"Ça devient une question d’être maîtres chez nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, and the Politics of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
"Ça devient une question d’être maîtres chez nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, and the Politics of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984
Abstract
The author analyzes the discourses produced by selected French and English Quebec media coverage of the Montréal Canadiens and Québec Nordiques hockey clubs from 1979 to 1984. The Montréal Canadiens, founded in 1909, were for generations the sporting institution most intimately associated with French Canadian identity. However, the author notes, following two decades of unprecedented social, political, and economic changes in Quebec following the Quiet Revolution, newspaper journalists in the early 1980s questioned the Canadiens’ monopoly over French Québécois affections. As a result, the newspaper coverage of the rivalry between the Canadiens and the newly-formed Nordiques was anchored in Quebec’s neo-nationalist politics, and the teams became channels for debates about language, social change, the shape of Quebec society, and the nature of French Quebec identity. Through a critical discourse analysis of the newspaper coverage of the Canadiens and Nordiques in both French and English newspapers, the author determined that the Nordiques were celebrated as an institution that both reflected and advanced French Quebec’s neo-nationalist project, while the Canadiens were depicted as having fallen out of step with the pace of Quebec’s social and political change. The author argues that the neo-nationalist identity constructed through this newspaper coverage normalized the French language as the foundation of Québécois identity, but, contrary to the claims of neo-nationalists themselves, also constructed ethnicity and biology as central to the neo-nationalist sense of self. He notes that the identity represented through this hockey coverage excluded and even demonized Quebec residents, especially Anglophones and Allophones, who deviated from these norms. One complete chapter of the author's study is devoted to Quebec's English language press, primarily focusing on Montreal's The Gazette, and its anti-nationalism stance vis-à-vis the two hockey teams, and exposed the deep schisms that existed in Quebec society in the early 1980s.
Type
PhD dissertation
University
University of Western Ontario
Place
London, ON
Date
2011
# of Pages
xii-404p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Gitersos, Terry. “"Ça Devient Une Question d’être Maîtres Chez Nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, and the Politics of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984.” PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2011. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1343&context=etd.
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