Are there two truths, two pieces of information? In this interminable COVID-19 pandemic, in this global revival of the Cold War, in this sclerosis of the struggle between left and right everywhere, even in Quebec, social media, in particular, makes us hesitate to respond with a not banal and serene. Quebec journalists Tristan Peloquin and Philippe de Grosbois both examine this most burning phenomenon.
The first, from the online daily The Press, does it in Do your research, where he draws up the “cartography of conspi thought”, for “conspiracy” (Québec Amérique, March 15), and the second, contributor to the progressive magazine To port!, in The collision of stories (Écosociété, March 29), dealing with the impasse of “journalism in the face of disinformation”.
An insult in everyday conversation only takes on an explanatory meaning in a sociological exposition. In the latter context, a professor at the University of Ottawa had an unfortunate experience of using the n-word to designate people of sub-Saharan African descent. A collective work, edited byAnne-Gilbert, of Maxim Prevost and of Genevieve Tellier, Manhandled freedoms (Leméac, February 23), exposes the case in the light of intellectual freedoms.
Three journalists from The Press wonder how more than 5,000 deaths, twice the toll of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, occurred during “the carnage of COVID-19 in our CHSLDs”. Gabrielle Duchaine, Katia Gagnon and Ariane Lacoursiere, in 5060 (Boréal, March 22), put “faces on the statistics”, as the prefacer Paul Arcand writes, and do not minimize a tragedy marked by the silence of many, loneliness, lack of care.
To misinformation, censorship, insensitivity to tragedies is added racial, social, political or gender-based exclusion. A collective work, edited by political scientists Pascale Dufour and Francis Dupuis-Déri, the analysis by describing the discriminatory practices of police forces in Quebec, France and Argentina from an intersectional perspective, taking into account the intersection of several marginalizations. The book is titled Police profiling (PUM, January 11).
Another misfortune, undoubtedly the most serious, overwhelms us: the impotence of those who have everything to act, but who cannot resist the paralyzing political decision dictated by electoralism. A long-time environmental journalist at Duty, Louis-Gilles Francoeur laments, in The green deposit (Eco-society, 1er March), with the help of economist Jonathan Ramacieri and a preface by sociologist Robert Laplante, “The Disengagement of the Quebec State in the Environment”.
But hopes remain high, especially since, according to a collective work edited by the political scientist Stephane Paquin and the economist X.Hubert Rioux, there is a “unique economic and social model” in Quebec that does not follow “the liberal logic specific to the Canadian standard”. This is what the collaborators of The Quiet Revolution 60 years later, on the theme “Retrospective and future”, the thought of which we exposed earlier this week in our Coup d’essai series. (PUM, January 25).
For the researcher Olivier Ducharme, the year that marks the imprisonment of the heads of the trade union centers best symbolizes all the political, social and cultural ferment following the Quiet Revolution. He explains why in 1972. Repression and political dispossession (Ecosociety, March 8).
As for Etienne-Alexandre Beauregard, a young researcher, he turned to much more current sequels to the Quiet Revolution. In his test The identity schism (Boreal, 1er March), he sees between the bold nationalism of the CAQ and the plural independence of Québec solidaire a “struggle to control the Quebec imagination”.
Gentriville, of Marie-Sterlin and Antoine Trussard (VLB, April 13), presents itself as “the first general public book on gentrification in Quebec”. It suggests the difficult reconciliation between the surviving popular urbanity and the costly restoration of old neighborhoods by newcomers who are better educated and wealthier.
As a resonance to this idea, in his essay Near Country Geographies (Boréal, April 20), the poet and literary critic Pierre Nepveu, by arguing against stagnation and folklorization, makes the oxymoron “unstable balance” the secret of Quebec’s future.