Local Settlement or Global Metropolis?Imagining Quebec as a Glocal City on the 400th Anniversary of its Founding

摘要

Situated within the Critical Discourse Analysis paradigm, this transdisciplinary study looks at the two official websites promoting the 400th founding anniversary of Quebec City in 2008, in order to uncover how the Societe du 400~e de Quebec and the Canadian government represent Quebec's identity and how they respectively relate it to a regional and a federal entity. Focusing on the semiotic strategies that both protagonists propose in order to construct Quebec's identity, it is demonstrated that different conceptions of region, nation, and State - which have given rise to many a predicament throughout Canada s history - are at the heart of these diverging local and global constructions of one single city. Whilst the Societe du 400~e attributes a crucial historical role to the city when it describes Quebec as 'the cradle of French civilisation in the Americas', the federal government simply salutes its status as the 'oldest of Canadian cities'. Drawing on social theories (Smith, 1991; Anderson, 2006) and sociohistoric context, the analysis which follows seeks to contribute from a linguistic point of view to the grand debate on identity that persists throughout Canada.