Dimitry Anastakis, ed. The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style.(Book review)

Dimitry Anastakis, ed. The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2008)

THE STUDY OF the 'Sixties' is in full expansion. Both within and outside of Canada, books are being published, conferences are being held, and articles, theses, and collections of essays are in the process of being prepared. The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style, collecting articles first presented at a 2003 conference held at Montreal's McCord Museum, forms part of this larger efflorescence. With articles spanning academic disciplines and treating a wide variety of topics, the book offers an eclectic look at some of the most important transformations and legacies of the decade.

In its range of topics and approaches the book casts a wide net. Authors explore questions as diverse as Charles de Gaulle's speech from the balcony of Montreal City Hall to the Voice of Women's opposition to the Vietnam War. The book's protagonists vary from artists to architects to bureaucrats. Gender is the topic that is given the most sustained treatment, as a number of articles in the collection treat the complex ways in which gender ideals were debated, challenged, and transformed throughout the 1960s. Kristy Holmes, for example, offers an innovative reading of Joyce Wieland's artistic work, arguing that Wieland sought not to defend, but to challenge Pierre Trudeau's model of the rational liberal citizen. Holmes' feminist critique of Trudeau is followed by an article by Christopher Dummitt, who offers an important cultural history of masculinity and automobiles. By demonstrating the relationship between being 'manly' and being 'modern' in the years following World War II, he argues that when "automobile-centred high modernism came under attack," so too did the form of masculinity embedded within it. (74) Both Holmes and Dummitt, in different ways, remind us that some of the most profound social changes of the Sixties were registered not in the realm of high politics, but in the gender relations that shape everyday life.

Two chapters of The Sixties also demonstrate that, at the same time that gender norms were undergoing important challenges, conceptions of architecture and urban space were being contested and transformed. France Vanlaethem, for example, argues that critiques of architectural modernism began much earlier than the 1970s, the time during which critiques are generally assumed to have surfaced. All throughout the 1960s, she maintains, the practice of architecture was undergoing important changes, ensuring that a sense of ambivalence and unease hung over the profession. Krys Verrall, for her part, discusses the intersections and divergences among urban development projects, avant-garde art scenes, and civil rights and anti-poverty movements in New York and Halifax. As conceptual art in New York "dissociated itself from concurrent social movements that were unfolding on its own doorstep," she concludes, so too "did conceptual art and civil rights activism in Halifax develop along two racially segregated trajectories." (162)

In one form or another, Quebec forms the subject of nearly half of the book's chapters. Olivier Courteaux outlines the historical circumstances leading to de Gaulle's relationship with Quebec, and Marcel Martel explores the role of both Ontario and Quebec bureaucrats in forming government policy on drug use. Courteaux and Martel's well-documented articles contrast with Gretta Chambers' impressionistic recollections. Chambers, an acclaimed journalist, even argues that over a period of five years "Quebec's churches were emptied and the 'priest-ridden' society disappeared without a trace." (19) This view of the Quiet Revolution as a "dramatic break" with a "parochial past" is also repeated in the book's introduction, where the Sixties in Quebec are portrayed as "a bridge from the time of Maurice Duplessis and the Grande noirceur to a vibrant, progressive, and modern Quebec." (4) There is no doubt that the Quiet Revolution was an important moment in Quebec history', but such generalizations, ignoring the rich historiographical debates on the topic, contribute little to our understanding of the period.

On the whole, the book's topics are varied and its argumentation nuanced. Yet, after finishing the book, one is left struggling to understand what is really meant by 'the Sixties.' Does studying the 'Sixties' merely mean studying anything that happened during the 1960s? Or is the period defined by its social, artistic, and cultural movements? Do the Canadian Sixties need to be understood through a national lens? Or were the Sixties in Canada merely one part of a much broader phenomenon? Perhaps more importantly, why are questions of race, immigration, labour, and region continually sidelined in discussions of the Sixties in Canada? If The Sixties at times alludes to these questions, they are never centrally addressed.

Part of the difficulty lies in the book's introduction. When attempting to define the book's scope and content, Anastakis suggests that the period may begin with the election of John F. Kennedy in the United States, or with "the seeming end of innocence symbolized by that president's murder." Or perhaps, he continues, the period began with "the screaming arrival of the Beatles." And because of the lasting impact of the style of the Sixties, he hints that the period may have no ending point at all. (3-4) While arguments over the beginning and ending point of the Sixties inevitably run in circles, defining the 'Sixties' in Canada by referring exclusively to developments in the United States points to many of the unresolved questions regarding how to think about the period in Canada.

The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style is not designed, however, to be the final word on the subject. Rather, it is conceived as a beginning, offering new lines of inquiry. Anastakis concludes the introduction by stating that the book's articles demonstrate that the Sixties remain years of "uncertain clarity" and "ambiguous legacy." (13) This is certainly true. And what this collection makes clear is that the period will be a subject of research and debate for years to come.

Sean Mills

New York University

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