In the Province of History

Ian McKay and Robin Bates make marvelous mischief of Nova Scotia’s social and political traditions in their assiduously indexed and foot-noted tome about one of Canada’s first signatories to Confederation.

 

Reading it, I might even imagine they’d spent decades as flies on the walls of their various academic bunkers in Atlantic Canada, observing events unfolding over 143 years. But, sadly, no. McKay is a professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; Bates is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago.

 

Still, however they spent their time assembling their fulsome indictment of East Coast mercantilism, they worried enough about their own swing on things to insert a choice morsel into their acknowledgements: “This [analyzes] the relations between tourism/ history, liberal order and the logic of commodification in capitalist society.”

 

Oh, bien sur mes amis, now we get it. This is just another 500-page trip down a left-wing polemicist’s memory lane. Or as Messrs. McKay and Bates stipulate, “The present work can legitimately be read as a sequel to the investigation into the cultural contradictions of capitalism in Nova Scotia initiated in Quest of the Folk (1994).”

 

In fact, the outrage In the Province of History drips like a clown’s tears as the twoauthors gleefully deconstruct the meaning of provincial poster art designed to “sell” Nova Scotia to its nearest neighbours and the world during the 1930s. To wit: “Each photo portrays an individual, none of whom has an intrinsic connection with any of the others... These people seem not to share any collective way of life. By implication, they inhabit distinctly separate gender spheres: women on the left, men on the right... Though paired in male-female duos, they seem not to be positioned as three heterosexual couples, for their eyes do not meet.”

 

Three-hundred-and-sixty pages later, the authors bookend their central argument— that tourism marketing is poor history... uh, no kidding—with another trenchant examination of the meaning behind the picture (circa 1950) that graces their front cover. “For the young couple,” they write, “captured by the well-known Canadian painter Franklin Arbuckle in a promotion for the Dominion Atlantic Railway, the romance seems to have only just begun... At least they have the means and the manners to dress properly for dinner.”

 

Ah-hah, it is funny stuff. And, to be honest, there’s a lot if it in here. On kilts: “The novelist Hugh MacLennan... recorded it as a ‘plain fact that the kilt was never worn in Cape Breton until the tourists came.’” And on Peggy’s Cove: “A little fishing village on St. Margaret’s Bay, almost entirely absent from tourist geography before 1920, became central within it after circa 1928.” Indeed, on dear, old Joseph Howe: “[He] agreed in substance with the critics of ‘dirty-phiz’d radicals and red-headed Highlanders’ when he condemned the ‘degrading and paltry bickerings’ of the Scots.”

 

This book won’t appeal to everyone—certainly not the recondite among us who refuse to reconsider Nova Scotia’s rather weird march through time in the clear light that wit and humour bestows—but it does open new vistas of appreciation for those of us who have always wondered: Who was that man behind the curtain, and why was he smiling? —Alec Bruce