Theoretical Musings

This is an adapted version of a conference presentation I gave at the Université de Laval’s annual graduate student conference in February 2008– “Commémorations: le Québec et les francophonies”

Samuel de Champlain’s Travel Writing: Cartography, the Making of the Imperial Subject and the Colonial Present

I visited Quebec City last year, when I was in the initial stages of forming my idea for my dissertation. I was here to do research for my supervisor, whose work involves a study of the creation of les écoles normales in the mid 19th century. At the time, I was moved by the romantic nature of the old city, as I had been on previous occasions. But that lingering feeling also led to some unease, a questioning of my understanding of the colonial heart of the city that beat quietly underneath its quaint charms. Working in these beautiful archives somewhere inside the maze of fortifications, I was unable to quell that unease.

With this in mind, I’ve been struggling to find ways to articulate my ambivalence, both deeply political and personal, with the ways in which Québec City, and specifically, the early colonial period, is imagined in French Canadian historiography. In order to do so, I’ve turned to some theoretical literature that I believe allows me to interrogate the colonial nature of the historical narratives celebrating the founding of the city, and as is most often claimed in relation to this, of French civilization in the Americas.

I do so with the backdrop of an important contemporary manifestation of colonial management having recently completed its purported mission: the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. Here, the racist and nationalist practices at the centre of the Québecois nationalist project were laid bare for all to see, coalescing nicely with the planning for the quatercentennary celebrations. While I won’t comment directly on these practices in my paper, I will discuss the formation of racial space, through which such national practices become possible.

First, I begin with a brief overview of some post-colonial and critical geography theory in order to explore the imperial subject’s constitution in the colonial encounter. Here, I provide a close analysis of not only the role Samuel de Champlain played in constituting the nascent imperial order of things, but also of the ways in which subsequent European subjectivities were formed in the colonial encounter. I do so by exploring some of Champlain’s travel writing.

Lastly, I finish with a set of questions about current academic trends in French Canada. I’m most interested in understanding how and why intellectual cultures in French Canada have been so pre-occupied with historical and social parameters that don’t consider wider intellectual trends, especially as this pertains to critical race and nation theories that abound in other intellectual environments.

Un-mapping The Imperial Subject

When imagining someone like Samuel de Champlain, as so many of us do, poised to discover new lands, and found settlements in the wilderness, it is important to consider what role this imaginary plays in constituting social and historical relations.

As I will be arguing, the vision of the imperial subject mapping and thus taming the unknown wilderness is a central figure in the imperial imagination, what Kathleen Kirby (1991) has called the Cartesian subject. David Harvey (1993:15), writing in another context, has also commented on the 16th century cartographic revolution. For him, the most salient aspect of this spatial re-imagining wasn’t the discovery and acceptance of new mapping techniques, but the transformation in the ways of thought of those who used them. Importantly, many post-colonial and feminist critics have explained how this subject was founded at the expense of racialized and gendered Others, in the case of Champlain, the original inhabitants of the north-eastern Americas. I want to underline here the violence inherent in this encounter, whether sexualized and gendered violence or racial violence, all of which relied on European epistemological frames that deemed original inhabitants inferior in a forceful civilizational imaginary, one in which cartography played a constitutive role.

Having said that, what I want to do now is materialize this imperial encounter, through a historical and geographical exploration of Samuel de Champlain’s travel writing. I have American geographer Kathleen Kirby to thank for much of the conceptual work here.

As I suggested above, the Western subject during the Renaissance sought to define itself by cataloguing Others (women, natives, etc). Samuel de Champlain, himself deeply embedded in this ontological relation between the utterly unknown, threatening horizon beyond European shores, and the known, stable set of relations behind him in Europe, re-articulates these gendered and raced relations by rendering the landscape intelligible, knowable in the imperial imagination. Rajchman, relying on Foucault’s idea that spaces are designed to make things seeable in a specific way, reminds us that spatialization plays a fundamental role in the constitution of the subject (1991:82). And from there, we could interrogate not what is seen, but what can be seen in any particular social and historical configuration. So then, what could Champlain see? And what role did this vision play in constituting the imperial subject?

In looking to his first travelogue, Les Sauvages, Voyage de Sieur de Champlain 1603, we see typical cartographic renderings. This is Champlain describing the coast two months after leaving Honfleur in Normandy. It is May, 1603:

The excerpt continues in such a way, with Champlain describing the physical characteristics of the Atlantic coast with great detail. The impressive series of dates and measures with which Champlain engages his readers lends itself quite usefully to the rational, disembodied cartographic project. As Derek Gregory, discussing colonial modernity, has suggested, this enframing process entails setting up and treating the world as a picture, which has the effect of truthfulness (Braun, 2002:60), whereby the representation is understood as encompassing the true structure of the world. By disciplining subjects through dividing, deploying, schematizing, tabulating, measuring, and etc, the cartographer exemplifies the colonizing power of such knowledge (Gregory, 2000:315).

Throughout his texts, as Kirby explains, Champlain repeats this colonial gesture, making as little outward judgment as possible. Another important aspect of this story that would be far-too-easy to overlook is how such descriptions can also be read as portends of the crisis in male imperial identity, in that the dread of engulfment, as Anne McClintock has called it (1995:27), is everywhere present in the feminized landscape. It is as if without recourse to conquest, Champlain himself would be emasculated, lost in the proverbial wilderness, without bearings. Therefore, it is in minutely describing the landscape that the imperial subject regains a sense of mastery over his surroundings.

Even in describing the original inhabitants of the Americas, Champlain falls into this cartographic imagination. This excerpt is from an encounter he had with what he calls the Algonquins, near Tadoussac, on June 9th, 1603:

Again, we see Champlain applying the newfound techniques of cartography to his descriptions of indigenous peoples, but in this case, he makes use of a number of adjectives to describe his object. In fact, his fascination with the feminized indigenous body stands out as a clear example of the ambivalence of Champlain’s undertakings: he at once inferiorizes the native, treating them childlike, but then seems desirous of the female ‘other.’ Importantly, through this technique of naming the body, he renders people visible in the European imagination. The last example I want to give is from two weeks later, June 23rd, 1603. In it, Champlain returns to describing the landscape, this time around Québec City:

Thus, in these three excerpts, we see one of the key features of the nascent science of mapping, European cartography: the cartographer, in this case, Samuel de Champlain, removes himself from the landscape. He describes what he sees as if he is not actually there, in fact, as if nobody is there. As we saw above, even when people are described, it is as objects on the landscape. By constructing such discursive formations, as Foucault would call them, Champlain is able to frame himself as the knower, the ‘master’ of his environment, thus occupying a secure and superior position in relation to it.

In Kirby’s words: “Champlain is able to maintain the ideal of an encapsulated, independent space for his subjectivity that will be the hallmark of Cartesian…[subjectivity]” (1991:48). While this in itself might seem hardly notable, what is, in my opinion, noteworthy here, is the way that this spatial imagination, where the imperial subject is detached from the surrounding space, allows this subject to see himself as in control of the space, in other words, as able to manage it, to name it, to fix it in the imperial imagination. And as Nicholas Blomley (2003) explains, by enframing himself as a subject among objects, both bodies and landscapes, on the horizon, he manages to conceal mapping as an ordering device, which has a crucial consequence. As Sherene Razack (2002:3,12) has pointed out, the Cartesian subject, of which Champlain is a prime example, is the inventor of Terra Nullius, the well-known legal doctrine of empty, uninhabited lands, first developed in the 16th century, and later applied in the 18th century to facilitate imperial expansion. According to this doctrine, indigenous peoples were deemed to not exist if they were not Christian, agricultural, commercial or simply, not sufficiently evolved (Culhane, 1999).

In other words, what I am presenting as the undeniable power involved in the cartographic exercise goes un-remarked by Champlain and his fellow imperial discoverers, who see themselves involved in a quasi-scientific endeavour. Mary Louise Pratt (1991), herself writing about imperial travel writing in Latin America, has called this process the ‘anti-conquest,’ in which figures like Champlain claim an innocence in the violence of imperialism due to their ability to separate themselves from the landscape as disembodied subjects, and more importantly, through the way they are able to construct their task as one of pure description, as an objective representation of reality. Leading feminist critic Donna Haraway (1988) has called this the ‘god trick of infinite wisdom,’ where the disembodied subject purportedly views the world from above, masking the fact that what one sees is always partial and culturally mediated.

And my question, on this point, is 400 years later, to what extent does our work recreate this notion of anti-conquest or the ‘god trick’ in understanding figures such as Champlain? Besides a whole series of maps and settlements, what other knowledge about our surroundings and the relations within it did Champlain put into motion?

I hope that through this analysis we can see how the ability to map a space, to fix it, enables its authors to powerfully constitute both the space in question and the subjectivities formed through the process involved in mapping the space. And because colonization was from the start organized hierarchically, as I mentioned earlier according especially to racial understandings that subordinated indigenous peoples to Europeans, Champlain sought to influence and possess the world he came across, while resisting with great effort being influenced by this outside world. In this way, Champlain’s cartographic work could be seen as an attempt to get away from America and its inhabitants, to keep it ‘outside’ himself, despite his frequent trips between Europe and the Americas.

The solid lines that Champlain drew between himself, the land, and the people who inhabited it, reinforced and reproduced the lines between European white subjects and racialized Others. As Razack (2002:12) reminds us, “[Champlain’s] sense of self is directly derived from controlling rigid boundaries and specific practices of knowledge production to create racial space, that is, space inhabited by the racial Other.” In this way, we can see cartography playing a similar role as 18th and especially 19th century scientific racism, for example, which also sought to delimit the lines between the white subject and his racial object.

Conclusion

The main point I have been trying to make here is that as academics we must challenge the ways that subjects come to see themselves as innocent in violence, and one useful way to do so is by un-mapping the geographical imagination behind imperial adventures. To remember Champlain as a hero, himself innocent of the violence both within territories he helped to settle, and also in the broader European imperial projects, is to lose sight of the difficult genealogical work that must be done in regards to French Canadian historiography.

The imperative for such genealogical work has become ever-more pressing with such colonial practices as last fall’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission, where the racial order in Québec was consistently re-articulated.