Assimilating Difference through the Construction of “Village”: The Politics of Place and Listening in Montreal West
Spaces oriented around whiteness
It is a Friday afternoon. I am driving home along Westminster Avenue in Montreal West and I decide to park my car right near the main commercial sector of the street. The garden center is busy with local residents stocking up on soil and flowers to keep busy over the long Victoria Day weekend. People are picking up coffee at the local bakery. Amidst what seems to be typical mundane activity for a Friday afternoon, a jarring element within the soundscape draws my attention. I hear an unfamiliar bird squawking. I look out my car window to the left and it is a tropical bird perched on the shoulder of a shirtless white man likely in his early 60s sitting on the front steps of the local medical clinic.
I am on this street as a sound artist and soundscape researcher interested in how everyday acoustic environments are sites where social difference, race in particular, can be marginalized and affirmed simultaneously. The current place-based research project I am conducting on Westminster Avenue and its surroundings is concerned with how conceptions of “community” are linked not only to the visible configurations of public spaces and the people that navigate through them, but also to a politics of listening. In particular, critically listening to seemingly mundane environmental soundscapes can reveal important information about the sonic registers of racism and neoliberalism. I have been living very close to Montreal West for 11 years and frequent the neighbourhood on a daily basis. While Westminster Avenue is where I sometimes pick up groceries and take my children to its nearby parks, it is a familiar yet still alienating place for me. As a racialized person navigating through an overwhelmingly white space, I pivot between being a cultural insider and outsider. It is a place where I feel my own identity politics and subjugated knowledge are neither affirmed or recognized. This lived experience is my motivation for using Montreal West as a case study to examine how visual and sonic markers of social exclusion intersect.
That being said, I place my phone on my car dashboard and start recording the environmental soundscape of Westminster Avenue.
Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2014) propose that “when we stop viewing place as a static backdrop for social life and research, and instead consider more fully how place and materiality more broadly are mutually constitutive with the social, it changes the research frame. We become interested not only in how humans perceive or understand places, but also how various aspects of places themselves are manifested as well as influenced through human practices (Tuck and McKenzie 2014: 100).[1] In this moment sitting in my car observing this semi-nude man freely sprawling his body across the entryway of a private building, accompanied by a bird and speaking loudly on his phone, I think about how certain bodies are accommodated by and occupy public spaces while other bodies are perceived as “out of place” if not policed in these same spaces. Social distancing in the current COVID-19 context only adds to such policing of outdoor space. The politics of place I am interested in studying here looks and listens to how power relations play out and social difference is managed within public spaces.
In her examination of the phenomenology of whiteness, Sara Ahmed (2007) argues “spaces are orientated ‘around’ whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen…which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space”. Because whiteness is unmarked and assumed to be given, it “may function as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those spaces are lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies. We can think of the chair beside the table. It might acquire its shape by the repetition of some bodies inhabiting it: we can almost see the shape of bodies as ‘impressions’ on the surface” (Ahmed 2007: 158).[2]
This white man on Westminster is unknowingly and accidentally serving as my research participant yet we are not interacting. We are instead locked into a dialectical opposition with each other both physically and phenomenologically. While his body and voice force the surrounding public space to take their shape, I am confined to the protective space of my car and covertly taking photos and audio recordings in a manner so as not to draw attention from a white passer-by or the public security agents who frequently patrol the neighbourhood. One of the “logistical” constraints of being a racialized person doing research in public spaces. I am not successful in discretely capturing a clear photo of the man with bird. So I settle for an image in which he remains anonymous thanks to the obstruction of my car’s side-view mirror. My body is thus not able to leave a physical “impression”[3] on the social space and its normative whiteness.
As part of the critical place inquiry I am conducting from the safety of my car, I am engaging with “embodied and emplaced data”.[4] More specifically, I am aware of my own emplacement as part of the research context. I am not solely collecting data from and with human research participants on and in place, but also “examining place itself in its social and material manifestations”(Tuck and McKenzie 2014: 101).[5] One such manifestation is whiteness and how it is interlocked with the configurations and surveillance of public spaces. My data collection is shaped by the space and my embodied presence in it as a brown-skinned and bearded man. My discomfort navigating and openly collecting data ironically exemplifies the exclusionary politics of place and listening I am trying to study.
The presence of the man with bird is especially striking as it conveys the sense that he is doing “nothing” and simply resting amidst the urban bustle. In her book How To Do Nothing (2019), Jenny Odell studies the potential of resisting and withdrawing our attention from the corporate forces that work to monetize it. The ways in which contemporary work culture punishes the lack of productivity and the ways in which smartphone app developers have fostered ideals of self-optimization that make even meditation and walking competitive all contribute to Western neoliberal attention economies. Odell suggests how a large majority of public spaces have been commodified. Asides from libraries and parks, there are very few spaces where people can simply exist and feel the right to be there without having to perform labour or buy. Odell therefore insists on the need for both literal spaces for doing “nothing” as well as abstract spaces such as the right to fall asleep in public or stopping on a busy sidewalk to look at birds. Of course not everyone has the privilege of engaging in such “unproductive” behaviour without being seen as suspicious and potentially getting into trouble.[6]
The man with bird was certainly soaking in the sun rays on that hot day and seemingly withdrawing from the consumption and work activity taking place around him. However, eavesdropping on his phone conversation revealed a paradox. Having heard snippets of his chat including “we can cut the line to get the Pfizer vaccine” and “I’m going to bring my boat up on the weekend”, the soundscape does not exemplify an act of doing “nothing” in Odell’s terms but rather affirms liberal and normative ideals. Furthermore, while this man may appear “out of place” with pedestrians and drivers smiling or giving him strange looks, critically listening to him confirms that his body and voice do indeed “extend into the space”[7] quite well. In fact, this man is a Montreal West resident and I have seen him sitting on benches with his bird on Westminster Avenue chatting with local residents several times.
I imagine switching places with this man and sprawling my semi-nude brown body across the entryway of private property while doing “nothing” or having a loud phone call with a friend. How would I be heard through what Jennifer Stoever (2016) terms the white “listening ear”? This particular ear is an ideological filter that aggregates historical normative listening practices and “amplifies listening’s epistemological function as a modality of racial discernment — it is an aural complement to an interlocutor of the white gaze” (Stoever, 2016: 13).[8] In my imagined researcher-research subject role inversion, I contemplate how the language of noise is used to marginalize certain sounds and (mostly racialized) sound-makers that supposedly violate social mores.[9] The policing of noise via city by-laws facilitates racial profiling without ever having to explicitly cite race as the driving factor.[10] Therefore, who is permitted to produce “noise” in spaces like Westminster Avenue and what types of sound are considered disruptive or a threat to white normativity and the neoliberal status quo? What possible tensions or contradictions exist between the environmental soundscapes of Montreal West and the visible manifestations of “village” and community that take place in this small suburban town?
Colour blind constructions of “village”
Montreal West with its population of only about 5,000 residents, of whom roughly 80% are Anglophone, is certainly unique from the other predominantly Francophone Montreal boroughs. “Mo Westers” pride themselves in having a small close-knit community.[11] The Town’s website describes Montreal West as a “garden community” surrounded by well-maintained parks, plenty of green space and a golf course. “One of Montreal’s best kept secrets” and “No community typifies the saying ‘small is beautiful’ better than Montreal West” are some of the website’s taglines.[12] As I walk along Westminster Avenue, the visual aesthetics evoke the feel of a quaint “village”. There is the large out-dated and faded Trident Gum sign likely from the early 1990s still hanging on the side of the convenience store. There is the friendly flower shop owner chatting with customers and residents passing by. Quebec and Canada flags hang neatly lined up in alternating order along both sides of the street (Canada Day is the largest event in Montreal West with large park BBQs and fireworks). Some residents have “Little Free Library” wooden book-exchange boxes on their front lawns.
Most noticeably, there is no Starbucks or high-end restaurants on Westminster Avenue unlike nearby Monkland Village where gentrification has been rapidly increasing over the past decade. It seems as though Montreal West residents prefer to “buy local” from small family businesses. The only corporate presence on Westminster Avenue is the large Pharmaprix pharmacy building but I am told there was a large amount of push-back from residents when its construction was in the planning phase about 8 years ago. As Montreal West is one of the most affluent on-island municipalities with an average annual household income of $121,781[13], the idea that residents would be so resistant to corporate coffee chains and stores is frankly surprising to me. The perceived commitment to “small is beautiful” makes me question how residents actually conceive of “community” here and who is included/excluded from it.
Iris Marion Young (2011) proposes we construct a normative ideal of city life as an alternative to liberal individualism. She argues that persons and groups should interact within urban spaces they all experience themselves as belonging to, but without those interactions dissolving into unity or commonness (Young 2011: 237). As opposed to the liberal notions of pluralism and colour blindness, Young (2011) asserts that social diversity should instead be informed by an openness to what she terms “unassimilated otherness” (227).[14]
On Westminster Avenue, city life seems to be more tied to individualism and the assimilation of difference. During my recent visits to collect field notes, I did not see any visible markers (e.g. racialized people sitting and chatting) or hear aural cues (e.g. accents, non-European languages) that signalled openness and inclusion. Unlike other cosmopolitan boroughs of Montreal, the few racialized people I saw all appeared to be passing though or going home (e.g. waiting for a bus or biking towards neighbouring Cote-Saint-Luc with its large immigrant population). This is not surprising as according to a 2016 census, only 805 people were identified as visible minorities out of the entire Montreal West population of 5,050 [15].
I suggest Montreal West is defined by a neoliberal and co-opted form of multiculturalism that is more rooted in colour blind racism and tokenism. The only interactions white residents seem to have with BIPOC community members may be picking up take-out at the local Indian curry shop, briefly chatting with the East Asian flower shop owner, or watching musical performances at the annual “Multiculturalism Day”. This speaks to Angela Davis’ (1996) assertion that multiculturalism often risks serving as a spectacle to be consumed by white audiences rather than as a critical engagement with radical identity politics and intersectionality.[16]
Montreal West residents appear to be driven by the “lure of the local” that connects them to a past (Lippard 1997: 7). Though, we may question what “past” they are romanticizing. As Lucy Lippard (1997) suggests, neighbourhoods can cover the absence of “community” by creating its façade through social conventions (e.g. Boy Scouts, Rotary Club). This façade simulates communal elements even as community members prefer to stay out of their neighbours’ business (Lippard 1997: 24).[17] At times, I notice this façade is exposed when critically listening to how the environmental soundscapes often do not evoke a sense of place (at least for me).
White “allies” / white children playing with Nerf guns
On a bike trip with my family to a local Montreal West park, I notice a home facing the park that has a Black Lives Matter sign in the window. While a few other residents on this street had put up similar signs last year after the murder of George Floyd, their signs were taken down after only a few weeks. However, this sign it still up.
Once I settle in on a picnic table in the park, a group of six young white boys come charging into the park with large Nerf guns and shooting foam bullets at each other and at the trees. One of the boys, likely a 3-year-old, is equipped with two guns along each side of his small torso. The guns are so large they eclipse his entire body. The boys’ parents are casually gathered around a nearby table, chatting and occasionally smiling at their “innocent” boys engaged in violent theatre as, after all, they are “boys just being boys”.
However, their game does not appear so innocuous once I am able to hear the soundscape of their play. One boy is heard telling his friend, “You’re not playing by the rules!” accompanied by an orchestra of clicks produced by all the boys reloading bullets in their guns simultaneously. In that moment, I think about how not all children are afforded the luxury of being “innocent”.
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black child who was playing by himself with a toy gun in a Cleveland Park was shot dead by police in 2014 who mistook his toy for a real gun. One of the officers was heard on the dispatch radio announcing, “Black male, maybe 20, black handgun by him”. Studies have shown that black boys are perceived by white police officers as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their white same-age peers. When the officers who killed Rice within two seconds of arriving on the scene were on trial, local Cleveland newspapers ran headlines such as “Tamir Rice’s Father Has a History of Domestic Violence” and speculated as to “why he [a child] had a toy gun.”[18]
The menacing gun play of the white boys in that Montreal West park sits in jarring tension with the Black Lives Matter sign in the window just a few meters away. Is this symbolic gesture of white allyship authentic or is it simply another element of the façade of an inclusive “community”? Listening to the soundscape of guns reloading once again reveals how as Ahmed (2007) would suggest, the whiteness of these children provides a public comfort in which the park environment has already taken their shape and they are given the unlimited freedom to “take up space”.
Looking and listening beneath the façade
If the events I have recounted here suggest a façade of “community” being performed in Montreal West, then what tactics can people deploy to resist and expose this façade? On that warm day with the man sunbathing with his bird, one could sense a relaxed and cheery mood with residents (many of whom likely already received their COVID-19 vaccine) perhaps excited for Quebec’s upcoming pandemic “deconfinement” roll-out that will mean a “normal” summer. However, not everyone is so certain that “normalcy” is arriving soon especially in light of the vaccine apartheid that is plaguing much of the Global South.[19]
On a side street off Westminster Avenue I notice an arresting protest sign on a front lawn with the statement, “HEALTH ≠ COMPLACENCY IN A SICK WORLD”. This resident has been “curating” a series of different protest signs outside his house for at least the past 6 years. Though, his current protest especially resonates with my own interrogation of the carefully constructed idea of “village” in Montreal West. This resident’s small act of refusal of the neoliberal status quo digs beneath the façade of “small is beautiful” to unearth complacency and the possible absence of community. The protest sign suggests one possible tactic of counterpublic resistance used to withdraw from attention economies.[20] It prompts us to think about alternative conceptions of community that look beyond liberalism as a defining ideological framework. A village where difference is affirmed rather than assimilated.
Endnotes
[1] Tuck, E. and McKenzie, M., 2014. Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. London: Routledge.
[2] Ahmed, S., 2007. A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8(2), pp.149–168.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Tuck, E. and McKenzie, M., 2014. Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. London: London: Routledge.
[5] Ibid.
[6] http://outsideinradio.org/shows/i-would-prefer-not-to
[7] Ahmed, S., 2007. A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8(2), pp.149–168.
[8] Stoever, J.L., 2016. The sonic color line: Race and the cultural politics of listening (Vol. 17). New York: NYU Press.
[9] White, K., 2012. Considering sound: Reflecting on the language, meaning and entailments of noise. In M. Goddard, B. Halligan & P. Hegarty (Eds.), Reverberations: The philosophy, aesthetics and politics of noise. London: Continuum.
[10] Stoever, J.L., 2016. The sonic color line: Race and the cultural politics of listening (Vol. 17). New York: NYU Press.
[11] https://montreal-west.ca/en/our-town/the-informer/
[12] https://montreal-west.ca/en/our-town/town-profile-history/
[13] https://statistique.quebec.ca/statistiques/recensement/2001/recens2001_06/revenu/revstrucfam06_an.htm
[14] Young, I.M., 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
[15] https://townfolio.co/qc/montreal-ouest/demographics
[16] Davis, A. Y., 1996. Gender, class, and multiculturalism: Rethinking race politics, in A. Gordon and C. Newfield (eds) Mapping Multiculturalism, Minneaopolis: U of Minnesota Press, pp. 40–48.
[17] Lippard, L.R., 1997. The lure of the local: Senses of place in a multicentered society (p. 9). New York: New Press.
[18] https://lithub.com/respectability-will-not-save-us/
[20] http://outsideinradio.org/shows/i-would-prefer-not-to
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Nimalan Yoganathan is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. His work aims to bridge acoustic ecology with critical race studies. His main research interests include anti-racist protest tactics, decolonized and intersectional modes of listening, as well as quotidian forms of noise and silence as practices of resistance. Nimalan is also a sound artist who has conducted research-creation and field-recording projects in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the northern village of Inukjuak, Nunavik.
