Abstract

Nationalism has informed all our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and state. Those ideas are being profoundly challenged by globalization, neoliberal responses to it, and the emergent new economy. Language, culture, and identity are commodified; communication takes on a central role as work process and work product in the new economy; multilingualism becomes a salient element of managing the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, and, indeed, of their very value. Through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of key sites of production of discourse constructing the idea of “francophone Canada” from the 1970s to the present, the author shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-state are destabilized under new political economic conditions, in processes which, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Examining sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, state agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe, she 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.