A Place in the Sun

What is the relationship between migration and politics in Quebec? How did French Canadians’ activities in the global south influence future debates about migration and Quebec society? How did migrants, in turn, shape debates about language, class, nationalism and sexuality? A Place in the Sun explores these questions through overlapping histories of Quebec and Haiti.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, French-Canadian and Haitian cultural and political elites developed close intellectual bonds and large numbers of French-Canadian missionaries began working in the country. Through these encounters, French-Canadian intellectual and religious figures developed an image of Haiti that would circulate widely throughout Quebec and have ongoing cultural ramifications. After first exploring French-Canadian views of Haiti, Sean Mills reverses the perspective by looking at the many ways that Haitian migrants intervened in and shaped Quebec society. As the most significant group seen to integrate into francophone Quebec, Haitian migrants introduced new perspectives into a changing public sphere during decades of political turbulence. By turning his attention to the ideas and activities of Haitian taxi drivers, exiled priests, aspiring authors, dissident intellectuals, and feminist activists, Mills reconsiders the historical actors of Quebec intellectual and political life, and challenges the traditional tendency to view migrants as peripheral to Quebec history.

Ranging from political economy to discussions about sexuality, A Place in the Sun demonstrates the ways in which Haitian migrants opened new debates, exposed new tensions, and forever altered Quebec society.

About the Author:

Sean Mills is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is historian of post-1945 Canadian and Quebec history, with research interests that include postcolonial thought, migration, race, gender, and the history of empire and oppositional movements. His articles have appeared in journals such as The Canadian Historical Review, Histoire Sociale/Social History, Mens: Revue d'histoire intellectuelle de l'Amérique française, as well as national and international collections of essays. In 2009 he co-edited New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, a major collection of essays reassessing the meaning, impact, and global reach of the period’s social movements. In 2010 he published The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, a book which received the Quebec Writers' Federation First Book Award (2010), as well as an Honourable Mention for the Canadian Historical Association's Sir John A. MacDonald Award (2011), given out annually for the best book in Canadian History. In 2011, Les Éditions Hurtubise published Contester l'empire. Pensée postcoloniale et militantisme politique à Montréal, 1963-1972. He is currently working on a history of Quebec's relationship with Haiti.