The Struggle of Others:  Pierre Vallières, Québécois Settler Nationalism, and the N-Word Today.

VALLIERES FOUNDED THE FLQ, FRONT du LIBERATION QUEBEC

HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MANIFESTO WAS ENTITLED 

WHITE NIGGERS OF AMERICA  

Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2017

Bruno Cornellier

This essay re-examines the paradigm of the Quebecer as a “nègre blanc” (“white n****r”) that circulated in left-nationalist literature in 1960s Québec, most influentially in Pierre Vallières’ 1968 book-length manifesto/autobiography, Nègres blancs d’Amérique. In conversation with Mark Rifkin’s recent analyses of what he calls “settler common sense,” I explain that Vallières’ racially appropriative theorization of a global village of all exploited underclasses under the rubric “nègres” provided new orientations for an emergent structure of feeling in Québec, and one that would easily be incorporated within the hegemonic because it already spoke (and still speaks) its language: it effectively assumed forms of dwelling and personhood predicated on the geopolitical self-evidence of settler sovereignty and settler occupancy, while exculpating Québécois whiteness and disengaging it from the history of Western coloniality. Secondly, I draw parallels between Vallières’ radical prose and our contemporary moment, in the aftermath of a series of alleged “crises” and expressions of public outcry about governmental failures to properly manage diversity and secure state secularism in Québec. Even though Vallières’ later work allows us to speculate that he would have been very critical of the orientalist and islamophobic undertone of recent policy proposals about secularism, I argue that the fame and polemical visibility of his book in Québec’s intellectual history nonetheless continue to orient and sustain, with other texts, corresponding affective mappings about the futurity of the dominant group’s historical sufferings, thus allowing “us”/“nous” to constantly assume “our” legitimacy in rearticulating such self-authorized delineation of zones of exception.

Issue: 1

Volume: 39

Page Numbers: 31-66

Publication Date: 2017

Publication Name: Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

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