Postcolonial imaginaries in the West: secular state-building and cultural defence in Québec since the Quiet Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses an understudied aspect of public secularity in the Canadian province of Québec, namely how its self-perception as a postcolonial nation vis-à-vis English Canada has shaped its secular state-building since the 1960s. In so doing, it shows that postcolonial legacies and imaginaries, a key theme for studying secularity in non-Western cases, may also prove productive for the North Atlantic world. The historical account proceeds in two parts. In the first period (1960-1980), the Quiet Revolution’s disestablishment of Catholicism was intimately linked to its anticolonial spirit, where the Church was identified as impeding development and self-determination. In the subsequent period (post-1980), the consolidation of Canadian multiculturalism and the rising accommodation demands of minority religions led to a contradictory form of ‘cultural defence’: an increased emphasis on Catholic heritage as well as on laïcité (state secularism), both deployed to underscore Québec’s unique society in distinction from English Canada. Exhibiting the consistent yet evolving effect of (post)colonial identity and memory in a North Atlantic example, and nuancing the concept of cultural defence by identifying its religious and secular forms, the article contributes to building a common vocabulary for the comparative analysis of secularities in Western and non-Western contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".