Soleils Atikamekw: Chloé Leriche's Critique of Whiteness

This paper offers a contribution to the decolonial critique of whiteness in francophone Quebec. I argue that Leriche’s film de-centers a whiteness that yet occupies this ubiquitous position of power at the border of the frame. I thus hold on to the concept of antagonism in that this film’s critical apparatus features such agonistic relations. Whiteness as an ontological grammar is constituted in the film as an anchor upon which state power and violence are predicated (and to which it is harnessed). In the process, whiteness is critically named and denaturalized as beneficiary of a colonial, structural racism that the Quebec state still refuses to recognize to this day.