Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation by Monica Heller, Lindsay A. Bell, Michelle Daveluy et al.

Reviewed by: Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation by Monica Heller, Lindsay A. Bell, Michelle Daveluy et al. Clint Bruce Monica Heller, Lindsay A. Bell, Michelle Daveluy, Mireille McLaughlin, and Hubert Noël, Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Modern Canada has offered a compelling, if perennially contested, model of official bilingualism and multiculturalist policies, upheld until recently by a robust welfare state. However, as nation-based structures grapple with the forces of economic globalization, how do protected minorities adapt to transformations that seemingly undermine the country's so-called "cultural compact"?1 Ambitiously co-authored by Monica Heller, Lindsay A. Bell, Michelle Daveluy, Mireille McLaughlin, and Hubert Noël, Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation examines the adaptation of Francophones from eastern Canada to the changes wrought by the boom in primary resource extraction in the northwestern regions of the country. Their multi-sited team ethnography weaves together fieldwork accounts from New Brunswick, Québec, and Ontario, on the one hand, and, on the other, Alberta and the Northwest Territories, the new frontier for "franco-mobiles" leaving and often returning to the traditional sites of French Canadian identity production. Casting a fresh eye on the now familiar trope—per Gilroy (1993) and Clifford (1997)—of "roots and routes," the book argues that "francophone" Canadians have been constituted as an ethnoclass, "a category that legitimizes class relations on cultural grounds" (26). In doing so, the authors show how the "flows and fixity" of its ethnolinguistic minority citizens are challenging paradigmatic "rooted" nationalism while redefining their relationship to discourses and structures presumedly designed in their interest. [End Page 283] The ethnocultural group on which Heller et al. focus most of their attention is not the Québécois but rather the Acadians, who form their own francophone society in the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and, to a lesser extent, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Acadian culture has been shaped by a particular history of diasporic mobility. Having emerged as a distinct people through a process of settler colonization that began in the early 17th century, the great majority of Acadians—some 14,000—were uprooted by a series of mass deportations implemented by British authorities from 1755 to 1763. Known as the Grand Dérangement, these traumatic displacements, intended as an ethnic cleansing, created a circum-Atlantic diaspora. The best-known Acadian-descended population outside of the Maritimes is the "Cajuns," who were integrated into francophone Louisiana through creolization, then largely Americanized in the second half of the 20th century. A relatively strong diasporic consciousness binds contemporary Acadians with distant relatives in other regions, the commercialization of which, through tourism and cultural products, offers strategies for economic renewal in eastern Canada. One of Sustaining the Nation's strengths lies in its analysis of the new mobilities of the neoliberal age as reformulations of the older displacements that came to define traditional identities, both of Acadie and French Canada more generally. Much of the context needed to understand the ideological stakes of today's "franco-mobilities" is laid out in a lengthy introductory chapter. My initial reading caused me some concern, for I noticed a series of inaccuracies that I feel compelled to point out before highlighting the book's very worthy contributions. Curiously, all of these problems involved Louisiana in one way or another. Firstly, the authors state at the outset that the British deported colonial-era Acadians "to France, England, New England, and Louisiana," thus "reducing possibilities of making a settled nation" (2). With no nitpicking intended, it bears highlighting that Acadians were not deported to Louisiana; this is a popular misconception which tour guides and history professors correct regularly. Instead, as the scattered exiles sought new homes after the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, a movement emerged among some communities to found a nouvelle Acadie in then-Spanish Louisiana. Initial arrivals began in 1764–1765, culminating in a large wave of nearly 1,600 Acadians from France in 1785. The decision to relocate in Louisiana was a concerted effort, one which...

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