U2
December 12, 2009 § Leave a comment
I just want to say apropos of nothing, that I am completely blown away that U2 would spend $3 million to build themselves a temporary outdoor stadium at the recently disused Hippodrome-de-Montréal. More than that, that they would offer tickets for as low as 30$. And even more than that, that this temporary stadium will seat up to 80,000 people and that U2 sold out two shows on 16-17 July 2010 in next to no time (and no, I don’t have tickets). As the Irish say in such moments, Jay-sus! Up to 160,000 people for two nights to see U2.
One of my students last week tried to argue that U2 were a spent force as a rock band. Apparently, dude was wrong.
I wish I could tie this to some commentary on the strength of the Irish diaspora in Montréal, or something like that. But sometimes, well, a cigar is just a cigar. So, instead, I present you with this video, tying U2’s classic “Sunday Bloody Sunday” back to its original meaning, Bloody Sunday on the Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 30 January 1972.
The House of the Irish: The Book
November 15, 2009 § Leave a comment
Well, almost 6 months to the day of defending my dissertation, I am heading out tomorrow to begin, in earnest, work on the book. Now that I have interest, at least, from a publisher, I am getting going on the new research I want to do, and moving forth with the revisions and whatnot. Next weekend or the following one, depending on when I get a bit of time, I am going to re-write the Preface of the dissertation to lay out where I want the book to go, though, of course, that will change a few times as I move forward.
Anyway, tomorrow I am meeting with a former Griffintowner I met at a talk I gave last year, to do an oral history interview. This is kind of exciting for me, and I’m excited to learn that I am not, in fact, sick of Griffintown and its history yet. In fact, I feel rather rejuvenated by 6 months away from it, as I have been immersed in Griffintown lore for most of the past 3 years, since I started writing the dissertation in earnest.
So let us hope the book doesn’t take as long to write as the dissertation did and sometime in the not-too-distant future, The House of the Irish: Diaspora, History & Memory in Griffintown, Montréal, 1900-2010, will be on the shelves of a bookstore near you.
Layers of Diaspora
November 15, 2009 § Leave a comment
Perhaps as a means of avoiding my current research project, which is to turn my dissertation into a monograph, I have been thinking about my next project, the one that will examine diaspora and its multiple layers on the urban landscape. Really, this is a mobile project, can be fit onto any large city with multiple diasporas, but Montréal is where the idea came from, and Montréal appeals to me because of the bifurcated nature of the host cultures here.
Back in the winter of 2006, I taught the History of Montréal, an upper-level course at Concordia. I think this is where this idea comes from for me, I taught that course as an ethnic history of the city. I traced the history of the landscape that is Montréal through the various ethno-religious groups that have called the area home, dating back to the pre-Contact Mohawk populations in the St. Lawrence River Valley, right through to the Vietnamese and various African and Arab diasporas today. As we moved through history, we dealt with the aboriginals, the Contact era, the French colonial culture here, then the onslaught of the British. This set the city up as a multi-layered, bifurcated location, French and English, the aboriginals more or less marginalised on reserves that ring the Île-de-Montréal. French and English were equal but different, though the British were dominant, they being the conquering colonial power.
It was into this milieu that the Irish arrived, becoming the first immigrant group in Montréal. Whilst the other groups, including the aboriginals, arrived at the location, they had done so as colonisers and conquerers, not as immigrants. The Irish set themselves up, established a model of negotiating space for themselves on the emergent urban landscape of Montréal. They found a niche for themselves in the Catholic Church (indeed, it is due to the Irish that there is an Anglo Catholic Church in Montréal today), established various community organisations, etc. Other immigrant groups that followed the Irish to Montréal all copied this model: Jews, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, African Americans (and Canadians), Arabs, Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, etc.
So I visualise these waves of immigration on the urban landscape of Montréal as successive layers building the landscape. I think of this as an archaeology of diasporic Montréal, not unlike Pointe-à-Callière, the archaeological museum down in the Vieux-Port (and, I might add, one of only a very few museums that can hold my attention). But it is not as simple as this, as each successive wave of immigration didn’t further bury the French and British (though aboriginal culture in Montréal seems to have gone further subterranean over the past century, though that is due more to Canadian government policy than immigration), as both have managed to establish and maintain their hold on the city’s culture and landscape.
But, as these immigrant groups are Montréalised, Québcised, or Canadianised (depending on your politics), there is a sanding down of their edges, of their distinct voices, as they are made more and more part of the urban landscape of the city. For some groups, this is a simpler process, like the Irish in the 20th century (before they re-discovered their separate ethnic identity in the mid-to-late 1990s), due to skin colour, language, and/or religion. For other groups, it isn’t so simple, for religious reasons (Jews) or skin colour (Jamaicans, Haitians), or language, or a combination of all three (Arabs). Indeed, of all the constituent elements of “Angl0-Montréal” throughout the last half of the 20th century, only the old-stock Anglo-Irish fully subsumed themselves into this identity/community. Other groups, most notably Jews, maintained their separate identity, in many ways due to the fact that they were never fully welcomed into the Anglo-Irish core of Anglo-Montréal. Nevertheless, there is a process of acculturation and Canadianisation going on here.
But, however one thinks of this process of immigration, retrenchment, and acculturation, I do think that the layer metaphor helps to make sense of the city and its myriad diasporic populations, and the ways in which they interact and influence each other on the urban landscape of the city.
the house of the irish
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
i submitted a book proposal to mcgill-queens university press the other week. i mailed it out monday, i got an email response on thursday. i was astounded canada post could get something somewhere that fast, even if the proposal travelled no more than 3.5km from pointe-saint-charles to mcgill. anyway, mqup liked what they read. they are interested in publishing the book, once it becomes a book.
so now, i am beginning to ponder how to turn “the house of the irish”, the dissertation, into the house of the irish, the book. i am cutting out the first substantive chapter, on the shamrock lacrosse club. that will become an article or two. and i am extending a chapter on nations and nationalism in griffintown, c. 1900-17 to at least 1922, with the establishment of the irish free state. part of my argument is that once ireland gained something approximating independence, even if the north was left out (or, more properly stated, opted out), the irish of the diaspora more or less lost interest in ireland, at least that was, i think, the situation in montréal. ireland was already an imagined nation by the early 20th century on account of there being hardly any irish-born irish in montréal by this time, immigration having dried up shortly after the famine. but after the free state was established, the irish here turned even more inwards. so that’s the first major revision or expansion.
the other is to correct the methodological issues in the last two chapters of the dissertation, which is too much reliance on the same set of sources. to correct this, i am going to engage in some oral history. but i am back to the same problem i had with the dissertation in a sense here. i am not interested in talking to the professional griffintowners, the don pidgeons and denis delaneys of the world. their thoughts and opinions on the griff are very well known, they are part of the commemorative process amongst the griffintown diaspora. i want to talk to people who didn’t necessarily think that they grew up in shangri-la. the ones who have an alternative view of the griff, or at least a more critical one. one former griffintowner in burman’s film said something like it was a shame to see the griff go, as they had it all. oh really? despite the poverty, unemployment, insecurity of tenure, etc.? of course, this is partly nostalgia, partly a child’s view of life in the 1940s. but i want to talk to people who have a more critical memory.
and that’s the hard part. where do i find these people? they’re not the ones at all the various griff gatherings. i have a few ideas, one of which is to make use of the parish of saint-gabriel, the historically irish church in the pointe (in fact, almost next door to us here). i recognise old griffintowners standing outside of saint-gabriel’s every sunday morning, so i’m hoping i can start there, talk to a few of them, get references to their friends, and so on.
either way, i am excited about this, i’m excited to turn this story of griffintown into a book. i think this is a story that has wider implications, not just for montréal, but for the irish diaspora, and even as an example of the acculturation of an ethnic group in a major metropolitan centre in north america.
as my favourite soccer blogger used to say at the end of each post: onwards!
The Melting Pot of Diasporas
March 26, 2009 § 2 Comments
So, with PhD in hand, I have begun to think about new research projects. One in particular that I am interested in is the plight of diasporas in large, multi-ethnic urban centres in North America. This one came to me in the Mile End of Montréal, today the home of hipsters, artists, and musicians. Indeed, damn near every Montréal band of recent vintage hails from the Mile End: The Arcade Fire, Stars, Patrick Watson, and so on and so forth. Anyway, we were in St. Viateur Bagels, buying bagels, then we planned to head over to Open Da’ Night, the legendary local Italian café, for the best caffé latté in North America. As we made our way along the street, we passed a Greek restaurant, whilst all around the hipsters and pretentiarati, Hasidic Jews made their way to and from synagogue and business. Me, I’m an Irish-Canadian. And, yeah, so, big deal. That’s urban life. But it’s more than that, it’s urban space, it’s identity, and it’s place. How do diasporas mix in the city in North America? How do Hasidic Jews in Montréal maintain their distinct, separate identity in the midst of this urban chaos? What has become of the old Portuguese, Greek, and Italian immigrants of the Mile End? What does it mean to speak the English language in Montréal? Charles Boberg, a linguist at McGill, has postulated that we speak a distinct idiom of English here, influenced as it is by the obvious source: French, but also by words and diction from the diasporic peoples of the city, especially Greeks and Italians. Me, I think about accents in the city, about the different French accents (they vary according to class, location in the city, location in Québec), how the Irish of Verdun speak so differently from the Anglos of Westmount, and the variations of Italian-, Greek-, Portuguese- Montrealers. And what about the cultures? Montréal is famous for, amongst other things, smoked meat, bagels, and poutine. The first two are Jewish delicacies, the last, québécois.
What about music? First there’s the case of the legendary québécois chanteuse, La Bolduc. La Bolduc was born Mary Travers in the Gaspésie in 1894, the daughter of an Irishman and québécois mother. Her music was largely comprised of traditional Irish jigs and reels, over which she sang in québécois French. Today, one of the most popular québécois bands is Les Cowboys Fringants, who play an acoustic, traditional-based rock, and by traditional, I mean québécois. And yet, many of the jigs and reels of the Fringnants’ music are Irish-based.
Indeed, so Irish are Les Cowboys that every time I listen to them, I sometimes forget that they’re québécois, they sound like an acoustic version of the Irish-American “punk” band, Flogging Molly. “Punk” is in quotations because Flogging Molly are more Irish than punk, their punk energy comes from the fast-paced nature of their Irish ditties. Indeed, they’re not unlike Les Cowboys in that sense. At any rate, Flogging Molly originated in Los Angeles, a city not particularly well-known for its Irish diaspora, but very well known for its punk rock.
All of this is still in its infancy, but it is something that I think about as I make my way to and from work, as I interact with my students, and listen to the conversations of the city. As I develop these ideas, watch this space, and the Complex Terrain Laboratory.
Matthew Barlow 