Translation as Counter-Memory: Mainmise and the Making of a Counter-Culture in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Published in Montreal between 1970 and 1978, Mainmise was the most important periodical associated with the emerging youth counter-culture movement in Quebec. Its editors drew inspiration from themes that formed the cornerstones of the American counter-culture movement – sex, drugs and rock n’ roll – and trips to American hippy meccas like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in New York. The magazine’s aesthetic was marked by an eclectic mix of typesetting, handwriting, drawings and photographs. It was also a product of translation. With access to images and texts drawn from over 200 publications (as a member of the Underground Press Syndicate), Mainmise’s editors and contributors translated some of the American movement’s key writings and music, adapted the psychedelic graphic styles of its comics and periodicals, and provided a hub for an alternative social network. This paper examines the evolution of Mainmise over three periods of its publication history. Integrating perspectives from translation studies and memory studies, it develops the idea of counter-memory as a translational phenomenon based on re-identification (the construction of alternative collective references through cultural borrowing and transfer) and re-temporalization (the re-inscription of references in a remembered past or utopic future). I will first discuss the emergence of alternative collective references in post-Quiet-Revolution Quebec to then concentrate on Mainmise as a locus of transnational, counter-cultural memory and translation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".