What is the relationship between migration and politics in Quebec? How did French Canadians’ activities in the global south influence future debates about migration and Quebec society? How did migrants, in turn, shape debates about language, class, nationalism and sexuality? A Place in the Sun explores these questions through overlapping histories of Quebec and Haiti. From the 1930s to the 1950s, French-Canadian and Haitian cultural and political elites developed close intellectual bonds and large numbers of French-Canadian missionaries began working in the country. Through these encounters, French-Canadian intellectual and religious figures developed an image of Haiti that would circulate widely throughout Quebec and have ongoing cultural ramifications. After first exploring French-Canadian views of Haiti, Sean Mills reverses the perspective by looking at the many ways that Haitian migrants intervened in and shaped Quebec society. As the most significant group seen to integrate into francophone Quebec, Haitian migrants introduced new perspectives into a changing public sphere during decades of political turbulence. By turning his attention to the ideas and activities of Haitian taxi drivers, exiled priests, aspiring authors, dissident intellectuals, and feminist activists, Mills reconsiders the historical actors of Quebec intellectual and political life, and challenges the traditional tendency to view migrants as peripheral to Quebec history. Ranging from political economy to discussions about sexuality, A Place in the Sun demonstrates the ways in which Haitian migrants opened new debates, exposed new tensions, and forever altered Quebec society.

Sean Mills is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (2010), received the Quebec Writers' Federation First Book Award in 2010 as well as an Honourable Mention for the Canadian Historical Association's Sir John A. MacDonald Award in 2011.

Sean Mills' profile page

"Meticulously researched, A Place in the Sun utilizes an impressive array of archival collections, oral histories, and other forms of media to provide a rich picture of the migrants' political life in Quebec. Scholars of the Haitian diaspora as well as of

“Building on his earlier book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, Mills shatters simplistic, mainstream understandings of North-South relationships, describes the colonial legacy of Quebecers in Haiti, and

“A Place in the Sun is an important contribution to Quebec, Canadian, and Haitian history. It brings the “other” Quebec into conversation with the dominant nationalist narrative, and in the process changes that narrative. It forces us to reconcile the pas

"This important book illuminates a little-known and important story, offering a richly nuanced portrait of the Haitian immigrant experience in Montreal. An exemplary work of cultural and social history, it will be of interest both to specialists on Haiti and Canada and more broadly to those interested in thinking about migration and politics." Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History