Abstract
Power from the North examines the development of the James Bay hydroelectric projects in the north of Quebec. The book traces the role of massive hydroelectric developments in shaping new identities for the marginalized Aboriginal territories as well as the French Canadian nationalist movements. Throughout the book Desbiens keeps these two aspects in dialectical tension, mixing archival research, literary analysis, interviews, and personal history to show how the hydroelectric project draws two geographically distant but inexorably intertwined cultures together.
After describing the development of the James Bay projects in the first two chapters, Desbiens takes a detour in the second part of the book to examine Quebecois culture more broadly. Through the analysis of roman de la terre (literally ‘novel of the earth’), a body of Quebecois literature ‘poised between fiction and history’ (p. 93), Desbiens traces how certain French Canadian identities are constituted through human labor directly upon the land. This relationship is one in which French pioneers are variously seen as taming a disorderly landscape while also remaining economically, socially, and morally dependent on the riches it provides. For Desbiens, this is the key to understanding the northern Quebec and James Bay development as essential to the French Canadian project of securing a national identity through the procurement and exploitation of natural resources via territorial expansion and development.
The final section of the book uses the insights from roman de la terre to analyze the production of knowledge, labor, and spectacle in the James Bay region. Again keeping the development of Aboriginal and Quebecois identity in a tension, Desbiens traces how certain types of knowledge were more valued by the James Bay developers. Despite local aboriginal populations working to have their own forms of communal and accumulated knowledge included in the process, western scientific knowledge that positioned the region as unknown yet economically valuable took precedence. These ideas were supported by the celebration of the (largely male) labor force as pioneers that were remaking the James Bay landscape for the benefit of all of Quebec. As a contrast to the pioneer ideology, Desbiens points to the monotonous and scripted environment workers were confined to during construction. After project completion, the lives of humans in the James Bay was largely erased by the creation of a tourist infrastructure that placed the dam within a version of ‘sustainable development’ that ignored the role of human labor in reshaping the landscape.
For a book about hydroelectricity, little attention is paid to the nature of electricity or the process of constructing dams and how this may have affected the cultural landscape. There is also little consideration of the global political economy of energy during the 1970s, and the role it may have played in the development process. But in contrasting differing ideas of identity, nationalism, and territory alongside the unfolding of the James Bay hydroelectric project, Desbiens’ book makes a major contribution.