"lf you don't speak french, you're out".: Don!Cherry, the Alberta Francophone Games, and the discursive construction of Canada's francophones

The Alberta Francophone Games (AFG), a yearly weekend-long sporting and cultural event, were instituted in 1992 to create an attractive space where young French speakers would produce themselves as "francophones." In the newspaper version of "Coach's Corner," hockey commentator Don Cherry has argued that it is "unfair" to allocate government funding to the AFG because participation is restricted to French speakers. In this article, we relate Cherry's comment nor only to the discourses of francophone identity produced at the Alberta Francophone Games, but also to those that circulate in Canadian society in general, all of which generate competing "truths" that make the francophone subject discursively unstable. We offer an analysis of "francophone" performance at the intersection of the AFG's main identity discourses which play their small, but revealing, part in the overall Canadian production of uncertain "francophone" communities and identities. The paper also suggests that Canada's minority francophonies provide a rich ground for the development of discourse theory along the problematic of identity/difference.