“Much more than a few hundred miles of land or water...”: Voices from Journeys around the Gaspé Peninsula (between 1929 and 1950)
Drawing on regional historiography and the historiography of tourism, our article seeks to explore representations of identity created and disseminated by tourists visiting the Gaspé Peninsula in the 1930s and 1940s. Written accounts and photographs clearly reveal attitudes and expectations on the part of travellers that they would be discovering a region – and the people living there – steeped in tradition. As a result, those same travellers felt fully justified in opposing efforts on the part of the tourist industry to adopt and promote a more modern image of the region. Rather than providing insight into the somewhat contrived representations peninsula residents constructed of their own identities, these accounts and images, influenced by a certain latent antimodernism, in fact serve primarily to educate us about the travellers themselves, their view of the world, and the kind of relationship they wanted to establish with a different world, one they saw as being simpler and more authentic than their own.