Mobilizing Historical Consciousness for Concerted Social Action: English-speaking Quebec's Community Leaders and Their Quest for Group Vitality

This article links Quebec English-speaking community leaders' historical consciousness to their attempts at rallying group members to effectuate change in their unique minority setting. English-speaking Quebec is a new, sociological minority, having originated from the province's Francophone majority's recent bid to reaffirm its dominant status and corollary language laws of the 1970s. With English-speaking Quebec's vitality today weakening, its long-term survival is challenged. In intersecting research participants' content knowledge of English-speaking Quebec's past and present with their understandings of history as an interpretive filter for reading reality, this article's qualitative study examines the impact of forty community leaders' historical sense-making on their ability to consolidate and mobilize the community for concerted social action. Through a narrative approach, using content analysis and constant comparison inquiry to analyze the data, it becomes clear that participants recognize history's unifying powers, but are unable to effectively optimize them. Despite feelings of threat and insecurity as a minority, the lack of a structured, usable historical identity disrupts participants' intended orientational uses of history. Employing Aleida Assmann's differing memory formats, the content knowledge component of participants' historical consciousness resembles a social/generational memory instead of a political one that is devised to inclusively and openly mobilize English-speakers.