Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Nationalism informs our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and state -- ideas that are being challenged by globalization and an emerging new economy. As language, culture, and identity are commodified, multilingualism becomes a factor in the mobility of people, ideas, and goods - and in their value.

In Paths to Post-Nationalism, Monica Heller shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-state are destabilized under new political and economic conditions. These processes, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Applying a fine-grained ethnographic analysis to the notion of "francophone Canada" from the 1970s to the present, Heller examines sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, state agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe. Her work shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to reimagine - or resist reimagining - who we are." (Book Cover)

CONTENTS:

1. Sociolinguistics as Social Practice 1.1 A Story for Our Times 1.2 A Brief Consideration of Sociolinguistics and the Nation-State 1.3 Toward a Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics 1.4 Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Francophone Canada 1.5 From Traditionalist to Modernizing to Post-Nationalist Discourse of the Francophone Nation

2. Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics 2.1 Labeling Experience 2.2 Critique and Ontology 2.3 Ethnography 2.4 Sociolinguistics 2.5 Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics and the Globalized New Economy: From Workforce to Wordforce

3. La foi, la race, la langue : Catholic Ethnonationalism in Francophone Canada (1926-1965, with an Interjection from 2000) 3.1 Discursive and Institutional Change 3.2 L'Ordre de Jacques Cartier 3.3 A Secret Society Seen from Below 3.4 The OJC, Modernity, and Traditional Ideologies of Language and Identity 3.5 The Dissolution and Its Aftermath

4. Brewing Trouble: Language, the State, and Modernity in Industrial Beer Production (Montreal, 1978-1980) 4.1 Investigating Modernizing Nationalism: Sociolinguistics in the Brewery 4.2 The Ethnolinguistic Organization of Expansion and Technologization 4.3 Position and Interest in the Francization of the Brewery 4.4 The Interactional Accomplishment of Francophonization 4.5 Discursive Shift and Political Economic Change 4.6 And What Is a Critical Ethnographic Sociolinguistics Here?

5. From Identity to Commodity: Schooling, Social Selection, and Social Reproduction (Toronto, 1983-1996) 5.1 If They Are Quebecois, Who Are We? 5.2 Education and Institutional Territorial Nationalism 5.3 Constructing an "Oasis" 5.4 Identities and Commodities 5.5 Crawling to Neoliberalism

6. Neoliberalism and La cause: Modernizing Nationalism at Its Limits (Lelac, 1997-2004) 6.1 The Milieu associatif as Discursive Space 6.2 From Rights to Profits: Canada's Neoliberal Turn 6.3 Lelac: Potatoes, Milk, Trees, Tourists, and the Highway 6.4 From Cultural Survival to Added Value 6.5 Le Festival du Village

7. Selling the Nation, Saving the Market (All Over the Place, 2001-Present) 7.1 Authenticity and Language in the New Economy 7.2 Tourism, Terroir, and the Performance of Identity 7.3 Bounding Francophone Space 7.4 Problems of Linguistic Commodification 7.5 Paradoxes and Potentials

8. Paths to Post-Nationalism 8.1 Leaking Meta-Commentary 8.2 The Poster Boys of Post-Nationalism 8.3 Cool Irony, High Anxiety? 8.4 Ethnographies of Discursive Shifts 8.5 Epilogue