<i>Monsieur Lazhar</i>: the ideal immigrant in the neoliberal Québécois imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability of Canadian films to bring the immigrant experience to the centre of public debate is certainly impressive. Monsieur Lazhar (2011 Greenlight Creative. 2011. Monsieur Lazhar Poster Number 2. IMP Awards Canada Movie Poster Gallery. http://www.impawards.com/intl/canada/2011/monsieur_lazhar__ver2.html [Google Scholar]) depicts the life of one such immigrant without the blemishes of Hollywood's essentialist tropes. The film tells the story of an Algerian exile who physically escapes the violence of civil war in his native land, only to find himself trapped in a new psychological battle zone of a Québec community torn apart by suicide and grief. As a substitute teacher, he ultimately becomes the surrogate cultural guardian and saviour of a cadre of Canadian children. This critique will examine the humanism of lead character Bachir Lazhar, his transformation from a French-speaking Algerian to a displaced francophone exile, and the characteristics that make him an admired and welcomed immigrant by francophone Canadians. Analysed within the context of postcolonial theory and identity politics, this article will expose the collapsing categories of identification which mandate that his valour and magnanimity depend upon negating his own Algerian cultural identity. In short, the more Bachir Lazhar is ‘fetishized’, in other words viewed within the narrow confines of cultural fetishism (ethnic food, tea-drinking habit, and belly dancing), the easier it becomes for the Canadian viewer to embrace him.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".