Negotiating the “Double-Minded Vocabulaire”: Montreal’s Jewish Communities and Contemporary Quebec
January 30, 2024 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Robert Schwartzwald, Université de Montréal
Montreal’s 90,000-strong Jewish community presents unique features that differentiate it from the Jewish populations of other North American cities. Even those aspects that it shares - a large Ashkenazic immigration in the early decades of the 20th century, broad and successful upward mobility, and the development of strong educational, cultural, and service institutions - have been achieved in a city once divided by language, religion, and geography (the English-speaking, largely Protestant business west versus the French-speaking, overwhelmingly Catholic proletarian and lower middle-class east), now a secular, multicultural metropolis whose official language is French but with the highest rate of citizens who speak at least three languages of any North American city. The departure of many Ashkenazic Jews in the 1970s and 80s in the face of the Quebec independence movement has been partially offset by the arrival, since the 1950s, of Sephardic Jews, at first from North Africa, and more recently from Israel and France. At the same time, Montreal received one of the world’s largest populations of Holocaust survivors and has become a world center for Hasidic Judaism. Today, Montreal Jewish institutions speak increasingly of the city’s Jewish communities, in recognition of this remarkable internal diversity. How do these developments challenge the vision and missions of Montreal’s historical Jewish institutions? How is the question of Jewish identity in Montreal shaped by the concern in Quebec for the flourishing of the French language and the codification into law of a concept of laïcité, or secularism, more in line with European views than with the prevailing notions of multiculturalism in North America? How do Montreal’s Jewish communities articulate their identities and sentiments of belonging in response to the range of ways, variously inclusive and exclusive, that Quebec identity is asserted in the linguistic, cultural, and political spheres?
Dr. Robert Schwartzwald is a professor in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal, where he directed the graduate certificate program in Jewish studies from 2016-2022. He received his M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Québécois literature from Université Laval. His publications explore interfaces between literary and national articulations of modernity with special attention to issues of sexual representation. He is a former editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes and a recipient of the Governor-General’s International Award for Canadian Studies.
Slavery and Self-Emancipation in Colonial Canada
February 13, 2024 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Gregory Wigmore, Santa Clara University
The US-Canada border played a central role in the history of slavery in North America. Yet, while Canada is remembered chiefly as a haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States via the Underground Railroad during the mid-nineteenth century, it is less well known that many people enslaved in colonial Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gained their freedom by crossing the border into the United States. Early Canadian and American anti-slavery laws did remarkably little to free people enslaved within their respective jurisdictions. But their enactment - and the proximity of a permeable border between rival regimes - afforded an unprecedented opportunity to enslaved men, women, and children. Laws on both sides of the Great Lakes inadvertently established free spaces, where fugitives from the opposite side could find sanctuary. By passing from one jurisdiction to another, enslaved individuals could exploit competing slavery laws and emancipate themselves simply by crossing the border, a development that destabilized and ultimately destroyed chattel slavery in the borderlands.
Gregory Wigmore will provide a broad overview of slavery in early Canada, especially in the Great Lakes region. His talk will explain how both slaveholders and the enslaved, along with British and American authorities, responded to the emergence of the new Canadian-American border after the American Revolution. While slaveholders in Upper Canada (now Ontario) begged the colonial government to help them protect their valuable human property, their enslaved laborers were among the first people in North America to understand the political significance of the new international boundary, using it as a portal to freedom.
Dr. Gregory Wigmore is a lecturer in the Department of History at Santa Clara University. He received his bachelor’s in journalism and history from Carleton University, and his Ph.D. in history from UC Davis. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of social and political history and foreign relations in North America, especially the role of frontiers and borders. His article, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland,” published in the Journal of American History, received the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Ontario Historical Society’s Riddell Award. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, “The Limits of Empire: Allegiance, Opportunity, and Imperial Rivalry in the Canadian-American Borderland.”
Come from Away: Newfoundland and Labrador’s Food Security Dilemma
March 12, 2024 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Catherine Keske, UC Merced
This presentation illuminates past and current complexities of Newfoundland and Labrador’s unique food system. Following confederation with Canada in 1949, the province’s once- abundant fisheries fed North America to the point of over-exploitation, creating both cultural and food system disruption. Currently, most food is imported into the province and transported by ferry, including produce from California’s Central Valley. Though hunting is prevalent in rural communities, high priced, pre-packaged, and processed food, rather than fish, are the dietary mainstay. Recent efforts to expand agricultural production within the province would improve local control over the food system. This would ostensibly be more expensive than most imported foods, given the province’s short growing season and relatively small, diffusely located population. Yet financially supporting such endeavors might be justifiable to facilitate a basic human right to access and produce food.
Note: The speaker will also share Newfoundland and Labrador artwork and handicrafts at the in-person presentation.
Dr. Catherine Keske is a professor of management of complex systems in the School of Engineering at UC Merced. She is an agricultural economist and social scientist who studies sustainable food, energy, and waste systems. Prior to joining UC Merced in 2017, she was associate professor of environmental studies (economics) in the School of Science and the Environment at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research on food security and Newfoundland and Labrador includes an edited book, Food Futures: Growing a Sustainable Food System for Newfoundland and Labrador, and “Economic feasibility of biochar and agriculture coproduction from Canadian black spruce forest” published in Food and Energy Security.
Sodomy and Settler Self-Government in the Canadian Colonies
April 16, 2024 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Jarett Henderson, UC Santa Barbara
This talk will explore the history of anti-sodomy legislation and its historical consequences in early 19th-century Canada. It argues that the new anti-sodomy statutes sanctioned by the then-new United Province of Canada in 1841 and 1842 reveal an unsettled understanding of the implications of queerness upon settler-colonial manhood. It highlights the complexities surrounding the anti-sodomy debates and their relation to the 1842 capital sodomy trials of Samuel Moore and Patrick Kelly. While the shifting sexual politics of the empire underscores an emerging consensus among colonial legislators that perceived queer sex and individuals as a threat to the colonial project, the cases of Moore and Kelly and Governor General Bagot’s moderate response demonstrate that dissenting voices did exist. By contextualizing these events within a broader trans-imperial framework, the talk will reveal competing understandings of same-gender sex, highlight the intersections of power and privilege, and expose efforts to orient the sexual structures of settler society in 1840s Canada toward straightness.
Dr. Jarett Henderson is a lecturer in history at UC Santa Barbara, where he coordinates the Gender + Sexualities Research Cluster. His research explores the history of gender and sexuality in Canada and the wider British Empire. Dr. Henderson earned his Ph.D. in Canadian history from York University in Toronto, and his MA and BA in history from the University of Manitoba. Before arriving in California, Dr. Henderson was an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University in Calgary. His current book project, Unnatural Sex and Uncivil Subjects: A Queer History of Straight Settler State Making in Early Canada, examines the debates over the implementation of white settler self-government in the Canadian colonies alongside efforts to re-criminalize sex between men in the first half of the nineteenth century.