Quebec

Novelist Kevin Lambert seeks to understand his northern Quebec roots

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 08 May 2023 21:11:52 +0000

Novelist Kevin Lambert seeks to understand his northern Quebec roots

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 05/08/2023 - 17:11

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Kevin Lambert, a post-doctoral researcher in the department of French, is fascinated with northern Quebec literary narratives – from colonialism to the contemporary (photo courtesy of Kevin Lambert)

Sean McNeely

Topic

Our Community

French

Faculty of Arts & Science

Quebec

Kevin Lambert is hoping to uncover the narrative of his northern Quebec heritage that dates back to the early days of colonialism.

Originally from the Chicoutimi borough of Saguenay, Que., Lambert is an award-winning novelist who turned to books growing up as a way to escape his feelings of isolation in an insular community.

“Everything that was different from the norm was bad,” says Lambert, who joined the University of Toronto’s department of French, in the Faculty of Arts & Science, earlier this year as a postdoctoral researcher.

“I never played hockey, but I know that in the change rooms homophobic jokes were commonplace. It was difficult to have relationships with other people, so, I preferred to live in books.”

You Will Love What You Have Killed was Kevin
Lambert’s first novel

As his love of books grew, Lambert shifted from reader to writer. His widely acclaimed first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize.

But he’s most noted for his second novel, Querelle of Roberval, which won the Prix Ringuet in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize last year.

The book’s plot follows a millworkers' strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval. As the strike drags on, tensions escalate between the workers. When a lockout renews their resolve, they rally around the magnetic charisma of Querelle, a charming newcomer from Montreal. By day, he protests and walks the picket lines. At night, he transforms, welcoming young men who flock to his apartment for sexual liaisons. As the dispute becomes more intense, and both sides refuse to yield, class struggles and entitlement ignite in a firestorm of passion that’s both sensual and violent.

“The story shines a spotlight on social and political tensions of life in this remote Quebec company town and the challenges related to sex, lust, loneliness and gay relationships in a remote setting,” Lambert says.

“It’s about the different political relationships between working class people and industry. But I also talk about the relationship between industry and colonial history, because there was a lot of wood cutting in this area – and with that big companies were active in polluting Indigenous territories.”

It’s these themes of clashing groups and colonial history that Lambert seeks to build upon in his research, which will continue at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi next year.

Part-writer, part-historian, Lambert is fascinated with the narrative surrounding colonialist attitudes in the late 1800s.

“How did colonialism explain or justify itself?” he says. “What language and stories were the government and media using at that time, what type of narrative was being shared to justify Quebec’s transformation to a colonial settlement?

“To send the settlers to steal lands from Indigenous Peoples, you have to have strong storytelling [and] you have to have a strong fantasy of what you are doing to convince people to do it.”

Kevin Lambert’s second novel, Querelle of
Roberval, won the Prix Ringuet in 2019

What makes this field of research so compelling for Lambert is the feeling that he’s covering new ground.

“In French literature, it's a field that is not very much explored,” he says. “Most post-colonial studies have first come in English. Often, we study history in a more nationalistic way. Those subjects have been talked about in Quebec's history, but in a very broad way. What I want to do is work in a small area. It's also a process about my own story because it’s where I come from.”

Capturing that story means understanding multiple perspectives.

“My goal is to deconstruct the main settlers’ narrative, so I need other points of view – for example, women who wrote about their experience during that time and LGBTQ people can bring elements of criticism to this story, because the main narrative is a nationalist heroic view with only male figures.”

Eager to dive into historical archives, journals, memoirs and photos, Lambert also intends to explore how these narratives continue to circulate in contemporary Quebec literature.

“I want to see if writers who come from there nowadays carry the same narratives or do they bring other points of view? Do they criticize this narrative in their novels or in their plays? What point of view do Indigenous writers bring, because it's only recently that we have novels written by Indigenous Peoples from this region.”

He’s equally curious to learn more about what he calls, “the queer dimension that appears in the gendered analysis of colonial structures.”

“White colonization is often presented as the logical outcome of male domination – that of ‘pioneers’ over the territory, women and Indigenous Peoples,” Lambert says.

The stereotypical image of a colonial settler family is always presented as heterosexual and patriarchal, he adds, noting that this picture of the family also includes the mistreatment of women, homophobic fear and an aversion to the unions of white and Indigenous Peoples.

“It’s these other narratives, historical and discursive elements summoning sex and gender dynamics that remain to be interpreted.”

Literature, politics, art: How an early French-Canadian magazine helped shape literary culture

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 04:04:36 +0000

Literature, politics, art: How an early French-Canadian magazine helped shape literary culture

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 12/07/2021 - 23:04

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La Revue moderne was a general-interest monthly magazine that targeted a mainly a female audience and became French Châtelaine after it was purchased by Maclean-Hunter (images supplied by Adrien Rannaud)

Topic

In his new book, La révolution du magazine au Québec, the University of Toronto’s Adrien Rannaud demonstrates how one of Quebec’s first magazines reflected and advanced literature and culture from 1919 to 1960 – and how its impact is still evident today.

Adrien Rannaud (photo by Atwood Photographie)

“This publication, called La Revue moderne, was an ideal starting point for examining the ways that magazines can shape literature,” says Rannaud, an assistant professor of French Studies at ��˾��ֱ�� Mississauga’s department of language studies.

His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Quebec literature, women’s writing, celebrit

y culture and middlebrow literary culture. In all of these areas, he says, studying magazines can be illuminating.

The book’s title refers to how the advent of magazines in the 20th century revolutionized print media.

“Unlike newspapers, magazines were freed from the pressure of reporting on day-to-day news,” he says. “They used images and design to present information in new ways. And they invited readers to take time for themselves to escape from reality, especially with fiction and poetry.”

In the book, written in French, Rannaud notes that English magazines such as Chatelaine, Mayfair and Canadian Home Journal – which co-existed with La Revue moderne – had similarly important roles in the literary world.

“French-Canadian magazines just haven’t received as much academic attention or systematic study as anglophone ones, or as magazines in France,” he says.

La Revue moderne’s founder, who wrote under the pseudonym “Madeleine” and whose real name was Anne-Marie Huguenin, was a celebrity in Montreal’s high society. She wrote for one of the city’s leading newspapers and became known as the “queen of the chronicle.” By the end of the First World War, Rannaud says, she wanted a bigger vehicle to showcase not just her own writing, but that of her fellow up-and-coming young francophone writers.

In the magazine’s first editorial, she laid out her intention to deliver a literary, political and artistic (the three words below the masthead) publication that would “brilliantly attest to the value of our poets [and] writers.” While the magazine was well-received in some circles, its lofty ambitions – and female leadership – didn’t sit well with the male social elite and clergy, says Rannaud. “She was outspoken about her goal of uniting francophone and anglophone culture, and there were a lot of articles that were quite political. It was difficult for a woman in the 1920s to lead an intellectual magazine. She was subject to a lot of anti-feminism.”

The external pressures, combined with commercial necessities, drove Madeleine to shift La Revue moderne’s emphasis away from political and other “serious” content to subjects considered appealing to women. “By around 1922, there were more advice columns, recipes, coverage of society events, and fiction and poetry,” says Rannaud.

It was in this last category, he argues, that La Revue moderne had the most profound effect on Quebec’s cultural history.

Announcement of the co-winners of the La Revue moderne prize. Gabrielle Roy was recognized for one of her first ever published short stories, which appered in the magazine (from the July 1940 issue)

The magazine launched the careers of many authors, poets and writers, including one of the most famous French Canadian authors: Gabrielle Roy, the author of The Tin Flute and other books. One of her first publications was in La Revue moderne. “Quebec isn’t known for avant garde, or highbrow, literature, but it has a thriving popular culture and literature,” says Rannaud. “La Revue moderne helped cultivate that literature by bringing it to a large audience and inspiring other young writers.”

Beyond its significant shaping influence on literature, the magazine kept pace with changing trends in the broader culture. By the 1940s, women’s rights and celebrity news began to take a prominent place in the magazine. The content also became highly interconnected with radio and television culture, featuring articles on the best and latest programs to listen to and watch.

“The profiles on celebrities and attention to other media were, in some ways, very current,” says Rannaud. “These are things we see everywhere in magazines in 2021. So while La Revue moderne was very old-fashioned in its depiction of women, domestic life and relationships, it also helped pave the way for contemporary publications.”

In 1960, Maclean-Hunter bought La Revue moderne and it became French Châtelaine magazine. The new publication built on the original’s cultural and literary foundations, says Rannaud, pointing to the ongoing tradition in several Canadian magazines of authors publishing short stories and book excerpts.

“Without the revolution La Revue moderne participated in, we wouldn’t have the strong relationship between literature and magazines that we have today.”

Pregnant Inuit women exposed to higher levels of chemicals found in consumer products: ��˾��ֱ�� study

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:16:39 +0000

Pregnant Inuit women exposed to higher levels of chemicals found in consumer products: ��˾��ֱ�� study

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 11/02/2020 - 12:16

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A ��˾��ֱ�� study found that pregnant Inuit women had concentrations of PFAAs, found in non-stick coatings for cookware and cleaning products, that were twice as high as those in a representative sample of Canadian women (photo by Halfpoint via Getty Images)

Don Campbell

Topic

Breaking Research

Physical and Environmental Sciences

Inuit

Pollution

Quebec

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

��˾��ֱ�� Scarborough

Pregnant women living in Nunavik in northern Quebec are increasingly being exposed to potentially harmful chemical compounds commonly found in consumer products.

This is one of the findings of new study by a group of Canadian researchers including Élyse Caron-Beaudoin, an assistant professor in the department of health and society and the department of physical and environmental sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

The study, published in the journal Environment International, focused on perfluroalkyl acids (PFAAs), which are used in a wide range of consumer products including non-stick coatings for cooking ware, water and stain repellents, food packaging, paints, cosmetics and cleaning products. It found that PFAA concentrations in pregnant Inuit women were twice as high as those in a representative sample of Canadian women.

“It’s an environmental injustice because people’s food in the Arctic is being contaminated by chemicals made far away from their homes,” says Caron-Beaudoin, an expert on toxicology as well as public and environmental health.

PFAAs do not biodegrade easily, and as a result, can persist for a long time in the environment. They can also be carried over long distances in the atmosphere and in oceans, where they accumulate in the tissues of living organisms in the Arctic food chain, according to Caron-Beaudoin.

She says that exposure to these compounds, including during fetal development, is associated with changes in hormonal, kidney, cardio-metabolic and immune function.

The study involved measuring changes in the concentration of PFAAs in the blood of 279 pregnant women living in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec from 2004 to 2017. The researchers found that one of the likely sources of PFAAs concentrations in the blood is the consumption of country foods, particularly marine wildlife.

Caron-Beaudoin says that many living in the north experience food insecurity and rely on the nutritional and cultural value provided by country foods, which make up the traditional Inuit diet.

“The benefit of consuming traditional foods still outweigh the negatives,” she says. “[But] we need adequate regulations that protect these country foods from harmful contaminants because these communities rely on them, especially pregnant women who need the nutritional value.”

While most PFAAs are regulated in North America, they do get imported by consumer products that contain them. The researchers found there’s been a drop in concentrations of legacy PFAAs – those banned by various international and North American treaties – but found that concentrations of long-chain PFAAs, which are more recent and can come from the degradation of other currently-used similar compounds such as Fluorotelomer alcohols (FTOHs), are on the rise.

“These long-chain PFAAs are even more persistent and have an even greater potential to accumulate in the food chain than the older PFAAs,” says Caron-Beaudoin.

Caron-Beaudoin says compounds like FTOHs not only travel long distances from their site of production, they also travel in consumer and industrial products that get imported into North America.

“It’s important to stay on top of this and make sure these new chemical compounds are tightly regulated as well,” she says.

Police should never have power to tap journalists' phones, says ��˾��ֱ��’s Jeffrey Dvorkin

lavende4 — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 16:03:28 +0000

Police should never have power to tap journalists' phones, says ��˾��ֱ��’s Jeffrey Dvorkin

lavende4 Thu, 11/03/2016 - 12:03

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Press freedom is at stake with revelations this week that Quebec police have been tracking cell phones of some journalists (photo by jeanbaptisteparis via Flickr)

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Canadian journalists and civil liberty advocates are outraged over revelations that various police forces in Quebec have been tracking the cell phones of local journalists.

Quebec provincial police admitted this week to police surveillance of six prominent journalists in 2013 as they tried to track down a person alleged to have leaked sensitive wiretap information involving a prominent labour leader. This followed revelations that Montreal police had been keeping tabs on the iPhone of a La Presse reporter, including tracking his whereabouts using his phone's GPS chip.

Today, the Quebec government announced a full public inquiry into the growing scandal, but critics are still concerned over what this means for freedom of the press.

��˾��ֱ�� News spoke with Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at ��˾��ֱ�� Scarborough, about the controversy. He is a former vice-president of news for National Public Radio and a former managing editor with CBC Radio.

Why should Canadians care about this?

Canadians should care because access to journalistic work and “work product” (in other words, the stuff that doesn’t get into the final reporting) should always be obtained with a warrant. Secondly, the amount of information about all of us – journalists and non-journalists – should be an area of great concern. We are living in an age of transparency and a diminishing lack of privacy. Google through Gmail has forced us to surrender any concept of privacy. The police are only doing (illegally) what Google does with our permission.

Is it common for police to employ surveillance on journalists in Canada?

Probably more than we know. We should know what all levels of government are doing to know more about us. Sometimes being paranoid is the only rational response to the times we live in. When I was managing editor at CBC Radio in the '90s, we discovered that the Canadian military could tap our phones without a warrant. We got that changed. At least we hope we did...

What effect will these revelations have on investigative journalists in Quebec and elsewhere?

It will make journalists more cautious about what is said in supposedly private communications. My own hope is that journalists will not give up on investigative reporting. But instead of being overly dependent on Internet research, more face-to-face, “shoe-leather” reporting might be preferred in certain circumstances.

Are there any circumstances where police should have the authority to tap journalists’ phones?

Never. Not without a warrant. If ever there was an argument for more media lawyers, this is it.