The Great Unravelling: New Histories of Deindustrialization

The Great Unravelling: New Histories of Deindustrialization Daryl Leeworthy (bio) DEINDUSTRIALIZATION IS A PROCESS, NOT AN EVENT. Historians have long understood this, although the field of deindustrialization studies is itself of more recent vintage.1 The socio-economic and political implications of colliery closures, the shutting of steelworks, and the loss of cod and lobster fisheries, papermills, and other large-scale primary industries has served as a catalyst for community activism and scholarly activity in Atlantic Canada, as elsewhere, for half a century. Writing in Acadiensis in 2000, as part of the famous debate on region and regionalism, Colin Howell recalled that one of the founding aspirations of the Acadiensis Generation was to make Canadians outside of Atlantic Canada “aware of how capitalism worked to the [region’s] disadvantage”; he also noted that in his Atlantic Canada Studies classes at Saint Mary’s from the 1970s onwards, discussions centred on historical industrialization and contemporary deindustrialization.2 It is, by now, well understood that the latter is experienced from below and, in the words of Christopher H. Johnson, often “engenders quiescence, the internalization of despair.”3 Industrial communities, once so central to the national story as drivers of development, as absorbers of migrants, as modernity embodied in the white heat of production, are pushed to the margins: disregarded, peripheralized, stereotyped, and subjected to every whim of the metropolitan fallacy–part of the false narrative that the big, modern city leads and the [End Page 158] ex-coalfields or ex-steeltowns or ex-papertowns or ex-fishing villages all follow along behind like an Oliver Twist asking for more. No one who has spent any time in a former industrial community can escape the palpable sense of loss that pervades, particularly amongst those older generations who were witness-participants to what was once there. To grow up in such a place, as did I and the writers of the two books under discussion here–Steven High’s One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario and Lachlan MacKinnon’s Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City–is to be rooted in a very particular mode of collective storytelling and of history writing.4 Memory acts as palimpsest. An empty patch of waste land is still called “the pit,” a squared-off parcel, not far away is called “the pony field” because this is where the colliery horses went during their holidays or (if they were fortunate) their retirement, a house holds onto to its tarnished reputation because a former inhabitant once broke a strike. Descendants, whether they live in the stained dwelling or not, retain the black mark of the “scab”; they are never fully trusted and never entirely integrated into the common weal of what is, otherwise, their home, their community. As Lachlan MacKinnon aptly describes in the introduction to Closing Sysco, “The historical moment in which I grew up was defined wholly by what came before.”5 It was ever thus on the industrial frontier. The deindustrializing present and a post-industrial future are the direct result of a great unravelling of the industrial past–a past in which the community was brought together around the pit, the steelworks, the papermill while producing a singular, genealogical sense of place and people or a place-identity. It will be apparent to readers external to such contexts just how emotive the language used often is, as though this is history written not in prose but in elegiac poetry. Thus, in the preface to One Job Town, Steven High writes of the papermill in Sturgeon Falls, Northern Ontario, being “suddenly ripped away,” its contents either removed and shipped out or “pulverized into dust.”6 It will be apparent also that for both authors this is personal history, the fourth wall between their observation and their involvement frequently shatters or is dispensed with entirely. “I cannot pretend to be a disinterested observer of this unfolding story,” High writes, indicatively. “I saw in Sturgeon [End Page 159] Falls a microcosm of the economic and political crisis facing the region as a whole.”7 This sense of connectivity is not an uncommon feature of histories written from below, although, per Eric...