Fondation et production de la revue Mainmise (1970-1978)

Abstract

Mainmise (1970-1978) a représenté dans les années 1970 un lieu important de définition pour la jeunesse québécoise. La revue se voulait une sorte d’almanach du village global dans les pages duquel le lecteur trouvait des renseignements sur une variété de sujets, dont l’incontournable trilogie du rock, de la sexualité et de la drogue. Cependant, plutôt que de s’intéresser au contenu idéologique de la revue, le présent article cherche à comprendre le contexte d’apparition de Mainmise et ses conditions de production. Dans un premier temps, il s’agit de retracer les origines de cette publication contre-culturelle montréalaise dans des expériences de publication alternatives antérieures d’ici et d’ailleurs (dont Georgia Straight, Logos, Le Voyage) afin de saisir à quel point Mainmise s’insérait dans un important réseau nord-américain. Dans un deuxième temps, cet article s’attache à décrire les défis (souvent financiers) que les collaborateurs de Mainmise devaient relever pour assurer la continuité de leur projet.In the 1970s, Mainmise (1970-1978) was an important forum for self-identification for Quebec’s young people. The periodical sought to be a sort of almanac of the global village in which readers would find information about a variety of topics, including the inescapable trilogy of rock music, sex, and drugs. However, rather than interrogate the periodical’s ideological content, this paper attempts to explain the context in which Mainmise appeared and its conditions of production. First, it traces the origins of this Montreal counter-culture publication back to previous alternative publishing experiences in Quebec and elsewhere (including Georgia Straight, Logos, and Le Voyage) in order to understand the extent to which Mainmise was part of an important North American network. Second, this paper describes the challenges (often financial) that Mainmise’s collaborators had to overcome in order to ensure the survival of their project

Translation as Counter-Memory: Mainmise and the Making of a Counter-Culture in Quebec

“…Quebec's counter-cultural movement arose over this period, partly as a result of the ideological transformations taking place but also due to the increased standards of living and education that accompanied these changes in Quebec, as elsewhere in North America 20 . The new craze for counter-culture magazines emerged, in part, from this context.…”

Mainmise, 1970

“…Unlike the multigenerational French Canadian publishers of Parti pris, the publishers of Mainmise included founder, Jean Bélisle Bezroudnoff, an immigrant of Russian ancestry who had arrived in Québec via Paris in 1964. 50 Although he drew upon previous experience writing for major daily newspapers in Montréal, such as Le Devoir, within the pages of Mainmise, he adopted the pseudonym "Pénélope." Bezroudnoff used this name to renounce ego and write about the politics of the magazine in the third person.…”

“…For instance, the pragmatic utopianinsm of Mainmise may have rejected official discourses of national identity, but the magazine nonetheless benefitted from a few grants received from the Canada Council for the Arts. 63 Following the media theory of McLuhan, Mainmise simultaneously exists as both content and object. This means that the object can travel in space and time, but so can the content, as it is reprinted, revised and reproduced, taking multiple forms in an extended process of circulation.…”