Steven High. Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. 440 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-228-01075-3.
Reviewed by Jean-Philip Mathieu (McGill University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (January, 2023)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Steven High’s new book, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class, is a comparative study of two working-class neighborhoods separated by the Lachine Canal: the largely white Point Saint-Charles and the more multiracial Little Burgundy. The title of the book is well chosen: “deindustrializing” emphasizes that the change these neighborhoods underwent was an active process and the result of choices made by governments and businesses and inflicted on industrial communities, and “entangled” underlines how race, residence, and class were interrelated and overlapping factors that cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Throughout, High tells a complex but very human story of two communities that experienced the intense dislocations of deindustrialization, their residents who left and those who stayed, and their transition into a postindustrial present.
The book is divided into three sections. First, High discusses Little Burgundy and Point Saint-Charles and the interrelated processes of class formation and racial segregation that both tied them together and set them apart. In the second section, the author shows that the “pauperization” of both communities largely preceded deindustrialization, as the rising wages of the postwar era meant that those residents with good union jobs began to move to the suburbs (p. 146). The factory closures that followed, along with the end of passenger rail service, served to complete the process. Here, the two neighborhoods diverge, as Little Burgundy was the subject of urban renewal, and Point Saint-Charles was left to rot. In the book’s final section, the neighborhoods converge again as they both experience postindustrial gentrification. Here, High takes a critical look at the role of place-based identity in resisting the dislocations of deindustrialization and reinventing the neighborhoods that had experienced it.
Deindustrializing Montreal is largely anchored by extensive oral interviews with residents both past and present. This is one of the many strengths of this book, and the diligently collected testimonials, especially of older working-class residents, will continue to be an invaluable resource, especially as they are usually quoted directly and often at length. These testimonials are particularly valuable in the discussion on childhood and how an “industrial culture” that cut across Montreal’s familiar linguistic divide developed at an early age and carried on into adulthood. Many of High’s older interviewees were “on a first-name basis with local factories,” being able to “rhyme off the family members who worked at this or that factory” (p. 58). More than simply workplaces, factories were “community institutions,” and their loss was keenly felt, directly leading to the loss of churches, stores, and schools (p. 90). That said, a brief explanation of how the testimonials were collected would have lent greater weight to the narratives explored in the text and opened a broader discussion around creating and presenting oral history. Considering High’s extensive experience in the field, this would have been a very beneficial, especially for readers less familiar with its methodology.
High provides a valuable corrective to narratives of the period that have focused on Montreal’s linguistic divide by emphasizing the equally important question of race. The two neighborhoods can be seen as three communities with indefinite borders: a white anglophone community to the south, a white francophone community in the center straddling both banks of the canal, and a mixed-race anglophone community to the north. The structuring force of racial capitalism largely explains this segmentation; Black workers were denied employment at the city’s unionized factories, men instead finding work as porters on the railroads and women as domestic servants. Their community was thus concentrated in the northern part of Little Burgundy near the city’s main railway stations. When the combination of declining passenger rail service and deindustrialization hit the neighborhood, Little Burgundy was subjected to urban renewal and then rapid state-led gentrification. Although High points out that governments never mentioned race specifically when justifying urban renewal, the connection becoming much more explicit with gentrification, he nonetheless convincingly argues that the speed with which Montreal remade Little Burgundy while ignoring Point Saint-Charles can largely be explained by “the spectre of the racial ghetto in the United States” (p. 117). However, just as importantly, Deindustrializing Montreal reminds us of the continued importance of class. As much as racial capitalism served to differentiate Little Burgundy and Point Saint-Charles, their common status as working-class communities until the dislocations caused by deindustrialization tied their experience together. Notably, High argues that the suburbanization that had already begun hollowing out the two neighborhoods by the 1960s cannot be explained by “white flight,” as the Black unionized workforce was also leaving for the suburbs. Throughout the book High is careful to show that race and class cannot be disentangled.
Finally, High is very critical of the narrative around community mobilization in the transition from industrial to postindustrial neighborhoods. He notes that the interests of industrial workers and those of local residents had been diverging for some time, and the local activism of the 1960s-70s was largely focused on the issue of housing and not on maintaining industrial jobs. Furthermore, more recent community activism has largely accommodated gentrification and “framed ... demands in terms of maintaining the socio-economic balance of existing social housing” (p. 278). High is also critical of industrial heritage projects, especially those spearheaded by condo developers and governments. Narratives about old factories and the maintenance of façades on industrial sites converted into condos safely consigned class conflict to the past. Deindustrialization becomes depoliticized, an inevitable force, while we are invited to forget about the governments and businesses who actually made the decisions. One of High’s most intriguing examples of how heritage is exploited to create pleasing narratives is that of Little Burgundy’s memorialization for its importance in the golden age of jazz. High directly connects this to Montreal’s shift from being an industrial hub to an “events city” (p. 309). He incisively notes that although there are several murals of jazz greats such as Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones, only a single modest plaque commemorates the Black porters’ union.
There is no way to ignore the stunning presentation of Deindustrializing Montreal. With its large format, glossy pages, and dozens of photographs (many in color), it occupies a place between densely argued academic monograph and lavish coffee table book. High has succeeded in the difficult task of producing a volume that will be of interest to a wide variety of readers, from specialist scholars in urban and labor history to members of the general public interested in the evolution of Montreal’s Southwest or, more generally, the story of the twentieth-century North American city.
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Citation:
Jean-Philip Mathieu. Review of High, Steven, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58106
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |