Julie Burelle, Encounters on Contested Lands. Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec

Abstract

Encounters on Contested Lands joins an ongoing conversation around the challenges and possibilities of decolonization from the perspective of Performance Studies, and represents an important contribution to decolonial thought and practice across the Americas. Specifically, it broadens this conversation by offering a much-needed investigation, in English, of decolonization and performance read in relation to Quebecois claims of sovereignty. The project reveals Quebec as a place of competing sovereignties, focusing on contemporary encounters between Indigenous peoples and what Burelle calls the French Québécois de souche—French-speaking white descendants of early French settlers, who were colonized by the British and later by Anglo Canadians. Burelle pushes against a long-time narrative of Quebec as a colonized minority, and makes visible the white possessive logic that connects English and French Canadian colonial projects, highlighting how Quebec’s history of suffering and practices of selective remembering have been used to assert a Québécois de souche nationalist project. Through her analysis of a range of cultural and political performances, Burelle exposes the discursive and performative strategies of dispossession of Indigenous peoples that have made this project possible, arguing throughout that Quebec’s imagined community is still unable “to accommodate (let alone comprehend) the concept of Indigenous sovereignty” (16). As a settler scholar, Burelle does not shy away from her positionality as Québécoise de souche, and offers a range of strategies for settler scholars to engage productively with their own accountability. Burelle’s introduction explicitly outlines her choices in nomenclature and citation, acknowledging the politics of naming and the importance of positioning theory in relation to the places and peoples discussed.