by Richard Watts<\/p>\n
Academics are nomads of sorts, and academic departments typically too fixed and confining a home for us. I arrived at the University of Washington in Fall 2009, having spent the previous 11 years at Tulane University in New Orleans as faculty in French Studies but with affiliations in several interdisciplinary programs. As pleased as I am to have landed in a vibrant department of French and Italian Studies at the UW, it has been equally gratifying to be invited into other intellectual homes on campus, and one of the most lively and welcoming has been the Canadian Studies Center.<\/p>\n
My research in francophone postcolonial studies (cf. Packaging Post\/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World<\/i>, 2005) has tended not to focus on French-speaking Canada, but my undergraduate courses and graduate seminars address the challenge that Qu\u00e9bec and other francophone regions in Canada pose to dominant ways of thinking about global \u201cfrancophonia.\u201d At once wholly removed from the French colonial sphere and yet resolutely postcolonial (in its relation to Canadian and U.S. \u201canglophonia\u201d), Qu\u00e9bec dramatically alters our expectations of the cultural alignments that a francophone space can maintain with France and, for that matter, with other francophone countries.<\/p>\n
It was with a view to getting scholars in and beyond French Studies to think differently about Qu\u00e9bec that I obtained support from the Canadian Studies Center for the visit of Prof. William Marshall of the University of Stirling, Scotland. Marshall\u2019s earlier scholarship on Qu\u00e9bec (cf. Quebec National Cinema<\/i>, 2001) sought to understand the province\u2019s cinema on its own local or \u201cnational\u201d terms. His most recent work, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History<\/i> (2010) casts Qu\u00e9bec in a more global frame.<\/p>\n
On January 13, 2011, he presented work from this recent project at the UW, focusing on how films such as Le crime d\u2019Ovide Plouffe<\/i> and novels such as Maria Chapdelaine <\/i>trouble the presumed filiation of Qu\u00e9bec to France, signaling instead its role as a culturally autonomous but connected site in \u201ca decentered French Atlantic.\u201d Many thanks to Canadian Studies for sponsoring a stimulating talk that led to a spirited discussion among scholars and students from a broad range of fields.<\/p>\n
Richard Watts is Associate Professor of French in the Division of French and Italian Studies. He has research and teaching interests in the literature and cinema of the francophone world and is currently at work on a project that examines the rhetoric of environmental change in contemporary cultural texts.<\/i><\/p>\n
This project was supported, in part, by funding from the Center\u2019s Title VI grant, US Department of Education, Office of International Education Programs Service.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Richard Watts Academics are nomads of sorts, and academic departments typically too fixed and confining a home for us. I arrived at the University of Washington in Fall 2009, having spent the previous 11 years at Tulane University in New Orleans as faculty in French Studies but with affiliations in several interdisciplinary programs. As<\/p>\n