Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties by Lara Campbell, Dominique Clément and Gregory S. Kealey (review)

A few years ago, I got to spend two full days involved in a series of in-depth discussions regarding my work on the 1960s with a group of historians representing a diverse range of interests. Over the course of these meetings, many of these scholars demonstrated serious concerns about the periodization of the Canadian 1960s employed by a lot of our colleagues. I was even asked, quite simply (but rather acidly), Are you one of those “Long Sixties” people? One historian of P. R. China went so far as to claim that, in her view, 1960s exceptionalism was plainly “bad history” since it approached the past unthinkingly, simultaneously imposing rigid temporal boundaries around events while relegating unhelpful happenings into the background. During my “job talk” I was asked whether I thought (presumably along with others in the field) that the late 1970s was just a brief blip, bereft of meaning, since these four or five years were little more than a bridge into the next eminently significant decade, the 1980s. I could only jokingly reply that perhaps we were in need of a “Long Eighties” concept as a remedy, so we could pull those orphaned years into a new and meaningful narrative. Or, maybe we could just jettison the late-seventies entirely, and that way erase checkered polyester, John Travolta, and shag carpeting? Anyway.

For all of the profusion of recent academic attention to the Canadian 1960s, a surprisingly limited amount of consideration has been aimed at this central question: What are we talking about when we talk about “The Sixties” in Canada? Is it a temporal period? (Turns out: almost never.) Then, is it a condition? A rupture? A thing? An idea? How we choose to answer this question says a lot about what we are asking of the period, and the way we have framed it in our minds. If this seems obvious, well, it should. And yet, so often we have failed to grapple with that brilliant day-glo elephant right there in the conference room.

As perhaps among the crankiest observers of the “Long Sixties” approach, I am so pleased that we can turn to this volume for an insightful, challenging, and provocative attempt to engage the idea. In their indispensable introduction, two of the editors of this collection offer a thoroughgoing discussion of precisely this question: “If historians reject both the decadal approach and the explanation of rupture, what characterizes the sixties as a particular period of study?” (p. 7) Even if I tend to find their solution—“we present the ‘sixties’ as an idea, linked only roughly to a moment in time, without borders” (p. 7)—to be tautological, the very fact of their deliberate engagement with the question strikes me as precisely the kind of work we need to be doing. I can’t imagine teaching another course on the Canadian 1960s without assigning this introduction as a required, foundational reading.

The remainder of the collection suffers somewhat in comparison to the bravura intro, although it still represents, in the aggregate, the single best volume we have on these “Long Sixties” in Canada. Comprised of some thirteen discrete essays on an impressive range of topics authored by almost every one of the emerging (and fully emerged) authorities on the period, Debating Dissent is a terrific introductory resource. Top shelf work from Erika Dyck on LSD, Matthew Hayday on constitutional rights and language politics, Michael Boudreau on Vancouver’s counterculture, and Catherine Carstairs on the advent of health food, stand only slightly taller than the other generally very good articles. Most importantly, the collection offers engagements with most—though surely not all—of the “big issues” at stake in the 1960s. James W.G. Walker’s contribution, a study of the emergence of the Black United Front in Halifax, begins to fill what remains a troubling blind spot for many Canadians, and provides a fascinating analysis of...