The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (review)

In recent years, as the Sixties recedes into increasingly distant memory, a new generation of academics has sought to reexamine and reinterpret the meaning and significance of the period. The work that these scholars have produced, which engages with a variety of methods, approaches, and theoretical frameworks, and focuses on a number of different geographical areas, institutions, and social movements, has offered new insights into the complexities of the era. Sean Mills makes an important contribution to this emerging literature and, despite a few limitations related to his geographical focus and a relative lack of background and contextual information, provides a nuanced and sophisticated exploration of the relationship of postcolonial thought to the political and social activism in Montreal during the Sixties.

Mills sets out three ambitious goals for his monograph: to reframe Quebec and Canadian history by situating the political activism in Montreal within a larger "framework of global dissent;" to elucidate the intellectual and ideological interconnections between various groups and individuals engaged in the political upheavals in the city; and to expand Sixties literature away from its traditional focus on North America and Europe by highlighting "the centrality of Third World decolonization to the development of dissent in Montreal." (9-10) These goals combine to inform his overall argument that, despite divisions and tensions, anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought linked together various groups and individuals within Montreal and contributed to the formation of a shared movement. "Challenging empire in Montreal," he argues, "was not the effort of a small group of isolated revolutionaries. Rather, it became a mass movement through which countless individuals came to see themselves as historically and politically consequential, providing a framework through which democracy was re-imagined as encompassing individual and collective sovereignty and social solidarity." (9) The chapters that comprise the text explore the overlapping and interconnected development of various ideas and organizations that contributed to this era of political activism in Montreal. The first part discusses the larger context of the period, including important developments within Quebec and Montreal and the rise of decolonization theory around the world. The second part, broken into chapters that deal separately with race, gender, language, and class, describes the various political actors in the city during the Sixties and their use of a common rhetoric of decolonization. By the end of the monograph, which closes with a brief discussion of the shifting nature of radicalism in Montreal by the early 1970s, Mills has largely achieved his lofty yet laudable goals.

Throughout this work, Mills provides substantial evidence to support his claims that decolonization theory connected various actors and organizations during the Sixties. He successfully explores the central features of anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought and explains how such ideas could be applied to the situation in Montreal. He also adequately illustrates how different groups, including Black Montrealers, women, francophones, and labour unions, sought to decolonize the city and the province. Although the relationships among these diverse movements sometimes appear tenuous, as they are occasionally based solely on particular word choices or individual actors, the monograph nevertheless demonstrates clearly how such ideas linked otherwise disparate movements.

In addition, Mills effectively exposes the limits and contradictions associated with the use of decolonization theory by political activists in Montreal. He frequently highlights the ignorance of many groups and individuals to their own role as colonizers, especially with respect to Aboriginal peoples, and explains in the conclusion how the recognition of such conflicts shifted the movements in a new direction by the 1970s. In doing so, Mills offers an intriguing exploration of the role of decolonization theory by the oppositional movements in Montreal during the Sixties.

One of the limitations of this work is its narrow geographical focus. Although scholars must always make difficult choices regarding the boundaries of their studies, and Mills justifies his decision by explaining that "[n]o North American city was as profoundly affected by Third World theory as Montreal," (3) comparative analysis might...