“In so many ways,” asserts Monica Heller in a colloquial voice meant perhaps to challenge the modernist–nationalist concept of the standard language, “the sociolinguistics we have inherited was shaped through modernist nationalism” (7). The postnationalism in the title is what she sees emerging in the study of language and identity, though a naïve reader might be forgiven for mistaking Paths to post-nationalism as the title of a manual for political revolution. “Towards a critical ethnographic sociolinguistics,” a subheading in the opening chapter, more accurately encapsulates the aim and unifying theme of this volume than does either its title or subtitle.
Note that she says “the sociolinguistics we have inherited”—for she does not exclude postnationalist perspectives from the general observation about how sociolinguistics has been shaped. She is under no illusion that one can simply declare one's methodology to be “post” whatever has been dominant heretofore, and be done with it. Her work is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, eschewing sudden discontinuity in favor of a more mature shifting of approach, achieved here through a retrospective consideration of studies she carried out in Canada between 1978 and 2007.
The title of the book hides too how very personal and local it is. A missed opportunity: for when the locale is Francophone Canada, and the person is Heller, whose contributions to the sociolinguistic study of that locale have been unsurpassed for three decades, one can be sure that this is a work of rich observation and deep insight, and not to be missed. The back cover blurb says that the book applies “a fine-grained ethnographic analysis to the notion of ‘francophone Canada’ from the 1970s to the present.” So it does—and the title ought to be trumpeting this, not hiding it beneath implicit universalism, not to mention ahistoricism: for Heller's horizons actually extend back to the early twentieth century and beyond, with considerable attention paid to the 1960s, the high point of Quebec nationalism.
Even the introductory chapter, “Sociolinguistics as social practice,” maintains a Francophone Canadian focus while surveying the theoretical literature on language and identity from recent decades. Heller tells a compelling story about the shift in her own views over the period, in terms both of theory and of policy applications. In the process she sheds much light on how the field at large has developed away from an approach that “fit nicely into the prevailing expectations of a putatively homogeneous society” (5), and toward one that emphasizes “diversity, inequality, mobility, and change” as “crucial and constitutive elements of emerging forms of social organization” (9).
The aims of Heller's “critical ethnographic sociolinguistics” are presented briefly in the introduction and elaborated further in the second chapter. Her approach draws heavily on the sociological legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, though once we are into the chapters on ethnographic observation, this theoretical scaffolding is hidden from view. She draws upon a varied range of analytical tools, with snippets of statistical data appearing from time to time, and much use of recorded conversations, printed texts, interview data, or whatever can serve to enlighten the topic of the moment. Two of the chapters make ample use of photographic evidence.
Heller returns periodically to the idea that shifts in global economics have driven the evolution in sociolinguistic analysis, but it is more leitmotif than leading idea, and one can agree or disagree with it without diminishing the value one takes from the book. I am not entirely persuaded. On the one hand, academic theories and approaches, unless developed in monasteries, are bound to reflect what is happening in society at large. If belief in cultural or ethnic uniformity is widespread among the population as a whole, chances are that an analysis embodying that belief is going to seem right as a matter of common sense. If the belief fragments, common sense will shift accordingly. On the other hand, the development of sociolinguistics over the last five decades has had its link with social reality mitigated very powerfully by the domination and retreat of Marxism, in both its theoretical and its economic-political dimensions—and this does not come within Heller's scope, even when she is discussing Gramsci. The use she makes of Foucault and especially Bourdieu would be sharpened by considering their theoretical development vis-à-vis the Marxism that inevitably framed their early work.
The problem with tying things directly to economic shifts is that the timescale is so shallow, on both ends. The traditional farming and fishing communities she studied in her early work have nearly vanished—but they were always vanishing. Urbanization has been under way ever since Canada was settled, which, from a European perspective, was not all that long ago. And urban neighborhoods, settled along ethnic lines with links to particular areas of the manufacturing and other working-class sectors, were already fragmenting in the 1920s and 30s, and were fragile by the time she began her research. Yet these social shifts were masked by mythologies and ideologies of various sorts, none more powerful than Marxist-informed working-class solidarity. What globalization has finished off is not so much the communities and classes themselves as the illusion that they were not already finished. Appropriately enough, globalization is itself largely illusory, a return to patterns of free trade characteristic of most of history that got temporarily interrupted by heavy-handed government restrictions in the twentieth century, either in the name of Marxism or in reaction to it.
Ch. 3 is a brief study of the Ordre de Jacques Cartier, “a francophone male Catholic secret society” that operated in Ottawa from 1926 to 1965. In the late 1990s, Heller got to know a couple of its surviving members, gaining an entrée into its unwritten history as a guild promoting Quebec nationalism. Ch. 4 propels us from the mid 1960s to 1978, when she began her fieldwork on “the discourse and practices of institutions regulating ethnonational and ethnoclass organization” (74), in the context of workplaces in Quebec having to obtain a certificat de francisation or be shut down by the state. She studied a brewery, a diverse environment with workers ranging from deliverymen, to skilled tradesmen such as master brewers, to female scientists in the quality control laboratory, where Heller was given a placement. Her autobiographical account is ethnography at its most immediate, and includes snippets of conversations in which language is itself the topic.
Ch. 5 is concerned with “Schooling, social selection and social reproduction” in Toronto between 1983 and 1996. Heller spent the last five years of this period doing fieldwork in a school, the management of which constructed an image of it as a “cultural oasis” within a mainly Anglophone society. She examines how they did this, and how students and teachers manipulated the rhetorical construction of what it meant to be “Francophone” and a “good” French speaker. Again numerous extracts from Heller's field recordings are used, in all cases fully glossed in English where French is the language spoken. Chs. 6 and 7 are about neoliberalism in the last decade and a half, in terms of how it has “modernized” nationalism, incorporating new immigrant communities in the process, while producing a commodification of cultural and linguistic “authenticity.”
The final chapter, more coda than conclusion, focusses on the cultural hybridity of Francophone Canada today. Heller is needlessly apologetic about the episodic nature of the chapters that have preceded, inevitable given their gestation over decades. No one can be everywhere at once, which is why ethnographic studies with a longitudinal dimension generally home in on one setting over different periods. That, of course, is the way to achieve a certain kind of understanding. But by taking us with her across the itinerary of her professional memory, Heller gives us the rare opportunity to gain another kind. It is a fascinating voyage, filled with compelling material and related in a very individual voice, subtly supported by a deep reflection on key theoretical and methodological issues.
The result is a book that should have very wide appeal, and can be used effectively and enrichingly on postgraduate courses, as well as undergraduate ones, though it is certainly not to be mistaken for a textbook. It also offers invaluable insights to professional scholars, and here's hoping it will inspire many more of them to practice the sort of critical ethnography championed by Heller. It requires more commitment, and infinitely more courage, than it takes to shroud ourselves in clouds of statistics and jargon, as though our own location in a particular time, place and life history contaminates our empirical observations rather then endowing them with what should be valued above all: the full truth of language in social life, insofar as we can know it.
