Why I’m Interested in Studying This Artifact (Even With Limited Resources).

This week’s blog question is very interesting and gives me the opportunity to discuss some of the questions that I’ve been asking myself with respect to understanding my site of research (that I would study with limited or unlimited resources!) — museum as an artifact/cultural text in a broader urban context that has been hailed into the social production of nationalism in and through the landscape. There are three main aspect about the museum that interest me in particular: 1. The physical morphology of the museum itself; 2. The museum as a source of political symbolic capital/cultural institution that is intended to transmit a particular message about Québécois culture; 3. The manner in which the physical landscape of the Old Port district in and around the museum was transformed to create a new cultural economy that asserts a homogenous vision of Québécois ethnolinguistic identity and how the museum, by virtue of its place specificity, extends or contests this totalizing vision.

The archaeological museum that I wish to study is a site of historical significance to the City of Montréal. It houses an in-situ archaeological site that is preserved to protect the site’s integrity as an authentic site (makes me think about the qualities of a record). I’m very interested in how the authenticity of identifiable archaeological strata are preserved in order to either render legible or obfuscate multiple, intersecting and diverging historical narratives over-time. Who's authentic narrative(s) are represented and to what degree? I’m framing this in my mind as the many-to-many relationships that are embodied in the strata. At the same, time what is equally interesting to me are the ways in which the local vicinity of the museum in the Old Port district was planned to assert a homogenous ethnolinguistic identity that could perhaps be conceived as an imposition of a one-to-many relationship that does not adequately represent the multiple ethnolinguistic provenance or ‘multi-creator’ context of the district. 

To rewind a bit, I became very fascinated by research that I undertook during my MA that allowed me take a closer look at a very interesting 1960’s era shift in City of Montréal’s urban planning away from the high-modernist Expo ’67-type mega-projects that we typically associate with era. The following is a paraphrased synopsis from my thesis work about this shift in cultural planning:

It was no longer unconditionally advantageous for the “nationalization” of Montréal – the modernization of the city according to particular a nationalist vision – to be executed through the tabula rasa approach associated with high-modernist design (think Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia). In fact, the ubiquitous design style associated with high-modernism’s homogenizing architectural style undermined the reassertion of legible Francophone identity in this landscape.  For example, to build the Turcot Interchange and an Expo parking lot, a large portion of the ethno-linguisitically mixed, yet uniformly low-income neighbourhood of Southwest Montréal was completely razed. City planners pursued a new course of action to preserve and restore the vernacular character of the Old Montréal district while avoiding the messy politics of neighbourhood clearance. Rehabilitation and preservation efforts attempted to explicitly reassert Francophone identity through the reclamation of authentic architecture from the French colonial regime, while simultaneously modernizing the district by altering the circulation of local traffic and implementing the latest technology to facilitate the historical preservation of buildings (post-modern cultural heritage preservation par excellence). The supposed original morphology of the district was restored by separating the flows of harbour traffic, which were economically and physically linked to the city’s industrial northwest, from the internal streets of the Old City. Truck unloading was not permitted on the main streets and only the harbour road would have a direct connection to the highway system (Kelly, 2010). 

To make a long story short, the thriving maritime industries of the Old Port and its physical linkages to the city’s older manufacturing activities that continued to produce huge local economic multiplier effects across the city (all geographically centred on taking advantage of proximity to the St Lawrence Seaway) were severed to create a new cultural economy. The re-planning of the district and zoning-out of actual economic growth hastened the effect of deindustrialization in the short- and long-term. This, in conjunction with the province’s political climate in and around the Quiet Revolution drove national and provincial investment away from suburban manufacturing districts and made these fringe areas dependent on growth fuelled mainly by variable cycles of foreign investment (ibid.).

I’m not a big fan of brazen “robbing Peter to pay Paul”-style urban planning that have a destructive long-term social and economic effect when the city and suburbs are divided along the lines of downtown cultural investment and handing the suburban economy over to foreign ownership. Furthermore, these local economic cleavages have had big implications for national unity in Canada… So, I became interested… and you should be interested too! But, I have to find a more elegant way to say that… As a result of this exercise, I’m starting to re-think/revise my initial research questions based on having had a chance to really flesh out what interests me about the site. Perhaps the three aspects that interest me about the site could be re-fashioned into better research questions…

Kelly, B. M. (2010). The transformation of landscapes in southwest montreal and identity formation during the quiet revolution