The Struggle of Others: Pierre Vallières, Quebecois Settler Nationalism, and the N-Word Today

Cornellier argues that Pierre Vallière, a journalist and Quebecois nationalist, turns race into an acquirable and politically insignificant category in Québec by conflating exploitation to slavery in his 1968 autobiography Nè**** Blancs d’Amérique. This disregards the fact that the Quebecois project of national liberation is founded on Indigenous dispossession. The use of the French N-word is derogatory, harmful and reproduces Blackness without Black people. Quebecois obsession with Black struggles may be an attempt to justify their own pursuit for independence, and Vallières compares the exploited class of French Canadians to nè***. In reality, French settlers chose to come to Canada, whereas African Americans were brought to the Americas with force. Cornellier connects this to a hegemonic “settler structure of feeling” which portrays settler colonialism as impermeable. Vallières’ book entirely ignores the positionality of Quebecois as complicit settler colonialists.