Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec

The author, an anthropologist, analyzes the rise and decline of the Parti Québécois from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, including its victory in the 1976 provincial election and the failure of its 1980 independence referendum. He attributes the party's failure to a seemingly inevitable drift from traditional culture that the provincial government was not able to stop. He argues that the nationalist movement's mistake was its attempt to maintain within fixed epistemological boundaries a distinct, homogeneous culture. A major problem involved the impact of English on the French language. Contributing to the problem was a decline in the French Canadian birthrate and the tendency of immigrant minorities to want to learn English rather than French.

Madison, WI

University of Wisconsin Press

1988

en