Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver's Beer Parlours, 1925–1954 by Robert A. Campbell (review)

488 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 literary anthologies, Doleñelová-Velingerová and Stephen Owen document the wilful omissions that became part of the May Fourth definition of the past. In Owen_s terms, May Fourth intellectuals enacted a >performative utterance= that encoded for future generations the >brilliant fiction of the Date.= They made it seem as if May Fourth (and by implication 1919 alone) was the beginning of the Progressive Era, and all before it was dead, or at most a supportive tale for the reconceived present. Using the theories of Bakhtin and Hayden White, contributors to this volume elaborate the argument of the >double bind.= May Fourth supposedly unleashed a false promise of pluralism, while at the same time, it erased the traces of its predecessors in the late Qing period. The problem with the metaphor of the double bind is that it ignores the other, more obvious >burden= of May Fourth: it was B and remains B the period of greatest intellectual debate and creativity in twentieth-century China. True, as Yu Yingshi_s brilliant essay >Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment= states, May Fourth became an important piece of cultural capital which the Communist party ceaselessly tried to enchain to its ideological agenda ever since the so-called >New Enlightenment Movement= of 1937. What is less obvious, however, is that the party failed. The varied intellectual agenda of May Fourth endured as a thorn in the side of all autocratic regimes B on the mainland and in Taiwan alike. One needs only to point to the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957 and the May Fourth conference of 1979 (mentioned only in a footnote) to see how the May Fourth legacy was never fully canonized or put to rest. It remains part of the potential for cultural B and political earthquake, as evidenced by the May Fourth celebrations in 1989. (VERA SCHWARCZ) Robert A. Campbell. Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver=s Beer Parlours, 1925B1954 University of Toronto Press. xii, 186. $19.95 Six-foot high petitions in beer parlours that separated >men= from >ladies and escorts=; bottles of wine hidden in brown paper bags under restaurant tables; people denied service in beer parlours because they looked >Indian=: these and other images are part of the curious history of liquor regulation in British Columbia. Robert Campbell has developed a commanding expertise on the policies and practices of liquor distribution in British Columbia, publishing two books on the subject that overlap in time but differ widely in perspective. The first, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (1991), traces the history of liquor policy in the province from the saloons that operated in a virtually unregulated market in the early years of the century through prohibition during the First World War, the sale of liquor in government- humanities 489 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 controlled stores starting in the early 1920s, and finally the slow liberalization of liquor access through lounges, restaurants, and neighbourhood pubs after the Second World War. Sit Down and Drink Your Beer builds on this policy-centred narrative but revisits the topic by examining social behaviour in the beer parlours of Vancouver from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. Like a number of Canadian historians whose writing in the 1990s has been informed by cultural theory, Campbell found in poststructuralism an approach that illuminates the complex ways that drinking was regulated in Vancouver=s public establishments. Indeed, >regulation= is the book=s central concept. Rejecting >master= categories of analysis such as class, race, or gender, poststructuralism emphasizes the multiplicity and simultaneity of influences that shaped social behaviour. The ideas that power centres in language, >conceived broadly as systems of signification,= and that through >language= norms are defined, frame Campbell=s study of beer parlours of Vancouver. >Regulation= did not mean >government control,= suggests Campbell, but rather was an interactive process by which the state, beer parlour owners, waiters, and patrons shaped behaviour according to shared norms. Not surprisingly, Campbell finds that in British Columbia the dominant norms were those of the...