City Visions Presents | Deindustrializing Montreal by Steven High
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The talk considers the entanglements of race, residence, and class in two hard-hit Montreal neighbourhoods. Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighbourhood and the historic home-place of the city's English-speaking Black community, face each other across the Lachine Canal. Each neighbourhood is a product of a long and varied history.
Neighbourhoods like these ones were torn apart and left to rot by suburbanization, urban renewal and deindustrialization until they were revalorized by gentrification. The historic divergence in the historical experience speaks to the importance of race. We need to think critically about locality and how places acquire identities, rather than treat them as empty territorial containers or as a static backdrop. The wider project challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality.