial schemes, even now in contemporary
“postcolonial” times. Consequently, in the context of Kapesh and Fontaine, I understand
“postcolonialism” not so much as study of the aftermath of colonialism, but rather as a
preoccupation with the authors’ anti-colonial stances—that is, their oppositionality to colonial
practices (Randall 2003, 78).
93
I argue that a consideration of the anti-colonial positionalities of
these two writers will provide powerful insights into both Innu cultural practices and
productions; I thus take heed of literary scholar Heather MacFarlane (2010, 193) who calls for a
postcolonial critique that does not rely mainly on the theorization of non-indigenous authors, but

92
Fontaine opens her novel with a citation from Je suis une maudite sauvagesse : “Je suis très fière quand,
aujourd’hui je m’entends traiter de Sauvagesse. Quand J’entends le Blanc prononcer ce mot, je comprends qu’il me
redit sans cesse que je suis une vraie Indienne et que c’est moi la première à avoir vécu dans la forêt. Or, toute chose
qui vit dans la forêt correspond à la vie la meilleure. Puisse le blanc me toujours traiter de Sauvagesse.” This quote
is the “Postface” found in the end of Kapesh’s essay.
93
This understanding of postcolonialism is inspired by postcolonial critic Marilyn Randall, via Jorge de Alva who
asserts, “we consider that postcoloniality signifies ‘not so much subjectivity “after” the colonial experience as a
subjectivity of oppositionality to imperializing/-colonizing (read: subordinating/subjectivizing) discourses and
practices.”
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
94

rather based, “sur le vécu des peuples autochtones.” MacFarlane’s critical positionality is
inspired by Huron-Wendat historian Georges Sioui’s call for an autohistoire amérindienne
[Amerindian Autohistory] (1999, 52), according to which the non-indigenous critic of
Indigenous history serves the role of a mediator, presenting Indigenous voices while insisting on
the necessity, “de la présence et de l’engagement des gens dont les traditions sont étudiées, dans
l’interprétation de leur histoire.”
94
Adapting this to the study of literature, and recognizing my
own limitations as a non-indigenous critic of Indigenous writing, the goal of the following
analyses is to show that Kapesh and Fontaine very much speak of colonialism and migration for
themselves through their written work, revealing the discourses of their texts to be highly
“theoretical” with or without the intervention of non-Indigenous theorists.
Migration and the Trope of Writing
This chapter considers a specific type of Indigenous literature: writing. This is not to
downplay the legitimacy of other Innu narrative forms—such as the oral tradition, or cinema—
nor is it to discount the possibility of these media to engage with colonialism.
95
However, as
scholar of Aboriginal literatures Diane Boudreau (1993, 70) famously quips, “l’histoire de
l’écriture amérindienne est indissociable de la réalité coloniale,” noting that the first Indigenous
texts emerged as protest letters and petitions that rally against the incursion of Euro-Canadian
colonialism on First Nations rights and territories. This is not, however, the only way in which
writing is indissociable from the reality of the colonized subject in Canada. The latest avatar of

94
Though Sioui works on historiography, I agree with Macfarlane that this methodology for engaging with
Amerindian history provides useful tools for the study of literature (MacFarlane 194). Much can be said about the
leveling of history and narrative, which a longer study may do well to address.
95
Many arguments can be made about how Indigenous authors transcribe the orality of traditional literary mode to
writing—something that Kapesh does. See Boudreau for the influence of orality in Québec First Nations works
(140). On cinema, see D’orsi’s article in which she claims that the audiovisual has become the privileged medium
for Innu and has been mobilized in efforts of linguistic and cultural preservation (77).
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
95

these political writings manifest as literary works through which Indigenous writers interrogate
the very practice of writing, questioning how it functions as a colonial institution imposed on
First Nations (Mailhot 2017, 31).
96
This metaliterary tendency has been identified as a recurrent
impulse of Indigenous writing; via an examination of U.S. Native authors, scholar of American
Indian Studies Christopher B. Teuton (2010, XVI) localizes one such tendency in the authors’
predisposition to posit, “the theoretical issues surrounding orality and literacy as a central
concern of their work,” oftentimes reckoning with graphic communication as a colonial
mechanism of control—for example, as Anishinaabe poet-scholar Gerald Vizenor does so in his
1978 novel Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (Teuton 2010, 96).
97
As I will demonstrate, such
Indigenous problématiques of writing also exist as predominant themes in the anti-colonial
discourses of both Kapesh’s essay and Fontaine’s novels—the two authors conceiving of writing
as a colonial mechanism of subjugation, and critiquing this construct in their very written
publications. The goal of this metaliterary critique, as readers would find, is to delineate how
writing can also be a form of resistance that colonized Indigenous subjects can appropriate and
redirect against the Euro-Canadian colonizer (Papillon 2016, 58)—a resistance epitomized by
Kapesh and Fontaine’s anti-colonial publications, or, their performative attempt to resist
colonization by writing about writing.
How, given these circumstances, does the metadiscourse of these two authors point to
both a modification of Indigenous migrant modalities in the wake of colonialism, as well as to a
resistance against these socio-cultural alterations? The answer lies in the very figure of the
migrant Indigenous writer that both Kapesh and Fontaine depict in their works. Across their
works, the Indigenous writer is perceived as a migrant figure that emerges from the colonial

96
See Mailhot for a review of critical studies regarding the thematicization of writing in Indigenous literature.
97
Other than Vizenor, Teuton examines the writers N. Scott Momaday, Ray A. Young Bear, and Robert J. Conley.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
96

reality, as well as a mobile proponent of anti-colonial resistance. The practice of writing contains
a mise en abyme of migrancy; not only is it engendered by the migration of the colonizer onto
their lands—and indicates colonial influence on Indigenous migrant modalities—it also permits
the Indigenous writer a certain mobility under the regime of colonialism. This figure represents,
in the eyes of Kapesh and Fontaine, how the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Innu has been
rendered in the wake of Euro-Canadian colonization; Innu nomadism is now transplanted to the
Colonizer’s economic and cultural circuits of literary production and consumption, forcing their
circulation not only between the reserve and the colonial metropole, but transnationally as well.
Colonial subjugation creates literary migrants of Kapesh and Fontaine, though perhaps not in the
sense criticized by researcher Angeline O’Neill (2008, 282); the critic, chastising readers of
Indigenous literature who are ignorant of “Indigenous perspectivism,” states that: “it is the
absence of this knowledge which has led many readers as well as critics and theorists mistakenly
to assign Indigenous writers to the status of literary migrants, somehow caught between
‘primitive’ oral tradition and ‘civilized’ written tradition.”
98
Eschewing a chauvinistic
understanding of literary migrancy, I contend that this term can still be mobilized to describe
Kapesh and Fontaine’s own physical and narrative migrations to the transnational literary
spheres and networks of the colonizer—a movement they regard as both a consequence of
colonialism as well as a form of resistance against the marginalization of Indigenous peoples.

UNWILLING LITERARY MIGRANT
The Quiet Revolution saw the transformation of Québec society in the 1960s, which lead
to emboldened Québécois self-assertion in the face of Anglo-Canadian internal colonialism; at

98
O’Neill’s argument is that writing should be perceived as an alternative Indigenous discursive space, rather than
as a successor to the oral tradition.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
97

the same time, the provincial government’s project of nation building was energized by the
economic power that was generated from the ensuing largescale nationalization of hydro-electric
companies, as well as from the expansion of natural resource extraction. What is necessary to
remember, is that the development of this sector was accompanied by the continued Euro-
Canadian practice of disenfranchising Aboriginal peoples of their lands (Desbiens 2013, 35).
Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, was first published around this period in 1976 and it
stood out, amidst a sea of Québec nationalist fervor in other cultural productions, as a critical
Indigenous voice that spoke out against colonial schemes that have subjugated, and continued to
subjugate, her land and people.
99
A bilingual text, with the right-hand side pages in the Innu
language and French on the left, her inaugural text functions as a powerful critique that aims to
present a sort of counter-history—a testimony of obfuscated stories neglected by the history
books of the colonizer; as she warns in the beginning of one of her tales: “vous ne trouverez cette
histoire nulle part dans un livre (35).”
Kapesh presents Je suis une maudite sauvagesse as the first-hand account of “le Blanc”
[the White Man] and his arrival in the traditional lands of “l’Indien” [The Indian] in the Québec
North.
100
In effect, her text serves as a biting indictment of colonial economic initiatives carried
out by the “White” colonizer including, among others, the advent of the mining industry, the
residential school system (Henzi 2016),
101
and the representation of Indigenous peoples in
Canadian news media and artistic works.

99
See Naomi Fontaine’s preface to the 2019 re-edition of Kapesh’s work. Author and editor of the Léméac
publishing house’s collection of Indigenous literature, Bernard Assiniwi noted that the 1976 publication of Je suis
une maudite sauvagesse was met with huge public backlash (Gatti 160).
100
See Anthropologist Amélie-Anne’s article for a reading of these racial categories as what she calls “political
habitations.”
101
For historical contextualization of the residential school system, see critic Sarah Henzi’s article. Her article also
outlines how Indigenous writers and artists have responded to this colonial mechanism, allowing creative voices to
preserve memories and histories of this colonial mechanism in hopes of inspiring political action and social
transformation.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
98

The departure point of Kapesh’s critique is the arrival of the colonizing “White Man”—
or, this settler’s migration to Innu territory. The writer associates this coming of the colonizer
with a concomitant transformation of Innu modalities of migration, a phenomenological shift she
chronicles in Je suis une maudite sauvagesse. Her essay is filled with depictions and
conceptualizations of human movement and Indigenous stasis, all of which are described to be a
consequence of the so-called White’s colonial migration to Innu lands. But regarding the
question of Indigenous writing, what insights might an analysis of this text’s migrant discourse
provide in the study of Indigenous cultural productions at broad? Just as it can be read as a
critique of colonial politics and market economics, the migrant discourse in Kapesh’s texts also
functions as a commentary on the practice of literary production—of writing and publication.
The issue of migration and writing therein is ultimately imbricated in the author’s broader
critiques of economic, political, and cultural colonization. Kapesh’s migrant discourse points to
this nexus through her description of a particular colonial practice, which in her eyes functions as
a mechanism of Indigenous subjugation: language, and by extension writing.
The author’s social critique manifests in part through her metaliterary discourse. In her
book, Kapesh reflects on her status as an Indigenous writer, as well as on the importance of
language—particularly the written word—as a form of anti-colonial resistance. As scholar of
Québec Indigenous literatures Marizio Gatti (2006, 112) reminds us, often times, “écrire dans sa
langue d’origine… constitute une affirmation d’identité distincte et d’originalité addressée aux
Blanc, mais surtout un geste politique dans un contexte historique où tout a été tenté pour
prohiber et éliminer les langues amérindiennes.” Kapesh’s essay functions as a political
manifesto that rallies against what she sees as the linguicide of the Innu language at the hands of
the White colonizer; as my analysis will show, the text’s metadiscourse forms part of the
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
99

rhetorical manifestation of her political stance on this linguistic issue. Such an occupation with
language and writing is reminiscent of the Gauvinien conception of the Francophone writer’s
linguistic hyperconsciousness—or, the propensity of Francophone authors to reckon with their
relationship to the French language in their writings (Gauvin 2000, 11)."
102
It is true that Kapesh
is not a Francophone writer per se, as she unilingually speaks and writes in Innu-Aimun
103

(Léger and Morales Hudon 2017, 6; Kapesh 1979, 5), and her writings are actually translated to
French before publication;
104
yet, Kapesh writes from a Francophone space, addresses
Francophone interlocutors, and is forced to think through her marginalized relationship with the
French language—factors that are all mediated by conditions brought about by colonization. My
argument is that it is this colonial reality that generates her particular brand of linguistic
hyperconsciousness—a colonial linguistic hyperconsciousness. But what exactly does this
hyperconsciousness have to do with the study of migration as it is conceptualized in Kapesh’s
essay? The catalyst of Kapesh’s linguistic hyperconsciousness can be traced to the modified
migratory modalities of both colonizer and colonized under imperialism.
When Mobility Isn’t Mobility
Kapesh’s essay places emphasis on the idea that colonization constitutes a migratory
phenomenon. The very impetus of the injustices experienced by the author’s people is described
to be the historic coming of the colonizer into her lands. With no frills, her first chapter is bluntly

102
My analysis will show that the anti-colonial positioning of the text is not just rendered as an address to the Blanc.
The fact of translating to French is a symptom of the white colonizer’s oppression of the Innu language, making it so
that Innus cannot read it without having the text in French.
103
Refered to by Kapesh as the “Montagnais” language.
104
It does not appear that the Innu portion of Je suis une maudite sauvagesse has been published without an
accompanying French or English edition.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
100

titled, “l’Arrivée du blanc dans notre territoire” [“The Arrival of the White Man in Our
Territory”], in which she recounts,
Quand le Blanc a voulu exploiter et détruire notre territoire, il n’a demandé de
permission à personne, il n’a pas demandé aux Indiens s’ils étaient d’accord. Quand le
Blanc a voulu exploiter et détruire notre territoire, il n’a fait signer aux Indiens aucun
document disant qu’ils acceptaient qu’il exploite et qu’il détruise tout notre territoire afin
que lui seul y gagne sa vie indéfiniment. Quand le Blanc a voulu que les Indiens vivent
comme des Blancs, il ne leur a pas demandé leur avis et il ne leur a rien fait signer disant
qu’ils acceptaient de renoncer à leur culture pour le reste de leurs jours (15) [emphases
my own].

Curious here is the repetition of the temporal adverb “quand” [when]—a repetition that spans the
text forming a motif. What this adverb suggests is that the apparition of White colonizer
represents for Kapesh a rupture in her historical reality. She has entered a period that is
characterized by the arrival of coloniality—of the Euro-Canadian’s colonizing migration into her
territories.
To place emphasis on the migrancy of the White colonizer, Kapesh attaches verbs of
movement to this adverb of time, as well as evoking objects associated with Québec colonial
expansion; continuing the passage, she writes, “quand le Blanc a eu l’idée d’exploiter et de
détruire l’ensemble de notre territoire, il est tout simplement venu nous rejoindre [emphases my
own].” Elsewhere, she asserts, “quand le Blanc a songé à venir nous trouver pour exploiter
notre territoire, quand il a songé à y construire un chemin de fer, il s’est mis à parler de nous et
à insinuer que la culture que nous avions n’étais pas bonne et que nous n’étions pas civilisés (67)
[emphases my own].” The temporal shift that Kapesh describes is characterized by verbs of
movement and domination [rejoindre, venir, trouver, exploiter, détruire] as well as by a
longstanding colonial-migrant image: the construction of the railroad. In these ways, Kapesh’s
very diction reflects how Euro-Canadian colonization can be understood as a historical event that
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
101

is defined in terms of human movement, one of them being the insertion of the White colonizer
into Innu territory who from then on wreaks havoc on Indigenous ways of life.
Migration (or, migrancy) in itself is not outright demonized by Kapesh; in other words,
the Innu writer’s position is not just a simple manifestation of xenophobia. The tragedy of the
arrival of the White colonizer is, for her, the implicit domination of the Innu’s own migrant
practices—how the colonizing migration of the settler inhibits in turn the colonized subject’s
movements. Kapesh associates this colonial temporality brought about by the “Whites” with a
shift in the modalities of movement that were proper to her own people. The Innu essayist
demonstrates this by analyzing a particular colonial mechanism: the colonizer’s boarding schools
in which Indigenous children were enrolled. With regards to the former Indigenous pensionnats
in Canada—and particularly in Québec—critic Sarah Henzi (2016, 179) reminds us that, “le
principe fondateur des pensionnats était celui de la séparation, de la rupture des relations
familiales et communautaires. Cette “grande blessure”
105
… est encore présente même chez ceux
qui ne sont pas allés au pensionnat.” Kapesh’s essay highlights how exactly this system may
rupture communities and familial ties through the regulation and alteration of the Innu’s
migratory practices. In the third chapter, “L’éducation des blancs,” Kapesh describes life before
the boarding schools’ establishment by the federal Ministry of Indian Affairs; having once
practiced the custom of seasonally migrating to the backcountry in order to hunt, Kapesh
explains,
On nous a fait croire que si on construisait cette école pour nous, c’était pour y garder nos
enfants afin que l’Indien qui montait toujours dans le bois n’en soit pas empêché par ses
enfants, qu’il puisse quand même aller à l’intérieur des terres.
…
Nous avons essayé de vivre comme autrefois, de monter à l’intérieur des terres malgré
tout, comme on nous l’avait dit. Mais cela ne nous a pas convenu pendant bien des

105
Henzi takes this term from the poetry of Innu writer Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. My chapter shows the scope of
this trauma which extends from Kapesh to the works of Fontaine a few generations later.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
102

années parce que nous ne sommes pas habitués, nous les Indiens, à ce que chaque famille
vive séparée de ses enfants. L’indien ne pouvait donc plus monter dans le bois pour dix
mois parce que ses enfants étaient gardés pensionnaires. Il voulait évidemment les voir et
savoir de quelle façon on s’en occupait, savoir si on les traitait bien ou non. (65).

Working under the guise of promoting the Innu’s freedom of movement, in practice these
schools according to Kapesh did nothing but constrain her people, confining them to one place
and restricting travel to their lands. As both Henzi and Kapesh would write, the sequestering of
Indigenous children in boarding schools culminates in an effective sedentarization of the Innu
people, obliging them to forgo their traditional nomadic cultural habits in order to keep their
families. Education, this colonial tool of subjugation, which implies the imposition of White
culture on the Innu, is therefore suggested to equally manipulate the migratory movements of the
colonized Innu subject. Kapesh’s attitude therefore troubles the common assumption—recorded
by the historian Goulet—that the boarding schools aided Innus by preserving their traditional
nomadic way of life, allowing them to travel freely without the hindrance of their children (28).
Rather, what she reveals is that these schools induced the sedentarization that mediated the
Innu’s very status as a constricted colonized subject.
The Restraints of Salaried Life
Nuancing her assertion that boarding schools constitute a colonial mechanism of control,
Kapesh argues that this colonization of Innu migrancy is anchored in the White colonizer’s
market economics. Kapesh conceives of a levelling of colonization, economic subjugation, and
regulation of migrancy, stating,
Pour ma part, j’incline à penser que c’était uniquement pour nous faire du tort, pour nous
faire disparaître, pour nous sédentariser, nous les Indiens, afin que nous ne dérangions
pas le Blanc pendant que lui seul gagne sa vie à même notre territoire. Voilà les seules
raisons pour lesquelles on nous a construit une école. Quand le Blanc a songé à venir
nous trouver pour exploiter notre territoire, quand il a songé à y construire un chemin de
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
103

fer, il s’est mis à parler de nous et à insinuer que la culture que nous avions n’était pas
bonne et que nous n’étions pas civilisés (67).

Again, one finds the image of the railroad—this persistent symbol of White settlement and
natural resource exploitation in the Québec imaginary—which alludes to the colonizer’s schemes
to access Indigenous lands in order to extract profit from them. By evoking this symbol, Kapesh
posits economic colonization as a primordial motivation for the Euro-Canadians to sedentarize
and acculturate her nation. Furthermore, Kapesh shows the economic exploitation of her lands to
be concomitant with the integration of her people in the White’s work force; Kapesh recounts the
colonizer’s entry into their traditional hunting grounds in the backcountry in the following
passage:
Comme le Blanc va partout dans la forêt, il lui arrive souvent d’importuner l’Indien et de
lui nuire…. Tous les Indiens sont dérangés par le Blanc sur leurs terrains de chasse, et il y
en a même dont le terrain de chasses est devenu inutilisable. Mon mari, par exemple, a
été poussé par le Blanc à prendre un travail salarié et il a accepté cela…Mon mari et moi
aurions constamment songé à exploiter notre terrain de chasse parce qu’aujourd’hui nous
nous ennuyions à force de vivre au même endroit. Cela fait à présent presque vingt ans
que mon mari est salarié. Moi je pense que le travail salarié n’a aucune valeur pour moi
qui suis Indienne (89).

Again, the White colonizer’s mobility is demonstrated to be achieved through denying the
Indigenous theirs. The Innu’s adoption of salaried work represents this denial of Indigenous
mobility, this sedentarization being achieved through the integration of the colonized in the
network of colonial economics. The notion that this salaried labor runs contrary to Innu values is
therefore accentuated by the immobility that this new mode of work implies. Kapesh thus
positions this colonial mode of labor as the antithesis of the Innu’s nomadic lifestyle—an
adoption of this form of labor signaling a veritable shift of both migrant and economic modalities
in colonized Innu culture.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
104

Forced to Write
By dint of its connection with the boarding school, the economic colonization of Innu
migrancy is tied with the subjugation of their language. In concurrence with the colonizer’s
intent to create a workforce from Indigenous children (63), the school system is described to
have disastrous effects on the linguistic customs of the Innu. Kapesh recounts that Innu children
who attend the colonizer’s schools are no longer adept in speaking Innu,
Aujourd’hui j’ai des problèmes avec mes enfants qui vont à l’école: moi qui suis
Indienne, quand je parle montagnais à mes enfants, ils ne me comprennent pas et quand
eux me parlent, je ne les comprends pas bien parce que déjà mes enfants sont à peine
capables de parler montagnais aujourd’hui (81).

In other words, sedentarization preludes the linguistic acculturation of the colonized Innu
subject. Kapesh thus draws a link between this linguicide and the colonization of Innu migrancy.
This colonial nexus that implicates the alteration of migrancy, economic integration, and
linguicide thus forms the conditions from which Kapesh’s hyperconsciousness of writing and
narrative emerge. It is because Indigenous languages were suppressed, or at best neglected,
under the Colonizer’s regime that Kapesh is forced to be engaged with the issue of language in
her own writing; she admits as much when she calls for more Innu writers to write in
“Montagnais” [Innu Langauge], stating that,
Il devrait y avoir plusieurs livres écrits en Montagnais que les enfants puissent lire. Et on
ne devrait pas faire de tels livres seulement dans une réserve, on devrait en faire dans
chacune des réserves indiennes. Moi j’estime qu’il est très important de faire de grands
efforts pour nous mettre à la recherche de notre culture et de notre langue indiennes et
pour les conserver (81).

By evoking the reserves, Kapesh alludes to the territorial stasis imposed on her people, an
immobility that instigated the need for writing in order to both combat colonial efforts and to
conserve her culture. Kapesh’s fixation on writing is thus suggested to originate at the site of a
negative migrancy—what I, via the writings of Kapesh, have been calling sedentarization, a
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
105

process that not only constrains Innu movement and robs them of their language, but also allows
the colonizer to extract profit from these processes. As critic Amélie-Anne Mailhot (2017, 30)
rightfully describes, writing is a, “geste politique qui prend ancrage dans la situation de
colonisation de son territoire et de sa culture et qui indique de manière forte sa position critique à
l’égard des mise en récits du ‘Blanc’.” Specifically, in the case of Kapesh, written narrativization
not only represents a symptom of White migration and “Indian” sedentarization, but also
functions as a critical response to this dual colonial event.
Though Kapesh espouses writing as an antidote to the effects of sedentarization, she
nonetheless alludes to her troubled relationship with it. She makes references to colonization’s
introduction of writing when she asserts that,
À présent que le Blanc nous a enseigné sa façon de vivre et qu’il a détruit le nôtre, nous
regrettons notre culture. C’est pour cela que nous songeons, nous aussi les Indiens, à
écrire comme le Blanc. Et je pense que, maintenant nous commençons à écrire, c’est nous
qui avons le plus de choses à raconter puisque nous, nous sommes aujourd’hui témoins
des deux cultures (35).”

The notion that writing is a “White” practice inevitably haunts Kapesh’s wish for more
Indigenous writers, even if these writers write in Innu. In this sense, writing, despite its
connotations with sedentarization, represents a tool that can and should be appropriated by the
colonized and subsequently redirected against the colonizer.
Kapesh regards this decision to write as a course of action that is taken unwillingly, much
like the sedentarization into which the colonizer coerced members of her nation. In a way, this
sentiment of unwillingness approximates the Innu practices of writing, migration, and labor that
all emerge from the colonial situation. This feeling of migrant alienation that subsumes the
practice of Indigenous writing are alluded to in the essay’s preamble. She begins her essay with a
tone of unease, writing, “quand j’ai songé à écrire pour me defender et pour defender la culture
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
106

de mes enfants, j’ai d’abord bien réfléchi, car je savais qu’il ne fait pas partie de ma culture
d’écrire et je n’aimais pas tellement partir en voyage dans la grande ville à cause de ce livre que
je songeais à faire (13).” A sort of literary dépaysment therefore underlines the migrant
dimensions that are implicit in Indigenous writing. It also becomes apparent that sedentarization
does not imply complete territorial stasis; it is a signifier that connotes the prohibition of
precolonial Innu migrant practices and the adoption of altered movements after the advent of
colonization. With her traditional migrant modes—Innu nomadism in the hunting grounds—
denied by Euro-Canadian colonialism, Kapesh is not simply forced to remain in one place, close
to her children in the Indigenous boarding schools. In order to combat such efforts to sedentarize
her people, she now must begrudgingly practice other forms of migrancy that are foreign to
her—travel to the Colonizer’s urban space, as well as a creative “migration” into the circuits of
Québec literary production. Kapesh becomes an unwilling participation in this creative market in
the same manner her husband unwillingly takes on salaried work.
106
In this way, Kapesh’s
literary migrancy refers not only to her geographical alienation as a colonized subject—an
alienation that both incites her to write and is brought about by writing; it may also be used to
describe her unease as an mobile Indigenous author who writes and produces in a strange
medium that she regards as non-Indigenous.
The Colonial Nexus of Migration, Economics, and Writing
This analysis of Je suis une maudite savuagesse has charted out a map that pinpoints
notions of migrancy and migration as they appear throughout Kapesh’s essay. As a colonized
subject she is forced to reckon with both movements of colonizer and colonized—with both
White settlers who economically exploit her traditional lands, as well with the sedentarization of

106
For more on the business of publication and on the market of Indigenous works in Québec see Gatti.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
107

her people that was enacted to facilitate this exploitation. To denounce this, the alienated Innu
writer takes up the pen, an act that is shown to be migrant in itself. Kapesh’s literary migrancy
thus represents how the author—as an attempt to resist colonial acculturation and economic
subjugation—implicates herself in the colonizer’s own cultural spheres and creative markets.
The Euro-Canadian colonization of Québec Indigenous land is thus seen by Kapesh to
afflict the economic, linguistic, and migrant practices of her people. The colonial regime’s
subjugation of these elements of Innu culture is what convinces Kapesh to engage in writing. It
may therefore perhaps be shortsighted to only recognize Kapesh’s linguistic hyperconsciousness
in her discourse. The colonial situation forces Kapesh to put emphasis not only on language, but
also on its interrelation with politico-economic imperial schemes, and of course with migration.
In the context of Kapesh and her nation, the parameters of Euro-Canadian colonialism
necessarily link linguistic hyperconsciousness to hyperconsciousnesses of labor and of migrancy.
Kapesh’s Indigenous literary migrancy manifests in the discursive and poetic planes of her
writing as these triple hyperconsciousnesses. As a reading of other works will show, the colonial
hyperconsciousness of these tropes is not only evident in Kapesh’s essay, but also manifests in
other politically engaged Indigenous written productions—for example, in Naomi Fontaine’s
autofiction.

NAOMI FONTAINE’S VISION OF NOMADIC MIGRANCY
If Kapesh provides political and historical context in understanding what I have called the
literary migrancy of Indigenous authors, Fontaine’s oeuvre articulates how such a creative mode
may translate into the realm of aesthetics. Like Kapesh, Fontaine belongs to the Innu nation, and
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
108

identifies as such in her writings.
107
Continuing in the same trajectory as Kapesh, Fontaine’s
writings imagine—and as I argue recast—their people’s nomadic lifestyles to include the
migrancy of the Innu writer. Migrations in this vein mainly takes the form of a nomadism—that
is, a nomadic migrancy that implicates wanderings, not only seasonally from the reserve to the
backcountry, but also periodic travel to urban spaces both within Québec as well as abroad.
Furthermore, the nomadic migrancy of this Innu pedagogue
108
and writer does not only take
place in the context of everyday life as a colonized subject, which she recounts in her novels. Her
very aesthetic practice of creatively representing this colonial reality reveals itself to be just as
nomadic. Kapesh’s layered literary nomadism serves as both aesthetic mode and anti-colonial
position, raising further questions on its function as an economic modality.
Kapesh’s literary nomadism is particularly exemplified in Shuni: Ce que tu dois savoir
Julie. A work that melds autofiction
109
and epistolary writing, this 2019 essay collection
addresses, among others, the migrant colonizer, while commentating the nomadic migrancies of
contemporary Innus.
110
A sizeable amount of the author’s letters are directed to a supposed
childhood acquaintance, Julie [transliterated to Innu-Aimun as Shuni]—a Baptist missionary

107
Throughout Shuni, Fontaine reckons with broad, problematic labelling such as “Indien” or even “Autochtone”
[Aboriginal]. In one passage on page 23, Fontaine teases her son when he is fishing, calling him “le petit Indien,” to
which her son replies, “Je suis pas un Indien. Je suis un Innu.” Reacting to this affirmation of their national identity,
Fontaine, writes, “Étonnée. Je ne m’attendais pas à cette remarque. J’ai repris mon sérieux. Tu as raison. Excuse-
moi mon Cœur. Et dire que moi, lorsque je suis née, j’étais Montagaise.” Fontaine herself goes on to critique the
usage of ambiguous terms to designate her people ; on page 33 she writes, “pour quelle raison devrais-je
m’entretenir avec des étrangers sur des clichés d’un amalgame de peuples distincts que l’on appelle Autochtone
pour mieux ne pas les nommer ?” Fontaine’s position is contrasted with Kapesh who makes prolific use of the term
“Indien,” a habit perhaps representative of their generational gap. Agreeing with Fontaine, this chapter takes care to
note that it does not simply treat with “Indigenous” writings; their specificity as Innu texts must be acknowledged,
while nonetheless opening questions of their relationship with other works from Québec and across the world.
108
Fontaine’s Manikanetish: Petite Marguerite recounts the story of an Innu teacher who returns to the reserve from
Québec City in order to teach.
109
Perhaps not in the sense of it being a fictional narrative about the author, but rather a fictionalization of events
from her real life.
110
Shuni has been variously described by journalists as a “série de brefs essais” [series of brief essays] as well as
“roman” [novel].
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
109

who decides to follow in the footsteps of her father and go work with the Innu of Uashat.
Fontaine’s stated intention for writing Shuni is to present Julie with a perspective of the Innu way
of life that does not depend on reductive statistics and quasi-colonial misconceptions (22). Like
her inaugural text Kuessipan, Shuni gathers a variety of narrative fragments and philosophical
reflections (Huberman 2016, 111). Concomitantly, a multiplicity of settings and localities form
the backdrop of these discursive fragments, which I argue serve to illustrate her nomadic
migrancy as an Innu writer and teacher. In the spirit of her nomadic style, my analysis will
meander to Kuessipan, in which Fontaine commentates more intensely the relationship between
Innu nomadism and the practice of writing. Just like in Shuni, Kuessipan’s discursive and
narrative fragmentation evokes the movement that constitute the Innu way of life; in a geopoetic
critique of Fontaine’s debut novel, geographer Marie-Ève Vaillancourt (2017, 26) summarizes
about the author: “les allers-retours qu’elle effectue entre les espaces mis-en-scène proposent
donc un angle de réflexion qui relève à la fois de la philosophie, de la littérature, de la
géographie et de l’architecture ou du design urbain.” Demonstrating this to be equally true in
Shuni and concentrating on the conceptions and articulations of these movements themselves,
these migrant dynamics function as windows into broader issues—which, I add, include the
colonization of her people and their nomadic customs in the present day.
To Understand Colonial Migrancy
Like Kapesh, Fontaine’s point of departure for her writings is the colonial subjugation of
Innu migrancy, to which she alludes in the opening pages of Shuni. Fontaine is just as direct as
Kapesh in her indictment of Euro-Canadian colonialism; echoing the experiences of Kapesh,
Fontaine recounts how her own grandparents were confronted with the arrival of the colonists,
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
110

Je ne prétends pas tout comprendre, mais je crois que mes grands-parents savaient que
leur monde était en pleine mutation… L’impérialisme avait fait des ravages dans les
relations entre Blancs et Indiens… Ils savaient que les manières de vivre ne seraient plus
les mêmes... Ils pressentaient, sans pouvoir le nommer, ce qu’est être colonisé (16).

Just as White imperialism and colonization of Innu lands pushed Kapesh to write, these same
events set the tone of Fontaine’s Shuni as an anti-colonial critique. As Fontaine describes the
temporality of her grandparents, many familiar occurrences from Kapesh’s text are recalled,
A l’établissement de la réserve, le gouvernement a cru bon d’élever une clôture haute, en
métal, pour marquer la frontière que désormais les Innus ne pourraient plus franchir sans
raison valable... Lorsque le chemin de fer révélait l’immense richesse cachée sous la
neige, à l’intérieur des forêts, sur le dos des rivières. Rien ni personne n’aurait été en
mesure de stopper l’exploitation effrénée du Nitassinan.

The story is the same as the one in Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, and even, before it, the
romans de la terre. While the rural text extols the opening of new lands, an act that was
facilitated by the the railroad, Kapesh and Fontaine furnish the other side of the coin of this
(hi)story of colonization: the imperial control and restriction of Innu movement in their own
lands, for the purposes of White economic exploitation. What is different now in Shuni is that the
perspective is shifted from the vantage point of Kapesh’s generation—who experienced the
incursion of the colonists—to be from that of Fontaine’s who grows up with colonial
sedentarization as the norm. Fontaine is very much symbolic of the children described by Kapesh
who were stripped of their Innu culture, and who were no longer adequate in Innu-Aimun
because of sedentarization. As Fontaine recounts, “mon grand-père a décidé que ses filles iraient
à l’école et parlerait en français sous son toit. Aux dépens de la distance qu’il créait entre elles et
lui. Aux dépens de sa propre langue. Et des savoirs transmis par ses parents. De sa fierté. Tu
vois, être colonisé c’est ça (17).” Her linguistic acculturation via sedentarization is what marks
her as a colonized subject in contemporary times. Tracing the trajectory of colonial subjugation
from the time of her grandparents to her own present situation, Fontaine situates herself to be the
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
111

inheritor of the province’s colonial legacy—to be just as much of a colonisée as those of her
grandparents’ generation.
Though it is possible to identify Fontaine’s positionality as the result of these colonial
initiatives to assimilate the Innu into Euro-Canadian society, the author’s point is that this
attempted eradication of her people’s culture is not entirely successful. Fontaine describes,
Nous étions nés enfermés et cet enfermement était devenu notre salut. Nous les nomades,
les voyageurs, ceux qui avait pour territoire le Nord tout entier, nous avons fini par croire
que cette clôture nous protégeait. Contre le mépris, les arnaques, la haine de ceux qui
l’avaient érigée…Tu vois mon ami, c’est ainsi que parfois l’impossible se produit. Dans
une réserve clôturée, un lieu fermé aux étrangers, nous avons recrée la communauté.
Forte, unie. Capable d’accueillir le visiteur… Je voudrais écrire résilience. Mais je sens
que c’est autre chose. Je creuse. Je sais qu’il y a autre chose (18).

Even though Fontaine alludes to the limitations placed on the movements of her traditionally
nomadic people, she suggests that this supposed sedentarization nonetheless begets a certain
form of resistance that holds out against colonial violence. Through the galvanization of the Innu
into a united community, the logic of the reserve is subverted, and this colonial mechanism
becomes not just anti-colonial, but counter-colonial—as it does not just denounce colonialism
but also seeks to actively resist it. Throughout Shuni, that is exactly what Fontaine attempts to
do: to subvert the notion of colonized Innu stasis—notions that purport colonialism has
succeeded in sedentarizing the Innu for good.
Fontaine’s stated motivation for writing to Julie alludes to this counter-colonial
subversion. One must not forget the colonial tints of this missionary’s projet in Uashat; as critic
Christophe Premat (2018, 96) reminds us, the colonization of Québec Indigenous peoples partly
functioned through the evangelization of these aboriginals with the end goal of assimilating them
into White Canadian society.
111
While, Fontaine, does not treat her acquaintance as a colonist

111
Admittedly, this usually meant conversion to Catholicism. Nonetheless, this raises the question of the legacy of
religious conversion, as well as the possibility of it being a neocolonial practice.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
112

outright, even expressing admiration in her choice of “helping” the Innu, the author is
nonetheless critical of the missionary’s intentions. As she states,
Je crois qu’avant d’aider qui que ce soit, avant de tenter de transformer des peines
incomprises en joies, des drames pas racontés en allégresses, avant de leur parler de
Jésus, il faut bien commencer par les connaître. Et leurs histoires, leurs identités, leurs
idéaux, ce à quoi ils rêvent la nuit. Le quotidien de ces gens vers qui elle a choisi d’aller
(11).

In a way, Fontaine warns Julie from assuming a sort of quasi-colonial attitude that dehumanizes
the Innu, stripping the Indigenous people of their subjectivities—of the narratives and identities
that compose her people’s complex lives. The anti-colonial implications of Fontaine’s advice is
accentuated further along when the author advises Julie not to reduce the Innu to simple statistics
regarding the elevated levels of alcohol abuse and suicide in the reserve—issues that both
represent the legacy and continued presence of colonialism in Fontaine’s everyday reality while
teaching on her reserve (Huberman 2016, 112); Fontaine laments, “maintenant Julie, je t’écris
pour te parler de qui nous sommes. Et la première chose qui me vient en tête, ce sont les
statistiques. Comment s’en défaire ? Comment défaire de petites choses aussi solides. Diseuses
d’avenir. Inhumaines (22).” In other words, Fontaine’s goal for her writing is to portray Innu
ways of life in a more complex manner than through a one-dimensional, reductive imperial lens.
This objective raises the question of how exactly Fontaine may humanize the people of her
reserve for this would-be colonizer’s eyes; Fontaine’s answer to this is what she conceives of as
nomadism. Nomadic movement is alluded to in the beginning of her letter to Julie : “assise en
indien, je te dirai comment les perpétuels allers-retours entre la ville et la réserve ont forgé mon
appartenance à ma communauté (13).” From her vantage point as a member of the reserve, in a
static, sedentarized, positionality [“assise en indien”], Fontaine will show the humanity of her
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
113

fellow tribesmen through the literary narrativization of these nomadic allers-retours, migrant
movements that signify the continuation of Innu life despite colonial sedentarization.
Instinct de nomade
This relationship between nomadic movement, narrative, and writing in Shuni is not new
and appears in Fontaine’s other works; such an idea is introduced in the very beginning of
Kuessipan. This novel, divided into four chapters—titled chronologically “Nomade”, “Uashat”,
“Nutshimit”, “Nikuss” (Vaillancourt 2017, 27)
112
— alludes to the primacy of nomadism in not
only the traditionalist conception of the Innu way of life, but also in the author’s writing. This
nomadism functions on two levels of Fontaine’s text. Firstly, it can refer to the representation of
Innu nomadic practices; one of the narrative fragments in “Nomade” recounts the journey of an
old Innu into the backcountry,
Les routes ne se ressemblent pas. Celle qui mène vers le nord. Celle qui nous ramène à
contresens… La route qu’il suivait, dès le début de l’automne jusqu’à la première neige,
l’amenait dans sa cabane… Lui maître de ses racines, humble devant la beauté d’un soir
d’octobre sans nuages… Reconnaissant de voir ses petits-enfants jouer avec des branches
et du sable. Il était la promesse de ce que nous ne devions jamais quitter, une route
poussiéreuse et cahoteuse, surtout l’automne, surtout pour nous. Nomade: j’aime
concevoir cette manière de vivre comme naturelle (Kuessipan 21–22).

In this passage, the old nomad, free from any constraints imposed by the colonizer, is “maître de
ses racines” whose meandering mobility on those labyrinthic country roads symbolizes for
Fontaine the ideal Innu mode of life. Nomadism in this case materializes as the author’s vision of
an Innu nomadic migrancy sans colonial constraints. The second level of nomadism is alluded to
here by the verb concevoir [to conceive]; indeed, this movement can also refer to how Fontaine’s
anti-colonial vision might be articulated or conceived. In a rather opaque passage towards the
end of Kuessipan, Fontaine refers to her mind and thoughts that emerge through, “ces méandres

112
See Vaillancourt for the geopoetic implications of these titles.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
114

moites et insensibles” [“these muggy and insensitive meanderings”] (108); she explains
subsequently that, “je n’ai pas le droit d’oublier mon instinct de nomade, sans cesse à la
recherche d’un état de grâce.” État de grâce evoking a theological dimension, the author’s
affirmation not only highlights her near-religious elevation of Innu nomadic migrancy but may
perhaps also point to the saturation of Innu culture into her mode of representation. Those
meanderings may very much refer to the fragmented style of her writings which seem to wander
from place to place, from character to character, and all across Fontaine’s thoughts—all of these
mobile representations serving to depict the multiplicity, complexity, and mobility of Innu lives
in the reserve. This ultimately leads to the question of how Fontaine’s nomadic textual
wanderings function as an aesthetic mode that serves to articulate a decolonized conception of
Innu nomadism—a nomadism free of the colonial conceptions of her people as one-dimensional
and sedentary.
Nomadic Counter-Colonialism
How might Shuni clarify this link between this nomadic multiplicity and its counter-
colonial potential? One possible answer lies in Fontaine’s auto-representation as the figure of the
nomadic Innu writer. The multiplicity of places in Shuni is concomitant with the multiple
geographical displacements that the author herself undertakes and subsequently narrativizes in
the novel. This migratory movement is not just limited to the Innu passage obligé to the
backcountry, which functions a sort of a pilgrimage that is intrinsic to her culture (25). Her
vocation as an author has her travel to centers of colonial power—Québec City, France, and
Spain—and to (post)colonial locales such the reservation where she teaches, as well as Haiti; as
Fontaine comments herself, “grâce à mes livres, je voyage de plus en plus. Je suis consciente de
la chance que j’ai de visiter des lieux nouveaux, toujours accueillie par une attente chaleureuse
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
115

(135). The multiplicity of localities serving to accentuate the frequency and scope of travels,
nomadism in the case of Fontaine therefore not only describes more traditional Innu migrations
but also just as adequately her highly transnational mobility as a writer that emerges with
colonization, as well as her fight against imperial violence.
Fontaine is proof that even with colonialism looming in the background, an Innu such as
herself can remain mobile; though she retains her nomadism, her movements must still reckon
with the reality of colonialism in some way. Reminiscent of her predecessor Kapesh’s own
literary migrancy, who had to travel to the imperial center of “la grande ville” in order to publish
her anti-colonial writings, the creative nomadism that Fontaine practices accordingly serves a
similar purpose: to counter colonialism. One of her travels, she describes, is a trip to Paris,
Il y a quelques années, j’étais au Festival America à Vincennes près de Paris…
Je suis sur la scène avec un animateur et un autre représentant des Premiers Peuples.
Celui-là vient de l’Amazonie. Il est le chef de sa communauté…Depuis une heure, nous
parlons de territoire, de cultures, de combats. Nous ne nous connaissons pas et pourtant
nous nous reconnaissons dans la tragédie de l’autre. Nos voix se font écho (60).

This narrative of Fontaine’s participation in the festival demonstrates a levelling of the different
nomadisms previously described. It is another example of Fontaine’s movement, this time
transnationally across borders, which the author effectuates to denounce the perpetration of
colonial violence towards Autochthonous peoples across the world. Her new nomadism gives her
the power to, collectively with other colonized peoples, denounce those forces that would
restrain her migrancy; such an anti-colonial posturing effectively symbolizes her ability to move
beyond the reserve.
113
The author’s anti-colonial mission is in turn narrativized within the frame
of Fontaine’s novel, where its aestheticization can then doubly denounce colonialism to those
who read Shuni’s nomadic narrative fragments.

113
This transnational communion of colonized Indigenous subjects will be discussed more in the chapter conclusion.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
116

To be clear, Fontaine’s writings do not suggest that Innu nomadism is readily
distinguished between precolonial and postcolonial modalities. Rather, what she aims to show is
that Innu nomadic customs persist despite coloniality, albeit in altered—even “modern” as
Fontaine herself would call it—forms. At the Festival America, Fontaine describes a French
woman who contrasts the Innu author with the Kichwa chief. The woman reasons that because
Fontaine wears western clothing bought in Paris, she has completely rejected the Innu culture,
while the Amazonian retained his culture because he wears a tribal outfit; Fontaine vehemently
replies,
Je lui affirme qu’en fait non elle n’a rien compris. Qu’effectivement je ne porte pas des
peaux tannées en guise de robe, que je n’ai pas fait le trajet de chez moi jusqu’à Paris en
canot…Et malgré ça, non je n’ai pas renié ma culture. Parce que tout cela n’est pas une
question de culture, mais plutôt de modernité.

Drawing a distinction between culture and temporality, Fontaine undermines a historically linear
conception of Innu culture that essentializes precolonial practices as more authentically Innu.
Fontaine’s affirmation thus leaves room for her practices in the contemporary “modern”
period—tinted by European colonization (Mbembe 12)
114
—to be regarded to be as Innu as the
customs of her uncolonized ancestors.
One way Fontaine recasts the profession of writing as an Innu nomadic practice is
through her depiction of nomadism as an economic modality, or a form of labor. Labor is
described by Fontaine to be another important element of Innu identity, stating that, “l’une des
valeurs fondatrices du nomade est le travail. Ils disent que ça coule dans les veines (91).”

114
There is an ample body of research and theory that touches on the inextricability of colonialism, Atlantic slave
trade, and eurocentric concepts of modernity. Philosopher Achille Mbembe, for example, even goes as far to
characterize the African slave trade, and by extension European Imperialism, as the baptismal founts of modernity.
Though Fontaine’ usage of the term “modernity” may not be consciously loaded with these implications, what the
Innu author describes to be “modern” inevitably implies the influence of European imperialism on her daily life—
from her clothing to her usage of the French language, and to her testimony of colonial violence in the capital of an
imperial metropole.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
117

Returning to the fragment about the French woman’s shortsighted conclusions about Fontaine,
the author evokes the “vrai travail des nomades” that her ancestors practiced, and how “ceux
qu’ils ont appelés Sauvages, n’ont jamais été contre le fait de faciliter leur mode de vie (61).”
Fontaine’s point can be read as an affirmation of how the economic practices of nomads are
adaptable, and have been adapted, given the societal circumstances. It is in this way nomadic
labor is connected to Fontaine’s vocation as an author. There is a moment in the novel during
which Fontaine reflects on the relationship between nomadic conceptions of labor and artistic
creation; describing her ébeniste cousin who is able to make a living out of art, Fontaine
summarizes that, “sans faire fortune, il pourrait vivre de son art, aisément…C’est ainsi chez moi,
le travail est fondateur. L’art est spirituel. Et il n’est recommandé à personne d’espérer vivre
seulement de son talent (93).” Though admittedly this relationship between art and nomadic
labor may be uneasy, in Fontaine’s eyes it is nonetheless possible for a nomad to make a living
by producing art. This recalls Fontaine’s own artistic productions—creative writing—which
serves as an example of such a viability.
By extension, it can be deduced that Fontaine regards her contemporary travels as a
nomadic writer to be just as “Innu” as her people’s traditional forms of artistic labor. Her literary
nomadic migrancy is simply the latest rendering of the nomadic practices that her people have
practiced before colonization and still continue to do after its onset. After all, as Fontaine
declares at a conference in her own homeland, to which she was invited after her tour of Europe
and Haiti,
Si le colonialisme, si les tentatives d’assimilation, si le vol de nos territoires, le vol de nos
enfants, si les réserves, si la loi sur les Indiens, si les pensionnats, si le racisme
systémique, si la négation de notre culture ne les ont pas tués, eux, ceux qui ont subi
toutes ces choses, rien aujourd’hui ne pourra détruire notre culture… La culture innue est
plus forte qu’elle ne l’a jamais été (128).

(II) Innu Literary Migrants
118

Given how she associates nomadism with writing, Fontaine’s novels themselves very much serve
as evidence of the continued vitality of Innu customs of migration and labor. Fontaine’s literary
nomadism represents how this Innu author continues the tradition of her nomadic laboring
ancestors, making a vocation out of resisting colonialism through art. Fontaine’s economic
modality as a transnationally mobile artist functions thus as one concrete example of how
nomadism can be adapted in an economic system that is imposed by the colonizer.
Fontaine’s literary nomadism is therefore as much a migrant modality as it is a practice of
aestheticization, and as much an economic practice as much as it is evidence of an anti-colonial
stance. What her novels show is that just as Euro-Canadian colonial-economic ambitions
impedes the nomadic customs of the Innu people, Fontaine resists these colonizing phenomena
through writing. Fontaine suggests that writing itself is an extension of those nomadic customs,
albeit with the stain of colonization. Fontaine’s profession as an author generates frequent
travels, a mobility that is itself represented in her writings in a meandering, nomadic style. This
mise-en-abyme of movements serve to demonstrate Fontaine’s persistent mobility and can thus
be understood as the author’s expression of her anti-colonial position.
Circuits of Colonial Aesthetics
Fontaine’s discursive focus on nomadism, coupled with the abundance of references to
this migrant practice, may very well be described as “hyperconsciousnesses.” Like with Kapesh,
this hyperconsciousness in Fontaine’s writing is deployed as a constellation that links
conceptions of migration and nomadism with equally abundant ideations of economic practices
and writing; in this case of these two writers, colonialism is rightfully identified to be an
important factor that conditions the emergence of this aesthetic of colonial hyperconsiousnesses.
Such an aesthetic therefore illustrates a way in which an Innu author may mobilize Innu
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
119

conceptions of migrancy, via the colonial construct of writing, to work towards the objective of
decolonization.

BEYOND AN INNU LITERATURE OF MIGRATION

In the end of my analysis, I have shown that these Innu authors do indeed engage with
discourses surrounding human migration under the parameters of colonialism. Kapesh’s essay
testifies to a veritable clash of the migratory dynamics that implicate both Euro-Canadian
colonizer and Innu colonized, demonstrating a shift in the migrant modalities of her people under
new colonial constraints; Je suis une maudite sauvagesse raises the question of her people’s
sedentarization, or their coerced enclosure on reserves that represents an interruption in their
people’s precolonial nomadic migrancy. Kapesh’s essay chronicles the emergence of a new Innu
migrant type—the Innu writer, whose nomadic mobility serves to counter this sedentarization.
Fontaine’s novels help show that this literary figure—literary in the senses that it produces
literature just as much as it is reproduced in literature—exemplify both the alteration of the
Innus’ nomadic customs as well as their vitality. The literary migrancy of the Innu writer
demonstrate their people’s continued mobility and resistance against colonialism. In this way,
this migrant figure links notions of anti-colonialism with economic and linguistic literary
practices, a series of rhetorical propensities that I have qualified as “hyperconsiousnesses.” The
nomadic Innu literary migrant is the fulcrum on which this colonial triple hyperconsciousness of
economics, language, and migrancy balances. My analysis therefore suggests that these Innu
nomadic texts may indeed share this aesthetic factor in common with other narratives of
migration from the Québec context; one only needs to look to the other side of the coin, so to
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
120

speak, of the colonization of the Innu: the White intrusion of Indigenous land, a colonial process
that is depicted in the romans de la terre of the precedent chapter.
A Literature of Migration, Rather Than Migrant Literature
Even though these Innu works are not what one may traditionally call “migrant texts”,
these two bodies of literature exhibit, as suggested earlier, many convergent characteristics—the
former remaining distinct of course because of the authors’ identification as Indigenous people.
Consider the “triptych” [“tryptique”] of so-called migrant writing, which literary scholars Adama
Coulibaly and Yao Louis Konan describe as, “le trauma du départ, la mobilité et l’intégration
dans le pays d’accueil (2015, 7)”—swap out “pays d’accueil” [“host country”] with “dominant
society of the colonizer,” and this triptych perfectly describes the Innu narratives in my study.
Similar to the migrants in Coulibaly and Konan’s framework, both Innu writers are mobile in
their habits and customs and describe trauma, which in the authors’ cases is the trauma of
colonialism. However, it would be problematic to say that the two Innu authors integrate into a
“host country”—they remain in their own land which happens to be colonized by a foreign
colonizer. Still, Kapesh and Fontaine still integrate in the sense that they are coerced to adopt
certain customs imposed by the colonizer in order to live under colonization and eventually to
defy it. It is at this point where “(im)migrant” literature and Indigenous literatures of nomadic
migration diverge: the site of integration is the determinant that distinguish these Innu texts from
“migrant texts.” However, it then opens the question of how one may approximate these two
bodies of traumatic migration narratives within a single generic category. A priori, the common
denominator may be (post)colonization, as the Innu texts of my study reckon with the fallout of
European colonialism in the same way as many “migrant texts”—the postcolonial dimension of
migrant texts alluded to by theorist of migrant literature Simon Harel (2005, 21); both corpuses
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
121

may perhaps be classified as part of a broad (post)colonial genre of migration literature that
crosses and transcends national boundaries.
Transnational Exchanges and Indigenous Writing
With Chapter One as context, and now the analyses of the Innu authors, it is perhaps at
this point a consideration of transnationality—as delineated in the introduction of Colonial
Ventures—might be fruitful. Though the crossing of contemporary geopolitical boundaries may
perhaps not be a central issue of Kapesh and Fontaine’s writings, an examination of movement,
as I showed, necessitates at least some reckoning with cross-border migration, as it forms part of
the forced colonized vocation of Indigenous authorship. The issues that surround this
transnational migrancy can all be unraveled from those powerful scenes in Shuni in which
Fontaine entered into dialogue with other Indigenous peoples during her work abroad, away from
Québec (60). These narratives are striking because of their representation of a common
communicative posturing that unites these two marginalized Indigenous persons, despite the fact
that they come from two different colonized locales [the Amazon and Québec] and are both
speaking in a land foreign to them [France]. Their common anti-colonial critique is
“transnational” in the sense that it thematically converges despite the geopolitical borders that
supposedly differentiate them. Just as their anti-colonial critique intersect, Indigenous creative
writing in general may also do so with other genres in two prominent, connected, ways: 1) as
aforementioned, by dint of their common yet distinctive engagement with coloniality like in
narratives de la terre; 2) with other Indigenous literatures from across the world that critique
colonialism in a similar fashion. Focusing on these thematic attributes effectively allows a
curtailing of rigid perceptions that view texts as solely belong to one national literary corpus or
another.
(II) Innu Literary Migrants
122

Already, current trends have eschewed the simplistic classification of Indigenous writing
in the ranks of the literatures of their colonizing countries; as Boudreau boldly asserts, in the
context of Québec,
La littérature amérindienne n’est pas une littérature francophone ou anglophone; elle est
plutôt une littérature créée, transmise oralement ou par écrit par des auteurs qui vivent sur
le territoire du Québec. Elle ne peut ni ne doit être assimilée à la société Québécoise ou
Canadienne-française qui la domine culturellement et politiquement (15).

Going even further by highlighting yet another fitting category for these works, perhaps one way
to compare these First Peoples writings with other narratives of migration, without
chauvinistically integrating them into the literary canon of a dominant culture, is via the
treatment of particular, convergent, anti-colonial themes, grouping them all under the umbrella
of a transnational (post)colonial literature of migration—a classification sans national or ethnic
modifier that nonetheless focuses on common conceptualizations of colonial human mobility.
Such an idea will be further reinforced in the rest of Colonial Ventures by considering the fertile
migrant discourses that are emerging from the writings and narratives of other marginalized
peoples and others from across the world.
(III) Uneasy Roads
123

CHAPTER III—UNEASY ROADS: COLONIZATION AND IMMIGRATION IN FRANCO-AMÉRIQUE
As the internal migration of Canadien settlers propelled the colonization of the Québec
North, others in the province made the decision to leave, opting instead to immigrate to the U.S.
This exodus to the States was the catalyst to those settler-colonial projects that sought to stymie
population flight and instead anchor Québec’s Francophone and catholic population to the
province’s land, thereby ensuring national preservation. The romans de la terre primarily recount
this movement within the Québec terroir while idealizing static agrarian life within the province.
Yet, as my readings showed, these productions also frequently grappled with conflicting migrant
impulses that run contrary to internal migration: emigration away from the national soil.
Commenting a wide range of migrant phenomena—ranging from internal settler colonialism,
emigration, and even implicitly the restraining of Indigenous mobility—these farm narratives
demonstrated that in this cultural space, migration is steeped in a settler-colonial imaginary that
sees the aestheticization of colonists and others who move both in and out of the province. But
now a new question arises: does this inextricability of migration and colonization manifest in
other genres—in texts that primarily narrativize Canadien and other Francophone movement
outside of Québec in the United States? To answer this question, this present chapter proposes a
study of the representation of Canadiens and of their Franco-American descendants in the works
of two celebrated road novelists: Jack Kerouac of the United States and Jacques Poulin of
Québec.
Their road novels take place within the vast North American continent—the same
continent that begot the rural narratives and Indigenous essays studied in Part One of Colonial
Ventures. Across this continent one can find settlements raised by Francophone colonists in
every corner, which speaks to how colonial-migrant dynamics subsume this land and shapes it.
(III) Uneasy Roads
124

Because road novels necessarily involve a traversing and commentary of landscape, I query how
such works from the Francophone North American contexts might also engage in a reckoning of
colonialism—this formative phenomenon of contemporary North America. Upon reading
Kerouac and Poulin’s road novels, one will find that they effectively engage in their own way,
via their poetization of migrant movement, with the imperial appropriation and exploitation of
land. Both the romans de la terre and Kerouac and Poulin’s road novels imagine the colonizing
migration of pioneers and settlers; but whereas the rural novels celebrate the expansion of land
and the internal migration of settlers, Kerouac and Poulin’s road stories are inflected with a
sentiment of unease towards colonialism. Contrasting with the romans de la terre, the two road
novel authors write to expose the imperial schemes and colonial conditions that underpin the
history of Canadien and Franco-American migrancies in contemporary times.
Canadien or Franco-American?
First, how might the Francophone United States, Franco-Amérique, and Franco-
American even be defined? This question is one that continues to preoccupy scholars of Québec
and Canadian studies; it is as recent as 2017 that saw the re-edition of the collective work by the
geographers Dean Louder and Eric Waddell (2017, 15), who attempt to identify the boundaries
of Franco-Amérique, or in other words, “la population francophone en Amérique du Nord.”
Despite this critical fixation, the relevance of the United States in Francophone and Canadian
studies still constitutes a conceptual blind spot; Louder and Waddell themselves acknowledge
that thinkers of the American Francophonie have insufficiently engaged with the experiences of
North American and Antillean Francophones and of their descendants—all of whom they simply
(III) Uneasy Roads
125

designate as “Francos”
115
—outside of Canada.
116
Furthermore, the geographers lament that
their own project to cartograph the Franco presence in the Americas was itself framed by
Canadian and Québecois nation-building initiatives
117
and thus,
fait totalement abstraction des millions de Francos qui se trouvent au sud du 49
e
parallèle,
effaçant ainsi d’un seul trait d’énormes pans de mémoire, d’histoire et d’action, voire de
projets d’avenir : Le Québec d’en bas, le pays d’Illinois, la Louisiane, bien sûr, mais
aussi la Floride et la Californie (17).

This chapter thus attempts to shine light on a particular category of Louder and Waddell’s
Francos: Franco-Americans, the term I use to refer to those of Eurocanadian origin in the United
States who are also descendants of French settlers.
118
Specifically, this chapter continues the
study of longstanding mobile literary figures in the Canadien imaginary—such as voyageurs and
other pioneers; I show here that iterations of these mythic types do not only continue to surface
in contemporary cultural productions about Québec, but also in those concerning Franco-
American immigrant communities. In short, I ask what insights a study of mobile types in these
geographic and ethnic contexts—and of the discourses and narratives that encompass them—
might generate. Doing so will, I argue, allow a deeper comprehension of the colonial and
migratory dynamics that underlie and connect all French-speaking communities across this
continent, regardless of contemporary geopolitical boundaries. Kerouac and Poulin’s common

115
Waddell and Louder explain, “nous avons opté pour l’emploi du terme « Franco » qui recouvre l’ensemble des
groupes nord-américains dont les origines remontent à la Nouvelle France, à l’Acadie ou à la Louisiane, qu’ils
parlent encore français ou pas. À ceux-là pourraient s’ajouter les immigrants plus récents en provenance d’Europe,
d’Afrique ou des Antilles. Il s’agit d’un néologisme qui se veut le plus inclusif possible (15)."
116
Franco-American is the demonym commonly attributed to those who belonged to Canadien communities in the
US, as well as to their descendants. See note 4 below.
117
This references the funding of their edited book both by organs of the federal government of Canada as well as of
the Québec provincial government.
118
Note that by focusing on these quintessential Canadien literary types, I do not deny the significance of other
Francophones from across the world who have also immigrated to North America and who now all very much so
also make up “Franco-America”—see Chapter 4, “New Arrivals, Different American dreams”; however, as a means
to focalize this chapter, “Franco-American” here will refer mainly to these Franco-Canadian immigrants and their
descendants in the U.S.—French-speaking or otherwise. For a brief historical overview of the Franco-Americans in
the US, as well as of the genesis of this demonym, see anthropologist Barry Rodrigue’s chapter in Franco-
Amérique, insightfully titled, “Francophones, pas toujours, mais toujours Franco-Américains.”
(III) Uneasy Roads
126

mobilization of migrant tropes to critique colonial oppression demonstrates the transnationality
of their discursive tendency—a tendency that, though admittedly is mediated by a shared
ethnicity and migratory history, troubles conventional understandings of what is uniquely
“Canadien” or “American.”
The Franco-American Road
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), hardly needs an introduction, as evidenced by the vast body
of scholarship dedicated to his numerous works. His novels, On the Road (1957), The
Subterraneans (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), and Satori in Paris (1966) have become
classics of American Literature—with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari even
citing his works as examples of the supposed superiority of American literature in relation to
French literature due to the former’s supposed liberative adaptivity
119
and association with
“empiricism, rupture, and experimentation (Pinette 2018, 120).” Furthermore, Kerouac is
commonly labelled as one of the forerunners of the Beat literary movement, as well as being the
creator of the archetypical road novel—On the road. In recent times, there is more mention of
Kerouac’s status as a Franco-American author, garnering elevated interest for the writer in
Francophone studies. In effect, Kerouac was born to Canadien émigrés in Lowell,
Massachusetts—a city that is host to a sizable Franco-American community. It is also notable
that Kerouac drafted manuscripts and took notes in a phonetic French, many of which are
archived in the New York Public Library. In 2016 Kerouac scholar Jean-Christophe Cloutier
published an edited collection of Kerouac’s French writings, titled, La vie est d’hommage, which
included early drafts of On the Road, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), and even an entire unpublished

119
Pinette suggests that Deleuze and Guattari associate the implicit movement of Kerouac’s road novel with their
concept of the "line of flight," a factor that permits change. See critic Susan Pinette’s reading of one of D&G’s
dialogues, "De la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine."
(III) Uneasy Roads
127

novella titled, La nuit est ma femme (dated 1951)—this latter title containing a narrative that
echoes many of his other published works (Kerouac 2016, 51).
120
In my study, I propose a
reading of not only La nuit est ma femme, but also the textual fragments titled, “Écoutez le
monde” because of their thematic propensity to engage with French-Canadianness and America.
Indeed, in these short texts one can find interlinked representations of movement, nomadism,
canadienité, and Americanness that form a veritable nexus in which notions of migrancy and
identity are entwined. This nexus, as I will show, demonstrates the way in which Kerouac
conceptualizes human movement and its relation to capitalist and imperial hegemonic forces at
play across the North American continent—forces that relegate Franco-Americans as internally
colonized nomads in their adoptive country.
If Kerouac gives a first-person view of the lived experience of the French-Canadians in
the U.S., perhaps it could be said that Jacques Poulin (1937-) provides an outsider’s vision of
American Francophone wanderings as they figure in the Québec imaginary. A resident of
Québec since his birth, apart from a 15 year stay in Paris around the 80s, Poulin is the author of
the celebrated road novel, Volkswagen Blues (1984), in which the iconic characters Jack
Waterman (Poulin’s narrative double) and Pitsémine (La Grande Sauterelle) drive across Canada
and the U.S. in search of the former’s brother. Many of Poulin’s later works expand on the
narrative universe elaborated in Volkswagen Blues; for example, Chat sauvage (1998), Les yeux
bleus de Mistassini (2002), La traduction est une histoire d’amour (2006), L’Anglais n’est pas
une langue magique (2009), L’homme de la Saskatchewan (2011), and Un jukebox dans la tête
(2015), all of which either involve the character Jack Waterman, or one of his relations
(Grégoire 2020).
121
This chapter will focus on his most well-known novel, Volkswagen Blues, for

120
See Cloutier for a list of similarities.
121
See Grégoire for a recent critical bibliography.
(III) Uneasy Roads
128

several reasons. Not only is this 1984 publication a road novel, like many of Kerouac’s works,
but it also contains direct references to the American author scattered throughout its narrative.
Furthermore, the issue of European colonization is one of the themes tackled by the author
through the characters’ allegorical search for traces of Francophone presence throughout the
continent (Morency and Thibeault 2011, 9). Hitherto, critics have variously engaged with
Volkswagen Blues to demonstrate, via a postcolonial lens, how its narrative acts to undermine a
Eurocentric history of the Americas (Vautier 1994; Weisman 1995), or how travel is tied with
notions of Americanness in Poulin’s novel (Deitz 1991). My concern will be to demonstrate that
these three issues are indeed imbricated one on the other. Firstly, I will do this by paying special
attention to the intertexual references to Kerouac in Volkswagen blues; this will allow a
juxtaposition of Poulin’s vision of Francophone colonization with the Kerouacian conception of
Franco-American nomadic migrancy as it is found in La vie est d’hommage. I will demonstrate
that while the two authors offer differing vantage points of the Franco-Canadian colonial project
in North America, they are tied together by a common colonial imaginary in which both
Canadiens and their Franco-American descendants are aestheticized to be mobile actors and
subjects who traverse the U.S.

Murky Roads
Effectively, this chapter is a study of an all-American literary trope: the road. How might
the concept of road, and more broadly the genre of road narratives, be defined? Critics such as
Julie Robert (2017, 99) and Ronald Primeau (1996, 1) identify road novels and narratives as
travelogues that involve motorized vehicles, usually taking place on roads or highways. In her
juxtaposition of the road novel with the French nouveau roman, Robert provides a critical
(III) Uneasy Roads
129

overview of the former genre, noting that other scholars have found that it engages with issues of
whiteness and masculinity (Larson 2009), femininity (Paes de Barros 2004; Ganser 2006), and
historiography (Lackey 1999). What becomes clear is that, while road novels may be
thematically diverse, one underlying attribute that links them is their narrativization of
movement: the road is the backdrop to migrancies, and road stories are necessarily stories of
migrancy. Other than this rubric, their thematic tendencies are numerous as they are varied.
What then of my argument that migrancy in Francophone North America seems to
possess a convergent relationship with colonization? Robert interestingly remarks that travelers
in road narratives, “overwhelmingly tend to push westward in the footsteps of the pioneers along
such well-travelled routes as the Oregon Trail and Route 66. It is for this reason that they have
also traditionally been associated with the imagery and the mentalities of the American Frontier.”
Though Robert does not directly evoke coloniality in this description, her observations about the
Oregon Trail and pioneers—which figure in the North American colonial imagination of
westward expansion—nonetheless underline the important imperial histories and dynamics that
serve as the narrative contexts of this genre. As this chapter will show, her statement can be
rewritten to say that the road novel followed in the footsteps of the Euro-American colonization
of the Americas. This trajectory of the road novel thus evokes the notion of the “frontier myth”,
or the notion that, “the conquest of wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native
Americans have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity,
an ever-expanding polity and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization (Slotkin
1998, 10).” These considerations inform my own question: in what ways does Kerouac’s French
writings and Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues engage on their own terms with, not only notions of the
frontier, but more generally with colonial expansion and imperial violence? Does their
(III) Uneasy Roads
130

engagement subsequently alter established understandings of the road novel? The answer to
these questions, I argue, lies in the motifs of disillusion that are recurrent in Kerouac and
Poulin’s narratives. Far from being texts that one-dimensionally celebrates freedom and
rebellion, the authors deploy melancholy to describe the colonial conditions that they and their
characters face; in short, this chapter argues that the road novel can figure as a novel of colonial
unease.
It is true that Kerouac and Poulin’s works stereotypically function, like other road stories,
as writings in the search of self—a task that concurrently manifests under the shadow of manifest
destiny and White colonial expansion. However, what is important is to recognize the
melancholic tone that often seems to accompany travel. Kerouac and Poulin’s road stories are
very much so stories of disenfranchisement and of disenchantment—of bitter migrancies in
coloniality. This can be shown in the persistent pessimism that Kerouac attaches to travel, which
he associates with labor, class, and economic disenfranchisement as an historically marginalized
Franco-American; yet what is noteworthy is that the author concomitantly associates bitter
migrant labor with the potential liberation from such colonized circumstances. Kerouac
effectuates his migrant conception of labor through the deployment of colonial figures such as
the pioneers and voyageurs, associating them with the socio-economic disadvantages faced by
his community that he yearns to leave behind. As for Volkswagen Blues, despite conforming to
generic road novel criteria by taking place in imperialized American locales, I contend that
Poulin adds another layer of complexity to his road narratives by overtly critiquing colonial
violence that underscores his characters’ movement; this is done by his narrative double’s
disaffection with common frontier symbols, ideological constructs, historiography, and mythic
narratives—such as, among others, Indigenous genocide, Manifest Destiny, the American dream,
(III) Uneasy Roads
131

and the Franco-Canadien voyageur. This is reminiscent of Simon Harrel’s reminder that
migration narratives often carry with them a traumatic dimension, and do not all function as
simple valorizations of hybridity and heterogeneity (Carrière and Khordoc 2008, 5). Kerouac and
Poulin’s conceptualizations of the road manifest as pessimistic ones, a vision that is mired by
grim, and sometimes violent colonial migratory dynamics—respectively by internal colonization
and imperial expansion. A juxtaposition of Kerouac and Poulin demonstrates this condition of
double coloniality that characterizes the Franco-Canadien and Franco-American experience:
while they were active colonizers in North America, their one-dimensionality is complicated by
their position as quasi-colonized subjects in Canada and U.S. Yet, what Kerouac and Poulin’s
works make clear is that no matter their position in this colonizer-colonized spectrum, these two
authors are both disillusioned by colonial dynamics that have marked the American continent.
Their colonial disaffection is expressed through the authors' poetics, which challenge
colonization in North America through the aestheticization of Francophones on the road.

THE ROADS OUT OF LOWELL

Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, Jack grew up in Lowell’s Petit Canada [Little
Canada]— a district in urban centers across New England and New York that, since the 1880s,
hosted large concentrations of Franco-Canadians (Rodrigue 2017, 130).
122
His parents arrived in
New England during l’Exode, among the influx of Francophone Canadians into American mill
towns between 1840 and 1930 (Cloutier 2016, 10). While anthropologist Barry Rodrigue notes
that the tight-knit communities of these Petits Canadas helped Franco-Americans navigate tough

122
Rodrigue attests to these flourishing communities which, “permirent à des médecins, des dentistes, des avocats,
des enseignants, des journalistes, des prêtres, et des politiciens de s’établir et d’avoir des pratiques florissantes.
Outre le fait de recevoir des soins de santé et des conseils spirituels dans leur propre langue, les Canadiens français
ont créé leurs propres troupes de théâtre, sociétés musicales et autres institutions."
(III) Uneasy Roads
132

economic periods and provided them “pleasant” social lives (132-4), he also underlines the
alienation that these laboring immigrants and their descendants faced. Rodrigue reminds us that
Canadiens in the U.S. were labelled as “the Chinamen of the eastern states”
123
during debates
surrounding the ratification of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (equating Franco-Canadiens
with another racialized group of immigrant laborers that served as the work force in the
American West); he underlines that,
Les élites de la Nouvelle-Angleterre aimaient bien avoir une main-d’œuvre et une
clientèle francophones, mais ils avaient aussi des soupçons et du ressentiment à leur
regard, tant et si bien que les insultes ethniques, le racisme, et les blagues anti-français
devenaient monnaie courante dans le nord-est des États-Unis (133).
Rodrigue’s account aptly summarizes the schema of alienation faced by many Franco-American
immigrants during the period of their initial arrival in the States: 1) economic exploitation as
menial laborers in mill towns, and 2) systemic, racist dehumanization at the hands of non-
Francophone New Englanders. The Franco-American condition fits definitions of internal
colonization, which sociologist Charles Pinderhughes (2011, 236) notably defines as the
“geographically based pattern of subordination of a differentiated population, located within the
dominant power or country;” Pinderhughes also notes that this internal colonization is marked by
systems of inequality that include, among others, economic subjugation and ghettoization. This
internally colonized condition serves as the socio-historic frame for the narratives in Kerouac’s
La nuit est ma femme novella and the “Écoutez le monde” pieces. In both fragments, the
descriptions of migrant labor and family life point to the colonized social status of its
marginalized characters.

123
Rodrigue attributes this label to Carroll Wright, director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in
1881.
(III) Uneasy Roads
133

Franco Identity at Home and on the Road
The trope of family is particularly important in understanding the thematic nexus that
links notions of Francophone identity, movement, disenchantment, and the road in Kerouac’s
works. As poet-scholar Tim Hunt (Hunt and Charters 2010, xlii) reminds us, for Kerouac,
“French was not only sound and gesture but also the language of family, storytelling, and a
child's sense of neighborhood community.” Hunt’s remarks underline the necessity for a critical
engagement of Kerouac’s French writings, as it appears that such texts may elucidate how
Kerouac relates his familial background to his conceptions of race, travel, and wandering.
Furthermore, Kerouac scholar Jean-Christophe Cloutier notes in the forward of La vie est
d’hommage that before Kerouac’s French writings were publicly released in 2006, no one had
access to them (10). Despite the prior obscurity of Kerouac’s French-language works, these
posthumously released writings echoed the Franco-American author’s English publications;
Cloutier specifies that, “plusieurs passages de La nuit sont reliés à d’autres romans de
Kerouac…La nuit est ma femme s’insère dans le projet romanesque unique que constitue
l’ensemble des œuvres de Kerouac (54)."
124
It is notable that critics have long acknowledged the
idea that Kerouac saw his oeuvre as a vast autobiographical project (Nicholls 2003, 524). The
texts in La vie est d’hommage now raise the question of how Kerouac’s newly discovered
narrative fragments fit into the cartography of the author’s oeuvre, expanding it to include
insights on his upbringing in Franco-American communities.
Because La vie est d’hommage was written in a colloquial French, the works therein may
increase scholarly knowledge about Kerouac’s Francophone identity. Already, one can find
many studies of Kerouac’s French-Canadian background and of its thematization in his writings

124
Cloutier draws narrative similarities, and character crossovers, between La nuit and Visions of Gerard (1963),
Vanity of Duluoz (1968), and Pic (1971).
(III) Uneasy Roads
134

(Melehy 2016; Poteet 1988), as well as of the critical and popular reception of the author and his
novels in Québec (Pinette 2018; Villa 2018). However, few, if any, concentrated studies of the
textual pieces found in La vie d’hommage have appeared since this anthology’s publication.
125

This chapter thus focuses on the thematic and narrative propensities found in this collection of
French-language texts, which risk providing powerful insight into how, behind his public
persona, Kerouac conceived of Franco-Americanness and its relationship to migrancy—of the
writer’s very conception of the road.
While La nuit est ma femme might lack some defining characteristics of what other
critics
126
might hold to be a traditional road novel—i.e., travel narratives that involve motorized
vehicles—I argue that this novella may nonetheless be understood as a proto-road novel. The
suffix proto- may be understood on several levels. Foremost, Kerouac dated the novella in the
beginning of 1951—7 years before his publication of On the Road; therefore, if all of the
author’s works might be understood as a unique autobiographical whole, then La nuit est ma
femme is very much a story that chronologically precedes his successful road narratives. Readers
of this novella may expect to find Kerouac’s early thoughts and views that are in full
effervescence of mutation, and which may differ from his perspectives reflected in later
publications. Congruently, the narrative of La nuit est ma femme is a story of a protagonist who,
though he does not set off on the road, expresses the desire to be on it; La nuit recounts the
protagonist Michel Bretagne’s obsession with travel and vagabondage on America’s roadways,

125
While critic Susan Pinette does evoke La vie est d’hommage at the end of her article, she concentrates mainly on
the text’s reception in Québec as well as on nationalist impulses that would attempt to claim Kerouac as a Québécois
author. Elsewhere, in his monograph, Kerouac: Language, Poetics, & Territory, literary scholar Hassan Melehy
examines several pieces now found in La vie est d’hommage, including La nuit est ma femme.
126
Critic Ronald Primeau provides a concise definition of this genre, stating that, “American road narratives are
fiction and nonfiction books by Americans who travel by car throughout the country either on a quest or simply to
get away.”
(III) Uneasy Roads
135

preluding the eventual voyages of this character, and even perhaps those of Kerouac’s other
protagonists in his later works.
La migrance béate
A reader of La nuit will find that Michel’s nomadic desires recall another migrant
modality: that of French-Canadian immigrants who historically moved across New England to
follow economic opportunities. Given that Michel identifies as a Franco-American, whose
parents are effectively Canadiens who settled in the U.S. (54)—the character’s desires for work
and mobility easily recall images of those Francophone economic migrants. Yet, in addition to
resembling his forebears who migrated for economic stability, Michel’s migrancy is also
motivated by another incentive: travel and pleasure. Kerouac, via his protagonist Michel,
associates the concepts of migrancy with labor, as the character both travels to acquire odd jobs
and works odd jobs in order to leisurely travel. It could be for this sole reason that La nuit
functions as a narrative of labor just as much as it does as a road story; in Kerouac’s narrative
universe, work entails travel and vice versa.
To complicate this assertion, I argue that in order to understand the Kerouacian
conception of labor and its imagined relation to migrancy, it is essential to consider the author’s
Beat philosophy. The Beat Generation, this counter-cultural literary movement that was a
reaction to the postwar socio-economic order, valorized non-conformity (Holton 2004, 11),
individual liberty (Adamo 2012, 34), “unfiltered” authentic experiences, and vagabond hoboism
(Crumbley 2019, 33). It was Kerouac who named this movement, playing on the double entendre
of the English colloquial term “beat”—in the sense of downtrodden and impoverished—and the
French “béat” [blissful] which bears religious connotations of grace and salvation in Catholicism
(III) Uneasy Roads
136

(archivesRC 2022, 13:40).
127
Fittingly, Kerouac historian John Tytell (1979, 315) describes the
Beats as a “movement… of reformist impulses…steeped in sorrow while yearning for
beatitude.” The double entendre of “beat” points to Kerouac’s philosophical fixation—rooted in
his Catholic beliefs—with earthly tribulation that potentially leads to a utopic state of
contentment.
128

How might Kerouac’s conception of being Beat—with its conflicting encapsulation of
both wretchedness and eventual bliss—influence his views on movement, labor, and
colonization? What is established is that Beat artists like Kerouac employ their writings to
critique postwar economic culture that valorizes consumerism and the maximation of efficiency
and productivity; in the same vein, through a reading of Kerouac’s On the Road, literary scholar
Jason Vredenburg (2016, 187) proposes that for Kerouac, “the prospect of steady employment…
is… imagined as an ethical compromise. To participate [in the system] is to sacrifice both one’s
freedom and one’s soul.”
129
Labor, therefore, does at times carry with it a pejorative connotation
in Kerouac’s worldview, which is unsurprising due to his general skepticism towards the socio-
economic order. Yet the keyword in Vredenburg’s statement is “steady,” a word that accentuates
the restricted character of the type of labor Kerouac criticizes. Labor in La nuit est ma femme, as
one will find, is not steady but rather episodic. Coupled with this transience, I argue that this
unpublished novella also shows labor to bear redemptive qualities despite the undesirability that
Kerouac generally associates with work.

127
Kerouac affirms this in a 1967 Radio Canada televised interview with the journalist Fernand Séguin on the show
Le sel de la semaine.
128
For more on Kerouac’s religious background, see Melehy (64).
129
Vredenburg arrives at this conclusion by analyzing two elements: 1) the figure of the sheriff that functions as
frontier symbol; and 2) the protagonist Sal Paradis prospective employment at a carnival, which echoes a plot line in
La nuit est ma femme. I will return to this scene from On the Road while analyzing Kerouac’s French novella.
(III) Uneasy Roads
137

In effect, elsewhere in his oeuvre, Kerouac depicts his characters to embrace work
despite its negative overtones. It is documented that at times the author does indeed espouse
labor, not as a practice that is valued in itself, but mainly in its capacity as an expedient means
that enables movement and thus the acquiring of experience; in an analysis of Kerouac’s
autobiographical short story, “Piers of the Homeless Night”
130
—in which the author recounts his
desire to join the crew of a merchant ship—literary scholar Jennifer H. Forsberg (2017, 1214)
makes this observation:
for Kerouac, entry on a ship that sails to exotic places is not a desperate cry for
employment, so much as the site of commodity exchange which includes acquiring
cultural capital. Entry on the ship garners Kerouac experiential credit across the world—
such as in Singapore or Australia—but, more explicitly, provides him material proof such
as [a] ‘fancy shirt’ from the ‘Hong Kong haberdashery’ which he can show off when he
returns to America.
131

It seems that for Kerouac, the value of work lies mainly in its fruits: the facilitation of
movement, which subsequently entails an expansion of the author’s experience. Labor, this
arduous practice, is readily embraced by Kerouac perhaps similarly to how he idealizes poverty
and downtrodden social status as expedients to beatitude. In Kerouac’s vision, labor might be
analogue to the sorrowful impoverished state of being “beat,” a process that must be endured in
hopes of becoming béat. I will show that La nuit confirms Kerouac’s association of migrant
labor with sorrow, a practice that is accepted by the narrator as the means to beatific travel and
overall bliss. Kerouac’s description of painstaking labor—linked to his internally colonized
Franco-American background—is the element that allows us to read his proto-road novel as a
tale of colonial unease. Indeed, what distinguishes the road, and by extension human movement
tout court, in La nuit is the dual melancholic and hopeful tone that accompanies the

130
This piece is found in his short story collection, Lonesome Traveller (1960).
131
Forsberg’s essay is an analysis of how Kerouac seems to commodify the Beat, hobo, aesthetic while also
recognizing the limits of his "working class" drag. An idea that will be revisited at the end of this section.
(III) Uneasy Roads
138

representations of migrancy qua labor. Accordingly, despite Michel’s obsession, his ideas of the
road and movement are strewn with tormented affective responses that are amortized by beatific
hope of escaping socially miserable conditions. These feelings of desperation and bliss toward
the travel and work might perhaps be clarified by Kerouac’s vision of his French-Canadian
ancestry—which he comments in “Écoutez le monde.” “Écoutez le monde” is a small collection
of unfinished fragments recounting the lives of the Franco-American Martin family. These
fragments pertinently contain evocations of mobile pioneers and settlers—reminiscent of the
coureur des bois and the défricheurs—contrasting them with what Kerouac sees as the
“American” way of life. These fragments shine light on how Kerouac relates migrancy qua labor
to his Franco-Americanité, and ultimately to how he champions a bitter yet redemptive migrancy
as a means to surpass his internally colonized socio-economic circumstances.
Yet, this characterization of Kerouac as a minority raises some ethical considerations.
Literary scholar Brendon Nicholls (2003, 543), in a study of how Kerouac attempts to reckon
with his own identity through the fetishization of dark-skinned peoples, asserts that, “if one were
to construct Kerouac as an original victim and survivor of American racism, one would elide the
very real, and often painful history of African Americans. This is a history to which Kerouac’s
fiction contributes, if only in a minimal and unselfconscious way.” Nicholls’s argument about
Kerouac’s chauvinistic attitudes towards Black and brown peoples is certainly fair—take for
example the racial and gender dimensions of the novella title La nuit est ma femme, which
echoes the critic’s assertion that Kerouac “envisages America as a dark woman (526).”
132

Despite Kerouac’s views, it would be shortsighted to dismiss completely the very real oppression
that Franco-Americans and French-Canadians have experienced in North America at the hands

132
He makes this remark through an analysis of On the Road.
(III) Uneasy Roads
139

of Anglo-Canadian and American politico-economic forces. As I frequently suggest throughout
Colonial Ventures, oppression is relative; though Kerouac may have subtle colonial views, that
does not discount the fact that he or those of his community suffered colonial oppression.
I propose a momentary step-back to consider this oppression, which, if for no other
reason, does act as a thematic pillar in Kerouac’s road narratives. I argue that the Franco-
American internally colonized condition is what sets the doubly melancholic and hopeful tone of
Kerouac’s French-language proto-road novel. To demonstrate this, in this segment I will analyze
how Kerouac relates the notions of labor to those of movement, travel, sadness, America,
language, and ultimately Franco-Americanness. Before this undertaking, let us return to a
familiar figure featured in my previous chapter: the coureur des bois—this Canadien pioneer
whose tracks also mark Kerouac’s works.
De la terre à la route
A possible connection between Jack Kerouac and the mobile coureur des bois, and even
the roman de la terre, Maria Chapdelaine, has been noted by American author Joyce Johnson
(2012, 18) (with whom Jack Kerouac had a brief two-year romantic relationship) and
commented on by literary critic Hassan Melehy (2016, 63). Melehy agrees with Johnson that it
was highly probable that Kerouac knew of Maria Chapdelaine or at least of its film adaptation,
given the works’ popularity in the Franco-American community during the early twentieth
century. Melehy goes on to suggest that the coureur des bois character François Paradis may
have inspired Sal Paradise—one of Kerouac’s narrative doubles in On the Road (Skinazi 2009,
87);
133
the critic notes not only the similarity of the two characters’ names but also their shared

133
See Skinazi’s article in which she argues that the character Salvatore Paradise recalls Kerouac’s own identity as
an ethnic minority in the U.S. with a dual-national identity.
(III) Uneasy Roads
140

“yearning for vagabondage,” a nomadic migrancy that, as Chapter One showed, was often
regarded as an attribute of franco-canadienité. But what is especially interesting in Melehy’s
examination is the connection of this “yearning for vagabondage” to the notion of Beat as a dual
concept; Melehy further analyzes Sal Paradis, affirming that,
it's easy to discern in his narrator’s name sale paradis, “dirty paradise.” …This double
entendre, signaling the utopian savior who’s also dirty, extends that of beat/béat,
according to which the blessed are precisely the downtrodden …The notion of a beaten-
down, wandering savior draws on the Québécois narrative of the difficult migration to
New England as a mission… for the purpose of bringing the… Catholic faith to those
south of the border... Kerouac [imagines a secularized version of]
134
the abused and
beaten wanderer who actualized the spread of holiness and beatitude.

It may therefore be expected that vagabonds in Kerouac’s narrative universe exhibit two
important connected attributes: 1) their reminiscence of mobile colonial figures in Canadien
history; 2) their tendency to navigate through wretchedness in an attempt to reach a state of
beatitude. Given that Kerouac’s vagabonds recall mobile figures in the colonial imagination such
as coureurs des bois, the question arises of how this wretchedness might be in fact colonial in
character. In effect, while there are no explicit textual references to the coureur des bois in
Kerouac’s French writings, one cannot help but perceive similar dynamics of colonial migrancy
when encountering his characters and his evocation of frontier symbols. However, the logic of
this colonial dynamic is somewhat subverted, as Kerouac reworks this mythic vagabondage to be
associated with the colonized rather than with the colonizer. This falls in line with the scholarly
observation that Kerouac, rather than reinforcing and idealizing colonial frontier myths, writes to
destabilize and ultimately reject them (Vredenburg 2016).
135
As Kerouac’s French pieces recount

134
Melehy explains that this figure is repurposed from common Canadien beliefs during this period that saw this
ethnic group’s migration to the States as a difficult yet necessary holy mission to spread Catholicism.
135
Vrendenburg advances his argument that Kerouac rejects the American colonial frontier myth with two
examples: 1) the author’s exposition of the persisting wilderness that occurs not only in the American West, but also
in the supposedly civilized East; 2) his unease and failure in assuming the occupation of a sheriff.
(III) Uneasy Roads
141

narratives of immigrant Franco-Americans, the wretchedness that these characters attempt to
overcome may—instead of pointing to the settler-colonial tendencies of those fabled
woodsmen—reference instead this group’s disadvantaged internal colonization in the U.S. In
sum, the coureur des bois and Kerouac’s representation of immigrants are similarly “colonial” in
the sense that they both associate French-Canadianness with the interlinked concepts of
movement and labor; yet the Franco-American author must redeploy this colonial stereotype of
mobility to instead accentuate the marginalization of Canadiens and of their descendants in the
U.S.
The Travaux of Vagabondage
The close relationship between migrancy, labor, and hardship is evident from the very
beginning of La nuit. One only needs to look at the subtitle of this novella: Les travaux de
Michel Bretagne (La Nuit Est Ma Femme) Feb. ‘51. From this subtitle, several important
elements can be deduced: the peculiar name of the protagonist as well as the themes of the
novella. The name Michel Bretagne is not significant simply because of its Frenchness, but also
because of the sense of the surname Bretagne—or the Northwest French region of Brittany to
which Kerouac traces his genealogy—which speaks to the thematic centrality of Francophone
familial identity in this text. Furthermore, the fact that it is subtitled “les travaux” is significant.
This term, as Kerouac uses it in his joualesque, English inflected French, is highly polysemic.
Not only does this term signify labor or work as it does in French, but also—as this segment will
make more apparent below—”travail” in the English sense of struggle.
136
Compounding this,
Kerouac adds his own interpretation of the concept of travaux; he categorically underlines for the

136
Melehy in his reading of La nuit proposes on the other hand a double entendre with “trials.” See page 46 of this
book.
(III) Uneasy Roads
142

reader that, “j’use le mot ‘travaux’ pour exprimer les ‘jobs’ et les voyages qu’il etait necessaire
de faire quand j’etait pas chez nous assi sur mon derriere penseé a propos de’la tristesse de la vie
(55)." It is then clear that for the character Michel Bretagne "travaux” does not uniquely signify
laborious hardship; this term also carries with it an implicit dimension of movement: travaux is
linked with the English word “travel”—a connection suggested by the two words’ phonetic
overlap. In a way, this may be yet another subtle reference to those coureur des bois whose
migrancy functions in part as an economic modality, as they are figures who circulate in the
wilds to hunt and trade. Whatever the case, it is evident that to the extent that La nuit/Les travaux
functions as a labor narrative, via labor’s association with movement, the novella must also
function as a narrative of travel—conflating the two generic categories.
But what of this notion of “tristesse” [sadness] that Michel evokes when contemplating
“jobs” and “voyages”? Michel’s conception of travaux in its capacity as tristesse can be clarified
by how he conceives of life and of his many migrant vocations. In the eyes of Michel, sadness
pervades life; as the narrator declares in the opening sentence of the novella, “Je voué ainque la
tristesse tout partout (53)." Fittingly, the notion of "tristesse" manifests in many forms
throughout the novella; for Michel, life is but a “pilgrimage doloreux" (58) which takes place in
a “universe abominable” (59). The reader obtains a better understanding of what exactly this
abominable “suffering” might be for Kerouac when he begins to describe work; while passing by
a protestant seminary, he makes this interesting remark about its students: “j’aimera pensée que
tandis qu’il font leux etudes dans la theologie moi je fait mes études dans les travaux tristes de la
vie, et un est aussi important que l’autre (56)." An interesting antithesis is constructed here that is
reminiscent of the beat/béat double concept. Michel opposes the divine theological studies of
those seminary students with his “sad” earthly work, underlining that his “travaux” are sorrowful
(III) Uneasy Roads
143

affairs that are in opposition to heavenly, and implicitly blissful activities. Michel’s “travaux” are
travails; his earthly migrant work therefore represents for him not only travel but also suffering.
The sorrowful aspect of travelling work is often emphasized by the narrator who
practices a multitude of odd jobs. Commenting his relatively carefree upbringing, during which
he worked at a printing press and enjoyed Chinese dining and “shows” with friends, “ça c’était
pas une preparation pour les travaux horrible qui m’a tombé plus tard. Oh la vie c’est un
pilgrimage doloreux. O qu’on vas ? —ou ? La mort c’est rien ; c’est la tristesse envie qui m’tu
(58)." To reiterate, life for Michel is thus equated to be a painful pilgrimage, or in other words, a
form of travel. His characterization of life as a form of painful yet holy migrancy reflects the fact
that Michel is frequently on the move to find work wherever he can. This dolorous pilgrimage
plays out narratively in the novella as Michel who, despite having aspirations as a writer, spends
the duration of the text recounting his days variously working as a travelling newspaper
subscription salesman (6); as a secretary for a French professor while attending university away
from home (67); and most notably as a worker for a travelling circus (though quitting after barely
15 minutes on the job and before the chance to leave his hometown) (79). The frequent
succession of his short-term occupations serves to illustrate the mobile dimension of his
professional journey, for which he must move from one job to the next. Also, the frequent
succession of jobs, one after the other, accentuates their protracted arduous character as well. In
other words, in a very Kerouacian fashion that reflects his penchant for double entendres, his
travaux are travels that he sees as an overwhelming multitude of dolorous travails.
Les tristes travaux de l’écrivain
Furthermore, his characterization of work as a painful migrancy recall his other
profession: writing. Importantly, it is with his description of writing that the reader begins to
(III) Uneasy Roads
144

understand how sorrowful work for him is necessary and perhaps even meritorious. While
ruminating on the necessity of work, he declares, “il faut travaillez. C’est pas pour dire que j’ai
travaillez comme les autres hommes dans le monde—j’ai travaillez plustot avec mes écritures
interminable dans la nuit infantile—mais j’ai travaillez assez pou être « hung-up » et fatiguer
(59)." Here a rather explicit link is drawn between sorrow, work, and writing—between “travail”
what he calls his “écritures.” With this musing, he equivalates authorship with other forms of
labor. Like other work, he attaches melancholic descriptors to the practice of writing: writing is
interminable and renders him “hung-up” and tired. Nonetheless, Michel underlines the necessity
for labor, and even works into the darkness of the night. This statement is significant for several
reasons—the most obvious being the fact that “la nuit” [the night] is the eponymous temporality
to which the novella’s title refers. Given Michel’s vocations—compounded with Kerouac’s
autobiographical impulses—the reader might imagine that is “Michel” himself who is the writer
of La nuit est ma femme. Michel’s evocation of “la nuit” may therefore refer to his own story: the
narrative recording the novella that he is writing in order to recount his experiences as a
travelling writer and migrant laborer—a veritable mise-en-abyme of “travaux” in all its senses.
In addition, “la nuit interminable,” with the infinitely somber imagery that this phrase projects,
serves to represent La nuit—or the account of Michel’s “travaux”—metaphorizing his activities
as a negative space that the protagonist must traverse.
Despite their negativity, the necessity of “travaux” is emphasized and even embraced by
Kerouac as a salvatory practice. This can be deduced by following the trope of night that
Kerouac deploys across the text. Take for example one of the monumental moments in the
novella in which Kerouac chances upon the opportunity to join a travelling circus and thus to set
(III) Uneasy Roads
145

off into the interminable night. Michel and his friend G.J encounter these circus performers one
evening.
137
At the circus, Michel and his friend G.J. meet the manager who proposes:
“You boys want to go to California with the circus or are you staying around here at your
mother’s apron strings?”
“You going through Kentucky too?” j’yai demandez. J’reva d’aller voir la Kentucky
Derby avec lui, j’racontra les trainers pis les jockeys avec lui.
«Kentucky !... You boys come along with us and get three squares a day with pay and
you’ll see the whole country inside one year. We’re pulling out for Kentucky tonight! »
Moi pis G.J. ons sa gardé avec les gueules ouvert (81).

The travelling circus job proposition is yet another example that encapsulates the levelling of
work and travel in Michel’s worldview. Notably, in contrast to his persistent disillusion towards
work and its inherent travel—or in a word, travaux—Michel seems to be pleased with the
opportunity as he is left with a gaping mouth. This is an indicator of that potential beatitude that
follows the sorrowful state of being beaten-up and downtrodden in the Beat imagination. Such an
interpretation seems to be comfirmed later in the passage; on the eve of leaving, Michel
contemplates, “tout d’un coup j’ai pensée apropos de toute la grand noirçeur d’Amérique en
avant d’moi pis G.J. pis la saloppri d’circus, pis les matins frettes qu’on travaillera, pis ça me
faisan vouloir allez dans mes culottes (82).” Here one finds work with its usual markers of
sorrow, which manifests as a litany of negative elements such as the “saloppri d’circus” [mess of
a circus], cold mornings on the job, and the vast and dark American continent, which all seem to
underscore his reservations towards work and travel with the circus. Yet this sombrous negativity
is offset by the narrator’s positive anticipation as he almost “goes in his pants” [“allez dans mes
culottes”] in excitement. It becomes clear that Michel would endure, and even embraces, the

137
Note that during this scenario Michel is ever in the midst of writing, recording what he sees—when observing a
group of flirting teenagers, he muses in English (the language of his intended written publications), “« She was
fourteen and I nineteen, there at the village fair ». J’ecri ça cette soir la (80).” This off hand commentary reaffirms
the notion that Michel’s tendency to work odd jobs is imbricated in his practice as a travel writer. Effectively, the
rest of the Michel’s experience with the circus shows that he is able to extract writing material from his nomadic
labor, which he recounts in the context of La nuit.
(III) Uneasy Roads
146

hardships and darkness entailed by travaux for a more blissful potentiality: joyful travelling to
see the Kentucky Derby and the rest of the American continent that is unknown to him. Therein
lies the dimension of “necessity” that the protagonist attaches to his “studies of life” as a writer
of travaux narratives. In line with his disenchantment with “travaux,” bleak migrant labor is
embraced as it is seen as a necessary means to a beatific journey. “Travaux” is thus established
as a “beat” concept in the sense that both are double entendres that encapsulate not only sorrow,
but also deliverance from this sorrow. The pain he suffers from his sad migrant travaux is the
means that permit his eventual beatific travels to Kentucky. The beatitude of this journey
outshines even the dark uncertainty of the continent, a metaphor of that sorrow and other
undesirable “travaux” that were anticipated by Michel, but which do not hinder his migrancy and
hopes for bliss.
Michel’s views towards the appropriation of bitter work can be perceived in many of his
comments throughout the novella. He suggests this in that very opening passage in which he
declares that the world is filled with sorrow: “j’use ma tristesse—c’est la tristesse d’un vieu
chien avec des gros yeux mouiller—pour passer mon temps penser. C’est comme ça je comprend
vivre. C’est ma manière (53)." While not speaking of work directly, it is clear he is doing so
given his frequent associations of labor with life and sorrow. The implications of Michel’s
declaration in the novella’s introduction becomes even clearer when examining his musings on
life and work, as he frequently elicits the notion of “painful life” when referring to his migrant
occupations of writing and working odd jobs. Therefore, what he means when he “uses” his
sadness, is that he uses his various melancholic labors as a migrant worker and writer in order to
fulfil his ambitions. What are these ambitions? It is his desire to transcend "travaux" and obtain
bliss; explaining what drives him, “toutes ma vie j’me leva après toutes les autres dans famille,
(III) Uneasy Roads
147

quand qu’il etait parti travailler, puis j’ecriva & j’ecriva pour pas avoir besoin d’travaillez (63)."
While his family is laboring, Michel works diligently on his own travaux: his writing, hoping to
become a “un gros écrivain Américain (60),” and thus no longer having the need to work. This
final workless potentiality is again a manifestation of that beatitude towards which Kerouac
strives when traversing earthly travails. Painstaking “travaux” are simply endured to achieve not
only joyful travel, but more generally a leisured workless (“travaux”-less) state.
A more obvious example of Michel’s approximation of writing with sorrowful “travaux”
can be found after his aforementioned reflections on the protestant seminary. The protagonist
passes by a meatpacking district and offers a description of butchers working in a “wholesale
meat warehouse;” he recounts the butchers lowering the meat into the cellar,
la viande descend, vite. Il y’a des hommes en bas qui la decroche. J’peu pas allez dans
cave voire qu’est qu’il font après ça. On m’dit quils se coupe des beau morceaux d’steak
quand quyon faim et pui les cuize eux autre même sur des poiles. J’aimera vois ça ces
vieux poiles là ! S’am donne la faim. Quand y’on finis d’travaillez, c’est ça, il boive, il
jouze au carte, il fume des cigars et un des gas cui les steaks. Il rise, il mange bien (57).

Despite the hard work attributed to the butchers, Kerouac paints them in an idealized light. Note,
however, that emphasis is not so much placed on their labor, but rather on the tangential
pleasures they are shown to enjoy because of their profession: food, drink, and gaming. This
recalls yet again the idea that Kerouac idealizes painstaking work predominantly for its fruits.
Michel exclaims at the end of this description of the butchers, "ça c’est la vie pour moi; ça c’est
pas si triste. Mais j’pas un « wholesale butcher », j’tun pauvre écrivain avec mon petit morceau
de steak dans un papier sur le chaussi." Michel creates here an opposition that distinguishes the
not-so-sad life of the butchers with his own “poor” profession as an author—a poverty depicted
by his meager portion of steak in comparison to those of the butchers. Through this description,
the reader receives an important clue in deciphering the negative, sorrowful, aspects of
(III) Uneasy Roads
148

Kerouac’s “travaux”: socio-economic poverty. What this clue effectively suggests is that a
certain poverty conditions the wretchedness that Michel encounters as a migrant laborer/writer.
Travaux en famille
Throughout La nuit, travaux are conceptualized as emancipatory practices that has the
potential to remedy Michel and his family’s socio-economic condition. Michel is frank about
why he aspires to be, as he puts it, “un gros écrivain Américain”:
c’est possible qu’un jour, quand je serai partit l’autre bord de la noirçeur pour rêvez
eternellement ; c’est chause la, des histoires des scénes, des notes, une douzaine romans
impossibles, a moitier fini, seront publiée et quel’quun va collecté l’argent qu’etait
supposer d’venir a moi. Mais ça c’est si j’t’un grand écrivan avant j’meure (55).

Again, the reader encounters here the trope of darkness in its function as the range of Michel’s
travaux. This darkness—and the labor and travel it implies—thus bears with it a financial and
economic dimension. The darkness of “travaux” has the potentiality to produce pecuniary returns
on the condition of success. It is towards the beginning of the novella that Michel announces this
desire to be an author who traverses darkness; at this early point of the text, readers do not know
much about Michel’s socio-economic background. However, later in the narrative, the poverty
that Michel and his family suffer becomes evident when they move from Lowell to New Haven
in order to accommodate Michel’s schooling and his father’s new job. This uprooting provokes
immense guilt in Michel who dreams,
j’m’enrappella de mon rève du ‘fils’ gentilhomme’ dans son beau chaussi fancy. D’abord,
bien, j’ai changez mon réve: maintenant, c’eta une pauvre famille vaudeville dans une
nouvelle gross ville étrange, et moi j’eta pour les sauvez de leur circonstances
malheureux avec un coup heroïque (99).

This passage serves to underline the alienation that Michel and his family experience. This tone
of alienation is rendered several ways. Firstly, there is a spatial alienation suggested by Michel’s
description of the “huge strange city”—an urban space that is as expansive as it is unknown.
(III) Uneasy Roads
149

Secondly, this alienation manifests via Michel’s characterization of his family as “poor” and
“vaudeville.” The adjective poor references their class alienation—of the family’s financial
instability which entails a congruent spatial instability—or in other words, a movement between
locales that is contingent on economic opportunity. “Vaudeville”—usually used to describe a
popular form of French theatrical entertainment in the late 19
th
century that takes place as a
succession of various acts—seems to refer here to the episodic movement which the family
practices. This sense of vaudeville is confirmed by the pervasive imagery of movement when
Michel commentates the process of his family’s move,
Dans une gross warehouse dans l’milieu du jour complexe et plein d’train (noising day)
toutes la pauvre furniture que j’ava vue toutes ma vie avec les yeux d’un enfant simple se
faisa sortir du truck comme les entrailles de ma famille et tirez a travers d’un gran
platforme sale pour être mit dans des tas avec les meubles similairement triste d’autre
pauvre famille nomadique (96).

Again, Michel attaches images of poverty and of instability to the experience of moving. His
family’s “poor” furniture is stored in squalid conditions—in dirty and crowded spaces along with
the possessions of other poor nomadic families. This passage clearly underlines the nomadic
dimension of Michel’s family and others’ poverty. Their precarious condition forces them to
practice a nomadic migrancy, a modality of movement that is both instigated and mediated by
travaux in both senses of the word. Michel dreams of blissful luxury thus encounter a roadblock:
his family’s socio-economic conditioned nomadism, a migrancy that relegates him to a life of
travaux.
Big American Author
What is then the connection between Michel and Kerouac’s travaux and their sense of
Franco-Americanness? From the beginning of the novella, Michel makes it clear that he
identifies as “Canadien français”; before his meditations on his desire to earn money as an
(III) Uneasy Roads
150

author, he announces that, “je suis Canadien Francais, m’nu au-monde a New England. Quand
j’fâcher j’sacre souvent en Francais. Quand je brauille j’brauille toujours en Francais; et j’dit :
« J’aime pas ca, j’aime pas ca ! » C’est ma vie dans le monde que j’veu pas. Mais j’lai (54)."
This is admittedly one of the only few mentions of Michel’s ethnic background in the novella;
however, this does not diminish their significance. As one can see here, his notions of ethnic
identity are equally interlaced with a pessimistic tone; his franco-canadienité seems to belong to
the semantic field of tristesse that Michel deploys in the text. This disenchantment extends into
his views on language; Michel laments, “J’ai jamais eu une langue a moi-meme. Le Francais
patois j’usqua-six-angts, et après ça l’Anglais des gas du coin. Et après ça—les grosses formes,
les grands expressions, de poète philosophe, prophète. Avec toute ça, aujourd’hui j’toute
melangé dans ma gum (55)." Michel describes himself to be living in a state of polyglossia,
which subjugates him to a state of linguistic dispossession from all his known languages—
underlining his sentiments of colonized non-belonging with both French and English.
Michel and Kerouac seem to evoke a possible remedy to their condition: their
“American” dream to become an author. Throughout the novella, Michel’s aspirations to become
a writer is expressed with oneiric imagery; take for example this passage in which he states, “j’ai
rêvez trop longtemps que j’etait un gran écrivain (55).” I suggest here that this desire is not only
one-dimensionally dreamlike, but also carries with it a nationalistic connotation. This is implied
when Michel sells newspaper subscriptions, and discovers simultaneously Saroyan and
Heminingway: “alors j’écriva apropos de ma job, vende des subscription porte a porte, avec le
ton d’un gros écrivain américain (60)." Michel imitating the tone of a "big American author"
reveals that his oneiric ambitions are centered on not just becoming an author, but specifically an
“American” one, perhaps as a means to alleviate his socio-economic dispossession. This attitude
(III) Uneasy Roads
151

is reflected by his desire to take on the darkness of America—to travel and travaille as an author
on America’s roads who recounts his travels—in order to make it big as an author and to be
financially stable. In other words, La nuit est ma femme recounts an all-American dream to
achieve success as an author via travaux, in all the Kerouacian senses of the word.
This idea seems to be hinted by some of Kerouac’s statements about the American dream
in “Écoutez le monde.” While admittedly a story about a different family—the Martins, who like
Michel Bretagne are “French Canadians” (291)—the evocation of the American dream in
“Écoutez le monde” echoes notions found in La nuit est ma femme, which reflects the idea that
all of Kerouac’s works form a unique narrative whole; Kerouac writes in these unfinished
fragments that,
L’American Dream c’est un ideal d’une vie de luxure pour tous ; deux machines dans
chaqe famille, bientot 3, bientot televisions dans chaqes famille ; une maison « moderne »
dans une communoté « moderne » et de haut rente ; certainement pas une vieille cabanes
dans les bois comme les pionieers d ancestors (296).

This mention of those old wood cabins of his pioneer ancestors recalls yet another familiar
colonial figure—analyzed in Chapter One—the défricheurs. The reader encounters here another
manifestation of Kerouac’s rejection of frontier myths, which now takes the form of his
derogatory characterization of pioneers and their log cabins. Kerouac thus destabilizes the
colonial idealization of these mobile pioneers, associating them instead with impoverished
conditions—a poverty that he links elsewhere not just with Franco-Americans but also with
migrant “travaux.” These mobile Canadien agents of settler colonialism, which serve as
metaphors for Franco-American “travaux,” are implicitly opposed with what Kerouac sees as the
American dream: luxury and uncolonized ease of living. Noting that he attached his desire of
being a grand American author to this dream, this all but suggests that Kerouac’s writings
represent his creative espousal of the sorrowful dispossession experienced by Franco-Americans
(III) Uneasy Roads
152

and their Canadien ancestors—travaux that are appropriated and narratively mobilized to
achieve the beatitude of being a successful author who transcends poverty.
Arduous Beatitude
The movement implied by the polysemic travaux in La nuit thus extends beyond the
vagabondage of migrant labor and travel writing—it also refers to the social mobility that
facilitates potential escape from internally colonized working-class conditions. This desire for
social mobility is the factor that allows La nuit to be read as a road story of colonial dejection.
Therefore, while Kerouac yearns to be on the road, his objective is only achieved through the
embracing of hardship; migrancy in Kerouac’s French-language novella is an arduous modality
of movement that involves navigation across the bottom rungs of the socio-economic hierarchy.
This low socio-economic standing functions as one of the symptoms of internal colonization,
which in turn allows the critic one way to perceive the colonial dimension of Kerouac’s writing.
The sociologist Robert Blauner (1987, 242) reminds us of the economic dimension of internal
colonization and of how America has historically concentrated racialized peoples, “in the most
unskilled jobs, the least advanced sectors of the economy, and the most industrially backward
regions of the nation.” While Kerouac and his family may not be in the most “industrially
backward regions,” it is clear throughout the novella that they were engaged in precarious jobs
that entailed menial labor. What I add to Blauner’s assertion that this internally colonized
condition also implicated a certain instability in the form of economically contingent nomadism.
However, let it be clear, the distinction of Kerouac’s narrative is that his characters are not held
back by their socio-economic disadvantages. Conforming to the author’s Beat idealism, their
sorrowful social position of these internally colonized immigrants—and the painstaking migrant
labor it implies—are embraced and exploited in the pursuit of beatific success and ease of living.
(III) Uneasy Roads
153

The extent to which the appropriation of socio-economic hardship à la Kerouac is viable,
however, remains a glaring question. The limits of Kerouac’s vision can be problematized
through a broader treatment of his attitudes towards marginalized social groups—long a site of
contention among scholars of Kerouac and the Beat generation. Some critics note that while his
language when speaking of these minorities may be at best naïve and at worst problematically
reductive (Encarnacion-Pinedo 2022), his self-identification with these groups and his sympathy
are honest as they are rooted in his real marginality as a Franco-American (Melehy 2012;
Nicholls 2003). Nonetheless, many decry Kerouac’s use of shallow and tired stereotypes to
romantically depict socio-economically downtrodden and racialized minority groups, critiquing
the author’s self-serving self-marginalization among these peoples he superficially idealizes (R.
C. Johnson 2012, 63)–an action that pays no heed to the systemic oppression faced by such
minorities, or to the Franco-American author’s inherent privilege as a member of the middle-
class (Ivančič 2019, 120–21). These criticisms of Kerouac’s shortsighted identification with the
marginalized may perhaps be summarized by what Forsberg, the critic, characterizes as the
writer’s “working-class drag”—or his performative donning of working-class appearances (in
Forsberg’s analysis, the wearing and idealization of Hobo garb) that, “functions as highly
masculinized performative escapism and expresses strategic identifications for audience approval
erring on the side of fetish (1222).” Forsberg notes, however, that Kerouac himself, after the
success of On the Road and his propulsion to fame, starts to problematize his capitalization of a
working-class image, and begins to recognize the complexities of identity in his later novel, Big
Sur (1962)—though admittedly in a self-centered manner as he felt his fame attached him to his
hobo persona, which obliges him to conform to his fabricated appearance, inhibiting, “the free
construction of an identity (or identities as the road provided) (Forsberg 2017, 1225).” Given this
(III) Uneasy Roads
154

information, it is prudent to categorize La nuit est ma femme among Kerouac’s early works in
which the author unabashedly, and uncritically, mobilizes a downtrodden persona as he attempts
to seek fame as an author. Concomitantly, it seems that La nuit precedes Kerouac’s anti-
consumerism and skepticism of the economic order, which scholars indicate become more
pronounced in his later works; this is perhaps understandable due to the immaturity of a Kerouac
who has not yet known fame and success from On the Road, and thus still yearns for authorial
success. Whatever the case, it is arguable that the novella’s marginalized protagonist who seeks
success to alleviate his social standing is somewhat believable due to character’s—and by
extension Kerouac’s—Franco-American background. Any credibility of his emulation of socio-
economically disadvantage depends on the author's identity as a member of his internally
colonized immigrant community.
This is not to say that Kerouac’s internally colonized background gives him free reign to
speak for everyone in the bottom rungs of society. The greater inconsistencies and shortcomings
of Kerouac’s emulation of the marginalized becomes apparent when considering his other
attitudes towards his ethnic others—who were equally as downtrodden as Franco-Americans, if
not more due to their color. Let us revisit Nicholl’s claim of the author’s chauvinism towards
dark-skinned peoples that is manifest in the former’s literary corpus—which according to the
critic disallows a reading of Kerouac as an oppressed subject. As shown in my analysis, there is
confirmation of Nicholl’s argument that Kerouac, in his various texts, sees America as a dark
woman; along with all of the references of America being a dark space, the gendered dimension
of this characterization is evident when Michel writes, “j’rentra plus creu dans ma grosse femme.
Pour moi elle etait l’Amerique, New England et N.Y. etait seulement sa tête (104)." Reproducing
colonial types—types, studied at length by feminist literary critic Annette Kolodny (1975, 7)—
(III) Uneasy Roads
155

America figures not only a as dark space, but also problematically a feminine one that the
protagonist desires to penetrate, enter, and master. This all but evokes similar attitudes, found in
the roman de la terre, that view land as this feminine entity to be impregnated for colonial
returns. Similarly, this assertion can be developed to state that this feminine, colonial space, is a
space of mobility—a colonial range over which migrancies and travaux à la Kerouac take place.
Therefore, though this segment showed Kerouac to be a victim of sorts of internal economic
colonization—and even demonstrates that the author effectuates an implicit critique of mythic
frontier symbols and colonial expansion through his treatment of vagabondage and pioneer
figures—Nicholls’ claim that the author perpetuates damaging racial stereotypes and imperialist
attitudes cannot be ignored. In short, despite Kerouac’s undeniable marginalized background,
this does not diminish the fact that he retains marginalizing imperialist views that denigrate other
downtrodden peoples. His lingering imperialist attitudes thus weigh down the authority of his
identification with marginalized others and of his reworking of frontier myths. This is where this
chapter’s next road story differs drastically from Kerouac’s works; rather than simply testifying
to the colonized positionality of White Francophones in the American continent, Poulin uses the
dynamic of the road to expose their equally pertinent role in the imperializing of the continent.

COLONIAL BLUES

Unsurprisingly because of its skepticism towards White colonialism, since its publication
in 1984, Volkswagen Blues has been the subject of many studies with a postcolonial focus. Critic
Marie Vautier (1994, 15) for example, while evoking postcolonial practices of challenging
eurocentric world views,
138
rightly argues that Poulin’s road novel is lined with what she calls a

138
Vautier draws a line between what she sees as deconstruction (the concern with destabilizing myth and concepts
of nation) to what she calls “concerns of postcolonial practice: the centre/margin debate; place and displacement;
language, speech and silence; written versus oral history; and multiple challenges to eurocentric world views.”
(III) Uneasy Roads
156

“posteuropean attitude;” in her study of the Métisse character Pitsémine, she asserts that “one
finds a parody of the myth of the superiority of the European explorer, a disempowering attack
on eurocentric theories of myth criticism, and a foregrounding of the role of the Amerindian
figure as an element of postcolonial discourse (18).” Scholar of Canadian Studies Roger Hyman
(1999, 107) joins this conversation, elaborating on his part that the post-colonial dimension of
Poulin’s novel lies in its critical engagement with power, historical authority, and notions of
individualism; in doing so, Hyman purports that Poulin challenges, “traditional Eurocentric
categories of thought from patriarchally determined gender relations to patriarchal historical and
literary constructs,” constructs which includes celebrated colonial figures such as the voyageur
as well as the American dream (108). While Volkswagen Blues’ anti-colonial impulses were
recognized, other critics were, however, more critical of Poulin’s project; take for example, the
literary scholar Adam Paul Weisman (1995) who argues that the author, “performs a selective
recuperation of French Canadian history that allows him to reimagine all of North America as
the cultural property of 17
th
and 18
th
century voyageurs, a legacy passed on to the French
Canadians of the late 20
th
century.” While, as I will show, Poulin does seem to exhibit unease
when acknowledging the violent history that is the European, Canadian, and American
colonization of the Americas, I argue that the author’s project is more nuanced than a simple
attempt to claim Francophone ownership of North America. Rather, I argue that Poulin’s unease
with colonial violence manifests in Volkswagen Blues as a disenchantment with imperial claims
over the continent which leads to the author’s active destabilization of colonial myths of the
frontier and its historical figures. This can be deduced from an analysis of the colonial
migrancies and migrant figures that appear in this novel: White imperialism and its deployment
of explorers and settlers; as well as the very concept of vagabondage as an American trait.
(III) Uneasy Roads
157

Being a road novel that takes place across both Canada and the U.S., movement and
migrancy is a central element to Poulin’s celebrated work. Critic Robert Sapp (2008, 353)
notably proposes a reading of what he terms the “linguistic vagabondage in Poulin’s novel”—
which manifests as a Gauvinian hyperconsciousness
139
of their relationships with the French and
English languages—arguing that the “the polyglot union of Jack and Pitsémine, and their journey
across North America, represent a nomadic image of the francophone world that traverses
linguistic borders opposing the monolinguistic practices of dominant hegemonies.” Yet, the trope
of vagabondage is not only mobilized as a socio-linguistic critique; as Sapp and others suggest, I
argue that migrancy on the road in contemporary times figures more generally as a reimagination
of colonizing migrancies that historically imperialized the North American continent. Like
Kerouac’s La nuit est ma femme, Volkswagen Blues is a road novel of disenchanted migrancies
that is mediated by its disillusionment with North America’s colonial reality.
This colonial disenchantment is the leitmotif that links Volkswagen Blues with Kerouac’s
work. This connection is alluded by the many explicit intertextual references to Kerouac and his
magnum opus On the Road that are found in Poulin’s novel; yet it is true, as literary scholar
Jean-Pierre Lapointe (1989, 22) would argue,
Tout au plus d’un clin d’œil au lecteur car, hormis le motif du voyage transcontinental,
les deux textes ne sont pas vraiment apparentés. L’errance de Sal Paradise est frénétique,
carnavalesque, irrésistiblement entraînée par un besoin démentiel d’absolu…Le voyage
de Jack Waterman, au contraire, aboutit à un calme pris en charge d’un moi purgé
d’angoisses, qui comprend—et accepte sans amertume et sans révolte—sa place dans
l’ordre des choses.

However, unlike Lapointe I am not much interested in direct authorial influences of Kerouac on
Poulin; Kerouac’s French-language archive was only released on 2006—though I am not

139
See Langagement again for Gauvin’s concept of surconscience de la langue [hyperconsciousness of language]—
what she sees as Francophone authors’ tendency to interrogate their uneasy relationship with the French language
(11). Note the sentiment of unease which is the narrative tone interrogated in this chapter.
(III) Uneasy Roads
158

discounting the possibility of Poulin being influenced by other Kerouac’s works, traces of which
can be found in his French writings. Rather, what I am interested is this convergence of the tone
of colonial unease that causes La nuit est ma femme to resonate with Volkswagen Blues. While it
may be true that Jack Waterman accepts the end of his road trip—and correspondingly,
recognition of America’s violent colonial past—throughout the journey, Volksawagen Blues
reckons with the character’s disappointment with this violence. This disappointment bears a link
to the intertextual references to Kerouac in Poulin’s novel, in which the Franco-American author
in inscribed into the imperial historiography of the North American continent; it is in this way
that Kerouac is related to the novel’s representation of melancholy-inducing migrancies: Poulin
and Jack Waterman’s volkswagen blues.
In Kerouac’s Footsteps
In Poulin’s novel, Kerouac is depicted to be linked with voyageurs—these colonial types
in the Canadien imaginary. Related to the coureurs des bois studied in the last chapter,
voyageurs were Canadien traders who moved furs across long distances on canoes (Podruchny
2006, xi).
140
In other words, these voyageurs were equally mobile figures who practice an
economic migrancy. References to this historical colonial figure implicate Kerouac through the
intermediary of Théo—Jack Waterman’s lost brother, the localization of whom forms the plot of
this novel. Jack and Pitsémine’s search for Théo consists of following breadcrumbs on their
volkswagen that lead them from the Gaspé peninsula, across Canada and the U.S., and ultimately

140
Historian Carolyn Podruchny writes that, “in its most general sense, the term voyageur has referred to travelers,
to contracted servants (engagés), or to small-scale independent fur traders, who worked alone or in small groups,
with some financial backing from merchants.” The historian regards coureur des bois designate, “independent
traders, including those who traded illegally without licenses.”
(III) Uneasy Roads
159

to San Francisco; during the initial phases of the journey, while searching for signs of Théo at the
Toronto police archives, they find his record:
La première image montrait une fiche de renseignements généraux sur laquelle figuraient
le nom de Théo, le prénom de son père, son âge (45 ans), sa date de naissance, son
occupation (voyageur) et le numéro de son permis de conduire ; sous la rubrique « motif
de plainte », il y avait ces mots : arme à feu sans permis (79).

This passage thus demonstrates the multiple layers of migratory dynamics that line the narrative
of Volkswagen Blues. Jack Waterman and Pitsémine are on the road, in the search of an equally
mobile character. This mobile character sees himself as an inheritor of a colonial migrant
tradition that facilitated White movement across the North American continent during the days
of European settlement. What is striking about Théo is the reason for his arrest: possession of a
firearm, which may be indicative of this character’s association with violence. His police record
showed that he possessed these items upon arrest, demonstrating that Théo’s migrancy is not
benign:
• Un revolver
• Un vieux chapeau de Camargue
• Un chronomètre
• Un portefeuille avec $32,58
• On the Road de Jack Kerouac
• Un couteau de poche suisse
• La photo d’une fille avec l’inscription « Claudia, Saint Louis »
• Un livre intitulé The Oregon Trail Revisited.

Theo is shown to possess artefacts that are symbolic of the violent colonial American west: the
revolver, the chapeau de camargue—reminiscent of a cowboy, or rancher’s, hat—and a history
book on the Oregon trail. Together, these items evoke images of settlers moving across the
frontier, establishing settlements, and oftentimes forcefully taming the west through its
appropriation of land from Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, the movement that underlies these
objects is doubly emphasized with the reference to Kerouac’s magnum opus, a story that, as
(III) Uneasy Roads
160

Robert mentioned, seems to take place in the footstep of those pioneers. Therefore, here, a
constellation is formed that links contemporary road stories with imperial history, suggesting the
former narratives are the descendants of the latter. In this way, Kerouac and Théo are implied to
be descendants of those colonial voyageurs and pioneers, engaging in different yet convergent
iterations of movement across the colonized landscape. The fact that Théo possesses Kerouac’s
novel along with these colonial symbols suggests that the migrancy of Poulin’s character is
inspired by the various nodes of this colonial-migrant constellation; Théo represents not only the
vagabond on the road, but also these voyageurs and pioneers.
Voyageur et bum
This idea is reenforced by Théo’s linkage with an historic explorer/coureur des bois:
Étienne Brûlé.
141
Brûlé’s history had pointed the duo to Toronto via a biographical excerpt in an
autoclub travel guide: “une note qui avait attiré l’attention de Jack car elle disait que le premier
Blanc à explorer la région où se trouvait l’actuelle ville de Toronto avait été Étienne Brûlé en
1615. Or, Étienne Brûlé était un des héros de son frère (67)." Once again, the reader is reminded
of Théo’s fascination with the vagabondage of voyageurs and coureur des bois. This famous
nomadic explorer is shown to be personal hero of Théo, confirming the idea that the character
may imagine himself to practice a voyageur-like migrancy. This fascination, however, is shown
to be problematic. Later on, while the duo was researching Brûlé at a Toronto municipal library,
they encounter a Pinkerton-history student who bluntly inform Jack and Pitsémine that, “Étienne

141
Volkswagen Blues provides this historiographical exerpt on Étienne Brûlé, who, "arrivant en Nouvelle-France
avec Champlain, avait obtenu la permission de vivre avec les Indiens pour apprendre leur langage et était devenu à
18 ans le premier coureur des bois ; comment il vivait à la manière des Indiens qui l’avaient adopté comme l’un des
leurs, et comment il avait mené plusieurs expéditions dans la région des Grands Lacs et s’était dirigé vers le sud
jusqu’à la baie de Chesapeake (70)." Note that the independent coureur des bois and state-sponsored voyageurs are
often times conflated, as they both functioned as vagabond fur traders.
(III) Uneasy Roads
161

Brûlé était un bum (76).” Yet another migrant figure enters the conversation in the form of the
Pinkerton agent—these proto-federal agents once hired to exert U.S. police power across the
Wild West. What is interesting here is that the Pinkerton advances the plot in a peculiar way—
this colonial figure indicts another colonial-era personality: Brûlé. Troubled by this accusation
against his brother’s idol, after the Pinkerton leaves, Jack asks what Pitsémine knows about
Brûlé; this conversation ensues,
- C’est lui qui a guidé l’expédition anglaise sur le Saint-Laurent. Il a trahi son pays.
- Ça commence bien ! … et qu’est-ce qu’on lui reproche à part ça ?
- On lui reproche son conduit avec les Indiens. Ou plutôt avec les Indiennes. Il
passait son temps à changer de femme. L’auteur dit… Attendez un peu. Ah oui,
c’est ici: “He changed Indian wives as rapidly and as frequently as he changed his
horizons in his restless roaming across the land (81).”

Brûlé is depicted to be doubly deplorable not only because of his alliance with enemy conquerors
but also because of his treatment of Indigenous people. Intriguingly, his very migrancy is
characterized as malignant; his chauvinistic behavior towards Indigenous women is described to
be as mobile as his vagabondage across the land. This criticism of the voyageur/coureur des bois
as a troubling colonial type is thus mediated by a critique of his problematic migrancies:
supporting enemy movement, and the persistent exploitation of women.
It is thus easy to see how Théo’s identification with the voyageur and Étienne Brûlé
seems to implicitly reaffirm desires for colonial control over the continent. As Weisman would
argue,
Poulin seems to agree… that they are descendants of voyageurs and are best called
“Canadiens.” But this line of argument, as Poulin’s novel immediately reveals, is fraught
with historical danger. To assume the identity of or to associate oneself with the
voyageurs is to take responsibility for a legacy of European colonialism that, if less
injurious to the native peoples of the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries, was still based upon Theo’s
egocentric conviction that he could do whatever he wanted—with a revolver to back him
up.

(III) Uneasy Roads
162

I agree that to celebrate the voyageur is to celebrate a colonial legacy that, if not directly, still
facilitates violent White imperialism in the American continent; it is undeniable that Poulin
invokes this relationship in Volkswagen Blues. However, I argue that Poulin does so critically in
a manner that does not simply idealize Canadien imperial power. The author does not articulate a
mere valorization of mobile colonial figures such as explorers, voyageurs, and coureur des bois,
but rather undertakes a destabilization of their mythic innocence.
Accordingly, attempts to whitewash the violent history of Étienne Brûlé are shot down
almost immediately in the narrative. Jack, responding to Pitsémine’s summary of Brûlé, retorts,
“So what? … Et les Indiens avaient des mœurs sexuelles plus libres que les Blancs, n’est-ce
pas?" to which Pitsémine just several lines later that, "Il est arrivé quelque chose, on ne sait pas
au juste ce qui s’est passé, mais il a fait une chose qui était contraire aux mœurs de la tribu dans
laquelle il vivait et les Indiens l’ont… Ils ont perdu patience et ils l’ont mis à mort (82)."It is
clear that Jack’s colonial fantasies of an innocent Brûlé will not be left untroubled. Pitsémine
inundates Jack’s fantastic image of Brûlé with historical insight, which problematizes any sort of
idealization of the coureur de bois. Jack’s reaction to this insight manifests as disappointment,
“l’homme ne trouva rien à dire et haussa les épaules. Ils se mirent à manger en silence (82)."
Hearing Pitsémine’s account of Brûlé effectively disenchants Jack. The migrancies of Brûlé, and
implicitly other explorers, are no longer innocuous and unproblematic; their wanderings are
exposed as a violent colonial modality of movement.
American Paradise Lost
This colonial disillusion equally manifests as Jack’s many disappointments with Théo
throughout the novel. As Pitsémine comments Jack’s colonial impulse to defend Brûlé,
(III) Uneasy Roads
163

C’est pas Étienne Brûlé que vous cherchez à défendre, c’est votre frère Théo. Vous avez
peur que votre frère ait fait quelque chose de mal…mais comme cette idée vous déplaît,
vous la foulez dans votre inconscient et, au lieu de défendre la conduite de votre frère,
vous défendez celle d’Étienne Brûlé.

This passage all but suggests that Théo, because of his association with voyageurs and Brûlé,
represents troubling White migrancies in the American continent. Reflecting how Poulin
destabilizes ideas that such colonial myths are benign, throughout Volkeswagen Blues Poulin and
Jack’s disenchantment with coloniality manifests throughout the latter’s journey across North
America in search of his brother. The symptoms of Jack’s colonial disenchantment are rendered
as two central narrative elements: Jack’s disillusion with the concept of America itself—this
colonial range that is the backdrop of his road trip—as well as with the disappointing discovery
of his amnesia-stricken brother in San Francisco, which puts an end to his cross-continental
travels.
This disenchantment is evident in the title of the novella with its evocation of “blues.”
Originating in the Deep South of the U.S., this musical form is characterized by depressing lyrics
and melodies. Reflecting this depressive tonality, in Poulin’s novel there is a chapter aptly titled,
“La chanson la plus triste au monde (105);” therein, Pitsémine and Jack, in an attempt to keep
the driver awake for the trip, have a contest to see who knows the saddest song in the world,
evoking variously the music of Georges Brassens; “Un Canadien errant” by Jean Rivard author
Antoine Gérin-Lajoie; and Léo Ferré. It is true that none of these singers belong to the blues
tradition; yet, what is notable is that Léo Ferré’s song, “Le bateau espagnol,”
142
provokes these
thoughts in Jack,

142
Jack recounts, "cherchant une émission de musique, et à sa grande surprise il entendit tout à coup une chanson
française, lointaine et comme perdue dans une mer de paroles anglaises – une vieille chanson française qu’il
connaissait très bien; il ajusta le bouton et alors il entendit très distinctement les mots qui disaient, ‘qu’il est long le
chemin d’Amérique / Qu’il est long le chemin de l’amour / Le bonheur, ça vient toujours après la peine / T’en fais
pas, mon amie, je reviendrai / Puisque les voyages forment la jeunesse / T’en fais pas, mon amie, je vieillirai (109)."
(III) Uneasy Roads
164

L’Amérique! Chaque fois qu’il entendait prononcer ce mot, Jack sentait bouger quelque
chose au milieu des brumes qui obscurcissaient son cerveau (Un bateau larguait ses
amarres et quittait lentement la terre ferme.) C’était une idée enveloppée de souvenirs très
anciens – une idée qu’il appelait « le Grand Rêve de l’Amérique » (109).

Melancholic music thus causes Jack to think of the land that he is traversing—a movement
alluded by the image of the boat setting sail. This boat recalls images of explorers and colonists
who set off from Europe to colonize the “New World.” Particularly, the melancholy of this
endeavor is suggested by the obscure and somber mist that clouds his mind, an obscurity that
encompasses this colonized continent. This melancholy becomes more apparent further on in the
passage when Jack explains,
Les historiens disaient que les découvreurs cherchaient des épices, de l’or, un passage
vers la Chine, mais Jack n’en croyait rien. Il prétendait que, depuis le commencement du
monde, les gens étaient malheureux parce qu’ils n’arrivaient pas à retrouver le paradis
terrestre. Ils avaient gardé dans leur tête l’image d’un pays idéal et ils le cherchaient
partout.

America as a concept was a solution for this “old-world” melancholy, and it is for this reason the
continent is idealized and coveted. Colonization is thus described to be instigated by a certain
unhappiness. In Jack’s view, White imperialism was not merely an economic scheme, but rather
an affective one that sought salvation in a mythical dreamscape—a dream that appears as blissful
promised land.
For Jack, America is just that: an unstable myth that leads to disappointment. He goes on
to comment that these colonial “découvreurs:” "lorsqu’ils avaient trouvé l’Amérique, pour eux
c’était le vieux rêve qui se réalisait et ils allaient être libres et heureux. Ils allaient éviter les
erreurs du passé. Ils allaient tout recommencer à neuf." By emphasizing the oneiric character of
America, Jack conjures images of an imperialist construct: the American Dream. A term coined
by the historian James Truslow Adams in his The Epic of America, according to critic Alison
Van Nyhuis, Adams understood the American dream to be, at its most basic level, a utopic
(III) Uneasy Roads
165

“concept of equality of opportunity for each American (63).”
143
Jack, however, does not seem to
be convinced of the materiality of his dream. Indeed, what is peculiar about Jack’s comments is
its expression in the imperfect aspect, which denotes a past reality that at one point changed.
“They were going to be free and happy [Ils allaient être libres et heureux].” “They were going to
avoid the errors of the past [Ils allaient éviter les erreurs du passé].” “They were going to start all
over again [Ils allaient tout recommencer à neuf].” All these locutions express a failed
potentiality—a sentiment of disappointment towards an unrealized ideal. The wishes and desires
of these mobile colonists are transitory, unstable, and ultimately doomed to fracture. As Jack
tells the reader, “avec le temps, le « Grand Rêve de l’Amérique » s’était brisé en miettes comme
tous les rêves, mais il renaissait de temps à autre comme un feu qui couvait sous la cendre
(110)." In Jack’s perspective, the American Dream seems to function as a disenchanted myth.
This construct no longer embodies the utopic characteristics that Adams envisioned; rather, the
oneiric vision of colonists settling the American continent in search of opportunity and happiness
becomes naught, in Jack’s eyes, but a narrative of disillusion.
How is Jack’s vision of America related then to his search for his brother Théo? The
answer lies in the novel’s development of Théo’s problematic association with violent colonial
histories and the aforementioned frontier myth of America that posits “savage” Indigenous
peoples and their lands as the enemy of civilizing forces. I already showed how, by dint of his
approximation with Brûlé, Théo’s harmlessness as a voyageur is called to questioned by the
former’s imperialist actions. Théo’s relationship with Brûlé, however, is just the surface of the

143
Van Nyhuis argues that despite the historian’s advocation for equality, “in practice, however, Adams narrates
Americans’ past theorization and realization of the American dream in the racially and sexually exclusive terms of
well-educated European American men’s expression of the American dream and working class white men’s pursuit
of the American dream, perhaps explaining why Adams basically has fallen out of American popular culture and
only has appeared intermittently in literary criticism as the historian who coined the American dream phrase.”
(III) Uneasy Roads
166

character’s colonial underpinnings. This is evident when the duo continues their search in Saint
Louis, where Pitsémine interrogates a journalist who claims to have read about Théo in an old
article, “il se souvenait très bien du nom de Théo parce que c’était un nom français et aussi parce
que l’article racontait un incident qui lui faisait penser aux premiers colons (141)." In other
words, Théo recalls images of those French migrants who were the first to colonize Louisiana.
My choice to employ the word “migrants” here is intentional; throughout Poulin’s novel, the
migrant dimension of colonists and pioneers is emphasized, as these colonists are often labelled,
“émigrants” (205). Théo’s migrancy therefore does not simply conjure the images of the
vagabond voyageurs, but also colonists and pioneers qua emigrants. The journalist’s linkage of
Théo and colonists, however, renders Jack uncomfortable, as shown in this dialogue between
him and Pitsémine,
- Alors qu’est-ce qui ne va pas ?
- J’en sais rien, c’est moi. C’est mon frère… c’est dans ma tête…C’est l’Amérique.
On commence à lire l’histoire de l’Amérique et il y a de la violence partout. On
dirait que toute l’Amérique a été construite sur la violence (141).

This violence almost certainly refers to the sufferings of Indigenous peoples that Pitsémine and
other characters expose throughout Volkswagen Blues (Hyman 1999, 109; Sapp 2008, 347).
144

Jack becomes cognizant of the violence that subsumes his romantic vision of his brother. Jack’s
uneasiness with Théo therefore figures as a symptom of the former’s disenchantment with North
America’s colonial history.

144
See Hyman who writes of the Indigenous peoples of North America: “that they have been named by those who
destroyed them, is of course, an act of colonial appropriation, as is their dubious distinction of being one of the first
North American peoples to have Christian texts translated into their language. As their representative, La Grande
Sauterelle symbolizes detribalization, economic exploitation and cultural erasure (109).”
(III) Uneasy Roads
167

Théo’s character is shown to act like a violent colonizer—an attribute alluded to earlier
by his confiscated revolver in Toronto. Following the trail revealed by the journalist, Jack and
Pitsémine discover the news article that,
Disait que Théo était détenu comme suspect dans une affaire de vol avec effraction
commis au Kansas City Museum of History and Science. Le gardien du musée, un vieil
homme de 68 ans, avait été frappé à la tête avec un objet contondant …le voleur avait
tenté de s’emparer d’une vieille carte dessinée à la main en 1840 par un jésuite d’origine
française, le père Nicolas Point. La carte était intitulée Plan de Westport…un village situé
à une vingtaine de kilomètres à l’ouest d’Independance… le cradle de Kansas City (151).

This article revealed the violent tendencies of Théo—a violence that Jack associates more and
more with the founding of the continent. Indeed, this robbery is unable to shake off the specter of
colonialism because the stolen object is a colonial artifact—a Jesuit map of a former French
colonial possession. Théo fascination with colonial objects is not the only factor that associates
him with imperialism. Jack himself says this about his brother: “Mon frère Théo et les pionniers.
Le rapport entre les deux n’est peut-être pas très évident…mais je suis certain qu’il y a un
rapport et c’est probablement le suivant : mon frère Théo, comme les pionniers, était absolument
convaincu qu’il était capable de faire tout ce qu’il voulait (149)." Here, what Weisman calls the
“egocentric conviction” of the colonizer becomes evident; Théo is a colonial figure not only
because he is violent, but he also egocentrically does what he wants, no matter the consequences.
Jack’s increasing unease with Théo thus serves as another marker of the former’s augmenting
disappointment with the colonial schemes that have historically shaped the space of his road trip.
It is on the note of disappointment that Poulin’s road novel ultimately ends. Finally
locating Théo in San Francisco, Jack finds his brother in a wheelchair:
- C’est Jack! C’est ton frère!

Les yeux de Théo se plissèrent comme s’il faisait un effort pour comprendre… Il remue
les lèvres et un peu de salive coula au coin de sa bouche…Théo eut un mouvement de
recul et d’une voix tremblante :
(III) Uneasy Roads
168

- I don’t know you, dit-il (313).

Jack is unrecognizable to Théo, and Théo acts nothing like the voyageurs in Jack’s imagination.
Immobilized in a wheelchair, it appears that Théo’s days as a nomadic vagabond are at an end.
Théo even seems unable to speak his native French to his own brother—a fact that shatters any
linkage with those Francophone colonial woodsmen. Théo’s condition—diagnosed as a
“creeping paralysis” (315)—is later explained by his attending physician to be terminal and that,
"sa mémoire était atteinte et il ne savait plus très bien ce qu’il était, mais avec les soins
compétents et attentifs qu’on lui prodiguait, il n’était pas malheureux … en essayant de faire
resurgir le passé, on risquait d’aggraver son état (319)." Disenchantment thus manifests in
several manners through the character of Théo. Not only does he live up to the expectations of
those French-speaking pioneers, but his paralyzing illness also forces him to leave behind his
colonial past as a vagabond. The description of Théo’s malady is nothing short of a suggestion
that his disability is caused by his violent past, which ends in the failure of his quests as a
colonizing voyageur-like vagabond. In short, his history is deplorable and must be renounced,
lest it recalls painful memories of being a violent colonizer. More broadly, Théo’s paralysis
signifies the “meaningless” of the American Dream, and of other frontier myths, that idealize
explorers and colonial expansion, revealing instead their violent implications and rejecting the
harm that it causes (Hyman 1999, 128). Théo represents therefore the collapse of colonial
mythologies, gesturing to how it ends in the agony of both those who attempt to valorize and
defend imperialist myths, as well as of their victims.
Jack returns to Québec with this disenchanted image of Théo. He comments to Pitsémine
before his departure, “l’idée qu’il vaut mieux ne pas revoir mon frère… j’ai accepté cette idée
tellement vite que… maintenant je me demande si j’aimais vraiment Théo. Peut-être que j’aimais
(III) Uneasy Roads
169

seulement l’image que je m’étais faite de lui (319)." A discrepancy is described between the
imperialist image of Théo and his actual paralyzed state in San Francisco, which causes Jack to
question his very affection for Théo. Though Jack does locate Théo, the author nonetheless fails
his objective: he is unable to recuperate the mythical image he had of his voyageur brother. Jack
flies back to Canada disillusioned by his road trip in several ways; his brother, while located, is
paralyzed by his past, and by extension, the continent this ancien voyageur traversed is revealed
to be gripped by a violent colonial past.

DISENCHANTMENT ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD

La nuit est ma femme, “Écoutez le monde,” and Volkswagen Blues clarify what Primeau
means when he writes that in some road narrative subgenres, “the decision to go on the road
most often arises from some dissatisfaction or desire to change. The ensuing adventures and the
writing of the narrative often take the form of social and political protest (15);”
145
this resonates
with his other statement that,
Road books open dialogues between oppositional elements. Old and new, high and low,
traditional and innovative, optimistic and cynical make space for each other in an
exploratory mode. The coexistence of dominant, residual, and emergent elements invites
people into dialogue that legitimizes new insights not possible in overly restrictive forms
(5).

Kerouac and Poulin’s narratives do just that: their trajectories on the road invite an imagination
of social change that rejects colonial conditions in its various forms. For Kerouac, these
downtrodden conditions figure mainly as an economic internal colonization as a Franco-

145
Primeau identifies 3 other common road book subgenres: narratives of a search for national identity that
culminates into a study of regional attitudes and values; stories of one’s search for freedom and self-identification;
or experimental stories that “stretch conventions into the radically discontinuous, the futuristic, or the parodic.” It is
true that an argument might be made about how Poulin and Kerouac’s narratives function as a search for national
identity; however, I argue, in their capacity as critiques of imperial oppression, La nuit est ma femme and
Volkswagen Blues resonate more with the first subgenre Primeau proposes: a lament for social change in the face of
colonialism.
(III) Uneasy Roads
170

American minority in the U.S.; he identifies the remedy to his socio-economic belittlement to be
migrant labor, from which he hopes to extract wealth via his vocation as a travel writer. Poulin,
on the other hand, conceives of colonialism as the violent oppression enacted by the forbears of
Franco-Americans: mobile French and Canadien explorers and pioneers; the manifestation of
colonialism that he critiques is the imperial violence and attitudes of these settlers towards
Indigenous people and the American continent. While different avatars of colonialism are
respectively critiqued by Kerouac and Poulin’s road stories, both share this in common: a tone of
unease and melancholy towards coloniality. In this chapter, I called this colonial unease many
things: disenchantment, melancholy, disillusion, pessimism; they are meant to refer to general
dissatisfaction toward colonized conditions. This colonial unease arises from those oppositional
forces that Primeau mentioned; the characters in Kerouac and Poulin’s texts encounter a colonial
force that run contrary to their desires and inspires them to veer towards change—or in Poulin’s
case, a reevaluation of his knowledge of the continent. This movement towards change is
mediated by their unease towards this colonial power that manifests in oppositional forms within
the White Francophone experience in North America—situations in which Francos are both
colonizer and colonized.
In the end, this should be clear: this chapter is not an attempt to claim Kerouac as a
Québécois author because of his self-identification, nor is it an attempt to claim Poulin as an
American one because of his writing of road novels. Yet as my analysis shows, it is extremely
difficult for both authors to shake the question of Canadianness from their writings because of
the socio-historical contexts from which they write. Kerouac, despite his aspirations to be an
“Big American author” nonetheless identifies as French Canadian and speaks of his experiences
as a downtrodden member of this ethnic group in the States. Poulin, while writing about the
(III) Uneasy Roads
171

United States, inevitably conjures images of colonial figures that marked the history of French
and subsequently Canadien exploration and colonization in the North American continent.
Perhaps one can say that the Franco-Americanness of the two authors’ narratives is not so much
dependent on the national identifications of the authors, but rather on the space they both aim to
represent: a North America riddled with the traces of Francophone colonization. It is this shared
discursive and aesthetic tendency to represent this continent that allows us to transnationally link
these authors despite their different, yet convergent, national backgrounds. Here, insight can be
drawn from the critic Jahan Ramazani (2006, 350), who writes that,
neither localist nor universalist, neither nationalist nor vacantly globalist, a translocal
poetics highlights the dialogic intersections—sometimes tense and resistant, sometimes
openly assimilative—of specific discourses, genres, techniques, and forms of diverse
origins. Located in translocation, transnational and cross-ethnic literary history thus
differs from “postnational” or “postethnic” history, in which writers are viewed, when
these terms are used most broadly, as floating free in an ambient universe of
denationalized, deracialized forms and discourses.

Ramazani’s statement reminds us that it not necessary to completely reject senses of national-
belonging or ethnicity in order to transnationally link two authors from different nation states. In
fact, it is perhaps Kerouac and Poulin’s common interest in canadienité that allows for their
cross-border discursive and aesthetic convergence: their shared conceptualization of migrancy as
a colonial and economic practice. In any case their narrative fixations not only reflect common
assertions that the Beat authors and their imitators, in their resistance to globalizing hegemonic
forces, question “myths of nationalism…but [refuse] to relinquish [their rights] to redream the
culture(s) that nurtured them (Grace and Skerl 2012, 4),” and nonetheless demonstrate lingering
attachment to national origin. The important point is that this attachment does not subtract from
the authors’ evident transnational propensity to engage “in projects of anticolonialism, and
[design] new models of transnational community (Mao and Walkowitz 2008, 123).” Reading
(III) Uneasy Roads
172

Kerouac with Poulin provides one possible articulation of this transnational anti-colonial creative
community, through which they both write against colonialism and its avatars through the
aestheticization of travel and labor. This reflects the fact that colonialism is not limited by
geopolitical borders but is in fact an issue that spans the whole continent. The thematization of
colonialism occurs throughout the diverse American continent, linking storytellers of different
literary traditions, generations, and national origins.
A Francophone Dream
In the end, both authors do just that: fantasize their America—that is, the American
continent from the perspective of contemporary White inheritors of the French imperialist
project. As I showed, in doing so, these authors participate in the articulation of a well-known
cliché with imperialist underpinnings: the American dream. This is perhaps not so surprising
given the fact that Kerouac and Poulin are writers of travel narratives; the rhetoric of this myth
very much comprises a migrant dimension, in such that it oftentimes figures as a settler’s or—
eventually with the passage of time—an immigrant’s pursuit of economic opportunity in a
colonized continent. Of course, Kerouac and Poulin have differing responses towards this cliché,
with the former ambivalently pursuing it, and the latter lamenting its failures. However,
continuing on this transnational throughline, what is clear, is that these authors show that the
American dream is not limited to the consciousness of Anglo-Saxon settlers and immigrants to
the United States; this ideal captured the imagination of writers and artists from across the
continent. Kerouac and Poulin, as White men, may have shown the range of affective responses
to this ideological construct among those who directly profited from European colonization;
however, what remains to be shown is how other Francophones, oftentimes migrants themselves,
(III) Uneasy Roads
173

engaged with this unstable, often contradictory, fantasy of individualistic success—which will
clarify the imperial connotations of this colonial migrant trope.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
174

CHAPTER IV—NEW ARRIVALS, DIFFERENT AMERICAN DREAMS
As my study of road novels showed, the entanglement of colonialism with the migrations
of people is not simply isolated to settler-colonial farm novels, or to Indigenous testimonies of
these settler initiatives and their aftereffects. This chapter shows furthermore that this colonial-
migrant nexus is also apparent in more commonly analyzed works within the framework of
migration studies: immigrant literature, or written texts by relatively recent, post-war,
immigrants to Québec and the rest of Canada who often hail from (de)colonized locales. How do
notions of migrancy in this immigrant corpus confront the colonial dynamics that subsumes the
modern settlement of the Americas? This is the question that guides my analysis of migrancy as
it is conceptualized by Francophone immigrant authors in Canada as they conjure their particular
visions of the American continent.
The America studied in this chapter is effectively a transnational one that signifies not so
much the United States but rather the entire continent. My task thus reflects current trends in
transnational American Studies that seek to decenter the primacy of the U.S. when critically
engaging with notions of Americanness, opting to accentuate instead this concept’s continental
dispensability (Gillman and Gruesz 2011). This chapter will show that even artists from the
Francophone Canadian context also participate in this transnational disarticulation of the U.S.
through their conceptions of America. I demonstrate that this decentering of the U.S. ultimately
evokes a broader transnational issue: the destabilization of restrictive senses of national
identity—a destabilization that nonetheless reaffirms the commonality of a shared delimited
geographic space. In short, the authors in this chapter effectuate this identarian decentering not
just by undermining the U.S.-centric conceptions of America, but also senses of national
belonging tout court. Their revaluation of nation and of the centrality of the U.S., I argue, is
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
175

entrenched in a broader critique of colonialism that is mediated by representations of migrancy
and labor.
Previously in Colonial Ventures, I have already explored how national categories are
passively undermined by my transnational approximation of artists; furthermore, I show that the
notion of nation is actively destabilized by the artists themselves through their discourse and
aesthetic practices. In effect, the transnational in the context of this chapter—as well as in that of
the other chapters of Colonial Ventures—may be understood in several ways. These artists,
originating from a multiplicity of geographical locales, are “transnational” not only in the sense
that they move across geopolitical borders; their transnationality also lies in their propensities to:
1) challenge national identifiers; and to 2) convergently aestheticize migration, colonization, and
labor despite their disparate nation localities. The authors of this chapter, as I will show, equally
satisfy these criteria, and perhaps do so readily because of their status as immigrants—these
implicitly cross-border mobile agents. The inextricable link between transnationality and
migration has already been recognized by the literary scholar Paul Jay (2014, 11) who writes that
so-called transnational works have a tendency to examine, “a new model of migration
characterized by the back-and-forth movement of people across borders, at once insisting on the
importance of location and deterritorializing the spaces in which their characters operate.”
Indeed, the creative productions in this chapter exhibit Jay’s description, as while they
aesthetically traverse and undermine national boundaries and identities, they nonetheless idealize
a sort of cross-continental American solidary that implicates not only Québec but also places
across the rest of North America and the Caribbean. Pertinently, critic Catherine Khordoc (2016,
3) notes that some Québec immigrant authors—such as Emile Olivier and Dany Laferrière—take
part, “in the hemispheric turn toward ‘American studies,’ thus complicating what is meant by the
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
176

term Québécois; those authors effectively propose an identification with the American continent
rather than with a specific nation within this space. I develop Khordoc’s argument to assert that
these works from Québec not only trouble established understandings of what is Québecois, but
also the senses of America and Americanness in their transnational, anti-colonial disarticulation
of identarian labels.
Québec/Amérique
What is clear is that America, or L’Amérique, is frequently referenced by Francophone
authors writing from the space of Québec. The persistence of this trope has garnered ample
attention among critics who reflect on the literary expression of Québec’s americanité—its
Americanness or, the province’s links with the United States and, depending on the thinker, with
the American continent as a whole. Critics Jean Morency and Jimmy Thibault (2011, 9) write
that this Americanness à la québécoise usually meant the discursive exploration of the American
continent for traces of French-Canadian presence—they cite Poulin’s classic road novel
Volkswagen Blues as a prime example of this “American,” nomadic, mode of writing; however,
in their treatment of Haitian-Québec-American writer Dany Laferrière’s own reckonings with the
image of America, Morency and Thibault raise the issue of how the existing paradigm of
américanité changes with the advent of immigrant authors in the Québec literary sphere—artists
who in their own way, continue the Québec literary tradition of reckoning with authorial
territoriality and migrancy vis-à-vis the American continent.
This chapter is a study of how newly arrived authors in Québec imagine their mobility in
the space of “America”—of how some of these authors dream of this migrancy and its
relationship with the geographical signifier “Amérique” in all its grammatical forms. My choice
of vocabulary here is not unintentional; I purposely evoke the idea of the American dream, a
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
177

national myth of the United States that is often mobilized in migrant discourse to signify an
immigrant’s dream of economic and political capital—a dream typically built upon ideologies of
individualistic freedom and the promise of social mobility. As innocuous as this ideal might
sound, critic Alison Van Nyhuis (2012, 63) reexamines the origin of this term, linking it with
U.S. colonial fantasies of manifest destiny to expand the White American’s dominion over the
American continent and the world. Though in the Canadian context, the American dream does
not usually refer to the U.S. and its imperial policies—as this chapter shows, the American
dream in Québec immigrant productions can be reworded as a North American dream;
nonetheless, in such a rebranding, this rhetorical trope in Canadian writing still connotes the
deployment of White colonial practices. Take, for example, critic Robert Major’s study of (1996)
of the Jean Rivard duology—one of the romans de la terre that I analyzed in Chapter One. In his
monograph, Major bluntly states that this Québec novel “is an American dream,” explaining that
its economic narrative, “is the dream of succeeding through one’s own ability and in hand-to-
hand combat with nature, achieving both the prosperity and the happiness that must logically
follow from it (72).” Despite being deterritorialized from the context of U.S. imperial ambition,
its reterritorialization in Canada equally conjures images of settler-colonial schemes à
l’américaine, though practiced by Canadiens—an aspect that I showed intrinsically tied it with
the issue of human migration. The settler-colonial motivations of those farm novels thus point to
an important lacuna in existing paradigms of analyzing Québec literary américanité: a direct
acknowledgement of the imperial discourses that condition its narratives—a transnational
colonial condition that stretches beyond the United States into the rest of the continent.
With its settler colonial commitments in mind, what can one make of the American
dream as it is conceptualized by non-white immigrants to the Americas? Returning to Van
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
178

Nyhuis’ study, the critic concludes her archaeology of the concept by interrogating how
immigrant authors in the US and Canada confront the hypocrisy and shortcomings of American
imperial policies, and concomitantly, “adopt, revise, and subvert the rhetorical trope of the
American dream (69).”
146
As I show, it is not only in the United States, or Anglophone, literary
contexts that immigrant authors undermine this idealized cliché of American exceptionalism, but
also in the Francophone literary sphere of Québec. This is manifest in the work of four authors
who are the focus of this chapter, writers whom I categorized in two groups: 1) the Asian-
Canadian authors Ying Chen (b. 1961) and Kim Thuy (b. 1968); 2) authors of Haitian origin
Dany Laferrière (b. 1953) and Rodney Saint-Éloi (b. 1963). My analyses will point to not only
the commonalities, but also the differences between these two groups, in their oneiric
articulations of l’Amérique.
I turn first to Sino-Canadian Ying Chen and Vietnamo-Québécoise Kim Thuy. Primarily,
I explore how these two authors critique contemporary manifestations of Euro-American
Canadian colonialism—internal colonization and White nativism. My argument is that they
mobilize their conceptualizations of the Americas and of the American dream—and implicitly
notions of national identity—to realize their anti-colonial critiques. Their position vis-à-vis
quasi-colonial oppression may perhaps be elucidated in-part by their biographies. Born in
Shanghai, Ying Chen immigrated to Montréal in the 1980s to study creative writing, and though
she currently resides in Vancouver, continues to publish French-language novels in Québec.
Regarding Ying Chen’s literary oeuvre, scholars Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht (2009, 129)
note that, “though [her] first two novels, La Mémoire de l’eau (1992) and Les Lettres chinoises
(1993), are rooted in her Chinese experience and immigration, her later novels, Immobile (1998),

146
Van Nyhuis study touches on Anglophone works by authors of Carribean origin such as George Lamming, Neil
Bissoondath, and Austin Clarke.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
179

L’ingratitude (1995), and Le Champ dans la mer (2002) are almost entirely stripped of temporal
and geographical markers.” In line with this division of her literary corpus, it is effectively one of
Ying Chen’s early works that is studied in this chapter: Les lettres chinoises, an epistolary
novel—in the manner of Montesquieu’s Les Lettres persanes (1721)—which juxtaposes scenes
of life in Shanghai and in Montréal. The former containing noteworthy musings on life in North
America and China, this comparison of origin and adopted cultures is a common narrative
structure for immigrant novels; for example, almost all of Kim Thuy’s solo works—Ru (2009),
Man (2013) and Vi (2016)—follow this schema.
147
Born in Saigon during the Second Indochina
War, Kim Thuy fled Vietnam as a child refugee and eventually settled in Québec. In contrast to
her disadvantaged childhood, during her adult years she succeeded as a lawyer and restauranteur
before devoting herself to writing. Reflecting this transition of environment, her novels often
revolve around a protagonist who experiences the difficulties of integration as a youth while
bearing witness to the clashing of cultures. It is through this juxtaposition of locations and
cultures that the immigrant narratives of Les lettres chinoises and Ru trouble fixed notions of
country-based identities—a critique that is partially realized by the authors’ reframing of the
“American dream” and of the notion of “America.”
My study then progresses to author Dany Laferrière and the screenplay for his 2004 film,
Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit, whose very title exhibits imperial undertones
through its violent diction. What does Laferrière signify by attaching this imagery of conquest to
his migrant narrative of two Haitian men who switch places—one leaving Haiti in the pursuit of
his own “American” dream in Montréal, and the other, the protagonist’s uncle, returning to his
idealized homeland? The answer to this may be elucidated by the work of another Haitian born,

147
Co-authored with Pascal Janovjak.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
180

Québec-based poet and essayist, Rodney Saint-Éloi. The founder of both the Haitian Mémoire
and the Québec Mémoire d’encrier publishing houses,
148
he is particularly known for his
critically acclaimed poetry collections, Jacques Roche, je t’écris cette lettre (2013) and Je suis la
fille du baobab brûlé (2015).
149
His essay, “L’amérique, je veux l’avoir,”—found in geographers
Dean Louder and Eric Waddell’s collective work Franco-Amérique (2017)—reflects on how the
migrancy of contemporary Haitians occurs in the shadow of the historical European conquest of
the Americas, and of the institution of trans-atlantic slavery that facilitated this violent
colonization. Both Laferrière and Saint-Éloi’s treatment of the American dream demonstrates not
only how this rhetorical cliché might be undermined given its colonial underpinnings, but also
how they envision its repurposing to resist the chauvinistic attitudes that this trope projects.

(UN)SETTLING AMERICA
Ying Chen’s Les lettres chinoises and Kim Thuy’s Ru fit the rubric commonly attributed
to works of migrant writing, both thematizing the trauma of leaving their origin countries, their
mobility as migrants, and integration in the host country (Coulibaly and Konan 2015, 7). As
narratives of immigration almost necessarily involve a reckoning of space, these stories also call
to question the relationship between aesthetics, migration, and territoriality. For example, literary
scholar Pamela V. Sing (2013, 283) has considered the extent to which in the works of Ying
Chen and Kim Thuy, “les passages poétiques révèlent la façon dont les narrateurs donnent du
sens au monde. Il en découle la considération du corps comme site de sentiments et de souvenirs

148
Mémoire d’encrier is known for publishing many Québec minority authors; on its website, it states its mission is
to be, “une large plate-forme où se confronte les imaginaires dans l’apprentissage et le respect de la différence et de
la diversité culturelle."
149
Jacques Roche, je t’écris cette lettre was nominated for the 2013 Governor General’s award for French-language
poetry, while Je suis la fille du baobab brûlé won the award in 2016.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
181

sensoriels invertis de significations et de valeurs. Bref, le modèle sensoriel traduit une vision du
monde particulier.” However, Sing’s study raises further queries on the specific aesthetic and
rhetorical elements that are employed by Ying Chen and Kim Thuy—elements that the authors
use to negotiate their relationship with geography and migrancy. I argue that the motifs of the
American dream, and more broadly the dreaming of America, function as powerful aesthetic
devices due to its dual reference to geography and to poetic imagination; to study conceptions
and imaginings of America—and by extension Americanness itself—is to examine the ways in
which those authors articulated their own aestheticized visions of the land that is the setting of
their immigration. In Les lettres chinoises and Ru, l’Amérique is thus not just the geographical
referent of their characters’ adopted continent, it is a literary trope that symbolizes the notions of
migrancy and of migrant success in this continent. Yet, these two novels undermine the
coherence and veracity of this trope by exposing the lived experiences of immigrants to North
America; this destabilization is achieved by critiquing customs and attitudes in both the original
and adopted countries of the novels’ characters, which thus troubles the oneiric idealization of
any one place.
Comment peut-on être américain ?
Les lettres chinoises narrativizes the epistolary exchange among three Shanghainese
friends—one of whom, Sassa, remains in Shanghai, while her fiancé Yuan and childhood friend
Da Li are new arrivals in Montréal. Ying Chen’s second novel, Les lettres chinoises was first
published in 1993, after which a second edition was released in 1998. This reedition in
interesting on several notes, particularly given Colonial Ventures’ preoccupation with
migration—and thus implicitly with this phenomenon’s juxtaposition of “native” and “host”
cultures; effectively, the 1998 version removed several passages that commented the issue of
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
182

cultural hybridization through the narratives of two minor characters: Tante Louise (the male
protagonist Yuan’s aunt) and Nicholas (Yuan’s schoolfriend) (Talbot 2003, 83). Literary scholar
Emile Talbot suggests this redaction is in line with Ying Chen’s stylistic development, as the
author came to eschew the usage of cultural and social markers in her later works; as Talbot
writes, “the paring down of Les lettres chinoises… signals a shift in her artistic itinerary which
has since increasingly focused on writing the universal through a spatially and abstracted
particular (89).” Yet, this pared-down second edition—the subject of this segment—is still rife
with geographical markers, the most pertinent of which being the constant references to
“l’Amérique du nord” [North America], “Américains,” and to “la culture américaine.”
Admittedly the character’s usage of these terms might qualify as an abstraction; interestingly,
though the characters Yuan and Da Li establish themselves in Montréal, explicitly stating so in
the novel, there are few, if any, specific references to Québec—or even to Canada or its
peoples—and commentary about their migration usually refer to the américanité of their new
home and lifestyles, as well as to “Américains” they encounter. To begin, I propose an
examination of this peculiar way in which Ying Chen conceives of Amérique and americanité.
Les lettres chinoises effectively demonstrates the persistence of notions of (North) America, and
their conflation with migrancy, even in an immigration narrative that takes place in Québec;
however, I argue that Ying Chen effectively sets these notions up in order to critique them as
stereotypes and unstable myths, echoing the author’s unease with cultural markers. I argue
furthermore that the author’s critique of clichés is but one node of her multifaceted unease that
also manifests as a resistance against national identification and the very concept of nation—
constructs that entail the separation of peoples, quasi-colonial views of the foreign other, as well
as the inhibition of cross-border, cross-national, movement.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
183

Though the term “American dream” itself is not explicitly mentioned in this book,
notions of dreams and the unreal ground Yuan and Da Li’s visions of their adopted continent. In
Letter 2, when Yuan arrives in Montréal, he writes home to his fiancé Sassa that, “lorsque
l’avion est arrivé tard hier soir au-dessus de Montréal, j’ai eu un étourdissement. C’était à cause
des lumières. De splendides lumières de l’Amérique du Nord. Des lumières qu’on ne trouve pas
chez nous. Je me croyais tombé dans un monde irréel (11).” This passage encapsulates two
important ideas. Firstly, despite moving to Montréal, Yuan mainly idealizes the North American
continent at large, rather than the particular region or country of his move; it is the “splendid
lights” of North America that causes him to enter this dizzy, ethereal, migrant state. The second
detail of note is that a sentiment of poetic illusion is attached to the act of immigrating; in this
sense, Yuan’s immigration is posited as dreamlike—as Yuan’s realization of his North American
dream.
Ying Chen undermines this dream by recounting the disillusion experienced by Yuan and
Da Li after arriving in Montréal. This critique of the American dream is mediated by the
characters’ who unsettle notions of “liberté,” and its privileged association with (North)
American society. Writing to Yuan in Montréal, Sassa recounts being admonished by a superior
in Shanghai for being late to work, the latter chiding her by stating, “crois-tu qu’on est en
Amérique du Nord où est allé ton beau garçon (18)?” This causes Sassa to question, “pourquoi
mon manque de diligence lui a-t-il rappelé l’Amérique du Nord ? Est-ce parce que les gens là-
bas sont libres d’être en retard ? Rien ne serait impossible dans un pays où le mot « liberté » n’a
pas un sens péjoratif.” A positive connotation is thus attributed to Québec, and more generally
North American life; it is conceived of as a freer place than China, an idea that encourages Sassa
to join her fiancé in Montréal. Here the imagery of freedom—normally associated with United
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
184

States exceptionalism—becomes sublated to the North American continent at large, which
includes Québec. Yet, Sassa’s preconception of North America becomes quickly disputed by
Yuan, who writes back, “ici, la liberté a peut-être un visage different, mais elle me semble avoir
le même caractère (20);” Yuan supports this with a description of one of his colleagues who is
visibly downtrodden because of his work and a difficult boss, causing the former to ponder,
Son expérience m’effraie. J’ai voulu me libérer un peu en quittant Shanghai. Et
maintenant je cherche un patron à Montréal. Je serais employé, discipliné, payé, ou
congédié. J’ai choisi de vivre tout cela : je me sens donc presque libre. Mais crois-tu que
je le suis vraiment ici plus qu’ailleurs (21) ?

Yuan suggests that even in North America—which is often stereotyped with the cliché of being
the land of the free—liberty has its limits and is constrained by other forms of oppression:
capitalism and labor. Though, according to Yuan, the concept of freedom is not stigmatized in
Montréal as it is in Shanghai, he further suggests that the positive connotations of the term in his
new home is nothing but an outward appearance that masks similar societal constraints he would
experience in China. Liberty thus remains ever out of reach, as by immigrating, Yuan exchanges
one master for another—leaving an authoritarianism that disdains “liberty,” for a predatory
capitalism that dons “liberty” as a mask. This notion resurfaces later in one of the anecdotes that
the couple’s mutual friend, Da Li, recounts; Da Li happens upon another young Shanghaier in
Montréal, who tells the former, “paroles d’ami: ne te fatigue pas trop. Si tu possèdes encore
quelque chose, ce doit être ta santé. Eh bien, garde-la. L’Amérique du Nord est un champ de
bataille pour les jeunes et les forts, et une immense tombe pour les vieux et les malades (40).”
North America is thus violently depicted as the site of a battlefield in which its denizens are
submitted to merciless competition dominated by the strong. Such a representation resonates
with conceptions of the neoliberal state with a minimal social safety net, in which citizens are
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
185

free to fend for themselves. This characterization serves to destabilize and weaken the idyllic
image of North America, revealing its own set of societal ills.
Through the dialectical exchange of letters between the origin and host country, Ying
Chen thus questions North American exceptionalism by showing the incongruency of its
rhetorical mechanisms (e.g. the characterization of the North American continent as dreamlike)
with the actual lived experiences of her characters in the continent; furthermore, positive aspects
stereotypically attributed to America are shown to be hypocritical as it masks an oppressive
reality that in fact exists elsewhere in the world. Such a sentiment seems to be a discursive
manifestation of Ying Chen’s universalist attitudes towards writing; in this sense, the author’s
conception of the world can be deemed as “universalist,” as it is a world in which oppressive
mechanisms exist in all continents and countries—an oppression that cannot be avoided just by
migrating to a different land.
Ying Chen has similar critical attitudes towards the idealization of migrancy as an
exemplary “American” practice as well. Take this passage for example, in which Yuan reflects
on the difficulty of emigrating from a familiar place,
Les Nord-Américains, eux, ne connaissent pas ce genre de malaises, j’imagine, puisqu’ils
restent rarement dans leur foyer. Ils mangent dans les restaurants, voyagent à l’étranger,
changent d’emploi et déménagent à une fréquence surprenante. Ils feraient de meilleurs
émigrants parce qu’ils aiment l’indépendance et la nouveauté (59).

This abstraction of North America recalls tendencies in Québec literary studies to posit the
American dimension of Québec writing as the, “traversé des espaces territoriaux, de la grande
ville aux déserts en passant par les routes qui défilent, selon le modèle du roadbook (Chassay
2017, 280).” The idealistic immigrant in Ying Chen’s tale, Yuan, shares a similar conception of
North Americans: they are migrants par excellence because of their “American” culture that
values innovation and freedom. Ying Chen’s narrative troubles such a problematic view in two
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
186

ways. First, she points out that North Americans do not hold a monopoly over migratory
practices; Sassa accordingly responds to Yuan’s comments,
Si tu crois… que les Américains sont libres parce qu’ils se déplacent facilement, alors les
Chinois ne le sont pas moins. En plus des oiseaux courageux et naïfs comme toi qui se
croient partout chez eux, les gens d’ici commencent de plus en plus de sortir de leurs
murs, à fréquenter les restaurants et autres endroits, à voyager. Depuis ton départ, on
dirait que le mot « liberté » n’est plus aussi péjoratif qu’auparavant (61).

By showing that people in China indeed engage in those “American” migrant activities that Yuan
describes (travelling, frequenting restaurants), Sassa dismisses his short-sided, borderline
chauvinistic, claim that migrations more naturally occur in North America, reminding him that
migration is not limited to national, or continental boundaries. Another way Ying Chen troubles
this leveling of migrancy with America is through Yuan’s own comments about his assertion,
Mais ne plaisantons pas : pourquoi émigreraient-ils alors qu’ils seraient bien plus à l’aise
dans le rôle du conquérant, qu’ils décideraient du destin des autres peuples en les aidant,
les « oubliant » ou les punissant, et établiraient ainsi les « ordres du monde » selon leurs
goût ou leurs besoins ? La liberté est à eux (59).

Though such a statement is not without its problems,
150
it still raises the issue of the dynamics of
power and oppression that disenfranchised immigrants and racialized peoples of color often face
in North America. The most obvious issue, evoked by Yuan’s choice of the word “conquérant,”
are the imperial schemes undertaken by those with power in this continent. State actors,
corporations, and clergy in both the United States and Canada have undeniably engaged in
imperial and neo-colonial projects in the continent and elsewhere in the world; furthermore these
two countries also facilitate internal colonization within their own borders to systematically
confine ethnic minorities to the bottom of the socio-economic and political order (Blauner 1987,

150
N.B. Yuan makes this generalization about all North Americans, no matter their ethnic or class background. Also,
as Chapter One showed, “conquerors” and colonizers do in fact migrate to settle and appropriate land.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
187

242). Yuan’s statement thus challenges North American dreams of exceptionalism in the arena of
immigrant inclusivity, showing that they are indeed marred by colonialism and colonial attitudes.
Une promenade éternelle
Such ideas regarding the precariousness of the immigrant condition in North America are
echoed elsewhere in the novel. Ying Chen’s depiction of these migrant subjects is inscribed in
her broader commentary against constrictive senses of nation. Across the novel, the author
critiques what sees as restrictive policies that not only reinforce rigid conceptions of national
difference, but also synchronically inhibit the cross-boundary movements of people—all of
which leading to destroyed personal relationships. Ying Chen’s position can be deduced through
the analysis of a particular motif in Les lettres chinoises: the passport.
It is therefore useful for this study to return to the basic plotline of Les lettres chinoises:
Sassa, to immigrate to Québec and to rejoin Yuan, must obtain a passport. The document that
permits the crossing of borders, its so-called necessity is often evoked and commented. For
example, in Letter 20, which contains one of Sassa’s many dream sequences, she recounts a
nightmare in which she encounters an unknown person who enters her room: “il a posé une
enveloppe sur la table de nuit puis il a disparu…. C’était un passeport. La couverture était rouge
foncé… Les mots étaient en chinois, mais aussi en une dizaine d’autres langues qu’on me
conseillait d’apprendre de toute urgence (49)." This panicked dream underscores the fear that
Sassa confronts during her attempt to emigrate. The object that permits her movement appears in
a menacing color and is expressed in a multiplicity of incomprehensible languages—an
opaqueness which instills in Sassa sentiments of urgency and desperation. This characterization
of the passport thus represents immigration to be a daunting, anxiety-inducing task that in
practicality is insurmountable. Despite this, Sassa makes this realization: "je comprenais
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
188

vaguement qu’il s’agissait d’un document décidément plus important que mon corps pour
traverser les frontières." In other words, notwithstanding the worries that this document
presupposes, a certain ironic notion of importance is attributed to the passport. This document is
described to supposedly be more important than one’s own body—or one’s actual person—in the
practice of migration across national boundaries. Effectively, this irony suggests a particular
ridiculousness of such an assertion—that migration be prevented not by the actual migrating
subject, but rather by a piece of paper that is symbolic of state power and interference. The rest
of Sassa’s dream may equally reflect her desperation towards these political obstacles:
Les frontières, c’étaient les belles lignes rouges dessinées sur la dernière page du
passeport. Soudain, j’ai découvert que le passeport se mouillait de plus en plus entre mes
mains. Les lignes dessinées se sont transformées en taches rouges. Une première goutte
d’eau est tombée sur mes pieds. Puis une autre. Puis encore. Le passeport ne cessait pas
de s’égoutter (50).

Like the passport, borders are yet another invented obstruction that prevents the free movement
of migrants. Its imaginative character is suggested by the description of being “drawn”
[dessinée]—or in other words, created—on the last page of the document. Sassa’s attitude to
these imagined obstacles is clear: they are unbearable and untraversable. Both the travel
document and immigration controls disintegrate in in her hands, which serves to accentuate the
administrative difficulties of her emigrant ambitions.
The idea of this emigrant difficulty is developed in later letters, with Ying Chen showing
how it particularly affects different marginalized peoples. Take for example Letter 40, in which it
is revealed that Sassa’s application has been lost by the passport office; a bureaucrat describes it
to be an unfortunately common occurrence while, “il s’est retourné vers les autres qui
attendaient. Comme d’habitude, la file s’étendait jusqu’à l’extérieur du bâtiment. C’était normal,
donc pas d’excuses ni de conseils. Tous ces gens voulaient rejoindre le vaste monde en passant
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
189

par un pont étroit. (104)." This image is striking for several reasons. Not only is the quantity of
emigrants emphasized but also the exclusivity of emigration itself. This twin aspect is
exemplified by the queue of Chinese emigrants. The line is immeasurable; thousands of potential
migrants are moving towards the same destination. Yet, the fact that they are in a queue implies
the scarcity of this migrant potentiality—the limitations and controls that are placed to restrict
free movement. Such restrictions are further emphasized by the image of the narrow bridge [“le
pont étroit”] that further inhibits passage only to a lucky few at a time. Interestingly, Sassa draws
a comparison between these emigrants and an anterior group with the same ambitions: "des
milliers de Chinois marchaient sur ce pont...Une longue marche semblable à celle des
Amérindiens préhistoriques traversant le détroit de Béring." In effect, Sassa metaphorizes these
so-called Amérindiens to represent contemporary migrant undertakings. In a way, this suggests
that Sassa imagines a sense of community and historical continuity between these two groups, as
they both participate in similar migrant practices that aim to settle the Americas. However, what
are the implications of such an approximation? Does Ying Chen reference these First Peoples
simply to imagine a solidarity between them and contemporary American immigrants?
Her metaphorization of the First Peoples is far from idealistic. Sassa continues her
reflection, “quelques-uns tomberaient dans l’eau, c’était normal. Ce serait surtout bien,
j’imagine, pour les pays riches où déjà le nombre des faux citoyens augment d’une façon
effrayante aux yeux des vrais citoyens (105)." The protagonist makes a point to evoke the
dangers that the First Peoples faced in their migration from Siberia to the Americas in early
human history. Though not explicitly stated by Ying Chen, this danger may perhaps even be
extended to reference the genocide of these peoples that was carried out by later migrants to the
American continent: European colonizers. Effectively, this passage seems to function as a
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
190

general critique of quasi-colonial attitudes of majority peoples in developed countries. The
passage transitions from images of drowning First Peoples to a commentary on chauvinistic
attitudes in “rich countries” towards “false citizens” [“faux citoyens”]—or in other words, ethnic
minority immigrants, often from recently decolonized places, who settle in geopolitically
“powerful” countries across the Global North. It is in this way that Sassa’s deployment of this
metaphor might be understood as an implicit critique of the shared colonial oppression faced by
diverse migrant peoples across history.
Sassa’s critical stance is rendered even more complex by the end of Letter 40. This is so
because the loss of a passport symbolizes for her other things beyond the impossibility of her
migration—one, for example, being the end of her relationship with her fiancé Yuan. She
recognizes as much, stating : “au fond, il ne s’agit pas du passeport ni de la neige de Montréal.
Cela s’est passé bien avant. Une perte dont on s’aperçoit seulement lorsque survient une seconde
perte plus évidente. Je t’ai perdu, toi…Et l’employé du bureau des passeports venait de me le
confirmer (106)." Sassa’s statements function as a lamentation to the interpersonal relationships
destroyed by national restrictions. More importantly, her loss, of both her fiancé and her
passeport application, provokes in her this affective and political response as she wanders
hopelessly away from the passport office: “ je continuais néanmoins, espérant marcher jusqu’à
l’extrémité du temps et de l’espace, là où les frontières s’effaceraient, où le monde deviendrait
un seul grand village comme on le prétendait, où les amoureux ne se sépareraient plus à cause de
passeports." To cope with the trauma that resulted from the emigration process, she thus
undertakes an alternative migrant modality: meandering. This meandering is noteworthy because
of the politically engaged thoughts that are instigated by it: the imagining of a world without
passports and borders (in a word, national and geopolitical divisions)—a world in which
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
191

movement is unfettered and unrestricted. However, in the end, Sassa acknowledges that her
imaginings will never come to fruition: she ends by stating, “je rêvais d’une promenade
éternelle.” According to her, her reflective meanderings are just that: an unattainable dream,
whose seekers are doomed to wander eternally.
The notion of dream is thus polyvalent yet convergent in Les lettres chinoises. In all
instances, the dream is posited to describe a sort of unattainable idealism: for example, Yuan’s
idyllic perception of North America, and Sassa’s wishes for a borderless world. Both are critical
of problematic and restrictive worldviews, though of different elements representing these
perspectives: one interrogates unstable clichés and stereotypes, while the other critiques national
categories and separation of peoples. It is in this way that Ying Chen’s rejection of cultural and
social markers seeps into her migrant discourse. While recognizing the difficulty of its
realization, Ying Chen dreams nonetheless of a world in which preconceived notions of the other
do not distort the perceptions people have of each other; this world is equally one in which
marginalized peoples can freely move about without geopolitical restrictions.

AN ALTERNATE AMERICAN DREAMSCAPE

Similar oneiric conceptualizations of a world free of divisive attitudes and restrictive
national boundaries can also be encountered in Kim Thuy’s Ru. The winner of many awards in
Canada and abroad since its publication,
151
Ru was Kim Thuy’s debut novel and was first
released by the Québec publishing house Libre Expression in 2009. It made its way its way to the
French literary scene a year later where it was republished by Éditions Liana Levi. The novel
largely figures as a success story of a refugee who flees war-torn Vietnam and is thrust into a

151
Awards include the Grand-Prix-Lire at the Salon du livre de Paris (France) and the Governor-General’s Award
for fiction (Canada) in 2010, the Mondello Prize for Multiculturalism in 2011 (Italy), and Canada Reads in 2015.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
192

new life in Québec—a fictionalized tale that is inspired by the author’s own experiences. In
contrast with the works studied in this chapter, the trope of the American dream carries a
relatively positive connotation in this novel, as it recounts the protagonist’s realization of this
ideal. While recognizing that such narratives of the “model minority” and “good refugee” easily
lend themselves to be appropriated by nationalist and neoimperial forces in North America, critic
Vinh Nguyen (2013, 3) argues for a productive alternative reading, suggesting that,
the idea of success not as the teleological destination of the American dream, but as a
node in the continual process of survival and subject formation for refugee Asian North
American subjects… for refugee subjects, success can become a narrative device, a
rhetorical strategy, and a mode of articulation for working through and understanding
their experiences and memories.

While it is true that refugee narratives of success in North America may serve as a discursive
space of healing after the experience of violent struggle, this does not mean that the refugee’s
integration in the host country does not encounter difficulties, particular in the form of
xenophobic discrimination. Though Kim Thuy embraces the mythology of the American dream,
her novel Ru shows that it is truly a metaphorical site of contention. This dream does not only act
as an assertion of solidarity amongst all refugees in North America, but also, as literary scholar
Jenny Heijun Wills (2015, 2) suggests, as a rhetorical device that “exposes the limitation” of
nationalist projects in her new home.
152
I argue that Kim Thuy confronts this nationalistic
chauvinism through her rejection of static identification with a particular nation—a national
detachment that she employs to imagine a deterritorialized, decolonized, American dream that is
inclusive of those who are like her: an ethnic-minority refugee immigrant who has made North
America a space of healing and ambition.

152
Wills does important work in contextualizing Kim Thuy as not just an Asian-Canadian author, but specifically
one who writes from the Francophone space of Québec. The critic examines how the works of Kim Thuy, and
Korean Québécois author Ook Chung, must confront the pressures of a “competing” Québec nationalism as they
write.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
193

At the Crossroads of Nationality
Kim Thuy’s work is marked by a general critique of identarian attachment to a particular
nation state. This theme functions as a thematic throughline that links several key moments in the
narrator Nguyen An Tinh’s life. An Tinh frequently reflects on the fluidity of national identity—
a discursive disposition that is suggested to be instigated by the character’s familial history; she
describes that,
Mon arrière-grand-père maternel était chinois. Il est arrivé au Vietnam par hasard à l’âge
de dix-huit ans, s’est marié avec une Vietnamienne et a eu huit enfants. Quatre de ses
enfants ont choisi d’être vietnamiens et les quatre autres, chinois… Même si mon grand-
père est devenu préfet, il n’a pas réussi à convaincre ses quatre frères et sœurs chinois
d’envoyer leurs enfants à l’école vietnamienne (54).

Ethnic and national identification is described to a choice, rather than to be a question of genetics
or ancestral roots. This is exemplified by the identarian division between the eight siblings who
share the same parents in a multi-ethnic household. Their later division can effectively be
interpreted as the manifestation of identarian agency. The option to choose one’s ethno-national
identity speaks to the malleability of this concept, thus highlighting its fluid qualities in the case
of the narrator’s family. An Tinh effectively demonstrates that this fluidity continues to be
embraced by her kin; though her branch of the family identified as Vietnamese,
La police avait l’ordre de laisser partir “clandestinement" tous les bateaux qui
transportaient des Vietnamiens d’origine chinoise. Les Chinois étaient des capitalistes,
donc anticommunistes de par leur origine ethnique, de par leur accent…Ma famille et
moi, nous sommes devenues chinois. Nous avons réclamé les gènes de mes ancêtres pour
pouvoir nous en aller avec le consentement tacite de la police (53).

In order to escape Vietnam, An Tinh and her family thus “became” [“nous sommes devenues”]
Chinese—or in other words, they assumed another ethnic identity. This recalls critic Vinh
Nguyen’s acknowledgement of survival as an important factor in the process of refugee identity
formation. This citation from Ru demonstrates the manipulation of national identity as the key to
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
194

the narrator’s escape from communist Vietnam. Most importantly, this facile movement between
different identities again points to the impermanence of national belonging, underlining its
ability to be expediently appropriated and molded in order to faciliate the refugee’s salvatory
flight.
Dreams that Change
How is the very notion of impermanence inscribed in her conception of the American
dream? In Kim Thuy’s work, the malleability of ethnicity, nation, and socio-economic class
conditions the notion of what is “American” in two different ways. This demonym does not only
represent the fluidity and agency of assuming a new North American nationality—a change that
allows a former Vietnamese refugee like her to obtain social and economic mobility in a new
home. This malleability also manifests as a reimagining and expansion of the adjective
“American,” playing on its wide semantic scope to modify the very senses of “dreams” that are
supposedly associated with this identity.
Conforming with conventional models of the dream, Kim Thuy’s conception of this
construct is shown to be inextricably linked to the mutability of not only her socio-economic
class, but also of her nationality—a double mutability that is linked to her status as a
transnational refugee whose identity is in the process of metamorphosis while seeking
opportunities in a different land. Accordingly, in Ru, as it is a narrative of transnational
movement undertaken by a downtrodden refugee, the notion of dreaming is necessarily related to
socio-economic advancement in her new adopted country, an advancement that is conceived to
be mediated by labor and professionalization. Take this passage for example, when An Tinh
recounts the story of her Tante Six, a worker in a chicken processing plant, who gifts the narrator
a decorative tea tin with, inside,
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
195

Dix morceaux de papier pliés en deux et insérés dans le thé un métier, une profession, un
rêve qu’elle avait pour moi: journaliste, ébéniste, diplomate, avocate, dessinatrice de
mode, hôtesse de l’air, écrivaine, travailleuse humanitaire, réalisatrice, politicienne. C’est
grâce à ce cadeau que j’ai appris qu’il existait des métiers autres que la médecine, qu’il
m’était permis de rêver mon propre rêve (85).

Tante Six’s humble vocation contrasts with the plethora of bourgeois professions that she
encourages the narrator to assume. This juxtaposition represents the desire for upward social
mobility that she imparts on An Tinh, a wish to which an oneiric quality is attributed. This
rêverie conforms with the textbook definition of the American dream: an ambition for increased
socio-economic capital that transforms the class positions of its pursuers—subjects who are
oftentimes disadvantaged immigrants.
The transformative power of this ideological construct is not simply confined to the plane
of class and profession, but also unsurprisingly to that of national identity—the “American” in
the American dream. This idea is explored in a passage in which An Tinh recounts,
Une fois obtenu, le rêve américain ne nous quitte plus, comme une greffe ou une
excroissance. La première fois que je suis allée avec mes talons hauts, ma jupe droite et
mon porte-documents dans un restaurant-école pour enfants défavorisés à Hanoi, le jeune
serveur de ma table n’a pas compris pourquoi je lui parlais en vietnamien. Je croyais au
début qu’il ne saisissait pas mon accent du Sud. Mais, à la fin du repas, il m’a dit
candidement que j’étais trop grosse pour être une Vietnamienne (86).

Le rêve américain is described as a growth that modifies one’s appearance. The visual
discrepancy induced by this dream is encapsulated in the image of the narrator who is
supposedly more corpulent than a “true” Vietnamese person, and who also dons business attire—
high heels, a pencil skirt, and a briefcase. The narrator’s “American” look contrasts with her
backdrop: a vocational restaurant for marginalized Vietnamese children. This image of contrasts
highlights the socio-economic dimensions of the myth of the American dream. What is peculiar
about this assertion, is the way in which this dream of economic success is shown to be bounded
to notions of nationality. The narrator, because of her socio-economic privilege, cannot be
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
196

Vietnamese despite the circumstances of her birth and upbringing in Saigon (11). Surprisingly,
the narrator agrees with the evaluation of this young waiter; she continues to reflect that,
J’ai compris plus tard qu’il ne parlait pas de mes quarante-cinq kilos, mais de ce rêve
américain qui m’avait épaissie… Ce rêve américain a donné de l’assurance à ma voix, de
la détermination à mes gestes, de la précision à mes désirs, de la vitesse à ma démarche et
de la force à mon regard…Ce jeune serveur m’a rappelé que je ne pouvais tout avoir, que
je n’avais plus le droit de me proclamer vietnamienne parce que j’avais perdu leur
fragilité, leur incertitude, leurs peurs (86-7).

It is true that here the narrator concludes by making problematic generalizations, reinforcing
orientalist stereotypes of Asian meekness and Western assertiveness. Despite this, some elements
of her statement might be salvaged. Precisely, her declaration remains compelling in its
suggestion that one’s own national and class identity can be molded—how it is not fixed simply
because of one’s race. This mutability opens the possibility for the narrator to have agency over
her identity and class—for it to be possible for a Québécoise of Vietnamese origin to partake in
the economic processes that are associated with the American dream.
Changing Dreams
Furthermore, it is not only personal constructions of identity that are shown to be
mutable. The adjectival modifier “American” is itself shown to be fluid, an aspect that perhaps
echoes the flexibility of identity. This is apparent in Kim Thuy’s usage of “Américain” and
“Amérique” which, like Ying Chen’s evocations, refers to an ambiguous continental sense of this
geographic entity. Such usage of this term expands the term beyond the confines of the United
States; the rêve américain for Kim Thuy is a rêve nord-américain that links Vietnamese refugee
communities across the continent and across national borders. This becomes apparent when Ru’s
narrator expresses,
Beaucoup d’immigrants ont réalisé le rêve américain. Il y a trente ans, peu importait la
ville, que ce fût Washington DC, Québec, Boston, Rimouski ou Toronto, nous traversions
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
197

des quartiers entiers parsemés de jardins de rose, de grands arbres centenaires, de
maisons en pierre, mais l’adresse que nous cherchions ne figurait jamais sur l’une de ces
portes. Aujourd’hui, ma tante Six et son mari (bel-oncle Six) habitent dans une de ces
maisons (83).

Uttering a litany of urban centers that includes cities from both the United States and Canada,
Kim Thuy describes a network that connect immigrant refugees across the two countries—a sort
of urban constellation. One also notes the picturesque imagery with which those urban spaces are
described; the rose gardens, ancient trees, and buildings convey both a sense of long-term
rootedness and bourgeois possession of social and economic capital that are at first beyond the
reach of these refugees but are ultimately attained by these new arrivals. An economic goal
shared by all of Kim Thuy’s immigrants, no matter their city or country of residence, her rêve
américain thus expresses a commonality of desires that seems to transcend the political and
cultural boundaries of the United States, connecting immigrant communities in the continent
without regard for geopolitical borders.
Her transnational detachment of the rêve américain from national affiliation—or the
neutralization of this ideological construct's connotations with a particular nation—is what
allows Kim Thuy to mobilize this trope even from Québécois space. Her narrative double’s
resistance against concepts of the nation-state is shown to have been molded by her run-in with
white nativism in her adopted home,
Mon patron a découpé dans un journal montréalais un article qui réitérait que la « nation
québécoise » était caucasienne, que mes yeux bridés me classaient automatiquement dans
une catégorie à part même si le Québec m’avait donné mon rêve américain, même s’il
m’avait bercée pendant trente ans (88).

The critic Wills has commented on how through this passage, Kim Thuy, “unearth(s) the
contradictions of this sovereigntist nationalism that articulates itself through language but rejects
French speakers of non-European origins or sees them only as an analogy for their own
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
198

subjectivity (9).” The American dream encapsulates this contradiction as it is often interpreted as
the equal opportunity to success for all who settle the country, or in this case, the continent.
Similar sentiments exist in the context of Québec nationalism, though reworded by the rubric of
language: all those who speak French are welcome to join the Québec nation; this notion can
perhaps be exemplified by a quote from Québec filmmaker, and outspoken sovereigntist, Pierre
Falardeau, which has become a popular slogan for the nationalist cause: “j’veux pas savoir d’où
ils viennent, j’veux savoir où ils vont. Le monde, ils peuvent être blanc, jaune, noir, mauve, bleu
avec des pitons jaune-orange : j’m’en câlisse. S’ils veulent se battre avec moé c’est mes frères
(Loco Locass 2004).”
153
Yet, as Kim Thuy suggests in her text, and which became clearer and
clearer as the Québec nationalist movement aged since its contemporary incarnation that rose in
the 1960s, this sentiment is not shared by all nationalists. Faced with the racist and hypocritical
elements that deny her inclusion in her adopted nation, what can Kim Thuy do? She questions
herself, “alors, qui aimer ? Personne ou chacun ? J’ai choisi de les aimer tous, sans appartenir à
aucun." This conclusion is powerful because it implies a personal rejection of national affiliation
and a refusal to belong to anyone or any place. The statement thus reaffirms the idea of Kim
Thuy’s denationalized, detached, American dream: a dream that differs from its past imperial
implication, and which breaks its ties with nation and hegemonic forces; this transnational
American dream is the simple aspiration of migrants who seek a better life in whatever
destination they may choose, and who wish to be unhindered by restrictive notions of nationality
and ethnicity while they do so.

153
A recording of Falardeau proclaiming this appears in the opening of the song “Résistance,” by nationalist rap
group Loco Locass.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
199

Un pays sans nation
Kim Thuy’s attitudes towards concepts of ethnicity and nation may thus elucidate the
valence of her epigraph. The author dedicates her book, “Aux gens du pays (7),” to the people of
the country. At first glance, this is an obvious reference to the Québec nationalist song by poet
Gilles Vigneault, written in 1975 and since considered to be a sovereigntist hymn. However,
with Kim Thuy’s views in mind, how are we to understand this epigram and its invocation of
“pays”? Are we to only take it at face value, and simply comprehend it as Kim Thuy’s address to
her adopted country of Québec and thus to her new compatriots? It is documented in interviews
with the writer that she does identify as “Québécoise” sans qualifier. The singularity of this
demonym implies an identarian shift that is the result of her transnational movement away from
her birth country of Vietnam, speaking to the fluidity of national markers. Alternatively, we
might understand “pays” in a completely denationalized sense, as an address to those who have
shared the same experiences as refugees in North America—to her people who now live across
the continent and who are destabilizing the very sense of “Amérique” through their new,
differing, immigrant dreams.

REWRITING CONQUEST
Like Ying Chen and Kim Thuy, Dany Laferrière and Rodney Saint-Éloi are critical of the
hypocrisy that underlies established notions of the American dream; however, these two authors
of Haitian origin go even further than the former writers by taking a militant stance against the
idea of America itself. Laferrière and Saint-Éloi’s treatment of this subject may perhaps be
described as an active reimagining, or even a conquering of these American clichés in order to
reappropriate it—an idea that I explore in this section. In direct dialogue with one another,
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
200

Laferrière and Saint-Éloi are friends in real life—the latter states as much in “L’Amérique je
veux l’avoir (2017, 358).” Saint-Éloi’s essay directly references Laferrière’s screenplay and film
Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une Nuit (Boréal 2004), elaborating that, “l’Amérique est
terre de liberté, terre à conquérir même en une nuit (360). What is at stake with these authors’
evocation of the term ‘conquest’ and its imperial undertones? How does their vision of an
identité amércaine tie in with migrancy and with colonial conceptions of America and the
American dream? To answer this, it is imperative to understand how these two authors conceive
of the notion of identity and its relationship with nation and colonialism, tying these concepts
with the cultural theme of the rêve américain.
The limits of Laferrière’s conquests
Reflecting his reputation as a prolific writer, Laferrière’s works—which include literary
productions, cinema, as well as journalistic pieces and academic essays—have received ample
interest from scholars of diverse critical traditions; this was true even in 2011, a fact
demonstrated by an issue of the Québec scholarly journal Voix et images that was entirely
devoted to his work—an issue that included a twenty-page bibliography (Lanteigne 2011) of not
only Laferrière’s writings, but also of media coverage on the author, as well as of the masters
and doctoral theses devoted to his oeuvre. On the level of academic criticism, Laferrière’s
americanité, and his self-assertion as an “American writer,” has particularly attracted attention in
postcolonial scholarship; critic Eloise Brière (2005, 165) notes that the, “language Laferrière
chooses enables him to exit not only the territorialized migrant condition but also the real of la
francophonie,” symbolically rejecting the imperial literary hegemony of Haiti’s former colonial
masters: the French. Laferrière himself states in an interview with journalist Ghila Sroka,
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
201

Je ne voulais pas mettre mon destin entre les mains de la francophonie, c’est-à-dire de la
France… On ne doit jamais vivre dans un pays qui vous a colonisé… parce qu’alors on
passe sa vie à être paranoïaque, à se croire attaqué, et on ressasse un seul débat, le débat
racial, le débat de la colonisation (Brière 163).”

This attitude is in line with Laferrière’s tendency in some of his works (most notably in his debut
novels that are commonly dubbed the author’s autobiographie américaine)
154
to resist static self-
identification with race, nationality, and politics in his writing; as Thibeault (2011, 25) argues,
Dany Laferrière n’a jamais caché son désir de rompre avec tout étiquette pour fonction de
lui attribuer une identité fixe, non désiré, fondée sur des questions d’origine, de race ou
de langue. Dans J’écris comme je vis, il affirme ne pas se connaître comme « ‘écrivain
immigrant’, ‘écrivain postcolonial’, ‘écrivain caraïbéen’ [sic], ‘écrivain du métissage’,
‘écrivain noir’… ».”
155

While Laferrière is rightfully skeptical of any totalizing and reductive identarian label attached to
his profession of a writer—even of ones that do not rely on transient constructions of nationality,
such as “postcolonial” or even “immigrant”—there are nonetheless textual instances in which the
author engages with the issue of nationality, migration, and postcoloniality. Comment conquérir
l’Amérique is one of those works, effectively parodying the idea of an imperial conquest of the
continent.
This parody of colonization is mediated by Laferrière’s representation of a Haitian
character’s migrancy. The young protagonist, Gégé, leaves Haiti for Montréal—the city where
his uncle Fanfan has resided for decades—explicitly for the “conquête de l’Amérique (14).” If
one is not yet convinced of this choice of expression’s colonial tint, note that elsewhere in the
text, Gégé explains to his friend his choice of leaving: “je ne m’enfuis pas, Raymond. L’île est
simplement devenue trop petite pour nous : sept millions d’affamés debout sur un caillou en

154
The foundational work of this corpus is his début, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer,
published in 1985. Starting with Comment faire l’amour, his “autobiography” is composed of all his published texts
up to his 2000 book, Le cri des oiseaux fous.
155
Here Thibeault cites a published interview with Laferrière: J’écris comme je vis (2010).
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
202

pleine mer des Caraïbes… Moi, je pars à la conquête de nouveaux territoires (21).” Mimicking
and mocking colonial attitudes towards the acquisition of space and territory, Gégé effectively
deploys the colonization of new lands as a metaphor for his migration to Montréal.
However, if Gégé is the new colonizer, who then is his colonized foil? The character
employs yet another metaphor to describe his migratory conquest: “conquérir la blonde, c’est
conquérir l’Amérique (13);” Gégé explains his chauvinistic association of blonde women with
America,
Je les trouve exotiques… Regarde, on n’a pas la même couleur, ni la même odeur, ni la
même culture… T’es d’accord ? On n’est pas non plus de la même classe, ni de la même
race, ni de la même religion… La Blonde n’est pas un être humain, mon vieux, c’est une
métaphore de l’Amérique.

Again, here the language recalls imperial practices of dehumanizing and aestheticizing the other.
Accordingly, the blonde woman here, the target of Gégé’s imperialist project, is exoticized,
objectified, and reduced to a mere literary device; Gégé’s migration thus becomes conflated with
both colonialism as well as with his sexual fantasies. The phantasmagoric aspect attributed to the
blonde is further accentuated by Gégé’s conception of this figure as his dream; on his arrival to
Canada, an immigration officer demands to know the reason for his entry, rightfully suspecting
that Gégé is lying about his visit to Québec—that is not a tourist and is actually intending to
immigrate,
L’officier : Pourquoi devrai-je vous laisser passer ?

Gégé : Parce que vous êtes impressionné, monsieur, puisque vous-même il y a
longtemps que vous avez laissé tomber ce rêve !

L’officier : Quel rêve ?

Gégé : La conquête de l’Amérique.

(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
203

L’officier : Laissez-moi comprendre : vous crevez de faim au sud et vous avez
remarqué que toute la bouffe était au nord. Et vous avez tout bonnement
pensé à venir la chercher là où elle est.

Gégé : Non, monsieur ! Je ne suis pas ici pour la bouffe. Je suis ici pour la
blonde (27) !

To deflect his stereotypification as an economic immigrant fleeing an impoverished country,
Gégé portrays himself instead as a colonist seeking new lands and new women. With this
gesture, the common understanding of the American dream becomes slightly, yet provocatively,
modified; it is no longer the White man’s colonial desire for economic stability and political
freedom in the United States, but rather a former colonized subject’s neocolonial fantasy for
White women in North America. The colonial conquest of a blonde woman thus becomes an
extended metaphor for Gégé’s migration to Montréal and his pursuit of the American dream, an
objective that itself bears colonial connotations. Through this metaphor, Gégé’s statement
subverts historical understandings of how imperialism manifested in this geographical range; a
Haitian man, a former colonized subject, now becomes a “colonizer.” The satirical nature of
Gégé’s fantasy of conquest lies in this inversion of colonial norms and expectation.
However, it is easy then to understand the accusations of sexism that scholar Lori Saint-
Martin (2011, 66) has levied on Laferrière; working on his 1985 debut novel Comment faire
l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiquer (Typo 2002), she characterizes it as unidimensionally
concerned with antiracism—through its ironic celebration of white women being sexually
dominated by black men—while neglecting equally important antisexist concerns. In effect, the
novel is highly reminiscent of Comment conquérir l’Amérique as both give the impression that,
as Saint-Martin would say, “la domination de la Blanche par le Nègre est donc compréhensible,
justifiée, naturelle. Donnée pour à la fois nécessaire et révolutionnaire, elle ‘passe’, voire passe
inaperçue.” Admittedly the domination of women in Comment conquérir l’Amérique does not
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
204

overtly carry the same tones of revolutionary necessity; rather it is enveloped in the humor of its
premise—of a Haitian migrant’s American dream that figures as the neoimperial conquest of a
blonde—which points to the possibility of its inherent critique of colonialism. Yet, despite this
notion’s ability to be read as a parody of colonization, there is little argument that it remains
uncomfortably misogynistic.
If there is any hope in rehabilitating Laferrière’s chauvinistic portrayal of women, it
would lie in the author’s own reflections on the figures of the nègre and the blonde, which is in
fact presented in one of the film’s scenes. Functioning as a metacommentary of the plot itself,
there is a scene in which Gégé watches a televised interview of no other than Dany Laferrière,
“l’écrivain,” speaking about the American mythologization of two types,
En fait l’Amérique a inventé deux choses : la Blonde et le Nègre. Couple Rare… Ce sont
les deux extrémités du spectre. La lumière et les ténèbres…. C’est en Amérique que la
Blonde a eu à faire face au feu le plus meurtrier. C’est aussi ici qu’elle est devenue un
mythe. La déesse Blonde n’existe pas en Norvège ou en Suède, la plupart des femmes
étaient blondes… La Blonde est une pure invention américaine. C’est l’ennemie
ancestrale du féminisme (96).

The idea of the negro being a mythological construct rooted in the Americas’ colonial history is
not new. Notable thinkers and philosophers such as Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe have all
theorized blackness as a social construct; Mbembe for example even goes on to assert in his
Critique of Black Reason (2017, 2), that, “blackness and race, the one and the other, represent
twin figures of the delirium produced by modernity,” an era that Mbembe believes is
indissociable with the trans-atlantic slave trade, the dehumanization of Black people, and
implicitly the European colonization of the Americas (12). Conversely, Lafferrière imagines the
figure of the blonde as the symbol of both American exceptionalism and antifeminism, rendering
this type as subservient to the same hegemonic, patriarchal, and imperial powers as is the negro;
this recalls how often in cultural productions Black masculinity was perceived as a menace to
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
205

White power, often represented by the Black man’s lust and sexual dominance of the White
woman (Miraglia 2000, 131).
156
Laferrière’s mock-interview thus hints at how both those
rhetorical types function as myths that are perpetuated to preserve White American hegemony.
This, however, does not deter Gégé from coveting a blonde; hearing Dany Laferrière’s
theorization of the blonde, and its connection with the nègre, only causes Gégé to play into those
colonial stereotypes—assuming the role of the lustful black man—and proclaim: “je la veux… je
veux cette blonde… Je veux l’Amérique (97).” In this way the author positions Gégé as a naïve
character, whose migrancy is based on the misguided pursuit of a chauvinistic imperial dream—
the myth of America and, of course, blondes—effectively condemning the character’s migrant
project and his misogynistic attitudes.
Reclaiming America
What then are we to make of Laferrière’s assertion of being an “American author” when
he also reminds us that the concept of America itself is constructed by colonial myths and
dreams? Rodney Saint-Éloi provides an answer to this, entering in conversation with Laferrière.
Despite his prominent work in the Québec and Haitian literary establishments, Saint-Éloi
remains rarely studied in scholarly circles. Starting his career as a writer and publisher in Haiti,
he moved to Montréal in 2001 and remains active in both the Haitian and Québec literary circles;
in a study of Saint-Éloi’s publishing houses and how it resonates with Martinican writer and
philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of the tout-monde,
157
critic Bonnie Thomas (2018, 32)

156
Miraglia studies the myth of the “Nègre grand Baiseur” as redeployed by Laferrière and other black authors from
the Americas, commenting that, “chez Dany Laferrière, comme chez Himes et Wright, l’exploitation du mythe du
Nègre Grand Baiseur comme du nègre cannibale sert à mettre en question tous ces mythes crées et propagés par les
Blancs pour mieux lyncher et châtrer les Noirs sans fondement véritable," which shows the usage of myths as
imperial mechanisms of control. The figure of Gégé effectively fills the criteria of this stereotype: a figure who is
hellbent on the sexual appropriation of a blonde woman.
157
As Bonnie Thomas explains, “tout-monde expresses the idea that it is the ‘imaginaire,’ or the imagination, that is
most potent to unite humanity in its infinite diversity and to overcome the multiple forms of oppression that exist in
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
206

credits the former with having created an space that, “allows him to foster other ‘marginalized’
writers in an environment that is inclusive and yet also outside mainstream publishing.”
“L’Amérique je veux l’avoir” demonstrates that Saint-Éloi’s written work is equally worthy of
study. His essay provides insightful conceptual considerations with which one may engage with
Laferrière’s film; if Comment conquérir l’Amérique is primarily an aesthetic rendering of
concepts of “Amérique”—mainly mocking established notions of the American dream and its
imperial heritage in a narrative mode—Saint-Éloi’s essay articulates the significance of these
notions on the level of history, migrancy, and identity, and in the material lives of actual
migrants who have left the Caribbean for American mainland. In the manner of Laferrière, Saint-
Éloi calls to question the usage of the term Amérique, inundating the term with geographical and
historical insight.
As mentioned above, this essay was published in the frame of a much larger, cultural-
geographical project; in the introduction of Franco-Amérique, Louder and Waddell (2017, 16)
describe their edited book on the geographical range of French-speaking peoples in the
Americas, and their descendants, as an attempt to reckon with how, “cette Amérique franco est
d’une part, de dimensions continentales et, d’autre part, de configuration pluraliste.” These two
geographers re-evaluate the sense of “Franco-Amérique,” showing that French-speaking peoples
did not just concentrate in the poles of Québec, Acadie, and Louisiana, and have established
communities and across the continent—communities of peoples that do not only include the
descendants of French and Canadien settlers, but also Francophone immigrants from around the
world who have helped shaped this geo-linguistic domain. Conforming to the conceptual
framework of Louder and Waddell’s book, “L’Amérique je veux l’avoir,” concentrates on the

the world. In his theoretical exploration of the concept, Traité du Tout-monde, Glissant asserts, ‘C’est par
l’imaginaire que nous gagnerons à fond sur ces dérélictions (29).’"
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
207

notion of Amérique, tout court, raising the question of how this concept may be expanded
beyond the connotations of European, United States, and Canadian imperial practices and
history. Saint-Éloi’s attempted transcendence of this imperial violence manifests as his
valorization of marginalized histories of those who are, or were once, exploited colonial subjects:
former slaves, Indigenous peoples, and their descendants.
Saint-Éloi’s essay instigates this exposition of colonial violence by first destabilizing
notions of America that remain centered on the United States. The essayist begins with an
anecdote of his daughter singing a pop song by American-French singer Joe Dassin, titled,
“l’Amérique;” the “Amérique” here almost unequivocally refers to the United States, which is
evident given the official music video in which the singer performs in front of a background of
red, white, and blue stars and stripes (Ina.fr 1976). In addition, the song’s refrain references the
cliché of the American dream:
L’Amérique, l’Amérique je veux l’avoir et je l’aurai
L’Amérique, L’Amérique, si c’est un rêve, je le saurai

L’Amérique, L’Amérique, si c’est un rêve, je rêverai
L’Amérique, L’Amérique, si c’est un rêve, je veux rêver

L’Amérique here expresses, for lack of a better term, the “standard” definition of the term,
reaffirming the term’s privileged association with the United States. Indeed, this country is
shown to be the object of the voice’s dream. While this reference to the dream does destabilizes
this place’s reality—which underlines its mythic character—it is nonetheless conceived as an
object of desire, of the voice’s persistent fantasization of his goals. “Amérique” as an object of
desire accentuates its colonial dimension, which is in effect reminiscent of Gégé’s desire to
“conquer” the Americas in Laferrière’s film; in a similar fashion, albeit in an unironic manner,
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
208

the voice in Dassin’s song dreams to possess and appropriate his phantasmagorical vison of the
U.S.
While listening to his daughter sing “l’Amérique,” Saint-Éloi reveals himself to be
dissatisfied with such a narrow, implicitly chauvinistic, definition; he muses, “Pourquoi
s’invente-t-elle une Amérique? De son île d’Haïti à Montréal, en passant par les autres îles
qu’elle a visités, elle a toujours foulé cette terre d’Amérique (357).” Saint-Éloi argues that there
is no need for his daughter to pursue the American dream, or mythically idealize the United
States; her life and migrancy takes place in the same continental range and is thus very much so
américaine.
Saint-Éloi therefore mobilizes his daughter’s migrancy as a discursive device to lift the
ideological fog of American exceptionalism, paving a way to both reject the U.S.-centered sense
of America, as well as to expand the transnational inclusivity of this concept. In the end of the
essay, Saint-Éloi does this again, recounting a different migrant anecdote; returning to Montréal
after a visit to Haïti, he proclaims,
Dans quelques heures, je fermerai derrière moi la porte dans cette rue Bourgeoys. Et je
retrouverai dans ma chambre un hibiscus en fleurs, qui me procure la chaleur des îles
sous le vent. Également un grand bananier qui me rappelle le vert tendre du peintre
Lazar. Je lui raconterai l’histoire de la Citadelle, l’histoire de la folie du monde et de la
mer. Je me sentirai ainsi bien Américain après un bon verre de Barbancourt cinq étoiles.
Je dormirai les poings fermés avec un grand songe qui a pour nom l’Amérique (365).

Saint-Éloi creates a cosmopolitan image of his home in Montréal (a Québec space) and melds it
with a plethora of objects that symbolize his birthplace of Haiti (the Citadelle Laferrière, Rhum
Barbancourt), and more broadly the Caribbean (the hibiscus flower, banana trees, the sea);
however, instead of simply compartmentalizing these symbols and places in their respective
countries and region, he attaches to them the continental modifier américain. This is Saint-Éloi’s
own songe américain, a dream that draws on the common territoriality of the multiplicity of
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
209

peoples, cultures, and nations in the continent. In this way, the transnational mobility of Saint-
Éloi, and his lived experiences in multiple locales in the continent, allows him to bring to surface
a reevaluation of the very notion of américain, reminding us that the adjective does not need to
be solely committed to the description of U.S. culture.
However, as the last paragraph implied with Saint-Éloi’s “poings fermés” [clenched
fists], the transnational reimagining of Amérique must also reconcile this term with its implicit
association to historic colonial violence. Reminding the reader of the horrors unleashed on the
land by European Colonization, he writes,
L’Amérique est cette mémoire et cette terre de sang. Terre d’Amérique nourrie du sang
d’Abel, c’est la matrice première. Le modèle que l’Occident nous a légué. La violence et
la trahison. Le viol et le pillage. Le désespoir et la mort. L’horreur du premier peuple de
la terre Quisqueya va pour suivre son cycle à travers la traite des Noirs (358).

Saint-Éloi thus directly addresses the violence with which Europeans and their descendants have
imbued the land. Note, however, that it is not just simply inanimate soil that is subjected to
imperialism; Saint-Éloi reminds us of some of the peoples who suffered the brunt of colonial
subjugation: African slaves and Indigenous peoples. However, he falls short of reducing the
notion of America to uniquely connote White imperialist violence and the suffering of slaves and
colonized subjects; Saint-Éloi’s thoughts on European colonialism can perhaps be summarized
with his powerful assertion that: “Christophe Colomb n’a pas découvert l’Amérique. Christophe
Colomb a saigné l’Amérique.” In other words, White imperialist violence did not create this
continent, only marked it. In the eyes of Saint-Éloi, the way forward, away from the violence of
imperialism, is clear: “nous construirons la terre Amérique malgré vents et marées. Nous dirons
HONNEUR. Qui répondra RESPECT (364).” This provides insight into what Saint-Éloi
suggests, when he agrees with Laferrière about the need for Amérique to be conquered. The
notion of Amérique, and its violent history, needs to be reconstructed—to be recasted in order to
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
210

respect the subjectivities of all those peoples, migrant or otherwise, who share this continent
together. Critic Kasia Mika (2014, 16) offers this succinct summary of Saint-Éloi’s guiding
philosophy, that seems to equally describe his intent in “L’Amérique je veux l’avoir”: “the past
and its representations must be creatively reclaimed if the future is to be envisaged and realized
other than as a repetition of simplistic binaries and objectifying metaphors. In this context, the
act of writing becomes a gesture of defiance and a call for change.”
158
Saint-Éloi’s intervention
in the “creative reclamation” of history and its representations manifests as his reforging of the
rhetorical cliché of the American dream, an attempt to not only symbolically reject imperialist
hold over the continent, but also cultivate a cross-continental solidary that is not inhibited by
restrictive national allegiances.
Poetic Dreams of Américanité
Therefore, as Laferrière and Saint-Éloi jointly reimagine the American dream in their
writing, they also reforge notions of Americanness. Laferrière’s américanité and his self-
assertion as an “American author” are not thus only based on his identification with Black U.S.
authors such as Chester Himes and James Baldwin—an aspect of Laferrière’s persona and
creative corpus that critic Anne Maria Miraglia studies (2000, 125). His américanité may equally
describe his tendency to employ American tropes and clichés in his migrant narratives,
notwithstanding his tendency to satire them. Saint-Éloi charts out a way in which this satire can
translate into a reworking of this trope to not only reject its exclusive relationship with the
United States—and its imperial heritage and implications—but also expand it to create an

158
Mika works on how his earthquake testimonial disrupts notions of a linear history, by providing a voice to the
obfuscated voices of the most marginalized in Haiti that are often ignored. Reminiscent of this project, Saint-Éloi’s
argument is similar, as it proposes a vision of Amérique that includes the subjectivities of the disenfranchised that
share this continent.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
211

inclusive continental rêve américaine and américanité for not only the transnational migrants
who circulate in these lands, but also for all the peoples who inhabit them.
Notre Amérique migrante
In this way, Saint-Éloi and Laferrière directly participate in a transnational disarticulation
of the U.S. through their conceptualization of a continentally inclusive America for all. As
Lafererière would state, this disarticulation is realized through a conquest of those chauvinistic
“American” attitudes and stereotypes that are remnants of empire in the continent. Saint-Éloi
inundates Laferrière’s idea of conquest, not just by reminding us of the imperialization of the
Americas, but also proposing that the concept of “American” be reclaimed to signify not just
those from the U.S., but all those who inhabit the continent—especially those who with
diminished social standing.
In the context of literature and media, Laferrière and Saint-Éloi’s affirmation of solidary
is compelling because of the implicit dialogue that it seems to foster, as they seek to implicate
the downtrodden and forgotten into the social discourse. The two authors’ work thus signal the
need to recognize not only the voices of Francophones from the Haitian and Canadian contexts,
but also those of all marginalized peoples in the Americas. This chapter therefore strategically
ends with Laferrière and Saint-Éloi in order to emphasize the necessity of engaging with other
artists who also participate in the discursive articulation of this continent—especially with those
who do so in order to reject U.S.-centric views. It is certain that others outside of the North
American Francophone context do so; one only needs to look as far as Latin America, where the
Cuban poet José Marti(1853-95) and his manifesto “Nuestra America" continue to resonate in
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
212

Hemispheric Cultural Studies and transnational American studies (Noble 1998);
159
in a similar
fashion to Laferrière and Saint-Éloi, Marti articulates a familiar indictment of European and U.S.
white supremacy and colonial violence that dehumanizes its Black and Indigenous subjects
(Noble 1998, 270). My point is, there are fertile intersections to be discerned that will reveal the
convergence of Laferrière and Saint-Éloi’s work with productions from other places; doing so
will reveal the wide-reaching commonness of the two artists’ hemispheric American stances, a
discursive tendency that spans creative spheres across the continent and perhaps even the world.

AMERICANS SANS THE UNITED STATES
My analyses in this chapter effectively attempt such a cross-hemispheric comparison by
relating Laferrière and Saint-Éloi with Asian-Canadians Ying Chen and Kim Thuy. Despite their
disparate ethnic and national origins, all four artists studied in this chapter have each expressed
unique, yet convergent visions of America and the American dream; their unifying principle is
possibly their rejection of these concepts’ nationalist connotations and of their imperial
underpinnings. While Ying Chen refuses this American mythology altogether in her bid for
universalism, Kim Thuy, Laferrière, and Saint-Éloi all attempt to recuperate it, first by rejecting
its colonial and nationalist baggage and then emphasizing its ability to express a continental
solidarity. While Nguyen is justified in stating that, “the blanket phrase ‘American Dream’ in a
French-Canadian context... points to the way American culture and ideology have become
transnational and pervasive in the era of globalization (3),”
160
what my analysis makes clear is

159
José Marti’s essay imagines an “America” for all those who live in the continent, not just for Anglo-Saxons and
others of European descent in the States.
160
Nguyen makes this comment in the context of Kim Thuy’s work; the citation continues, “but it also reveals how
Vietnamese scattered across the globe continue to remain connected to America through both a backward forward-
looking gaze.” This, however, left open the question of what this “America” is, which my chapter aimed to answer.
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
213

that the term “American,” as it is employed by the authors of my study, resists its ideological ties
with US imperial culture. America, and the literary tropes that support its colonial ideologies, are
exploited as floating signifiers by those authors, deflecting their connection with the United
States by emphasizing the transnational continental senses of these linguistic constructs. In this
sense, the demonym American is not only the site of a Laferrièrian tactic to bypass the hegemony
of the neocolonial Francophonie, as Brière described; it is the evidence of how all those authors
attempt to detour U.S. nationalist, and more broadly, White nativist forces by claiming America
for the migrant, often marginalized, peoples of the continent—by articulating and asserting their
own transnational and inclusive conception of this landmass. Their reworking of the American
dream is the aesthetic manifestation of an anticolonial project that aims to: 1) reject both white
and national hegemony over the term America; and 2) make the “American” dream of success
truly for immigrants, no matter their origins or race—not just reserving it for European colonists
and their descendants.
Such an endeavor inevitably ends with a query on its efficacity. Questioning the ability of
disenfranchised peoples to reclaim inherently hypocritical national symbols in their struggle to
create a more inclusive national space, philosopher Judith Butler (Butler and Spivak 2007, 66)
does note, however, that,
to exercise a freedom and to assert an equality precisely in relation to an authority that
would preclude both is to show how freedom and equality can and must move beyond
their positive articulations. The contradiction must be relied upon, exposed, and worked
on to move toward something new.
161

161
While in conversation with Marxist literary theorist of postcolonialism Gayatri Spivak, Butler makes this
comment while reflecting on the singing of the U.S. anthem in Spanish by protestors who marched for the rights of
undocumented immigrants in 2006. She concludes this particular subject with a couple of unanswered questions that
are pertinent to this chapter, including this one in particular: “is it still an anthem to the nation and can it actually
help undo nationalism?”
(IV) New Arrivals, Different American Dreams
214

Effectively, the key is to expose the hypocrisy and the shortcomings of idealized concepts, such
as liberty and opportunity, that are often denied to racialized minorities in the Americas. It is
from there on, as Butler’s comments suggests, that new conceptualizations of ideological
constructs might be realized, expanded to include and support the marginalized. The authors of
this chapter seem to attempt this undertaking by rearticulating a myth through the abandonment
of “nation” altogether. This is what perhaps what sets these authors apart from other writers from
Québec whose américanité describes the recovery of a Franco-Canadien ethno-national identity;
Ying Chen, Kim Thuy, Laferrière, and Saint-Éloi imagine, rather, a new migrant américanité that
allows them to not only circumvent Québec nationalism, but also U.S imperial hegemony. It is a
denationalized American dream that they propose—sans United States or any sort of White
nativism and exceptionalism. But what can we say about the success of their attempts? In the
end, are these artists too idealistic, ignoring the real, material, discrimination, and structural
racism that grip minorities in the Americas? I conclude this final chapter with the words of
feminist author and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, which unavoidably comes to mind: "for the
master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. This may allow us to temporarily beat
him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change (2007).” In
other words, can such an imperialistically tinted construct such as the American dream be
salvaged when its very foundations are rooted in colonial violence and racism? How are we then
to understand the fate of immigrants to this continent whose passage have been paved by violent
imperialisms, and who now must refuse its legacy?
Conclusion
215

CONCLUSION: MIGRANT BOUNDS

The aesthetic and discursive conceptualizations of migration in the North American
Francophone productions of my study easily recall ideations of historic and ongoing colonial
projects. This hyperconscious propensity reflects the contemporary ontology of the Americas,
which was shaped, and continues to be shaped, by colonial projects to settle and work (on) the
land. Under the sign of imperialism, colonial forces violently manipulate both space and the
movements of people; it is colonialism's inherent manipulation of mobility that allows it to
readily seep into narratives of migration and labor—tales that emerge from colonized areas, and
that are articulated by storytellers who bear witness to this multivalent exploitation of land and
movement.
This inextricability of migration narratives with colonialism and labor is not limited to
those pioneer stories of colonists who migrate to the limits of White settlement. As I showed,
colonialism manifests as a central theme in a multitude of other migration genres, which include
the anti-colonial writing of Indigenous nations; road narratives that navigate the shadow of
settler colonial history; and writing by immigrants from postcolonial locales who face a different
colonial situation in their newly adopted homes. This scope of colonialism across different yet
related contexts reflects the assertion of geographer Paul White (2002, 4) who writes that,
the act of migration concerns people and places, but it also concerns time. The first
movers settle down. More migrants follow the path of the earlier pioneers. The world
these latter move to is not the same as for the first arrivals, since the existence of past
movement will have in some way altered the conditions of reception, whether directly
from people of similar origin, or in terms of the underlying social, economic and political
conditions that will influence the experiences of the later arrivals.

What White suggests is that the temporality of contemporary migratory practices—in the
American context at least—has been framed and conditioned by the initial advent of European,
American, and Canadian colonists. I demonstrated this to be true as I began my investigation
Conclusion
216

with settler-colonial farm narratives and subsequently branched out into creative corpuses of
other genres, showing how similar imperial dynamics that instigated the former equally function
as the thematic catalysts for the latter. The colonization aestheticized in Maria Chadelaine, Jean
Rivard, and Les pays d’en haut belongs to the same category of exploitative colonial practices
that the Innu writers, An Antane Kapesh and Naomi Fontaine, critique in their essays.
Effectively, this violent colonization equally shapes the world that the road novelists (Jack
Kerouac and Jacques Poulin) and immigrant authors (Ying Chen, Kim Thuy, Dany Laferrière,
and Rodney Saint-Éloi) commentate. While some might some extol colonization, and others
critique this phenomenon (or even do both such as in the cases of Jean Rivard and Les pays d’en
haut), one unifying factor is that all these works frequently think through notions of colonialism
and of its longstanding aftereffects, by dint of their hyperconscious philosophizing and
poeticization of migration and labor.
This shared aesthetic and discursive propensity functions as the fulcrum on which my
seemingly eclectic corpus balances. Though many of the works in my corpus are not
conventionally considered to be migrant productions from a thematic or generic perspective—for
example, the roman de la terre, or Indigenous political essays—their colonial-migrant
connection is undeniable. Precisely, what I demonstrated is that through this shared
consciousness of colonialism, the theme of migration pervades all these superficially divergent
works. My argument is therefore that one can and should discern the migrant dynamics that bring
together these creations as distinct but connected colonial migrant ventures. In effect, I insist on
the usage of “venture” here, and implicitly across my entire project, because of its polysemic
economy that implies both mobility and undertaking, revealing the connectivity of these two
concepts. All of the productions I studied can be thought of as ventures—as laborious creative
Conclusion
217

enterprises. This characterization obtains a double meaning because the productions of my
corpus also narrativize ventures and venturing—migrant movements, often times into unknown
spaces. It is this propensity to imagine the venturing into new places that links the term “venture”
to colonization—to colonial adventures into so-called unclaimed lands. Of course, no viable
venture can be without labor, returns and profit; as suggested in Chapter One, migration brings
about colonial returns through the means of laborious colonization. In some instances, the fruits
of this labor can be conceived as both the reification of coloniality in the physical world, as
exemplified by the romans de la terre and their settler-colonial objectives; in all cases, colonial
returns reference the very production of colonial critique and commentary in the form of creative
works, such as novels, T.V. series, films, and essays. In all these different ways, the polysemy of
ventures thus points to the inextricable relationship of migration to colonization and labor. These
colonial ventures are shown to be expansive, as they are not just an abstract idea explored in the
diegetic universes articulated by narratives; these ventures also readily describe the production,
circulation, and consumption of these stories in the real-world colonial cultural marketplace as
they are mobilized to work and shape—or attempt to shape—society. Therefore, my employment
of the phrase “colonial migrant ventures” aims to emphasize that my study does not amount to a
constricted, single-minded, reckoning of migration to the exclusion of other issues or themes;
rather, the concept of “ventures” is a recognition of the myriad issues that accompany the subject
of human movement: settler colonialism, ideological constructs, cultural production, artistic
consumption, class and labor—issues which also bring to the surface a multiplicity of other
concerns such as Indigeneity, gender roles, aesthetics, literary genre, xenophobia and so on.

Conclusion
218

AESTHETICS, DISCOURSE, AND GENRE
To be clear, what I propose is not an overarching criterion that characterizes all migration
narratives; effectively, I do not argue that every migrant production necessarily engages in the
debates surrounding colonialism. Rather, what I have localized is a subgenre of migration
narratives: a migrant modality of colonial creative production. These colonial-conscious
narratives of migration form together a corpus that is mediated by their shared thematic
propensity to think through colonization, migration, and labor. This conclusion may then better
inform my original questions, and perhaps clear the path for more lines of inquiry: can we then
say that these "colonial ventures" constitute or represent a body of migrant texts that
transnationally bypasses rigid national categorizations and static identity? How, after
identification of these colonial aesthetic motifs, can we understand the very notions of aesthetics
and even of discourse themselves? How then might this understanding inform our critical eye
when engaging with the issues faced by our contemporary society in the domain of migration,
and with the role of the arts in these contexts?
A Cross-national Identarian (Sub)genre
The investigative basis of Colonial Ventures was rooted in an interest in Québec Studies,
using the roman de la terre as a conceptual springboard for the analyses that followed it; because
of this, a connection to Québec remains an undeniable throughline that links all my objects of
study. However, what becomes clear is that Colonial Ventures brought together productions by
authors with connections not just to la belle province or the rest of Canada, but also to a plethora
of national contexts, such as those of France, the United States, Mainland China, Vietnam, and
Haiti. In addition, as my analyses demonstrate, artists of my study often demonstrate a fraught
relationship with the act of national identification. The writers of the roman de la terre as well as
Conclusion
219

Québécois author Jacques Poulin—the latter studied in Chapter Three—explore what it means to
abstract national identity through the material exploitation and settlement of land. The Innu
writers I examine in Chapter Two resist identification with the colonizer’s demonyms, asserting
their identity as First Peoples. Across the chapters of Part Two, Jack Kerouac and Kim Thuy
question what it means to assume a new national identity as members of immigrant communities.
Finally, my analysis of Ying Chen, Dany Laferrière, and Rodney Saint-Éloi contends that these
writers seem to reject the notion of nation all together, questioning rather the possibility for a
transnational, continental inclusivity. Reminiscently, in his introduction to a volume of essays on
the migration literatures of marginalized peoples, historian Andor Skotnes (Benmayor and
Skotnes 2017, 6) remarks that all the essays, “include stories of cultural and ethnic tension
related to the contradiction between the reality of migration and the myth of the nation-state.”
Likewise, I find that the artists of my study do just that, in common with other transnational and
migration narratives: negotiate the sense of identity and nation (White 2002, 2).
Therefore, while I acknowledge that the artists I study participate in articulations of
identity, it is important to note that they do not also do so just to affirm their membership in a
particular national or linguistic community. In such, despite the fact that all the artists I study
bear a link to Québec, they do not categorically and one-dimensionally see themselves as
Québécois, French-Canadian, or even Francophone. For this reason, their forced integration into
the Québec literary tradition can be imperial and unstable if done so on the basis of authorial
identity. Undeniably, there is one prominent Québec element that is common to all the creative
works in this study: their locale of reception. While I do not reject the plausibility of grouping
productions on the premise of artistic consumption, one of the objectives of my study is to
interrogate if there are more productive ways to categorize these works in a way that also
Conclusion
220

respects the author’s identarian philosophies. In this regard, the notion of the transnational
proves its utility, time after time throughout my analyses, in suturing together these diverse
creative pieces. As I have stated earlier in Chapter Four, transnational in the context of Colonial
Ventures could be understood many ways that not just include the cross-border migrant
tendencies of the authors, but also their convergent aesthetic practices that transcend nations. In
other words, what I hoped to accomplish was to propose an alternative transnational
categorization that focuses on their shared thematic attributes: their aesthetic and discursive
propensities to level the concepts of migration, colonization, and labor. What my corpus reveals
is a veritable transcolonial aesthetic—as conceptualized by cultural critics Françoise Lionnet and
Shu-Mei Shih (2005, 11) —that represents a "shared, though differentiated, experience of
colonialism” across several geographical contexts. This transcolonial aesthetic creatively
mobilizes migrancy and labor to represent colonialism in order to defend it or critique it,
sometimes doing both at once. These three connected themes are mobilized by the artists to
destabilize national boundaries, expanding them or doing away with them all together. This
transcoloniality of aesthetic practices approximates Québec with the United States and the rest of
the continent, demonstrating the colonial links that connect their peoples and narratives, and
revealing the scope of this boundless phenomenon in the Americas. By doing so, it denied the
U.S. of any purported monopoly that it has in the domain of migrant productions, showing that
other literary traditions and creative trends also participate in the narrativization of migrancy, as
well as in other convergent aesthetic modes. In the wake of this decentering, geopolitical
boundaries, fixed conceptions of national identity, U.S. exceptionalism, and other colonial
attitudes/ideological constructs are all discursively and aesthetically destabilized and
undermined. Effectively, this transcolonial aesthetic modality is another piece of evidence of
Conclusion
221

how exactly transnational discourse can engage in colonial critique (Mao and Walkowitz 2008,
123), imagining connections and even new solidarities amongst different colonized groups across
the world. What my studies demonstrate in particular, is that this transnational and transcolonial
critique, and their derived aesthetics, function because of the inextricability of migration and
colonialism, which reflects the tendencies of imperial projects that manipulate their migrant
subjects in multinational locales.
Colonial Ventures barely covers a single node of this transcolonial aesthetic; future
studies will do well to study the triple colonial tropes of migration, colonialism, and labor as they
appear elsewhere in the continent and in the world. Surely, similar narrative and aesthetic
propensities can be revealed from creative producers and storytellers across the world,
solidifying my findings on the status of colonial thought in migration literature—as I suggested
in the end of Chapter Four, when I referenced José Marti’s “Nuestra America” from the Cuban
context. Doing so will reaffirm the broad transnational scope of colonial aesthetics and discourse
that permeates numerous bodies of literature across the world in our postcolonial and neocolonial
era.
A Poetics of Colonial Discourse
What is warranted now, is a clarification of my findings and their rapport with what I
regard as poetics, as well as with this concept’s relation to aesthetics and discourse. Earlier, I
evoked what I conceived as a poetics of colonization and labor that is prevalent in migration
narratives. Understanding poetics as the theorization of literary form—or, the organization of a
literary production (Genette 2005, 14)—what I did in this project, is effectively expand this
construct beyond the confines of literature into narratives tout court. Colonial Ventures was
preoccupied with how migration narratives, no matter the medium, are formally organized in a
Conclusion
222

way to represent colonization and labor. Therefore, despite the general apprehension in
postcolonial studies toward narratology—which has a tendency of reinforcing Eurocentric
aesthetic patterns in its objective to study the mechanics of a particular narrative—I find myself
agreeing with literary scholar Sandra Heinen (2021, 26) who argues that this subdiscipline
remains useful in linking the textual strategies of (post)colonial novels. Effectively, by
concentrating on a broad notion of narrative, I was able to reveal that transnational convergence
of common authorial tendencies from different locales, and by artists of different social statuses.
Furthermore, as Heinen asserts, narratives, “are works of art, not because they leave politics
aside, but they use complex literary means to give expression to a large variety of topics.” Her
assertion reminds us that just because (post)colonial creative productions are inherently engaged
in a particular political stance, this does not discount the fact that they are still creative
productions, and therefore can be studied as such and, by extension, be compared with other
narrative works. Colonial Ventures revealed in fact the inseparability of political and cultural
concepts—like colonialism, migration, and labor—from aesthetics, as these former theoretical
constructs are articulated by artists and other thinkers through the means of narrative and poetic
form.
In effect, my project strove to not be a simple superficial reading of form which neglects
thematic content—this supposed antithesis of form and aesthetics (Adorno 2015, 1–15).
162
My
analyses revealed how depictions of colonization, migration, and labor are mobilized to support
its discourse. These depictions are revealed to possesses an inherent political position vis-à-vis
colonialism and its many avatars (settler colonialism, internal colonialism) and negative forms

162
This opposition is explored by the likes of critical theorist Theodor Adorno in the first chapter of his title,
Aesthetic Theory. In this introductory chapter, Adorno argues the inseparability of aesthetics from social reality,
critiquing the treatment of art in uniquely formalistic terms.
Conclusion
223

(anti-colonialism). The imbrication of representation and thematic content indicates here yet
another way of how aesthetics cannot be divorced from social experience. The conceptualization
of colonialism implicates the manipulation of aesthetic formulations of colonialism, an act that
constitutes a socially engaged, and by extension political and philosophical, posture—an
important criterion that characterizes colonial narratives as a (sub)generic category. This
manipulation is revelatory of the power of narratives in general—of its ability to aesthetically
render discourse into an idealized, consumable form for audiences.
In this context, narrative—an encapsulation of both aesthetic and critical thematic
content—therefore engages with what I mentioned in previous chapters as the "migrant
discourse": with the debates that surround the movements of people in our contemporary time.
Colonial Ventures revealed both how colonial discourses functioned as migrant discourses (like
in the roman de la terre) and how migrant discourses today are formed and conditioned by
longstanding colonial attitudes, ideology, imaginaries, and undertakings. These discourses are
excavated from representations, images, and types, reminding us of the function of colonial
migrant aesthetics: to creatively represent colonialism and migration, in either a good or bad
light, to influence the artistic consumer’s opinion of this phenomenon. These discourses
therefore not only tap into the social imaginary (Taylor 2004, 23), but also contributes to its
reordering by evoking and reworking its longstanding myths and figures through the production
and dissemination of narratives to influence the masses. It is perhaps this lens that will allow us
to elucidate the myriad evocations and representations of migration, labor, and colonialism that
exist not just in literary and other creative productions, but also in narratives circulating in the
mediatic sphere and political discourse.

Conclusion
224

COLONIAL STRUCTURE, MIGRATION, AND IMMIGRATION
My findings do not imply that all migration should be regarded as a form of colonialism.
Congruently, I do not argue that all migrants and laborers in Francophone North America be
considered categorically as settlers or colonists. What is clear from my analysis is that it is
difficult to make any generalizations about migrants as they appear among a variety of distinct
positionalities. Colonizers, colonized, and others all undertake movement, though with differing
purposes and under different circumstances. Beyond the singularity of their experiences, what I
want to acknowledge in my analyses is their propensity to commentate colonization and labor,
precisely because of their peculiar socio-geographic context.
Nonetheless, because of this, it is important to discern the relationship of these migrant
actors and their relationship with the colonial structure that parametrizes this space. In particular,
it is important to address the position of these immigrant others—these migrants who do not fit
neatly in the category of colonizer or colonized. In the narratives I examine, colonizers (such as
Canadien settlers and their descendants) and colonized subjects (the Innu, Haitian immigrants)
engage in critiques of colonization because of their entanglement in such projects. However,
what are we to make of the status of immigrants in these locales and of their complicated
relationship with both colonizers and colonized in their new homes?
The scholarly debate on this issue is not short of perspectives. Geographer Adam J
Barker, for example, in a study of “The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism,”
notably states that, “like [Albert] Memmi, I do not distinguish between Settlers born in Settler
states and immigrants who intentionally come to occupy Indigenous territories (2009, 329),”
which implies the complicity of new immigrants in the settler-colonial appropriation of
Indigenous land. Literary scholar Iyko Day (2016, 24) offers a nuanced elaboration; while
Conclusion
225

recognizing that migrants form a broad spectrum of groups (including slaves whose migration to
this land was violently coerced, as well as Asian settlers who participate in the colonial regime in
places such as Hawaii), Day argues, that “for slaves and racialized migrants, the degree of forced
or voluntary migration or level of complicity with the settler state is ultimately secondary to their
subordination under a settler colonial mode of production driven by the proprietorial logics of
whiteness.” Following Day, I emphasize not so much the intentionality of certain forms of
migration and its integration in colonial policies but rather, the fact that distinct forms of
migration do arise from colonial conditions. Furthermore, my findings do not deny that
immigrants to the Americas may participate in colonial and quasi-colonial schemes; such is
evident when considering the history of Québec’s promotion of (im)migration to further its
settler-colonial objectives in contemporary times. Instead, my project shows that some of these
immigrants do not uncritically commentate and represent colonialism, but, through their
positions in society as cultural producers, lambast the problematics of imperialist attitudes. If
they are seen as complicit in colonial schemes, their critical tendency may perhaps be thought of
one redeeming factor of their migration—this tendency to imagine an inclusivity for all, while
being skeptical of colonialism.
Even though migrants cannot be conceptualized as colonists simply because of their
migrancy, it is still necessary to recognize the ascendance of their migration to historic colonial
migrant patterns. Yet, what seems to me to be of paramount importance is their own critical
engagement with this phenomenon and their desire to remedy its defaults. The effectiveness of
this stance, however, does warrant further scrutiny in order to determine the coherence and
integrity of such posturing and activism, especially given today’s political climate and the
prevalent narratives surrounding migration in our public discourse.
Conclusion
226

THE COLONIAL RANGE TODAY
During summer of 2022, leading up to the October provincial parliamentary elections,
the Coalition Avenir Québec, with premier François Legault still at its head, was readily poised
to form another government—and which it did the autumn of that year (“Quebec Spotlight:
Governing CAQ Hold Comfortable Lead, One-in-Five Each Support Liberals and
Conservatives” 2022).
163
Once again, during that new campaign season, the issue of immigration
was thrusted onto centerstage. Campaigning on a promise to negotiate with the federal
government for more powers over immigration, Legault yet again stirred controversy. “La
maîtrise de l’immigration, ‘une question de survie’, dit Legault," blares one headline in Le
Devoir, an article that recounts the premier’s contentious warning of the imminent
“Louisianization”—or, assimilation of Francophones into Anglophone culture—of Québec, if it
should not have more control over immigration [read: the restriction of immigration at its current
level] (Bélair-Cirino 2022; The Canadian Press 2022).
164
Immediately, Legault’s comments
garnered an array of criticism, with members of the opposition claiming he is distracting from
more realistic issues such as housing and the labor shortage (Robillard 2022),
165
and with
historians claiming that Québec’s position is nowhere close to that of Louisiana, the latter never
having instated French as an official language or as a language of instruction.
166
Nonetheless,

163
In a poll dated July 5th, 2022, the CAQ was forecasted to obtain a 35% plurality of the vote intention. This is
despite a dwindling metric of people who deem that the provincial government is doing “a good job,” from
September 2019 to June 2022.
164
According to an article from the Canadian Press, Legault stated that under the current system, Québec selects
around half of its immigrants, while the rest is decided by the federal government; the premier explains that the
province mainly chooses economic migrants who speak French while the Federal tends to select refugees and family
members of Canadians—the latter two groups less likely to be Francophone.
165
The previously mentioned Canadian Press article remarks the Legault himself admitted that his incendiary
comments were intended to spark debate.
166
The Canadian Press cites historian Louis-Georges Harvey, who, while he acknowledges the dwindling of French
in particular in Montréal, believes the threat of Louisianization is overstated.
Conclusion
227

Legault stood by his comments, citing the lowering percentages of those who use French in the
household and in the workplace, which thus indicate the need to maintain mastery over the
province’s own immigrant inflows.
In this concluding chapter, Legault’s comments should sound familiar, and not only
because of his rhetoric in the 2018 election (described in the introduction of Colonial Ventures),
during which the premier delineates a colonial threat of assimilation and acculturation into the
Anglophone world, whose remedy is the seizure of the means to manipulate migration. In the
past, this ordering of migration manifested as the Canadien colonization of the province’s North,
or the invitation of a workforce composed of Francophone former colonial subjects from
elsewhere; however, now it figures as a limitation of undesirable immigrants in an attempt to
preserve national identity and prevent so-called cultural eradication. Despite this nuance, this
much becomes clear: the ordering of migration and labor continues to constitute a prevalent
element/aspect of (anti-)colonial struggle. There is no denying the threat of assimilation that
Francophone Québecers historically faced and continue to face. However, Legault’s comments
now raise the question how such anti-colonial resistance may take the form of sensationalism
and, even worse, xenophobia towards those with diminishing social capital in Québec: non-
Francophone inhabitants of this land, or even those who do not fit the conventional mold of
Quebecness—such as peoples of Indigenous First Nations; and non-whites described in Kim
Thuy’s text who are subjected to racist White exceptionalist conceptions of québécité. The
confrontation of all of these challenges today is the reason for which my corpus of primary
sources warrants continuous study—not only to understand the history and cultural milieu that
gave way to current social conditions, but also to problematize and critique neocolonial policies,
statements, and attitudes towards migrants that newly arise each day.
Conclusion
228

That is perhaps one of the blind spots of my analysis that can be absolved with further
study. In the end, my strict focus on those who are French speaking inevitably, and
unfortunately, left aside the existence of non-Francophones who very much live in the confines
of Francophone North America. It is apparent that these populations also play a significant part
in the migratory circuits of this continent and as such, they and their stories deserve to be
investigated. Furthermore, across the world, refugee and other migrant crises rages on,
exacerbated now almost everywhere in the world by events such as the reascension of the
Taliban in Afghanistan, unrest in Haiti, the suppression of civil liberties in Hong Kong, and the
war in Ukraine. At the same time, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric remains rampant as
demagogues continue to seek the restriction of borders. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to
direct a critical, inundative, perspective towards migrant discourses wherever they appear, not
just in the political domain and its structures, but also the scientific, mediatic, and creative
spheres that support it. The study of literature and cultural production thus becomes
indispensable, not just because of the necessity to excavate migration narratives in the domain of
arts and media, but also because of this scholarly practice’s cultivation of critical thought, with
which one may engage with the public discourse in our contemporary migrant age.

BUT WHAT OF LITERATURE AND ART?
In her essay “Lire la literature québécoise pour pouvoir imaginer demain," literary
scholar Miriam Suchet underlines what she calls, “l’extension de nous” as one of the principal
issues that “Québec Literatures” might help us reimagine.
167
According to her, because of the

167
Other than this supposed extension of the sense of “us,” she also identifies, “la fabrique de la ‘langue,’… le
branchement recherche-action-création, et l’invention de formats inédits de production comme de moyens de
circulation de l’objet livre," as other principal areas to which literature opens new paths of thought (408).
Conclusion
229

tendency of current authors from Québec to negotiate their sense of national identity, it is then
possible that, “les littératures offrent d’autres manières de se raconter qui puisent non pas dans
un passé idéalisé, mais dans un futur encore à inventer ensemble (Suchet 2017, 401).” Suchet’s
proposition underlines an important aspect of the productions in this study, that I would argue is
not just reserved to literature, or writing, but is also true for these migrant creative productions
and narratives—a trait we saw in many of the productions of my study, but particularly so in
Chapter Four. By drawing similarities through my diverse primary sources, not only have I
blurred the line that supposedly separates different national literatures as well as authors from
different places, but also those demarcations that divide genres from other genres, and mediums
from other mediums. By doing so, I revealed interconnections between dissimilar works, which
in the end elucidated their socio-political underpinnings and conceptual ranges. This “nous,”
symbolized perhaps by my varied corpus, shows not only their interrelation, but also the
complexity of their circumstances. This complexity extends to that very practice I sought to
analyze: migration. Ultimately, this is what my investigation strives to achieve: to acknowledge
migrants and their complicated place in the world that we share, giving the stories of those
without a voice or much visibility an opportunity to exist and be heard; and to imagine for us all
a new and inclusive tomorrow.

Bibliography
230

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achille, Etienne, and Lydie Moudileno. 2018. Mythologies Postcoloniales : Pour Une
Décolonisation Du Quotidien. Paris: Honoré Champion.

Adam J. Barker. 2009. “The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism: Settler Colonialism
and the Hybrid Colonial State.” The American Indian Quarterly 33 (3): 325–51.
https://doi.org/10.1353/aiq.0.0054.

Adamo, Christopher. 2012. “Beat U-Topos or Taking Utopia on the Road: The Case of Jack
Kerouac.” In The Philosophy of the Beats, edited by Sharin N. Elkholy, 33–46.
University Press of Kentucky. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcg6d.6.

Adorno, Theodor W. 2015. Aesthetic Theory. Eighth printing. Theory and History of Literature;
v. 88. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univ of Minnesota Pr.

Althusser, Louis. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review
Pr.

Archambault, Sylvain, dir. 2016. “Les Pays d’En Haut.” DVD. ICI Radio-Canada Télé.

archivesRC, dir. 2022. Entrevue En Français Avec Jack Kerouac En 1967.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ij8dao3Kaw.

Assiniwi, Bernard. 1996. La saga des Béothuks. Montréal: Leméac.

Audre Lorde. 2007. Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press Feminist Series.
Berkeley: Crossing Press.

Bauböck, Rainer. 2003. “Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism.” The
International Migration Review 37 (3): 700–723. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-
7379.2003.tb00155.x.

Bélair-Cirino, Marco. 2022. “La maîtrise de l’immigration, «une question de survie», dit
Legault.” Le Devoir, May 30, 2022.
https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/716580/la-maitrise-de-l-immigration-est-une-
question-de-survie-pour-notre-nation-selon-legault.

Bélair-Cirino, Marco, and Marie-Michèle Sioui. 2018. “Test de valeurs: il faudrait être de
«mauvaise foi» pour échouer, plaide François Legault.” Le Devoir, September 14, 2018.
https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/536817/test-de-valeurs-il-faudrait-etre-de-
mauvaise-foi-pour-echouer-plaide-francois-legault.

Benmayor, Rita, and Andor Skotnes. 2017. “Some Reflections on Migration and Identity.” In
Migration and Identity, 1–18. Routledge.

Bibliography
231

Blauner, Robert. 1987. “Colonized and Immigrant Minorities.” In From Different Shores:
Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, 149–60. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Boudreau, Diane. 1993. Histoire de la littérature amérindienne au Québec : oralité et écriture :
essai. Montréal: L’Hexagone.

Brière, Eloise. 2005. “Quebec and France: La Francophonie in a Comparative Postcolonial
Frame.” In Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, 151–74. Gainesville:
UP of Florida.

Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language,
Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books.

Carrière, Marie J., and Catherine Khordoc, eds. 2008. Migrance comparée: les littératures du
Canada et du Québec / Comparing migration : the literatures of Canada and Québec.
Littératures de langue française ; v. 5. Bern; New York: Peter Lang.

Cavanagh, Edward. 2014. “Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France, 1600–1663:
Debunking a ‘Juridical History’ and Revisiting Terra Nullius.” Law and History Review
32 (1): 97–125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248013000679.

Chapman, Rosemary. 2000. Siting the Quebec Novel: The Representation of Space in
Francophone Writing in Quebec. Oxford ; New York: Peter Lang.

Chassay, Jean-François. 2017. “L’américanité: The Next Generation.” In Que Devient La
Littérature Québécoise? : Formes et Enjeux Des Pratiques Narratives Depuis 1990.
Montréal: Nota Bene.

Chen, Ying. 1992. La mémoire de l’eau. Montréal: Leméac.
———. 1993. Les Lettres chinoises. Montréal: Leméac.
———. 1995. L’ingratitude. Montréal: Leméac.
———. 1998. Immobile. Montréal: Boréal.
———. 2002. Le champ dans la mer. Montréal: Boréal.

Chuan, Alvin Y. 2021. “The Returns of the Roman de La Terre: Défricheurs and Other Migrants
in the Canadien Colonial Imaginary.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
25 (3): 287–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2021.1909362.

Clark, Bruce. 1990. Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty: The Existing Aboriginal Right of Self-
Government in Canada. McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies ; v.4.
Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP.

Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. 2016. “Avant-Propos : Les Travaux de Jean-Louis Kérouac.” In La
Vie Est d’hommage, by Jack Kerouac, 9–48. Montréal: Boréal.

Bibliography
232

Coulibaly, Adama, and Yao Louis Konan. 2015. Les écritures migrantes : de l’exil à la migrance
littéraire dans le roman francophone. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota P.

Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. 2008. “Treaty Texts - Treaty No. 9.”
Agreement. November 3, 2008.
https://www.cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028863/1581293189896.

Crumbley, Paul. 2019. “Being Beat: The Stern Reality of London’s Tramp Diary and Kerouac’s
Road.” Studies in American Naturalism 14 (1): 32–55.

Dahab, F. Elizabeth. 2009. Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature.
Lexington Books.

Day, Iyko. 2016. Alien Capital: Asian Raciailization and the Logic of Settler Colonial
Capitalism. Durham and London: Duke UP.

Deitz, Ritt. 1991. “Au Bord de l’américanité : La Fonction Du Voyage Dans Volkswagen Blues
de Jacques Poulin.” Iris V (2): 87–93.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2013. Mille plateaux. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Capitalisme et
schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit.

Derrida, Jacques. 2016. Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre. Paris: Galilée.

Desbiens, Caroline. 2013. Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of
Hydroelectricity in Quebec. Nature, History, Society. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Deschamps, Nicole. 1980. “Avant-Propos.” In Le Mythe de Maria Chapdelaine. Montréal: P de
l’Université de Montréal.
———. 1988. “Avant-Propos.” In Maria Chapdelaine, by Louis Hémon. Boréal.

Deschamps, Nicole, Raymonde Héroux, and Norman Villeneuve. 1980. Le Mythe de Maria
Chapdelaine. Montréal: Pr de l’Université de Montréal.

“Développement social.” 2014. Government. Plan Nord. 2014.
https://plannord.gouv.qc.ca/fr/priorites-daction/dev-mieux-etre-commu/.

Dion, Robert, and Andrée Mercier, eds. 2017. Que Devient La Littéature Québécoise : Formes et
Enjeux Des Pratiques Narratives Depuis 1990. Montréal: Nota Bene.

D’Orsi, Annalisa. 2013. “Conservation et Innovation: Les Articulations Contemporaines de La
Tradition Innue.” Recherches Amérindiennes Au Québec 43 (1): 69-85,120-122.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1024475ar.
Bibliography
233

Doyle, Laura. 2009. “Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism.” Journal of Transnational
American Studies 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.5070/T811006941.

Edwards, Adrian. 2017. “Forced Displacement Worldwide at Its Highest in Decades.” Nonprofit
Organization Homepage. United Nations High Commisionner for Refugees. June 19,
2017. https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2017/6/5941561f4/forced-displacement-
worldwide-its-highest-decades.html.

“En Région.” 2019. In Banque de Dépannage Linguistique. Office québécois de la langue
française. http://bdl.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/bdl/gabarit_bdl.asp?id=3424.

Encarnacion-Pinedo, Estibaliz. 2022. “Ethnicity and Gender in the Beat Generation: Jack
Kerouac and the Other Woman.” International Journal of English Studies 22 (1): 1–22.
https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.477981.

Falardeau, Pierre, and Julien Poulin, dirs. 1985. Elvis Gratton: Le King Des Kings. Comedy,
Music. Association Coopérative des Productions Audio-Visuelles (ACPAV).

Fontaine, Naomi. 2011. Kuessipan : à toi. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier.
———. 2017. Manikanetish : Petite Marguerite. Montréal: Mémoire d’Encrier.
———. 2019a. “Préface de Naomi Fontaine.” In Je Suis Une Maudite Sauvagesse / Eukuan Nin
Matshi-Manitu Innushkueu, by An Antane Kapesh, translated by José Mailhot. Montréal,
Québec: Mémoire d’encrier.
———. 2019b. Shuni : Ce que tu dois savoir, Julie. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier.

Forsberg, Jennifer H. 2017. “‘A Jack-of-All-Trades’: Jack Kerouac’s Fashionable Practice of
Working-Class Drag.” The Journal of Popular Culture 50 (6): 1213–29.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12618.

Fortin, Gérard L. Fortin, and Jacques Frenette. 1989. “L’acte de 1851 et La Création de
Nouvelles Réserves Indiennes Au Bas-Canada En 1853.” Recherches Amérindiennes Au
Québec XIX (1): 31–37.

Freitag, Florian. 2013. The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United
States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945. European Studies in North
American Literature and Culture. Rochester: Camden House.

Ganser, Alexandra. 2006. “On the Asphalt Frontier: American Women’s Road Narratives,
Spatiality, and Transgression.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 7 (4): 153–67.

Gatti, Maurizio. 2006. Être écrivain amérindien au Québec : indianité et création littéraire.
Montréal: Hurtubise HMH.

Gauvin, Lise. 2000. Langagement: L’écrivain et La Langue Au Québec. Montréal: Boréal.

Genette, Gérard. 2005. Essays in Aesthetics. Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska P.
Bibliography
234

Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine. 1862. Jean Rivard, Le Défricheur Suivi de Jean Rivard, Économiste.
Montréal: Boréal.

Germain, Georges-Hébert, and Jean-Pierre Hardy. 2007. Les coureurs des bois - La saga des
indiens blancs. Montréal: Libre Expression.

Gervais, Lisa-Marie. 2017. “Québec Rouvre Des Bureaux d’immigration Dans Les Régions | Le
Devoir.” December 6, 2017. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/514746/forum-
sur-l-immigration.

Gillman, Susan, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz. 2011. “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-
Network.” In A Companion to American Literary Studies, 228–47. John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444343809.ch14.

Girardcatherine. 2012. “Plan Nord: une main-d’oeuvre qui n’a pas froid aux yeux.” Journal
Métro (blog). April 10, 2012. https://journalmetro.com/carrieres/54627/plan-nord-une-
main-doeuvre-qui-na-pas-froid-aux-yeux/.

Gosnell, Jonathan. 2018. “Le Base Ball, Assimilation, and Ethnic Identity.” Quebec Studies 66:
49–75.

Goulet, Henri. 2016. Histoire Des Pensionnats Indiens Catholiques Au Québec: Le Rôle
Déterminant Des Pères Oblats. Montréal: P de l’Université de Montréal.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv69t826.

Government of Québec. 2015. Le Plan Nord à l’horizon 2035: Plan d’action 2015-2020.
https://www.deslibris.ca/ID/246446.

Grace, Nancy M., and Jennie Skerl. 2012. “Introduction: Transnational Beat.” In The
Transnational Beat Generation, 1–11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gravel, Alain. 2017. “L’exode des Québécois vers d’autres provinces préoccupe.” ICI Radio-
Canada, December 2017. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/gravel-le-
matin/segments/entrevue/50001/quebecois-canada-francophone-autre-province.

Grégoire, Tania. 2020. “BIBLIOGRAPHIE DE JACQUES POULIN.” Voix et Images 45 (2):
107–35. https://doi.org/10.7202/1069514ar.

Grignon, Claude-Henri. 1933. Un homme et son péché: les belles histoires des pays d’en haut.
Outremont: 10/10.

Hamelin, Jean, ed. 1978. Histoire Du Québec. Montréal: France-Amérique.

Hamelin, Jean, and Yves Roby. 1971. Histoire Économique Du Québec : 1851 - 1896. Montréal:
Fides.

Bibliography
235

Hamley, Will. 1993. “Native Land Claims in Quebec Considered in a Canadian Context.”
Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 75 (2): 93–109.
https://doi.org/10.2307/490702.

Harel, Simon. 2005. Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante. Montréal: XYZ.

Heinen, Sandra. 2021. “On Postcolonial Narratology and Reading Postcolonial Literature
Narratologically.” DIEGESIS 10 (1). https://www.diegesis.uni-
wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/416.

Hémon, Louis. 1911. Maria Chapdelaine. Montréal: Boréal.

Henzi, Sarah. 2016. “« La grande blessure »: Legs du système des pensionnats dans l’écriture et
le film autochtones au Québec.” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec; Montréal 46
(2/3): 177–82. https://doi.org/10.7202/1040445ar.

Higginson, Kate. 2008. “(Re)Settlement Begets Displacement: Testifying to the Coereced
Migration of First Nations Peoples.” In Migrance Comparée / Comparing Migration,
251–70. Bern: Peter Lang.

Holton, Robert. 2004. “‘The Sordid Hipsters of America’: Beat Culture and the Folds of
Heterogeneity.” In Reconstructing the Beats, edited by Jennie Skerl, 11–26. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982100_2.

Huberman, Isabella. 2016. “Les possibles de l’amour décolonial : relations, transmissions et
silences dans Kuessipan de Naomi Fontaine.” Voix Plurielles 13 (2): 111–26.
https://doi.org/10.26522/vp.v13i2.1441.

Hunt, Tim, and Ann Charters. 2010. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.

Hyman, Roger. 1999. “Writing against Knowing, Writing against Certainty; or What’s Really
under the Veranda in Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues.” Journal of Canadian Studies
34 (3): 106–33.

Ina.fr, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel-. 1976. “Joe Dassin ‘L’Amérique.’” Ina.fr. 1976.
http://www.ina.fr/video/I05057956.

Ivančič, Nejc Rožman. 2019. “The The Image of a Woman of Colour and Native American
Woman in Two Kerouac Novels: A Double Otherness.” ELOPE 16 (2): 117–33.
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.16.2.117-133.

J.A Cuddon. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin
Books. http://archive.org/details/penguindictionar00cudd.

Bibliography
236

Jay, Paul. 2014. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. 1st ed. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.

Johnson, Joyce. 2012. The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. New York: Viking.

Johnson, Ronna C. 2012. “Beat Transnationalism under Gender: Brenda Frazer’s Troia: Mexican
Memoir.” In The Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie
Skerl, 51–66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kapesh, An Antane. 1976. Je suis une maudite sauvagesse / Eukuan nin matshi-manitu
innushkueu. Edited by Naomi Fontaine. Translated by José Mailhot. Montréal: Mémoire
d’encrier.
———. 1979. Qu’as-tu fait de mon pays? Montréal: Editions Impossibles.

Kerouac, Jack. 1999. On the Road. Penguin Books.
———. 2016. La Vie est d’hommage. Edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. Montréal: Boréal.

Khordoc, Catherine. 2016. “Traversing the Borders of Écriture Migrante and Transnational
Writing in Québec.” CLCWeb 18 (4). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2910.

Killick, Rachel. 2006. “In the Fold? Postcolonialism and Quebec.” Romance Studies 24 (3): 181–
92.

Kirsch, Fritz Peter. 2008. “French-Canadian Literature from National Solidarity to the École
Littéraire de Montréal.” In History of Literature in Canada, edited by Reingard M.
Nischik, 127–46. Nischik, Reingard M. Boydell & Brewer, Camden House.

Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

La Presse Canadienne. 2015. “Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse Sera La Nouvelle Donalda Dans ‘Un
Homme et Son Péché,’” April 28, 2015.

Lackey, Kris. 1999. Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative. Omaha: Univ of Nebraska
Pr.

Lacombe, Patrice. 1846. La Terre Paternelle. Bibliothèque électronique du Québec.

Laferrière, Dany. 2002. Comment Faire l’amour Avec Un Nègre sans Se Fatiguer. Montréal:
Typo.
———. 2004. Comment Conquérir l’Amérique En Une Nuit. Outremont: Lanctôt.

Lanteigne, Mathieu. 2011. “Bibliographie de Dany Laferrière.” Voix et Images 36 (2): 93.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1002445ar.

Bibliography
237

Lapointe, Jean-Pierre. 1989. “Sur la piste américaine : le statut des références littéraires dans
l’oeuvre de Jacques Poulin.” Voix et Images 15 (1): 15–27.
https://doi.org/10.7202/200812ar.

Larson, Lars Erik. 2009. “Literary Criticism’s Road Scholars at the American Century’s Turn.”
Literature Compass 6 (6): 1071–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00659.x.

Larue, Monique. 1996. L’arpenteur et Le Navigateur. Saint-Laurent: Fides.

Léger, Marie, and Anahi Morales Hudon. 2017. “Femmes autochtones en mouvement :
fragments de décolonisation.” Recherches féministes 30 (1): 3–13.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1040971ar.

Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. 2011. “Introduction.” In A Companion to American
Literary Studies, 1–11. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444343809.ch.

Lévesque, Kathleen. 2011. “Plan Nord - La résistance innue s’organise.” Le Devoir, June 2,
2011. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/324594/plan-nord-la-resistance-innue-
s-organise.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shumei Shi. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. E-Duke Books Scholarly
Collection. Durham: Duke UP. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386643.

Loco Locass. 2004. Résistence. CD. Montréal: Audiogram.

Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Third edition. The New Critical Idiom.
London: Routledge.

Louder, Dean R, and Éric Waddell. 2017. Franco-Amérique. Nouvelle édition revue et
augmentée. Québec: Septentrion.

Macfarlane, Heather. 2010. “Pour Une Autochritique Amérindienne: Le Fantastique de Bernard
Assiniwi et l’étude Des Genres.” In Littératures Autochtones, edited by Maurizio Gatti
and Louis-Jacques Dorais, 193–205. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier.

Mailhot, Amélie-Anne. 2017. “La perspective de l’habitation politique dans Je suis une maudite
sauvagesse/ Eukuan nin matshimanitu innu-iskueu d’An Antane Kapesh.” Recherches
Feministes; Québec 30 (1): 29–45. https://doi.org/10.7202/1040973ar.

Major, Robert. 1996. The American Dream in Nineteenth-Century Quebec: Ideologies and
Utopia in Antoine Gerin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard. Toronto: Univ of Toronto Pr.

Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. 2008. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123 (3):
737–48. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.737.
Bibliography
238

Martínez Guillem, Susana. 2015. “Migration Discourse.” In The International Encyclopedia of
Language and Social Interaction, edited by Karen Tracy, Cornelia Ilie, and Todd Sandel,
First Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois.

Melehy, Hassan. 2012. “Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile.” In The
Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl, 31–50. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2016. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Memmi, Albert. 1985. Portrait Du Colonisé, Précédé de Portrait Du Colonisateur et d’une
Préface de Jean Paul Sartre. Saint-Amand: Gallimard.

“Migration, n.” n.d. In OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed June 7, 2022.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118324.

Mika, Kasia. 2014. “Histories of the Past, Histories for the Future: Representing the Past and
Writing for the Future in Rodney Saint-Éloi’s ‘Haïti, Kenbe La!’” Journal of Haitian
Studies 20 (2): 4–19.

Miller, Christopher L. 2008. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave
Trade. North Carolina: Duke UP.

Miraglia, Anne-Marie. 2000. “Dany Laferrière, l’identité Culturelle et l’intertexte Afro-
Américain.” Présence Francophone 54: 121–39.

Morency, Jean. 1994. Le mythe américain dans les fictions d’Amérique. Montréal: Nota Bene.

Morency, Jean, and Jimmy Thibeault. 2011. “Dany Laferrière : la traversée du continent
intérieur.” Voix et Images 36 (2): 7–13.

Nepveu, Pierre. 1999. L’écologie Du Réel: Mort et Naissance de La Littérature Québécoise
Contemporaine: Essais. Collection “Papier Collés.” Montréal: Boréal.

Nguyen, Vinh. 2013. “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy’s
Ru.” Canadian Literature, no. 219: 17-36,203.

Nicholls, Brendon. 2003. “The Melting Pot That Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua
Franca of Jack Kerouac’s Fiction.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49 (3): 524–49.
https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2003.0053.

Noble, David W. 1998. “Anglo-Protestant Monopolization of ‘America.’” In José Martí’s “Our
America” : From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, edited by Jeffrey Belnap and
Raúl Fernández. Durham & London: Duke UP.
Bibliography
239

Noyes, John. 2004. “Nomadism, Nomadology, Postcolonialism: By Way of Introduction.”
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6:4: 159–158.

O’Neill, Angeline. 2008. “Creating a New Space: From Literary Migrants to Resistance
Writers.” In Migrance Comparée/Comparing Migration, edited by Marie Carrière and
Catherine Khordoc. Bern: Peter Lang.

Paes de Barros, Deborah. 2004. Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road
Stories. Travel Writing across the Disciplines; v. 9. New York: Peter Lang.

Papillon, Joëlle. 2016. “Apprendre et guérir: Les rapports intergénérationnels chez An Antane
Kapesh, Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau et Naomi Fontaine.” Recherches Amérindiennes
au Québec; Montréal 46 (2/3): 57-65,192-193,200-201.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1040434ar.

Parliament of Great Britain. 1828. The Constitutional Act of the Province of Lower Canada.
Robert Armour, printer to the King’s most Excellent Majesty for the District of Montreal.
https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.21241/2.

Pask, Kevin. 2009. “Late Nationalism: The Case of Québec.” In Canadian Cultural Studies: A
Reader, edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou. Duke UP.

Patriquin, Martin. 2019. “Quebec Nationalism Could Once Claim to Be Colour-and Country-
Blind. Not Anymore.” CBC, January 29, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/quebec-
nationalism-1.4996280.

Pinderhughes, Charles. 2011. “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism.” Socialism and
Democracy 25 (1): 235–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2011.559702.

Pinette, Susan. 2018. “Jack Kerouac’s French, American, and Quebecois Receptions: From
Deterritorialization to Reterritorialization.” L’Esprit Créateur 58 (4): 120–33.
https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2018.0050.

Podruchny, Carolyn. 2006. Making the Voyageur World :Travelers and Traders in the North
American Fur Trade /. Lincoln : http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31822035322197.

Porter, Isabelle. 2018. “L’immigration en région en attente d’une direction.” Le Devoir, March
31, 2018. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/524206/l-immigration-en-region-
en-attente-d-une-direction.

“Postes à Pourvoir : Postes Vacants Dans Le Secteur Privé, T4 2017 | FCEI.” n.d. Accessed
March 21, 2018. https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/fr/rapports-de-recherche/postes-pourvoir-
postes-vacants-dans-le-secteur-prive.

Poteet, Maurice. 1988. “Avant la route, le village.” Voix et Images 13 (3): 388–96.
https://doi.org/10.7202/200726ar.
Bibliography
240

Poulin, Jacques. 1984. Volkswagen blues. Montréal: Actes Sud.

Pouyez, Christian, Yolande Lavoie, and Gérard Bouchard. 1983. Les Saguenayens: Introduction
à l’histoire Des Populations Du Saguenay, XVIe-XXe Siècles. Sillery, Québec: Pr de
l’Univ du Québec.

Premat, Christophe. 2018. “Mémoire et Survivance Dans Kuessipan de Naomi Fontaine et
Comment Je Perçois La Vie, Grand-Mère de Rita Mestokosho.” Nouvelles Études
Francophones 33 (2): 91–107. https://doi.org/doi:10.1353/nef.2018.0056.

Primeau, Ronald. 1996. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway.
Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

“Quebec Spotlight: Governing CAQ Hold Comfortable Lead, One-in-Five Each Support Liberals
and Conservatives.” 2022. Angus Reid Institute (blog). July 5, 2022.
https://angusreid.org/quebec-spotlight-bill-96/.

Raja, Masood Ashraf. 2010. “Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of
Empire.” Postcolonial Text 5 (2).
https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1073.
———, dir. 2019. Postcolonial Concepts: Inundation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psh_Gdip5LY.

Ramazani, Jahan. 2006. “A Transnational Poetics.” American Literary History 18 (2): 332–59.
https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajj020.

Randall, Marilyn. 2003. “Resistance, Submission and Oppositionality: National Identity in
French Canada.” In Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. London:
Arnold.

Rangarajan, Sudarsan. 2010. “The Roman d’Aventures as a Subgenre in Maria Chapdelaine.”
The French Review 83 (4): 767–83.

Ringuet. 1938. Trente Arpents. Montréal: Bibliothèque québécoise.

Rioux, Christian. 2019. “François Legault veut davantage d’immigrants français.” Le Devoir,
January 21, 2019. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/545955/en-visite-
officielle-en-france.

Riquetti de Mirabeau, Victor. 1760. L’Ami Des Hommes. 5th ed. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Hamburg:
Chrétien Hérold.

Robert, Julie. 2017. “A Nouveau Roman de La Route: Marc Séguin’s La Foi Du Braconnier and
the Challenge of Rewriting.” Australian Journal of French Studies 54 (1): 96–109.
http://dx.doi.org.libproxy1.usc.edu/10.3828/AJFS.2017.08.

Bibliography
241

Robillard, Alexandre. 2022. “Critiqué pour ses propos sur l’immigration, Legault riposte.” Le
Devoir, May 31, 2022. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/717414/les-
oppositions-denoncent-les-propos-de-legault-sur-l-immigration.

Rodrigue, Barry. 2017. “Francophones, Pas Toujours, Mais Toujours Franco-Américains.” In
Franco-Amérique, Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 121–45. Québec: Septentrion.

Saint-Éloi, Rodney. 2013. Jacques Roche, je t’écris cette lettre. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier.
———. 2015. Je suis la fille du baobab brûlé. Montréal: Mémoire d’Encrier.
———. 2017. “L’Amérique Je Veux l’avoir.” In Franco-Amérique. Québec: Septentrion.

Saint-Martin, Lori. 2011. “Une oppression peut en cacher une autre : antiracisme et sexisme dans
Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer de Dany Laferrière.” Voix et
Images 36 (2): 53–67.

Sampson, Ximena. 2018. “La pénurie de main-d’oeuvre décortiquée | Élections Québec 2018.”
Radio-Canada.ca, September 20, 2018. https://ici.radio-
canada.ca/nouvelle/1124388/immigration-penurie-main-oeuvre-donnees.

Sapp, Robert. 2008. “Linguistic Vagabondage: The Driving Force in Jacques Poulin’s
Volkswagen Blues.” Romance Notes 48 (3): 345+.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. “Colonialism Is a System.” Interventions 3 (1): 127–40.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13698010020027074.

Scheiding, Oliver. 2019. “Worlding America and Transnational American Studies.” In The
Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. New York: Routledge.

Scholl, Dorothee. 2008. “French-Canadian Colonial Literature under the Union Jack.” In History
of Literature in Canada, edited by Reingard M. Nischik, 89–109. Boydell & Brewer,
Camden House.

Schué, Romain, and Yannick Donahue. 2018. “L’immigration sera le sujet décisif de l’élection,
juge Couillard | Élections Québec 2018.” Radio-Canada.ca, September 10, 2018.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1122852/plq-main-oeuvre-immigration-francisation-
elections-quebec.

Sing, Pamela V. 2013. “Migrance, Sensorium et Translocalité Chez Ying Chen et Kim Thúy.”
International Journal of Francophone Studies 16 (3): 281–301.
https://doi.org/10.1386/ijfs.16.3.281_1.

Sioui, Georges E. 1999. Pour une histoire amérindienne de l’Amérique. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Pr
de l’Université Laval.

Bibliography
242

Skinazi, Karen E. H. 2009. “Through Roots and Routes: On the Road’s Portrayal of an
Outsider’s Journey into the Meaning of America.” Canadian Review of American
Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines 39 (1): 85–103.
https://doi.org/10.3138/cras.39.1.85.

Slotkin, Richard. 1998. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America. Oklahoma paperbacks edition. Oklahoma Paperbacks. Norman: Univ of
Oklahoma Pr.

Suchet, Miriam. 2017. “Lire La Littérature Québécoise Pour Pouvoir Imaginer Demain.” In Que
Devient La Littérature Québécoise, edited by Robert Dion and Andrée Mercier, 387–410.
Montréal: Nota Bene.

Talbot, Emile. 2003. “Rewriting Les Lettres Chinoises: The Poetics of Erasure.” Quebec Studies
36: 83–91. https://doi.org/10.3828/qs.36.1.83.

Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Planet Books. Durham: Duke UP.

Teuton, Christopher B. 2010. Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian
Literature. Univ of Nebraska Pr. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7fmfq0.

The Canadian Press. 2022. “Quebec Is No Louisiana, Experts Say, as Premier Accused of
Stoking Immigration Fears.” Montreal, June 1, 2022, sec. Montreal.
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-is-no-louisiana-experts-say-as-premier-accused-of-
stoking-immigration-fears-1.5927313.

Thibeault, Jimmy. 2011. “« Je suis un individu »: Le projet d’individualité dans l’oeuvre
romanesque de Dany Laferrière.” Voix et Images 36 (2): 25.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1002440ar.

Thomas, Bonnie. 2018. “Rodney Saint-Éloi: Writer and Publisher of the ‘Whole-World.’” Small
Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22 (3): 28–36. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-
7249101.

Thuy, Kim. 2009. Ru. Montréal: Libre Expression.
———. 2013. Man. Montréal: Libre Expression.
———. 2016. Vi. Montréal: Libre Expression.

Ty, Eleanor, and Donald C. Goellnicht. 2009. “Introduction to Asian North American Identities:
Beyond the Hyphen.” In Asian American Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. New York:
Bloom’s Literary Criticism.

Tytell, John. 1979. “The Broken Circuit.” In On the Road: Text and Criticism, edited by Scott
Donaldson, 313–41. New York: Viking Press.

Bibliography
243

Vaillancourt, Marie-Ève. 2017. “Un héritage à habiter : lecture géopoétique de Kuessipan/ À toi
et de Puamun, le rêve, de Naomi Fontaine.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 47 (1):
25–34. https://doi.org/10.7202/1042896ar.

Van Nyhuis, Alison. 2012. “Caribbean literature, North American migration, and the American
dream.” Atenea 32 (1–2): 59–71.

Vardi, Liana. 2012. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge
UP.

Vautier, Marie. 1994. “Postmodern Myth, Post-European History, and the Figure of the
Amerindian: Francois Barcelo, George Bowering, and Jacques Poulin.” Canadian
Literature, no. 141: 15–33.

Villa, Sara. 2018. “Le Club Jack Kérouac and the Renaissance in Beat Scholarship on Kerouac’s
French Canadian Background.” Journal of Beat Studies 6: 89-108,164-165,167.

Vredenburg, Jason. 2016. “‘Solitary Bartlebies’: Kerouac’s On the Road and the
Ideology of the Superhighway.” Twentieth Century Literature 62 (2): 170–96.

Waddell, Éric, and Dean Louder. 2017. “Conceptualiser et Cartographier La Franco-Amérique:
Une Tâche Redoutable.” In Franco-Amérique. Québec: Septentrion.

Weisman, Adam Paul. 1995. “Postcolonialism in North America: Imaginative Colonization in
Henry David Thoreau’s A Yankee in Canada and Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues.”
The Massachusetts Review 36 (3): 477.

White, Paul. 2002. “Geography, Literature and Migration.” In Writing Across Worlds: Literature
and Migration, 1–19. Taylor and Francis.

Wills, Jenny Heijun. 2015. “Competing Nationalisms in Ru and La Trilogie Coréenne:
Francophone Asian Québécois Literatures.” Canadian Literature, no. 227: 75–93, 201.

Wysote, Travis, and Erin Morton. 2019. “‘The Depth of the Plough’: White Settler Tautologies
and Pioneer Lies.” Settler Colonial Studies 9 (4): 479–504.
https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2018.1541221.

Xavier, Subha. 2016. The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature. 1
edition. Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s UP.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation addresses an underrepresented area in the field of Francophone Studies in the United States: Québec and Franco-American literature and culture. Examining narratives of migration from these geographical contexts, I argue that in Québec and the Francophone U.S., the narrativization of migration is marked with a tendency to discursively reckon with colonization and labor; because of this, the aestheticization of migration is often accompanied with images of colonization and labor. To demonstrate the inextricability of these three processes, I engage with what I term migrant cultural productions—creative works of all sorts (e.g. writing, film, and televised series) that narrativize movements of people. The productions I chose to analyze each represent a particular monumental moment in the migratory history of Francophone North America from the 19th century to the present day—moments that, I show, bear ties to colonial undertakings. My analyses are grounded in current trends of scholarship in migration studies and draws from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In sum, Colonial Ventures strives to be a contribution to the expanding critical corpus that studies migration and how its transnational tendencies undermine fixed notions of nation; my project brings to this discussion the poetics of migration and labor, raising the question of their commitments and engagements with colonial power.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The world in the nation: Migration in contemporary anglophone and francophone fiction; 1980-2010

PDF

Beyond the sea that separates: francophone voices of Oceania

PDF

Tasty, comestible men: metabolic poetics in Senegal

PDF

Making global citizens: South Korean student and labor mobilities in the Global Age

PDF

The pantoum across the Pacific: the circumnavigation of a poetic form; and, Why can’t it be tenderness (poems)

PDF

Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

PDF

The breaking and remaking of everyday life: illegality, maternity and displacement in the Americas

PDF

The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

PDF

Colonial brews: café and power in the Américas

PDF

Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

PDF

The anxiety of interrupted kinship: Transpacific cultures of Korean historical trauma

PDF

Speculating backward: speculative rewritings of the past as anti-colonial protest

PDF

Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

PDF

Spaces of violence: indigenous figuration and Los Angeles colonial culture

PDF

Revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women's political texts

PDF

A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

PDF

Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

PDF

Essays on narrative economics, Climate macrofinance and migration

PDF

Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

PDF

A cinema under the palms: the unruly lives of colonial educational films in British Malaya

Asset Metadata

Creator Chuan, Alvin Y (author)

Core Title Colonial ventures: the poetics of migration, colonization, and labor in francophone North America

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 03/09/2023

Defense Date 03/01/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 19th century,20th century,21st Century,American studies,Canadian Studies,Colonialism,colonialism and migration,economic culture,farm novels,Franco-American studies,francophone studies,French studies,immigrant writing,indigenous writing,Innu authors,migration narratives,migration studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonial studies,Quebec studies,road novels,roman de la terre,transnational studies

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moudileno, Lydie (committee chair), Harrison, Olivia (committee member), Rowe, John (committee member)

Creator Email achuan@usc.edu,chuanalviny@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112764248

Unique identifier UC112764248

Identifier etd-ChuanAlvin-11496.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-ChuanAlvin-11496

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Chuan, Alvin Y

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20230313-usctheses-batch-1009 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu