Colony on Main: history and the ruins of imperialism in Vancouver’s restaurant frontier

Abstract

Vancouver’s ‘revitalization’ has been characterized by the influx of upper-end restaurants and bars into parts of the city home to marginalized communities. We argue that some of these establishments code Vancouver’s complex racial and colonial present as a benevolent remembrance of things past. We employ and compare three modes of analysis to underscore the relationship between the historical geography of colonialism/imperialism and its modern guise in Vancouver. First, critical toponymy looks at the connection between place names and meaning. We then take a postmodern framework to explore the production of authenticity and heritage in bars emphasizing a colonial era decor. Finally, we draw from Stoler’s notion of ‘imperial debris’ to argue that these places are literally the detritus of empire revitalized as the material markings of nostalgia. In each part of the article, we demonstrate the critique offered by a different means of historical analysis. We conclude that the deployment of historical markers in the gentrification of Vancouver ultimately demonstrates the use of history as a claim to locality.