University of British Columbia Press
Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada
Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada
Places are imagined, made, claimed, fought for and defended, and always in a state of becoming. This important book explores the historical and theoretical relationships among place, community, and public memory across differing chronologies and geographies within twentieth-century Canada. It is a collaborative work that shifts the focus from nation and empire to local places sitting at the intersection of public memory making and identity formation – main streets, city squares and village museums, internment camps, industrial wastelands, and the landscape itself.
With a focus on the materiality of image, text, and artefact, the essays gathered here argue that every act of memory making is simultaneously an act of forgetting; every place memorialized is accompanied by places forgotten.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Local Acts of Placing and Remembering / James Opp and John C. Walsh
Part 1: Commemorations: Marking Memories of Place
1 Performing Public Memory and Re-Placing Home in the Ottawa Valley, 1900-58 / John C. Walsh
2 History and the Six Nations: The Dynamics of Commemoration, Colonial Space, and Colonial Knowledge / Cecilia Morgan
3 Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue: Public Ritual, Heritage, and Memory on Main Street / Frances Swyripa
4 The Highland Heart in Nova Scotia: Place and Memory at the Highland Village Museum / Alan Gordon
5 “That Big Statue of Whoever”: Material Commemoration and Narrative in the Niagara Region / Russell Johnston and Michael Ripmeester
Part 2: Inscriptions: Recovering Places of Memory
6 Placing the Displaced Worker: Narrating Place in Deindustrializing Sturgeon Falls, Ontario /Steven High
7 Capital Queers: Social Memory and Queer Place(s) in Cold War Ottawa / Patrizia Gentile
8 Archive and Myth: The Changing Memoryscape of Japanese Canadian Internment Camps / Kirsten Emiko McAllister
9 Immersed: Landscaping the Past at Lake Minnewanka / Matthew Evenden
10 Finding the View: Landscape, Place, and Colour Slide Photography in Southern Alberta / James Opp
Part 3: Afterword
11 Complicating the Picture: Place and Memory between Representation and Reflection / Joan M. Schwartz
Index