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AbstractA large part of the research being done today in urban sociolinguistics concern language practices in the city or the discursive construction of urban spaces. This paper concerns the importance of using sociolinguistic tools to bring about a better understanding of cities as a specific form of social, economic and political organization. Throughout history, cities have played an essential role in the structuring of economic and political processes. Today, cities contribute to the new globalized economy, in which communication is central as a process and as a product. With examples taken from my recent research, I will examine how sociolinguistics can contribute to the social theorization of the city.

Over the last few years there has been an attempt to redress the asymmetrical relations between Canada's First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, and the non-Indigenous people in Canada. Post-secondary education plays a prominent role in this endeavour and many institutions across Canada are currently working on innovative ways to make their environment more inclusive, or what is called “Indigenizing” the academy. This study focuses on how the University of Alberta (Edmonton) is meeting this challenge and argues that a form of activist translation needs to be an important part of this endeavour in order to redress damages caused by colonialism.

Keywords: indigenizing, universities, TRC, translation, space, indigénisation, universités, CVR, traduction, espace

Louis Hémon's novel has been adapted several times for film, fiction or documentary by the French, the English, the Quebecois, or all of them at once. The present article describes these adaptations and their critical appreciation at the time of their release and afterwards. The author describes and distinguishes the films of Julien Duvivier, Marc Allégret and Gilles Carle, maintaining that one of Carle's adaptations is the best. This is not the 1983 film and TV series but rather the 1973 film La mort d'un bucheron. This movie adopts only some of the elements of the novel (the names of the characters, the relationship between father and daughter, between these characters and nature, etc.) but transposes them into a decolonizing scenario where Maria breaks with tradition by exposing the covert social violence in French Canadian society. This revisionist approach seems to have been historically more relevant since this film remains the one most appreciated by critics and historians.

AbstractThis paper focuses on the hybrid writing of American authors of Hispanic descent in its double dimension as a process of translation and representation, and also as a process subject to other processes of translation and representation, including scholarly assessment and description. It examines the problems and ideological implications of translating these translated fictions, inasmuch as this writing calls into question both traditional visions of literature and hegemonic translation models.

Keywords: translation, hybrid literature, multiculturalism, hispanicism, women's fiction, traduction, littérature hybride, multiculturalisme, hispanisme, écriture féminine

This article addresses the way mass suburbanization was marketed to Montrealers in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing advertisements for newly-built single-family homes in Anglophone and Francophone newspapers, I seek to better understand the evolution of marketing strategies and the structuring of their underlying suburban ideal. The analysis allows me not only to shed light on what constitutes the ideal-typical publicity for this period, but also to observe how the discourses and strategies were complexified over the years and converged between both linguistic groups, at least in their content.

In English-language studies on youth and women, a new concept is emerging: sexual agency. While the term is rarely used in informal English, it appears even less frequently in French. Sexual agency refers to one's capacity to be in control of one's sexuality, or the capacity to take charge of one's own body and sexuality. The concept considers women and girls as agents able to act and make decisions, rather than potential victims of masculine desire. From this viewpoint, it could help break the deadlock in which the hypersexualization discourse has found itself. This article offers a review of diverse key articles on the subject in an attempt to define the concept in terms that make it useful for research on teenage girls' and young women's sexuality. It also proposes ways to operationalize it.

AbstractThe authors contrast and discuss two views on medical drugs. Their own research and studies by others point at the wide popularity of pharmaceuticals in both high income and poor societies. At the same time, however, they came across evidence of a counter view: a more sceptical and reluctant attitude towards pharmaceuticals. They see scepticism about biomedical drugs as a kind of incipient medicinal politics, formulated in both individual and cultural categorical terms. The paper reviews the reasons for the worldwide popularity of drugs, and then suggests that some of the same factors may help to understand reluctance to use them in other circumstances.

Keywords: Sjaak van der Geest, Susan Reynolds Whyte, médicaments pharmaceutiques, popularité, scepticisme, efficacité, ambiguïté, Sjaak van der Geest, Susan Reynolds Whyte, pharmaceutical drugs, popularity, scepticism, efficiency, ambiguity

After years of colourful yet speechless spectacles, speech arises in a Vegas-based Cirque du Soleil show through the unexpected voice of a leather-clad New York transvestite preaching the acceptance of the inner freak. Tapping into American “freakshow” and “sideshow” scholarship, this article explores the paradoxical discourse on intimacy and uniqueness which emerges in Zumanity. In spite of its promise of spectacular sensuousness, Zumanity offers vain, joyless erotic gyrations. The assorted sexual acts and proclivities in the show fail to titillate in spite of the mistress of ceremony's voluptuous whispers. To point out an erotic cabaret's vacuity is to merely comment on superficial consumer society through its Vegas metonymy. The Cirque du Soleil has strayed away from circus with Zumanity where it instead flirts with an American idea of the German cabaret of the twenties and early thirties. By giving free reign to theatre artists, the Cirque has once again challenged the assumptions and expectations of circus while renewing its aesthetics and creative talent. Zumanity's discourse remains strangely metatheatrical (and meta-circus) in the sense that it insists on the Cirque's ability to reveal its attributes without prudishness. The show is billed as exploring sensuous intimacy – sexual intimacy, revealing one's desires, perversions, and preferences. In fact, what precisely is exhibited is the Cirque's own corporate exhibitionism. In this, we see the Québec cultural corporation's desire to be American, to be seen and desired, to underscore its own audacious behavior.

Keywords: cinéma autochtone, recherche collaborative, savoirs autochtones, colloque international, Montréal, Kahnawake