Qu茅b茅cois Cultural Activism
by Emilia Hillyer
The 黑料不打烊’s Studio Theatre is committed to producing Canadian work as a part of its season offerings. Recent examples include Beth Graham’s Weasel, David Yee’s Rochdale, and a re-imagining of The Birds which explored “contemporary Indigenous questions about truth and reconciliation,” directed by Reneltta Arluk, the first Indigenous woman to earn a BFA Acting degree from the 黑料不打烊. This season’s Canadian work, Wildfire by Québécois playwright David Paquet, comes from a considerably different artistic environment than that which we find in 黑料不打烊 and Anglo-Canadian society in general. Let’s see how Wildfire is situated in the cultural and historical context of Quebec and how that context came to be.
Quebec is a minority nation government, a functioning society which is not significantly culturally changed when incorporated into a larger state. Quebec and other minority nation societies like Scotland in the UK, the US’s territory Puerto Rico, and the region of Catalonia in Spain, all “seek to promote their identity and pursue policies that shape national identity, such as cultural and linguistic policies” in order to maintain cultural identity (Gagnon, Saint-Pierre 116). Québécois identity and culture is unique in Canada; the province is the home of the majority of Canada’s French-speaking population.
In the 1960s, Quebec’s tensions with the Canadian federal government included cultural policy demands for repatriation of federal funds dedicated to culture. Since that time, and subsequent efforts of separatist movements that increased nationalism in the province, the province’s Ministry of Culture and Communications has had an ever-growing budget, in contrast to the slashed funding of many other departments, due to the idea “that national identity relies on cultural successes” (Gagnon, Saint-Pierre 125). Quebec’s investment in the arts results in the highest contribution of cultural industries to any province’s gross domestic product, coming in at 4.1% in 2015.
Quebec’s emphasis on cultural activism is in line with the colonial approach of France–for many, the province’s cultural homeland–as French culture was the primary import during French colonizing missions. The installation of French colonial administration erased political systems, languages, and cultures of the colonized peoples. In contrast, when Great Britain wasn’t creating settler colonial states, the Crown tended to indirectly rule, and used the pre-existing structures to serve their purposes. The French mission was to create new citizens out of the peoples they colonized via assimilation. Other colonial era major powers were trying to create subjects of their respective royal families. France still uses a centralized cultural policy approach which exerts a great deal of control over its administrative regions.
The Québécois performing arts environment is seriously impacted by the aim of the Quebec government’s goals of culture democratization and “increasing the artistic, literary, musical, and architectural heritage for reasons of prestige and philanthropy” (Gagnon, Saint-Pierre 116). During the 1970s and early 1980s, foreign language plays produced and translated in Quebec looked more like adaptation, “transposing the action into a Quebec setting and totally appropriating the initial play to the target context” (Fricker 356). This approach was abandoned after Québécois consciousness shifted to a more international outlook. Translation and cultural exports connected Quebec to a larger performance and cultural community.
Works cited:
Couture Gagnon, Alexandre, and Diane Saint-Pierre. “Identity, Nationalism, and Cultural and Linguistic Policies in Québec.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 50, no. 2, Feb. 2020, pp. 115–30, . Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.
Fricker, Karen. “‘The Simple Question of Ireland’: La Reine de Beauté de Leenane in Montreal.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 35, no. 3, July 2019, . Accessed 9 Nov. 2020.
Gattinger, Monica, et al. “Toward Subnational Comparative Cultural Policy Analysis: The Case of Provincial Cultural Policy and Administration in Canada.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, Sept. 2008, pp. 167–186, . Accessed 15 Oct. 2019.
Lee, Alexander. “Comparing British and French Colonial Legacies: A Discontinuity Analysis of Cameroon.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol. 7, no. 4, 17 Oct. 2012, pp. 365–410, .Published December 2024