2024 BMO Postdoctoral
Université de Sherbrooke| Rachel.Nadon [at] USherbrooke.ca (Email)
With a PhD in French-language literatures from Université de Montréal, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ), she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective Relire les revues québécoises : histoire, formes et pratiques (PUM, 2021). She is also director of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle.
Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow is “Emotions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through Allô police, 1970-2004”.
With a print run of almost 200,000 copies in 1954, Allô police quickly established itself in the reading habits of its readers, while retaining a reputation for bad press until its closure in 2004. Intimately linked to urban life (but not only) and nightlife, the Montréal weekly relied on sensationalist treatment of crime news and photos. A source of inspiration, disgust or fascination, Allô police is a kind of media commonplace, even a lieu de mémoire, whose editorial archives have been entirely lost. This is more often the case with mass-market publications than with other cultural products and works.
The project aims to help “fill in” some of its missing archive by combining 1) an analysis of the poetics of the newspaper (forms, discourses, objects) and the various ways in which Montreal is present in its pages (situated bodies, streets and neighbourhoods, people featured in articles, cultural or sporting events, etc.) and 2) an analysis of the “alternative” archives produced by Allô police, conceived as "archives of feelings", to use Ann Cvetkovich's (2003) expression. Anchored in Montréal’s urban space, a popular figure with an often transgressive reading, the crime newspaper supports and “produces” archives of feelings that shed light on new ways of inhabiting the city. The research question that drives this project is: What archive of Montréal feelings can be constituted by interweaving voices and readings of the mass-market weekly Allô police (1970-2004)? Focusing on a period marked by several major events for Montréal, including the 1976 Olympic Games and the rise of the feminist movements, the project examines the relationship between emotions, memory and urban space through the weekly crime news.
