Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Rayside, David

Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers:  National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).

Freeman, Victoria

31
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
What is Active History?
Victoria Freeman – University of Toronto
So I started thinking about the conference/book idea. I was thinking that I’d
like to find a name that conveys the thought that history is alive. The best I
could come up with so far was “active history,” because it has a double sense –
the history practice of activist historians who acknowledge the political and prac-
tice history for social ends and also the sense of the history itself being active,
sort of the way chemicals can be active or yeast can be active, so there is also the
sense of change bubbling up through processes that go beyond human action
(ties in with Indigenous knowledge!). Well, and there’s even a third sense – the
action and activity of history, the sense of motion and movement and change.
—Email message sent to lisa helps, March 9, 2007
There are many ways to think about history or define one’s historical
practice, but in 2007-8 “active history” was a useful shorthand I came up with to
articulate the kind of historical practice a number of graduate students and histo-
rians were interested in exploring. The term emerged over the course of discus-
sions with lisa helps, a Trudeau scholar and fellow graduate student in the History
Department of the University of Toronto, who was working on comparative his-
tories of homelessness in Victoria, B.C, and San Francisco. I was researching the
historical memory of the Indigenous and colonial past of Toronto. Before enter-
ing graduate school I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North
America, which explores my own family’s involvement in North American colonial-
ism from the 1630s to the present.1 For many years I was also an activist and I
entered the PhD program convinced through my own experience as a feminist and
non-Indigenous anti-colonial activist of the powerful ways that historical research
could contribute to social change.
The day before I sent the above email, I participated in a panel discus-
sion on Indigenous Know l e d ge s, Re s e a rch Methodolog i e s, and Indige n o u s
History at a “Methodology Lab” that lisa had organized in our department. The
speakers were Six Nations historical researcher and curator Keith Jamieson, Heidi
Bohaker, professor of Aboriginal History in our department, and myself. The
thrust of my paper was an argument for a socially engaged practice of history and
a call for academic historians to critically examine the Canadian history profes-
sion’s entanglement with colonialism. I quoted American historian Devon
Mehusueh, who wrote:
Considering that this is a country founded by colonizers whose policies
and behaviors disrupted and almost destroyed Indigneous cultures, his
torians of the Indigenous past have a responsibility to examine critically
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 31
Freeman32
the effects of their historical narratives on the well-being of Natives 
and to also examine their stories’ influence on the retention and 
maintenance of the colonial  power structure.2
I also cited the assertions of Edward Said and Vine Deloria Jr. that not only his-
torians’ sources but our basic categories and assumptions have been shaped by
colonial rule. I noted that while I was answerable to my supervisor and my
department and the university, I was only minimally answerable to the people I
was writing about through the evolving ethics review process. I was (and still
am) uncomfortable with the academy’s control over who defines knowledge,
who has access to knowledge, and who produces knowledge, especially because
the graduate students in my department (the next generation of academic histo-
rians) were certainly not representative of Canadian society as a whole and did
not then include any Indigenous students, nor were there any Indigenous faculty
members; in fact, the discipline of Canadian history had often seemed to consist
mainly of white people talking to each other.
Echoing critiques by Indigenous scholars and the discussions on ethical
research with Indigenous peoples then being discussed by funding agencies such
as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I called for historians to
conceptualize and conduct research in partnership with Indigenous groups, to
consult members of the group who had relevant expertise, and to make  research
results accessible to Indigenous communities. I said that not to engage seriously
and deeply with Indigenous knowledge and scholarship-including Indigenous con-
ceptual categories, theoretical constructs, historiography, and articulations of
experience- was to perpetuate the hegemony of Western thinking. One such con-
cept stressed by many Indigenous elders and scholars was expressed through the
Anishinaabe word pimaatisiiwin, living well, and I noted the related idea that the
goal of scholarship should be to enhance the wellbeing of the community.
In making these remarks, I was not saying anything terribly original, but
trying to respond to Indigenous critiques of the academic practice of history and
struggling to find my own ethical and methodological footing as a non-Indigenous
researcher of Indigenous-settler relations. I was all too aware that many
Indigenous scholars spoke of an “emerging concept of sovereignty that has as
much to do with the reclaiming and retelling of various histories – of peoples, cul-
tures, and institutions – as it does with control over territories and resources.”3 I
asserted that history is never just “what happened;” it is always also the story of
the historian’s relation to the material and the community he or she writes about.
In the synergy that took place in the discussion after the Methodology
Lab, lisa helps and I discussed the possibility of doing a book together or organ-
izing a conference that had a more activist slant than most history conferences,
and that included community researchers like Keith who were not necessarily aca-
demically trained historians.
The next day I emailed lisa with the message printed at the beginning of this arti-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 32
What is Active History? 33
cle, and the phrase “active history” took wing. Meanwhile, lisa had also been hav-
ing discussions about history and activism with several graduate students at York
and had the idea of bringing us together. In April, 2007, Jim Clifford, Tom Peace,
lisa and I met for the first time and quickly focused on a conference to be jointly
sponsored by the history departments of York and University of Toronto, which
in itself marked the beginning of our efforts to build community, as the two
departments rarely collaborated. The conference was held in September 2008 at
Glendon College, York University.
Although we were all committed social activists, the four of us varied in
the degree to which our activism and historical research coincided. It’s easier to
combine the two in some fields, such as Indigenous history, than others. But all
of us were asking questions about power, community, responsibility, and the
importance of making history accessible beyond the academy. As activists, we
were aware of the need for a better grounding in history within activist movements
and shared a sense of the usefulness of historical scholarship beyond getting pub-
lished in the next academic journal. History then, was not just knowledge about
the past for its own sake, but critically important for the present and future.
This orientation was reflected in the subtitle we gave the conference,
which was taken from Jocelyn Letourneau, “Active History: History for the
F u t u re.” In our call for pap e rs, we defined active history va r i o u s ly as
[H]istory that listens, that is responsive; history that will make a tangible
difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is
transformative to both practitioners and communities. We see a practice
of history that emphasizes collegiality, builds community among active
historians and other members of communities, and recognizes the pub-
lic responsibilities of the historian.
The desire for a conference was also born out of our experiences of iso-
lation, a sense that we practiced or wanted to practice history in a different way
than many of our colleagues, some of whom disapproved of politically engaged
historical research. We needed to articulate and explore this different orientation
to historical scholarship for ourselves and with each other, to identify and learn
from our colleagues, and to investigate and locate ourselves within a largely unac-
knowledged and unexamined history of activist historical practice.
While academic history tends to privilege and reward the perspectives of
the individual professional historian acting in isolation, conducting “original”
research, we were interested in history as a collective enterprise, involving a range
of people who conduct historical research. We wanted to inspire, invigorate, sup-
port and sustain people interested in this form of history, whether or not they
were professional historians, and help people find ways to connect to history on a
personal level through doing historical research themselves. We rejected the elit-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 33
Freeman34
ism that regarded community historians and genealogists as inferior or ersatz his-
torians rather than colleagues playing valuable roles in a continuum of historical
inquiry. Our conception of “active history” also came out of a certain frustration
with some aspects of public history, which often reflected institutional or nation-
al, rather than more grassroots priorities.
I will leave it to others to discuss the Active History conference itself and
its legacy. But I will say that it helped consolidate my own orientation to a histor-
ical practice that is anchored in community and my belief that such a practice can
benefit the academy as well. As Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen, following Spivak
argues in Reshaping the Academy, Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the
Logic of the Gift, responsibility towards the “other” is a crucial premise of a re-
imagined academy. She characterizes the “externalization” of responsibility to
community in academia as a neoliberal perspective similar to the exclusion of the
environment in conventional free market economics.4
As I wrote in my dissertation, “Toronto Has No History!’: Indigeneity,
Settler Colonialism and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City,”5 my own
historical practice has been deeply informed by my personal engagement with and
participation in contemporary Indigenous epistemes, and especially the logic of
reciprocity or giftgiving as a central ethic in Indigenous cultures. The gift logic,
according to Kuokkanen, “is grounded in an understanding of the world that is
rooted in intricate relationships and responsibilities that extend to everyone and
everything.”6 This gift logic grounds many Indigenous peoples’ understandings of
their history; it also underlies their conceptions of the role and purpose of story-
telling.
For many Indigenous cultures, learning is a dialogic process of participa-
tory reciprocity. Within the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Cree, Syilx,
Secwepemc, Inuit, Sto:lo, Pueblo, and other Indigenous epistemes  that I have
been exposed to, “engagement and participation are more than conditions of
being: they are also knowledge” and knowledge is active and alive.7 Anishinabek
philosophy, for example, rejects the western premise that the mind is distinct from
the world. For Anishinaabek,
[T]he mind subsists in the very involvement of the person in the world,
caught up in an ongoing set of relationships with components of the 
lived in environment. And the meanings that are found in the world,
instead of being superimposed by the mind, are drawn from the contexts
of personal involvement. 8
In writing about history, then, historians are participating in what they
describe and are changed in the process. I knew this to be true in my own case,
but it is rarely reflected in our critical theories or methodologies.
For me, the practice of active history also validates an alternative to the
traditional historian’s stance of “critical distance,” though it took me a few more
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 34
What is Active History? 35
years to be able to articulate the concept of “critical intimacy” (borrowing from
Kuokkanen and Spivak).9 Over the course of my research, I would become
increasingly involved with the Indigenous community of Toronto, through atten-
dance at teachings and cere m o n i e s, i nvo l vement in the To ronto Nat ive
Community History Project at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, and then
through the (still continuing) process of the collective creation of a theatrical pro-
duction about the Indigenous history of Toronto. The latter has involved an
Indigenous director and actors and draws on both EuroCanadian and Indigenous
sources of historical knowledge, including my dissertation and other archival
research, oral tradition, ceremony, and the historical knowledge or intergenera-
tional memory in the body that actors tap through improvisation. All of these
involvements deepened my understanding of the Indigenous history of Toronto
and its memory and also returned something to the community, both the
Indigenous one and the larger community of Toronto.
What I like about the image of historical knowledge as active and alive is
the sense that, like yeast, it can create air pockets, new spaces for growth and learn-
ing; it can alter the chemical composition of an issue. Active history, in my view,
is not change directed by a historian, but an acknowledgement of the power of
knowledge to be an active agent, a force on its own, and to enable other people to
become active agents. These changes are multi-directional, move throughout soci-
ety, and are not just the preserve of an intellectual or political elite. Historical
knowledge can be “medicine” in the Anishinaabek sense, something that can
actively work in the mind of the reader or listener to promote positive change.
Indigenous historian Donald Fixico  speaks of telling a story as “reviving the expe-
rience of the past so that it becomes alive again,”10 a process I witnessed firsthand
when my book Distant Relations was used as a springboard for community dia-
logues about the past, present, and future of relations between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous peoples. In these community events, I saw how my own story
helped close the gap between genealogy and history, enabling other people to find
their own connection to the larger history of colonialism in North America.
In my understanding of “active history,” then, history is not merely the
preserve of professional historians. It is a communal enterprise and it belongs to
everyone.
NOTES
1 Victoria Freeman, Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America (Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 2000).
2 Devon Abbott Mehusueh, “Should American Indian History Remain A Field of Study?” in
Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, eds. Devon Abbott
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 35
Freeman36
Mehusueh and Angela Cavendar Wilson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004): 157.
3 Introduction to Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, eds. Political Theory and the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16.
4 Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 105.
5 Victoria Freeman, “`Toronto Has No History!’ Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism and Historical
Memory in Canada’s Largest City,” (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Toronto,
2010).
6 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, 7.
7 Ibid., 60.
8 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000), 101, quoted in Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, 60.
9 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, xiv, 149; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425.
10Donald Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional
Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:22 PM  Page 36


What is Active History?

Henderson, Stuart

Disappointment, Nihilism, and Engagement: Some Thoughts on Active History

Helfrich, Joel T.

On Being an Active Historian and the Usefulness of History: The Case of the Ongoing Struggle for dzil nchaa si'an (Mount Graham)

Fowler, Tim

Left History 15.1184
to investigate new Canadians of European origin is impressive, and ultimately we
are better informed about the Nationalities Branch and its idiosyncratic staff. But
are we further ahead by knowing so much about Tracy Philipps?  Perhaps, but
Caccia’s work only proves is that there was debate about the presence of growing
numbers of non-British and non-French Canadians throughout the 1940s, not of
Tracy Philipps’ centrality in that debate. It might be very easy to accept such an
argument from within the pages of the book, but given the vast amount of
research available on the wartime period, and on issues of ‘race’, immigration, eth-
nicity, and public policy, Tracy Philipps’ context is decidedly thin. In that sense,
Dreisziger’s original assertion stands in the opinion of this reviewer. What is
remarkable is how Philipps managed to stay on for as long as he did, and Caccia
paints an interesting portrait of an almost Kafkaesque Nationalities Branch that
finally got the notice of those in charge who wished to clean house at the
Nationalities Branch by “Canadianizing” it. In an interesting (and fitting) twist,
Philipps becomes the “foreigner” as the former British-born head was replaced by
Canadian-born Robert England.
Stephanie Bangarth
King’s University College
Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Ryan Edwardson sets out to tell the history of Canadian popular music from the
mid 1950s to the present. In this project he looks at the intersection of Canadian
nationalism and popular music. Canuck Rock is, essentially, two separate research
projects: the first provides a history of popular music in Canada from the 1950s
forward, the second looks at the establishment of Canadian Content Regulations
(“CanCon”) and their effect on popular music in Canada. Edwardson’s analysis of
CanCon regulations makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular music
in Canada, but the general history of popular music in Canada he provides lacks
perspective and focus.
The subtitle of the book, A History of Canadian Popular Music, is rather
misleading. Edwardson does point out, in passing, that Canuck Rock looks at the
“transition from ‘music in Canada’ to ‘Canadian music’” (5), but the vast majority
of the book looks at music in Canada. The history of music in Canada that
Edwardson provides is a clichéd and well established history of popular music:
moral panics over rock & roll in the 1950s, the British invasion (and the moral pan-
ics linked with the invasion) of the 1960s, the growth of psychedelic music and
drug culture, etc. The first five chapters of Canuck Rock provide this overview of
“music in Canada” and do not make much, if any, contribution to the academic
literature on popular music in Canada. Indeed, the first five chapters focus most-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 184
Book Reviews 185
ly on “music in Canada”, and the few Canadian artists that make it into these chap-
ters are mainstream and (now) well established.
Edwardson is interested in Canadian nationalism and popular music. He
makes the claim that Canadian popular music is indicative of a quiet nationalism,
which developed slowly and over time. He further suggests that the political con-
tent of Canadian popular music is nationalistic in character. While Edwardson
provides some cases to support this thesis, he does ignore a vast section of mate-
rialist political Canadian popular music which is not overtly nationalistic. For
example, nowhere in the book does the Vancouver punk scene of the early 1980s
get mentioned. The materialist songs and political outlook of many Vancouver
punk bands (D.O.A. springs to mind) severely undermines Edwardson’s thesis of
politics as quiet nationalism in Canadian popular music.
Canuck Rock also marginalizes, or in some cases ignores, the CanRock
renaissance of the 1990s. Just to name some of the many suspicious absences
from Edwardson’s history, mentioned only in passing are the Barenaked Ladies,
Sloan, The Lowest of the Low, and The Pursuit of Happiness. These bands had,
and in some cases continue to have, a major influence on CanRock, and ignoring
them ignores a large and important chunk of the history of Canadian popular
music.
It should also be noted that there was an undercurrent of materialist pol-
itics present in some of the songs of the bands in the CanRock renaissance of the
1990s. For example, The Lowest of the Low’s critically acclaimed and best selling
album Shakespeare My Butt was influenced by the Spanish Revolution and Marxism,
not by Canadian nationalism. The Rheostatics, another very important Canadian
band of the 1990s receive slightly more attention, but this is only in the context of
‘The Ballad of Wendel Clark’ which Edwardson uses as an example of the quiet
Canadian nationalism he is researching. It is curious to note that Edwardson does
not mention ‘Claire’, the Rheostatics’s only Top 40 hit which is an apolitical song,
or ‘Bad Time To Be Poor’, a Rheostatics single which received substantial airplay
which served as a materialist critique of the Mike Harris regime in Ontario.
The real strength of the book, and where Edwardson makes a valuable
contribution to the literature on popular music in Canada, is his analysis of
CanCon regulations. Edwardson provides a detailed and complete history on the
formation and implementation of CanCon, and includes a discussion of the suc-
cesses of CanCon, as well as the failures of the program - namely that the bulk of
artists used to fulfil CanCon regulations are already well established. Canuck Rock
also looks at the history of the Juno Awards, FACTOR and MuchMusic, and how
these institutions have evolved and contributed to Canadian popular music. It is
in this section, where a rich political history of CanCon regulations are provided,
that Edwardson shines.
Sections of Canuck Rock hint at the political economy of popular music
in Canada. Edwardson notes that “Canada lacked the necessary recording indus-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 185
Left History 15.1186
try infrastructure and domestic airplay for a musical component of the new
nationalism” (89) in the 1960s, and he discusses how the Junos shifted from a cel-
ebration of Canadian talent into an engine for record labels to increase profits.
The book seems to hint that nationalism in Canadian popular music was partially
constructed by various aspects of the recording industry to sell records - the his-
tory of Canadian Content regulations, MuchMusic and the Juno awards all support
this claim. The book would be much stronger if an analysis of the profit motive
of Canadian nationalism was expanded upon.
Canuck Rock covers quite a bit of the history of Canadian popular music
and popular music in Canada that is provided elsewhere. The first half of the
book does not really provide any new insights or analysis. The second half
though, which discusses Canadian Content regulations, is a valuable contribution
to the study of both popular music in Canada and Canadian popular music. If just
for these chapters, Canuck Rock will be enjoyed by scholars and fans of Canadian
popular music.
Tim Fowler
Carleton University
Katrina Srigley, Breadwinning Daughters:  Young Working Women in a
Depression-Era City, 1929-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2009).
Breadwinning Daughters addresses the imbalance in Depression-era historiography,
which emphasizes male employment and unemployment, by considering the
essential wages that young, usually unmarried women provided for their families
in the 1930s. Srigley explains that, “When ‘men’s’ jobs in primary industry were
disappearing, leaving fathers and sons from a wide social and economic factions
of the city with few places to turn and few ways to support their families, young
women continued to have viable wage-earning options in secondary and tertiary
sectors of the economy, including textile manufacturing, office work, domestic
service, teaching and nursing. This meant that gendered divisions of labour, which
relegated women to lower-wage and –status jobs than men, also offered them
greater opportunity and stability.” (4)  Depending primarily on one hundred oral
interviews—eighty of which the author conducted herself—the book considers
not only the extent to which ‘dutiful daughters’ contributed essential wages to their
Toronto families, but also the experiences of these young women in Toronto’s
economy, homes, and places of leisure (4).
Beyond the book’s main argument that daughters’ wages were crucial for
families surviving the Depression, Srigley presents two particularly valuable relat-
ed arguments: the strong ethnic/racial aspect to young women’s employability in
the 1930s, and the young women’s complex negotiation around respectability and
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 186


Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

MacDonald, Heidi

Left History 15.1186
try infrastructure and domestic airplay for a musical component of the new
nationalism” (89) in the 1960s, and he discusses how the Junos shifted from a cel-
ebration of Canadian talent into an engine for record labels to increase profits.
The book seems to hint that nationalism in Canadian popular music was partially
constructed by various aspects of the recording industry to sell records - the his-
tory of Canadian Content regulations, MuchMusic and the Juno awards all support
this claim. The book would be much stronger if an analysis of the profit motive
of Canadian nationalism was expanded upon.
Canuck Rock covers quite a bit of the history of Canadian popular music
and popular music in Canada that is provided elsewhere. The first half of the
book does not really provide any new insights or analysis. The second half
though, which discusses Canadian Content regulations, is a valuable contribution
to the study of both popular music in Canada and Canadian popular music. If just
for these chapters, Canuck Rock will be enjoyed by scholars and fans of Canadian
popular music.
Tim Fowler
Carleton University
Katrina Srigley, Breadwinning Daughters:  Young Working Women in a
Depression-Era City, 1929-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2009).
Breadwinning Daughters addresses the imbalance in Depression-era historiography,
which emphasizes male employment and unemployment, by considering the
essential wages that young, usually unmarried women provided for their families
in the 1930s. Srigley explains that, “When ‘men’s’ jobs in primary industry were
disappearing, leaving fathers and sons from a wide social and economic factions
of the city with few places to turn and few ways to support their families, young
women continued to have viable wage-earning options in secondary and tertiary
sectors of the economy, including textile manufacturing, office work, domestic
service, teaching and nursing. This meant that gendered divisions of labour, which
relegated women to lower-wage and –status jobs than men, also offered them
greater opportunity and stability.” (4)  Depending primarily on one hundred oral
interviews—eighty of which the author conducted herself—the book considers
not only the extent to which ‘dutiful daughters’ contributed essential wages to their
Toronto families, but also the experiences of these young women in Toronto’s
economy, homes, and places of leisure (4).
Beyond the book’s main argument that daughters’ wages were crucial for
families surviving the Depression, Srigley presents two particularly valuable relat-
ed arguments: the strong ethnic/racial aspect to young women’s employability in
the 1930s, and the young women’s complex negotiation around respectability and
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 186
Book Reviews 187
disrespectability. In “Chapter 3: Young Women’s Job Options in an Urban Labour
Market,” Srigley emphasizes the racialized nature of employment in Toronto. She
describes how immigrant women and women of colour could hope only for fac-
tory or domestic work, whereas professional employment, such as nursing, teach-
ing and office work, was reserved for young women of British descent (57). Her
oral history evidence is very compelling, and at times heartbreaking. In Srigley’s
description of her 2001 interview with Clair Clarke, for example, she notes that
Clarke was second in her graduating class in 1932 and received the Timothy Eaton
Scholarship medal, yet her school did not find her a job placement as they did for
so many other students. When Srigley asks “why she had difficulty securing
employment, Clarke … exclaimed with great conviction, ‘I am black in case you
hadn’t noticed?’” (59)!  
Srigley also uses oral interviews very effectively in “Chapter 4: Where is
a Woman Safe? City Spaces, Workplaces, and Households.” With more young
women than ever before going out to work in the 1930s, their safety and
respectability were of great concern to themselves, their families, and society.
These young women were under great pressure to conform to social expectations
for appearance and behaviour. Moreover, as with employability, respectability had
strong race and class dimensions. And so, the rape and murder of a ‘respectable’
girl, Ruth Taylor, in a Toronto ravine, sparked widespread outrage. Such violence,
while accepted to some degree among immigrant society, was considered a tragedy
among the British element, and lead to much fear among young women, including
some whom Srigley’s interviewed. Srigley also considers safety within the home,
noting how the Depression-era’s veneration of the home backfired by contribut-
ing to the further silencing of domestic violence.
This book, which started as PhD dissertation, is an important and need-
ed addition to Depression era historiography, labour studies, and oral history, and
goes a long way in balancing the previous literature that focuses on male employ-
ment and unemployment. I have a couple of quibbles, however. The first is prob-
ably more the publisher’s than the author’s decision; given that this book is entire-
ly about Toronto, why is that not in the title or table of contents?  “A Depression-
Era City” seems unnecessarily ambiguous. Secondly, I would like to have seen a
more nuanced analysis of marriage. Srigley notes several times that many bread-
winning daughters were so dutiful that they postponed or cancelled marriages,
knowing that they could not keep their jobs if they married, and that their parents
badly needed their contributions to the family economy. However, an equally
strong reason for the decreased marriage rate in the 1930s is that unemployed
young men were also not in the position to marry.
Heidi MacDonald
University of Lethbridge
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 187


Katrina Srigley, Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Smith, Julia

Left History 15.1190
Candida Rifkind, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in
1930s Canada ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
In Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s Canada, Candida
Rifkind examines the “the writing, activism, and politics of the 1930s literary left
in English Canada as well as their reception in English-Canadian literary history
and their place in national cultural memory over the past eighty years.” (4)
Focusing on women in particular, Comrades and Critics revisits the issues of
women’s participation on the left, and the place of the 1930s literary left in
Canada’s national literary history. In regards to Canadian literature, Rifkind coun-
ters previous analyses of leftist women’s work that have “marginalized and even
excluded them from dominant narratives of English-Canadian literary history.” (6)
As she explains, more broadly, “there has yet to be an acknowledgement by the
English-Canadian literary institution…that the 1930s literary left is a recognizable
and diverse movement holding a distinct aesthetic position within national literary
history.” (6)  In addition, Comrades and Critics also contributes to the literature on
Canadian women’s leftist activism. While other scholars have documented
women’s participation in leftist political parties and organizations, Rifkind focuses
on leftist women’s poetry, novels, and theatrical productions. By situating these
works in their particular historical circumstances, and by providing an in-depth
analysis of their production and reception, Rifkind explores the challenges and
contributions of leftist women literary figures in the 1930s.
Rifkind combines historical and literary analyses to examine the work of
several leftist women writers, playwrights, and theatre workers. In particular, she
looks at the works of such women as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird,
Toby Gordon Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Elsie Park Gown, Minnie Evans Bicknell,
and Mary Reynolds. At times, Rifkind broadens her focus to include the people
with whom these women worked and “who form the backdrop of national and
international socialist modernism in 1930s Canada.” (4)  Rifkind’s central argu-
ment is two-fold: First, she contends that “as individual lives and the nation itself
seemed to disintegrate under immense economic hardships and political discon-
tent, literary forms documenting and transforming this social reality begin to
cohere.” Second, Rifkind argues that “the reception of these women’s anti-capi-
talist writings by both critics and the Canadian public reveals the extent to which
leftist ideologies and socialist aesthetics had been absorbed into the liberal main-
stream of English-Canadian culture by the end of the decade.” (5)  The result is a
book that serves as an important addition to the historiography on Canadian liter-
ature, and on women and the left in Canada.
While Comrades and Critics represents a significant addition to Canadian
historiography, it does have minor weaknesses. First, given the use of “Canada”
in the title, one expects Comrade and Critics to examine women from both French
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 190
Book Reviews 191
and English Canada. However, throughout the book, Rifkind emphasizes that
Comrades and Critics is a study of English Canada only. The reason for this deci-
sion is not clearly communicated to the reader and thus begs the question: What
about women in French Canada?  A simple footnote explaining the decision to
focus only on English Canada could have addressed this issue. Second, in her
analysis of women, literature, and the left, Rifkind relies heavily on Ian McKay’s
work on Canadian socialism, without adequately situating his research in relation
to the broader historiography. For example, she writes “McKay breaks with his-
toriographical tradition to propose a different starting point for understanding
socialism in Canada, one that sets aside factional disputes over the time, place, or
personalities of authentic Marxism in favour of interrogating the broader project
of the Canadian left in the twentieth century” (6). This statement is supported
with a reference to McKay; however, no reference is made to any specific exam-
ples of the previous “historiographical tradition” with which McKay’s work sup-
posedly breaks. While lengthy discursive footnotes can be dry and cumbersome,
situating research in relation to previous works is a crucial part of producing
responsible and informed scholarship.
These criticisms aside, Comrades and Critics nevertheless provides an
important analysis of leftist women’s literary contributions during the 1930s, and
is thus an important addition to the historiographies on Canadian literature, and
on women and the left in Canada.
Julia Smith
Trent University
Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In The Province of History: The Making of the
Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2010).
Ian McKay is one of Canada’s most prolific and well-respected historians. Among
his diverse body of work is a series of attempts to deal with the views of Nova
Scotia’s past of organic intellectuals. So, when I saw this most recent book, I
immediately wondered how In the Province of History differed from his highly-
regarded Quest of the Folk and his earlier essays on Peggy’s Cove, the tourist gaze
and the imagined Scottishness of Nova Scotia. As he tells the reader in a foot-
note, this volume (and another book yet to come) is an installment in his not yet
completed study of the creation of a past for Nova Scotia that was useful as a
tourist destination and supporting the racial and economic status quo.
Something of the evolution of McKay’s thought can be gleaned from his
theoretical debts, although his work cannot be reduced to playing out other’s the-
ories. Early on he was reading (among many dozens of other historians) Raymond
Williams on the representations of the rural pastoral and Hobsbawm and Ranger
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 191


Candida Rifkind, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Omatsu, Glenn

Left History 15.1200
this is a sadly missed opportunity.
In relation to the latter goal, Soja rightly shows that much spatial theoret-
ical development must be understood as rooted in the insights Henri Lefebvre
developed over his long career (leavened with more than a few dashes of
Foucault). He explains that a robust theory of spatial justice requires an “ontolog-
ical restructuring” (69) that allows the aspatial, liberal, Rawlsian theories of justice
that are dominant in much political philosophy to be transcended by a spatialized
theory of justice that understands uneven development to be a root fact of life and
that gives rise to and supports both the theorizing of, and political struggle for,
what Lefebvre called the “right to the city.” But then things turn weird. Instead
of examining in any depth the work of those theorists who have toiled away on
this project of ontological restructuring (Harvey, Castells, Young, and a raft of
lesser theorists, myself included), critiquing them where necessary and out of that
developing a more robust theory of spatial justice, Soja instead dismisses them not
because their work is lacking (he is in fact frequently generous in his appreciation
of aspects of this work), but because they possess “little inclination to use either
of the specific terms of spatial or territorial justice.” (91)  This complaint – a dis-
missal, really – is repeated over and over again (e.g. 82 [twice], 87, 91, 107), even
as those couple of geographers who have used the terms explicitly are praised. In
neither case, however, does Soja really examine the substance of the arguments he
is examining to see whether or not the arguments at stake in fact contribute to the
project of theorizing spatial justice, even if the explicit term is not used. The
result, intended or not, reads like a blacklist rather than an engaged critique. This
too is a sadly missed opportunity.
Nonetheless Seeking Social Justice possesses much of value. As a chronicle
of Soja’s long and productive career, it is enlightening. The vignettes about organ-
izing in LA of which the BRU is just one example whet the appetite. The biblio-
graphic essay that concludes the book is an excellent resource for anyone seeking
the richness of theories of spatial justice (as long as they are not too worried about
whether the specific term is used or not). And the encomium for the Right to the
City movement that appears off and on throughout the book is particularly wel-
come at a moment when signs of progressive organizing around critical urban
issues are all too few and far between.
Don Mitchell
Syracuse University
Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor
Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
In the United States and other multiracial nations, how do workers from different
races and ethnic groups become a unified class?  According to most labour histo-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 200
Book Reviews 201
rians, workers develop awareness of their common interests by replacing their
older racial consciousness with new class consciousness. In contrast, Moon-Kie
Jung argues that this widely accepted viewpoint of “deracialization” is misleading.
I n s t e a d , Jung proposes that wo rke rs ’ p re - existing consciousness becomes
“stretched and remolded” to reinterpret and rework race (7). In other words,
rather than class consciousness replacing race consciousness, workers transform
their notions of race to encompass class.
Jung develops this analysis of the relationship between race and class
through a detailed study of Hawaii from the mid-1800s to 1946. From the mid-
nineteenth century to the early 1940s in colonial Hawaii, an immigrant workforce
was divided racially and ethnically in the islands’ main industries of sugar, pineap-
ple, and longshoring. Although immigrant workers waged militant strikes against
the white oligarchy controlling Hawaii, especially on sugar plantations, they were
unable to unite across racial and ethnic lines. Hawaii’s three main groups of immi-
grant workers – Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese – formed ethnic-specific labour
associations, and despite efforts to form strategic alliances to counter employers’
divide-and-conquer tactics, the workers remained divided until 1946. Thus,
according to a U.S. Department of Labor report, until 1944 Hawaii was one of the
least organized areas in the U.S. and its territories. However, by 1946 it had
become one of the most highly organized areas (107). What happened to dramat-
ically change this situation?
Labour historians identify the 1946 strike in the sugar industry lasting 79
days as the transformative moment. Led by the International Longshore and
Warehousemen Union (ILWU), the workers organized interracially, with Japanese
and Filipino Americans especially modeling the new class consciousness. Jung
agrees with labour historians on the impact of the 1946 strike for changing the
political landscape of Hawaii. However, in contrast to standard interpretations of
the strike, Jung contends that for workers a new class consciousness did not
replace their older racial consciousness. Instead, new ideas of class combined with
pre-existing notions of race. To explain this development, Jung examines earlier
racial ideas of workers and how they shifted.
In nineteenth century Hawaii, the white elite that controlled the sugar
and pineapple industries constructed a rigid racial hierarchy to govern an immi-
grant workforce. They reg arded Portuguese as nonwhites but different from
Asian “cheap labor.” Portuguese became foremen on the sugar plantations and
were seen as a “model minority.” (73)  In contrast, Japanese and Filipinos were ini-
tially defined as “cheap labor,” replacing earlier Chinese “coolies.” The status of
Japanese in Hawaii, however, changed by the 1930s due to two developments: the
coming of age of second-generation Japanese American “citizens,” and the suspi-
cion over their “national loyalty” due to the emergence of Japan as a powerful
nation state threatening the hegemony of the U.S. in the Pacific (82). Meanwhile,
the white elite regarded Filipinos as an “inferior race” due to coming from the col-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 201
Left History 15.1202
onized nation of the Philippines (84). The racial classifications of the white oli-
garchy impacted how workers saw each other and themselves, influencing the
kinds of struggles they waged (i.e., ethnic-specific labour associations) and their
strategic thinking about how to unite against a common enemy. Thus, from the
mid-1800s to the early 1940s, workers struggled among themselves over racial clas-
sifications like coolie, cheap labor, citizen, haole, and American, “defining what
these categories meant and who belonged to them” (188). To unite together,
workers of different ethnic groups needed to confront and overcome qualitative-
ly different racial inequalities.
According to Jung, during World War II and the immediate years preced-
ing it, new “mobilizing structures” and “political opportunities” enabled workers
to transform their thinking about race and class (107). In this period, workers took
advantage of New Deal legislation and the coming of the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) to Hawaii. Longshoremen in the islands gained
resources and new approaches to organizing from their contact with West Coast
counterparts. Japanese Americans fought valiantly in World War II, shifting per-
ception in the islands of their loyalty.
The impact of these developments culminated in the 1946 strike. For
Jung, the strike represented for workers a new understanding of racial justice as
encompassing united worker power. In other words, workers defined the strike as
not simply an economic struggle – i.e., a campaign for better wages and working
conditions and union power – but as part of the historical struggle of workers in
the islands against racial discrimination and for the rights of immigrants against a
common oppressor.
Can Jung’s insights about the relationship of race and class be applied to
other multiracial settings, beyond colonial Hawaii?  Most definitely. However, the
crucial starting point is for labour historians and social scientists – as well as labour
and community organizers – to discard the predominant framework of “deracial-
ization” and to understand that the making of a working class integrally involves
racial justice.
Glenn Omatsu
California State University, Northridge
Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown
Sol idar i t y (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Race relations between African Americans and Mexican Americans are command-
ing greater attention from scholars. Both racial groups have comprised key con-
stituencies of the American left during the twentieth century. A contributor to the
Du Bois Institute of African and African American Research Nathan Huggins’
Lecture Series, Neil Foley’s Quest for Equality explains the historical failure of Black-
Quark final draft.qxd  2/3/11  12:23 PM  Page 202


Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)

-, -

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Stephen Brooke teaches twentieth-century British history at York University. He
has published in Past and Present, American Historical Review, Historical Journal and
other journals. He is the author of Labour’s War (Oxford, 1992) and the forth-
coming Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left, 1880s to the Present
Day (Oxford, 2011).
Elizabeth Jameson holds the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American
Studies at the University of Calgary. She chaired the "Ludlow Committee" of the
Labor and Working-Class History Association that worked successfully to estab-
lish the Ludlow site as a National Historic Landmark in 2009. Her publications
include All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998) and (with James Green) “Marking Labor
History on the National Landscape: The Restored Ludlow Memorial and Its
Significance,” International Labor and Working-Class History 76:1 (September 2009):
6-25.
Michelle Mart is an Associate Professor of History at Penn State University,
Berks campus. She is the author of Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel
as an Ally, and is currently at work on a study of pesticides in postwar America.
Ian McKay teaches history at Queen’s University and is working on a multi-vol-
ume history of the Canadian left.
Ronald Paul is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Göteborg, Sweden. His most recent books include The Other Half: British Working-
Class Stories (1994), Unruly Nations: a People’s History of Britain (1996) and Dissonant
Voices: Literature and Society in Britain from Chaucer to the Present Day (1999).
Left History 14_2 ready to go to printer  8/6/10  12:56 PM  Page 7


Not a member yet

Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).

What is Active History?

Disappointment, Nihilism, and Engagement: Some Thoughts on Active History

On Being an Active Historian and the Usefulness of History: The Case of the Ongoing Struggle for dzil nchaa si'an (Mount Graham)

Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Katrina Srigley, Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Candida Rifkind, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)

About the Contributors

What is Active History?

1,044

1,130