BLACK ROSE BOOKS
Upcoming Events
May 29th to June 1st, 2008
Book Expo America, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA
Visit us at the Consortium/Persius Booth
May 31st to June 7th, 2008
Congressof the Humanities and Social Sciences
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Congress Book Fair
Thursday, June 5th at 1:00 p.m.
ANSO 207 (Anthropology/Sociology Building)
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Everyone is welcome to this exciting panel on
The Sixties and Canada: On the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of 1968The CBC's Morningside Sunday programme recently had a 40th anniversary retrospective on 1968. On the radio panel with Michael Enright were two 60's Americans, and a young unknown UTP historian. This morning show was just that: lots of music and thirty-five minutes of chatter during the hour devoted to the most superficial view of a radical moment wherein the Canadian experience was reduced to a minor footnote.
This panel will be different. It will combine seasoned veterans of the sixties in Canada, left-wing academics and public intellectuals. A blend between what happened, and why, will be presented as the session will also examine the legacy of this decade and what is on the agenda at present.
Presenters:
Dimitri Roussopoulos, chair of the panel, Montreal, activist, writer, and founding president of the Urban Ecology Centre of Montreal will introduce the subject, drawing from his most recent book The New Left: Legacy and Continuity. The basic framework of the panel will be a balance between the past and the present.
Bryan Palmer, Canada Research Chair & Professor of Canadian Studies, Canadian Studies, Traill College, Trent University. This presentation entitled "New Left Liberations: The Poetics, Praxis, and Politics of Youth Radicalism in the 1960s," will address the content and meaning of the New Left in this country. Rather than dismiss the eclectic and diverse mobilizations and movements of dissent associated with a tumultuous decade, this exploration of the period suggests that the New Left made history (and remade Canada), albeit not in ways entirely of its own choosing. It thus had a lasting, if ironic, impact. The 1960s, in various ways, wrote finis to longstanding, if waning, understandings of nation, leaving in their place ambiguities and ambivalences that have framed the politics of being Canadian for the last four decades.
Lucia Kowaluk, Montreal, social worker teaching at McGill University, community organizer during the sixties and today, editorial coordinator of Our Generation. Kowaluk's presentation entitled "The Ethos of Community Organizing from the 60s Through Today, a New Left Perspective on Social Housing for the People," will deal with the politics of everyday life and how an impressive community organising movement evolved in a major Canadian city and will evaluate its impact on the political and economic history of its urban development. How the communitarian Left organized the grassroots, is another question discussed.
Cy Gonick, Winnipeg, publisher and editor of Canadian Dimension, whose presentation is entitled "Looking Back at the Sixties from the Vantage Point of Today," will show that it is remarkable how the concerns of that era and the core ideas that emerged then still resonate in most currents of the Canadian Left, shaping the way we see the world, Canada's place in it, and our conception of the good society. Gonick will reflect on this by perusing the pages of Canadian Dimension Magazine over the course of its 45 years, which began in 1963.
Sean Mills, Montreal, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison will present a paper entitled "The Many Means of Decolonization: Montreal in the Sixties": a complex city where a vast array of international and local influences converged, and which acted as the nerve centre of radical political activity in both Quebec and Canada during the 1960s. The city's blending of linguistic and cultural groups created a unique laboratory in which New Left ideas and activism flourished. Montreal not only acted as the location of major political confrontations, but also as a physical and symbolic incarnation of the cultural and economic exploitation that was to be resisted and overturned. This presentation will explore the various ways in which political groups in Montreal made use of the idea of "decolonization" to advance their specific political projects, arguing that they were all affected not only by the larger language of Third World liberation, but also by the specific local conditions which prevailed in the city.
Myrna Kostash, Edmonton, writer will discuss her book, Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada and the reception it received. When it was published in 1980, it provoked harsh reaction from the mainstream press, and virtually no reaction from the Left. Kostash had felt justified in expecting a welcoming response from its activists and adherents. Responses from other quarters were forthcoming, hostile as well as supportive, but the men and women of the organized Left were silent. Not only was her book ignored, most other books--memoirs, biographies, memorabilia, and deconstruction--remain unwritten. Why?