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.
Gender, Religion, and J-Roc
October 10, 2009 § Leave a comment
Christianity has a long history of being a female-gendered religion. I would suggest this derives from the early Christian Church, which saw men and women as equals. It was only the rise of the Vatican in Rome that saw the gradual dissolution of women’s roles in the church.
In the late 19th century, throughout the British Empire, including Canada, there was a massive reinvigoration of mainline Protestant churches. In part, this was driven by the concept of “muscular Christianity”, a doctrine that was used to justify and extend the British imperial project. According to this doctrine, the (white) British Christian man was to give his body and soul over to Jesus. His body was to be his temple. The muscular Christian, then, could be found all over the British Empire, in Africa, in India, extending British dominion over a usually recalcitrant populace. He could also be found in the inner-city of London and Manchester, as well as Montréal and Toronto. The Americans got into the act, too. Indeed, the rise of organised sport, largely centred around Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School and the ubiquitous sport, derived from muscular Christianity, as did the Boy Scouts movement of Lord Baden-Powell in the late 19th century.
But this masculinised Christianity arose in response to the feminisation of these mainline Protestant churches. Women were always the more devout, the ones who actually went to mass, and they began to create space for themselves within the parish, within the church itself. Women’s auxiliaries, in particular, but also other organisations. The Catholic Church, at least in Québec got involved, too, creating groups that were female-centric. The fact that these churches would become feminised is not all that surprising, in many ways. Women were left without recreative spaces through the rise of industrialisation and the middle classes in the 19th century. The advent of domestic servants for large swaths of the population meant that these women had less to do.
Just as their husbands’ masculinity had to change and take into account their new sedentary employment as managers, these bourgeois women’s femininity also shifted. They were no longer so much caregivers and housekeepers, they had free time. But they lived in a world where their public excursions and causes were always going to be limited due to the dominant patriarchal ideals of the day. There were concerns about their safety and security, about the “delicate nature of the fairer sex.” Thus, the church became the ideal location for women. What safer place could there be than God’s house? And so the parish (or whatever you want to call it in whatever Christian church you want to talk about) became this feminised space, just for women.
And men were turned off by the church, hence the response of muscular Christianity.
Recently, I exchanged emails with my CTlab colleague, Marisa Urgo, about American jihadists, and she noted something kind of interesting. She suggested that it makes sense that bored (white) suburban youth in the US would be intrigued by Islam, as it is a very masculine religion, when compared to Christianity. While I am not so interested in the consequences of this, it’s not my area of expertise, I do find the idea of gender and religion really interesting. The fact that a particular disaffected segment of white, suburban youth would be attracted to the masculinist vision of radical Islam is fascinating for all sorts of reasons.
I think there’s also something to be said for the exotic here, much like white suburban boys in the late 80s/early 90s got so fascinated by gangsta rap coming out of Los Angeles and New York City. This was when I was a teenager, and whilst I love hip hop, I never quite understood these guys who became so obsessed with not just the music, but the alleged lifestyle of gangsta rappers, to the point where they began to not only dress like Easy-E and Ice Cube, but they began to commit petty crime and to act like idiots, so that they could be gangsta. You know the type, like J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys
Matthew Barlow 