[LINK] "American? Maybe. But not `United States-ian'"

Sean Gordon's article in The Sunday Star takes a look at a conference in Montréal where the idea of a common North American identity--américanité--was discussed. Américanite is a term that I'm familiar with from Québec, describing the somewhat controversial thesis that the Québécois (and other North American Francophones) are at least as much shaped by American influences as French influences, if not more. (This difference sometimes surprises French immigrants to Québec, as Fannie Gordon wrote last year.) This is the first time that I've heard about américanité being applied to the North America continent as a whole.

Is the conventional wisdom regarding U.S. cultural imperialism wrong? What if the "American" identity were being nudged toward a trans-national, continental one by the influence of Canadian and Mexican cultural factors?

French-language scholars in Quebec and elsewhere refer to it as "l'américanité," an idea that beyond national boundaries, linguistic differences and divergent histories, the countries of North America have forged a distinctive continental culture.

"Are we American? In my eyes, yes," said Université du Quebec à Montreal sociology professor Jean-Francois Côté. "But that's not the same thing as being United States-ian."

In research he presented to one of the conference workshops, Coté discerned a continental sensibility in a literary genre he identified as "travel literature" – the greatest exemplar of which is Jack Kerouac, the U.S.-born child of French-Canadians who penned the seminal On the Road.

"It began before NAFTA and has gone a long way beyond it in cultural terms," he said.

Côté cited the common thread that unites authors as varied as Russell Banks, Dany Laferriere, Octavio Paz and many others – themes such as solitude and nativism, a preoccupation with border narratives and the search for a broader identity.

"These are all ideas that put into question political borders," he said. "They have evolved into a cultural space that is no longer national ... there is an ongoing rediscovery of the Americas in literary terms."

Poet and author Emile Martel – the impromptu Spanish translator – also broached the subject of "l'américanité."

"The word American has strong resonance, both positive and negative, depending on your point of view. American-ness also allows for significant differences ... labels like Canadian or Québécois offer a sort of protection," he said, speaking in French.

Martel also suggested that national identities in North America are often invoked less out of profound difference than as a political reaction when a country's sensibilities are offended, such as Canada's by the George W. Bush administration.

"We create a moral wall called Canada, or better yet, a refuge called Quebec," he said. Points of differentiation like language, geography and history "help distinguish us without reducing our shared American-ness," he added.

[LINK] "Will we still love the Bills in Toronto?"

As people have been speculating for at least the past few months--I touched briefly on the subject last October and last November--earlier this month the Buffalo Bills have announced plans to actually play eight games in Toronto over the next several years. This is far from being confirmation of a full-scale relocation of the team, but it is enough to make many people like Donn Esmonds in the Buffalo News start to wonder what the people of Buffalo would think of their team if it relocated to Canada.

That is the question: Is Toronto close enough that the Bills would still feel like “our” team? Will moving 90 minutes up the QEW remove them from our hearts and minds, or will we still stake a claim on them? Will watching the Bills on TV keep the flame of fandom burning, assuming that most of us cannot afford the $250 Toronto-market ticket?

Sadly, the ever-rising fortunes of the NFL is pricing smaller-market teams out of the market. I do not want to ruin any-one’s Sunday. But by all indications, and despite various efforts, odds are the Bills will go when Ralph Wilson passes on. We wish the 89-year-old owner many more healthy years. But no one lasts forever.

Wilson said he will not pass the team to his wife, which would allow the Bills to stay in the family (and in Buffalo), while avoiding a big estate tax bill. Wilson said he will not cut a pre-mortem deal with prospective owners to keep the Bills here, because the team is worth (and could be sold for) far more if relocated to a deep-pockets metropolis.

Longtime fans and Buffalo boosters have criticized Wilson on both counts. But the cold, hard fact remains: It is his team, not ours. He — as always — will do what he wants with it. Unless someone persuades him otherwise, the Mayflower vans will probably arrive when the owner departs. Toronto, a cross-border boom town and already the site of eight future games, is a likely destination.

It could be worse. Ninety miles up the QEW is a better location than, say, a cross-country trek to Los Angeles, the continent’s other covetous NFL-less metropolis. Indeed, plenty of Buffalonians root for the baseball Blue Jays, a team with no Buffalo roots. Plenty of folks in Rochester and Syracuse — cities about as far removed from Buffalo as Toronto is from us — claim the Bills as their home team.

Of course, those upstate cities are not separated from Buffalo by an international border, which may heighten the psychological barrier between here and Toronto. But still, Toronto is not far away. The Bills would remain the closest NFL team to us. And we have a half-century of sentiment tying us to them. Will it be enough that they still will feel like “our” team?

[BRIEF NOTE] What do you think about Kosovo's declaration of independence?

Yesterday's declaration of independence has met with a mixed global reaction, but general recognition isn't far off. Most of the member-states of the European Union, including Britain, France, Italy and Germany, are planning to announce their recognition of Kosovo's independence, alongside extra-regional countries like the United States and perhaps Japan, and Muslim countries of note like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The result? A state with an international status that Douglas Muir called a "Balkan Taiwan", a state that enjoys recognition from most of its neighbours and the European Union and with many other countries, but which lacks recognition from other major powers (Russia, China) along with international institutions like the United Nations.

My opinion? Yugoslavia was an idea that worked quite well for a time, and could have worked better if not for first and foremost paranoid Serb nationalism that helped destroy a promising upper-middle multiethnic income country. Had Yugoslavia survived, would almost certainly have joined the European Union at least as early as the big bang accession of 2004. Serb nationalism as applied to ethnic Albanians was particularly destructive, reducing them almost to the level of Morlocks as Vladimir Arsenijevic described in his essay "Our negroes, our enemies". In the light of this and the general unwillingness of anyone living in either Serbia or Kosovo to exist in multiethnic societies, a separation of Kosovo from a Serbia strikes me as probably the least bad solution.

As for the international consequences, eh. There are plenty of frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet world and elsewhere. Maybe, under supervision, they should start to thaw.

Your thoughts?