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What is the relationship between migration and politics in Quebec? How did French Canadians’ activities in the global south influence future debates about migration and Quebec society? How did migrants, in turn, shape debates about language, class, nationalism and sexuality? A Place in the Sun explores these questions through overlapping histories of Quebec and Haiti.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, French-Canadian and Haitian cultural and political elites developed close intellectual bonds and large numbers of French-Canadian missionaries began working in the country. Through these encounters, French-Canadian intellectual and religious figures developed an image of Haiti that would circulate widely throughout Quebec and have ongoing cultural ramifications. After first exploring French-Canadian views of Haiti, Sean Mills reverses the perspective by looking at the many ways that Haitian migrants intervened in and shaped Quebec society. As the most significant group seen to integrate into francophone Quebec, Haitian migrants introduced new perspectives into a changing public sphere during decades of political turbulence. By turning his attention to the ideas and activities of Haitian taxi drivers, exiled priests, aspiring authors, dissident intellectuals, and feminist activists, Mills reconsiders the historical actors of Quebec intellectual and political life, and challenges the traditional tendency to view migrants as peripheral to Quebec history.
Ranging from political economy to discussions about sexuality, A Place in the Sun demonstrates the ways in which Haitian migrants opened new debates, exposed new tensions, and forever altered Quebec society.
“Building on his earlier book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, Mills shatters simplistic, mainstream understandings of North-South relationships, describes the colonial legacy of Quebecers in Haiti, and shows the responses from Haitians and their allies in Quebec to such colonialism and racism... As a Quebec scholar and as an activist of Haitian descent, I make sense of who I am and of the work I do in relation to the history of the communities to which I am bound. As such, Sean Mills deserves great credit for his contribution to the story of how my generation has emerged.” The Literary Review of Canada
“A Place in the Sun is an important contribution to Quebec, Canadian, and Haitian history. It brings the “other” Quebec into conversation with the dominant nationalist narrative, and in the process changes that narrative. It forces us to reconcile the past with our present, and to imagine possible futures that reflect the reality that there are many peoples who have made Quebec, and in the process made Quebec their home.” Montreal Review of Books
"This important book illuminates a little-known and important story, offering a richly nuanced portrait of the Haitian immigrant experience in Montreal. An exemplary work of cultural and social history, it will be of interest both to specialists on Haiti and Canada and more broadly to those interested in thinking about migration and politics." Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History