by Ramsay Cook
York University
Manitoba History, Number 4, 1982
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Though East is still East and West still West, the twain, represented by the historians of the two regions. did meet in 1978 at the Great Chautauqua, first in Calgary and then in Fredericton. Two central Canadians. David Bercuson and Phillip Buckner, now zealous regionalists exiled in the hinterlands worked energetically to make this event a valuable and productive one. That the moveable feast was a success would no doubt be attested to by both active and passive participants. As a semi-active one (a commentator at Calgary), I found this meeting as I had found earlier ones at both Calgary and Fredericton, intellectually stimulating and socially agreeable. (The skiing at Banff more than compensated for the desolation of downtown Calgary!) Nevertheless, this joint Conference of students of Western and Atlantic history, society and culture left me with an uneasy sense that we had come to the end of something rather than to a new beginning. The papers published in Eastern and Western Perspectives reaffirms that uneasiness.
Let me say at the outset that all of the papers contained in this volume are perfectly respectable. Each is thorough enough for a conference paper, none contains anything unusually foolish or ill-founded, and every contributor writes with at least the competence of a Ph.D. holder. Yet only Murray Beck’s iconoclastic dissection of the very idea of regional political culture retains on paper the sparkle it exuded when delivered from the lectern. Naturally there is a great deal of good solid stuff in a collection that contains work by Bill Acheson, David Alexander, Robert Painchaud, David Smith and other seasoned practitioners of “regional” studies.
But that, I think, is partly what lies at the root of my uneasiness about the Conference and the collection. What was especially valuable and exciting about earlier Western and Atlantic Conferences was that they provided platforms for new voices. At Fredericton, a younger Ernie Forbes (presumably he travels as “E.R.” these days), presented the first revealing results of his work on maritime rights and, to select another example at random, David Frank and Don Macgillivray recreated the world of Dawn Fraser. At Calgary outsiders discovered the valuable research of an Macpherson, Paul Voisey and William Calderwood. This work had the freshness, and occasionally the pretentiousness, of recent thesis research. But it was new, and the discussions that followed were usually vigorous and analytical.
These regional Conferences were, to a significant degree, a response to the explosion in graduate research that began fifteen years ago and is now largely finished. The Conferences were not only about regionalism; they were themselves a manifestation of that amorphous phenomenon. Expanded regional academic power centres (often expanded by imports from the centre), were the scene of competition for status within their own spheres and claims for recognition from the older power centres. Calgary was the only place it could begin: the Western Canada Studies Conference was simply the academic equivalent of the move by Mira Godard and the Globe & Mail (National Edition), to that western Eldorado. Settled into the resplendent surrounds of the Highlander or Kodoy’s, visiting scholars could don their anthropological guises to taste the distinctiveness of regional cultures: the nocturnal wanderings of curlers, a thoroughly integrated and inebriated Orange Lodge Convention, the longest plaidest bar in the universe. Only occasionally did the thought occur that the conferences of academe were less and less distinguishable (except in the levels of subsidization) from those of insurance salesmen. But my criticism of Eastern and Western Perspectives is not social, it is intellectual: its contents are nearly all predictable, even occasionally stale.
It is most disappointing exactly where its strength should have been most evident. Surely the goal of bringing East and West together was something more than merely to demonstrate the wonders of pre-Pepin Via Rail. Even the Grey Cup Game has a more serious purpose, namely to compare football, and doubtless other delights as played in Western and Eastern (Central) Canada. But comparison is almost totally absent from Perspectives. Acheson’s study of commercial growth in St. John ends where Artibises’s survey of prairie cities commences. The same can be said of Stanley on the Acadians and Painchaud on the Franco-Prairians. Gerald Friesen’s study of prairie fiction is paired with David Alexander on the Atlantic economy. Of course it is not “paired”; there are no essays on Maritime fiction or the prairie economy generally. Even the two best matched papers, Smith and Beck on political culture ride off in different directions; Beck looks at internal characteristics and finds little that unites the Atlantic provinces; Smith looks at prairie reactions to national policies and finds near unanimity. Even the reader is left without material for home comparison. Finally there is the centrepiece of the volume—historiography. Once again there is little effort at comparison and, indeed, the approach is again very different: L. H. Thomas describes especially what “westerners” have done about their own history (quite a lot). while Forbes concern is that nobody, maritime or uitlander, seems to have cared much about post-Confederation maritime history. He argues that the seduction of Canadian historians by F. J. Turner led many west who might have done something for the east. My view is that Turner is a good deal less blameworthy than such indigenous problems as Bruce Ferguson. (It may also be noted in passing that Forbes’ assertion that the conservatism of maritime life has been exaggerated, especially by Central Canadian writers, is contradicted at virtually every point by Murray Beck.)
In short, it is not entirely clear why these essays should exist as a separate book, rather than journal articles. Three indeed have already appeared in Acadiensis (and thus, in a time of financial restraint, are subsidized a second time), and the others could surely have found a similar outlet. But brought together between common covers they suggest that regionalism as what the cognoscenti call a “paradigm” is dangerously near exhaustion. Back in 1911, Murray Beck tells us, Single Tax Wood claimed that the concept existed only in the minds of Ontarians. Perhaps that explains why this collection should come from Toronto. a centre not deeply admired in the hinterlands, from the University of Toronto Press, a publisher whose name one has frequently heard taken in vain in the smoke-filled salons of regional studies’ Conferences.
Page revised: 1 January 2011
