“Potpourri”

This is truly the oddest trio that I've tried to link together - as the last three books in the field, these are the ones that just didn't quite fit anywhere else.

Henderson, Making the Scene

Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy

Penfold, The Donut

There are honestly few coherent links between these last books; I will be making some fairly dramatically non-sequitous acrobatic leaps to segue between the three.

Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s is a convincing and engaging analysis of 1960s counterculture, using Toronto’s Yorkville “scene” as a jumping-off point to consider broader trends of the 1960s, the construction of a community in nostalgic memory, and most prominently, the role of performativity in shaping identities. Henderson breaks down the idea of a counterculture, positioning it in response to the context of the dominant culture, as part of a hegemonic process (6). His work is an interrogation of the discursive contexts of identity performance, looking at the diverse manifestations of identity in “the scene” (12-13). Henderson outlines how Yorkville came to be constructed as a youth “institution” that was sick or deviant, heightened by ideas that it was a foreign space. Yorkville was carefully imagined and performed by Villagers and those who observed them, and served as a battleground for physical space and its meaning (20). In one of many parallels between Henderson’s work and that of Sean Mills, Yorkville’s youth in the early 1960s positioned themselves as an “embattled minority,” claiming third world status for themselves and thus entrenching Yorkville as a politicized space (22).

Henderson’s research is drawn from a range of sources, particularly newspapers; a central strand of his analysis is considering how the media constructed Yorkville and mobilized social and political forces against it (25). He also worked with oral histories from some of the area’s most prominent activists. He structures his work around four temporal sections, each containing thematic chapters. His first chapter, part of his introductory section, details the creation of Yorkville and hip identities. Henderson argues that hipness entailed “cultural sharing, appropriation, and bastardization,” processes which depended on contact between youth and immigrants (32). In the early 1960s, Yorkville included bohemian coffee houses next to—or above or below—upscale boutiques and galleries, all taking the place of low-rent working-class housing (40-41); the neighbourhood’s culture varied between the day and the night, intermingling bohemian poverty with Euro-chic (42), a combination that produced regular friction (58). The area’s youth worked to escape alienation by seeking authenticity (44), knowingly performing their identities and celebrating this identity performance (54). In addition to the “hippie” youth who dominate memories of the area, working-class “greasers” also posed a concern to other Torontonians (65).

Henderson’s next section examines the period between 1964 and 1966, positioning Yorkville as a disputed territory, with tensions catalyzed by media representations of the area as violent and sexualized (85, 96). The characters in these tensions could be easily distinguished, with fashion as a significant expression of identity; “Villagers” understood their attire to be a costume (110). Fashion was one element of Villager identity and performance that was centered around male expressions; women had a narrower range of fashion choices with which to rebel, and experienced more hazards in sexual experimentation (110, 95). In this emphasis on performativity, Henderson follows Judith Butler’s assertions that everything in culture is constituted through performance (114). Drug use even served as a performance of authenticity for middle-class hippie youth, an expression which provoked significant concern (128).

While many histories of the 1960s highlight links between hippies and the era’s social and political movements, Henderson points out that there was significant divergence. Radical feminists, for example, opposed the performance of “free love” that privileged men and was often unsafe for young women in Yorkville (158-159). Among Villagers and bikers, there was a silence surrounding violence, such that it is hard to differentiate young women’s sexual agency from the violence that they experienced; media portrayals of sexual danger blurred this distinction (197, 203, 206). Radical feminists were a small component of concerned parties who focused on Yorkville; a current through Henderson’s third section is the image of Yorkville as a cancer needing excision (165, 183). This concern became heightened with the LSD-linked suicide of John Stern, a young music student performing hip authenticity through drug use (174).

Henderson’s final section details the decline of Yorkville’s counterculture scene. By the late 1960s, there was a pervasive sense among Torontonians that Village youth were damaged and a disgrace for Canadians (212). Many Villagers were also concerned about the consequences of their performances of identity, while a younger cohort of hippies were socially and emotionally troubled. The media and research such as that by the Addiction Research Foundation portrayed Yorkville as centered around drug use (216, 246), and activists such as June Callwood worked to help the community build social support that reflected its needs (230). The medicalization of Yorkville peaked with a hepatitis “epidemic”—really a hyperbolic media presentation of isolated cases—that increasingly stigmatized the community (249-252); a subsequent government commission in 1968 conflated drugs, hippies, and Yorkville as having a singular meaning, expressing concern that hippies glorified the health impacts of drugs such as speed (263).

Class and ethnic tensions run through Henderson’s work; from the early period of Yorkville’s scene there were tensions between “hippies” and “greasers,” with the more populous greasers seen as a second-rate cultural expression. This produced resentment from the greasers, as the hippies had chosen a lifestyle of poverty, while greasers had systemically curtailed social and economic opportunities (132). This tension evolved through the 1960s, as the hippies became younger, were frequently from outside of Toronto, and were often youth without the social supports of a middle-class family to return to (146). Along with the tensions between Villagers and business owners and city officials, Yorkville became a contested space “in which hegemonic constructions of reality were rendered inconsistent” (272).

Ethnic tensions are the prevailing theme of Timothy Stanley’s Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians. Stanley’s disciplinary background in sociology is clear through his emphasis on racialization and anti-racist practice. His monograph is ultimately unsatisfying; the thrust of his ideas would seem self-evident to any reader with a background in anti-racist scholarship and Canadian immigration history. Stanley analyzes the 1922-23 school strike in Victoria, BC, arguing that the strike—a means of resistance orchestrated by Victoria’s Chinese-Canadian community—responded to a masculinist, colonialist system of racialization (18). Racialization meant that racism became part of a “texture of life,” a phrase Stanley borrows from Hannah Arendt; it informed discourses and the material arrangements of the lives of Chinese Canadians (5-6). The main source body for his work comprises Chinese-language newspapers, to show discourses spread by the Chinese, rather than simply about them.

Stanley begins his study with a useful overview of the 1922-23 strike. On the premise that Chinese students slowed down their elementary school classes, school officials in Victoria implemented policies to place students racialized as Chinese in separate classes and schools. The Chinese Canadian Club was very active in organizing resistance to this policy, working with major overseas Chinese organizations, articulating that segregation was an example of simple race prejudice, rather than the means to an academic end (27-29). The CCC emphasized that Chinese Canadians paid taxes, and were thus entitled to equal schooling; they refused to set up a parallel school system that would absolve the school district of this responsibility, instead organizing temporary Chinese-language education (38, 190). They also stressed the need for integration for Chinese-Canadian children to assimilate into the dominant culture (40). While the strike resulted in a partial change in policy so that children who academically kept up could remain with Euro-Canadian students, the 1923 restrictions on immigration from China essentially legislated that racialized Chinese people could never be Canadian (44).

Stanley’s work is divided in two major sections. The first untangles the racisms—emphasis on the plural—experienced by Chinese Canadians; the second focuses on anti-racist practices and organizing by the Chinese-Canadian community and their allies. Stanley situates anti-Chinese racism as part of British Columbia’s colonial project, arguing that it was part of an attempt to establish European privilege and form BC according to white dominance (47). This was intertwined with, but separate from, the racism experienced by First Nations people, and often made indigenous Canadians invisible through assertions that Euro-Canadians were native to British Columbia (48). The policies in this project assumed that “race” was neutral and objective, making racializing assumptions hegemonic (64, 68). Part of these racializing assumptions was the construction of “the Chinese” as a distinct group, flattened of diversity (69); often this became a representation of “the Oriental,” which included Japanese Canadians (95). Segregated schooling was a means of normalizing categories of racialization, making racialization an assumed element of the state (113). At the end of this first section, Stanley introduces an idea of a “Chinese Archipelago,” the result of a constellation of policies that isolated and marginalized Chinese Canadians (116).

In his section on anti-racisms, Stanley positions the very category of “Chinese Canadian” as a means of resistance, showing the dual reality of people with Chinese ancestry and lived experiences in Canada (146). These Chinese Canadians positioned themselves outside the binary of “Chinese” versus “Canadian,” rejecting this dualistic racialization and showing that their lives were shaped in and by British Columbia, not China (170). They formed an inclusive imagined community across the “Chinese Archipelago” to create an alternate discourse on Chinese nationalism and articulate their interests in a diverse community (171). What is unclear from Stanley’s analysis is the extent to which these individuals considered their work to be specifically “anti-racist,” the terminology that Stanley employs; this is unlikely, however, as he acknowledges that “racism” was not in the lexicon of British Columbians during the 1920s (29). These Chinese Canadians positioned their identity not as racialized, but as belonging to a civilization and a shared experience of marginalization (173). The Chinese-language schooling organized by these groups was a form of protest, not just an accommodation for their children; it was an attack on Euro-Canadian state formation, and a means of instilling Chinese nationalism in their community (190). Given the precarious position of the Chinese Canadian community, the Victoria Chinese Free School gave children a safety net through literacy in Chinese languages and rejection of assimilation (191, 207). Stanley devotes a final chapter to non-Chinese support for the school strike, generally from missionaries who saw segregation as un-Christian (210). Stanley largely uses this chapter as an illustration of the importance of allies for anti-racist organizing (224).

Some of Stanley’s final conclusions are unfortunately troubling or incomplete. He argues that racisms can be eliminated by eliminating the binaries that underpin them, and acknowledging diverse lived experiences (224). He may well be right; however, his work does not really show this as being effective, as Chinese-Canadians positioned themselves as distinct from Euro-Canadians despite their efforts to show similarities. Of more concern, he argues that people of European origin have been represented as “Canadian” and thus as “white” (231). While this is true for a significant majority of Euro-Canadians, this slippage is ahistorical and does not consider the challenges faced by immigrant groups through the twentieth century, even if people of those ethnicities are presently racialized as white. He closes with a call to eliminate the “grammars of racism” (234), unfortunately without clarifying what he means by “grammar” in this context.

I would insert a nice segue here, but it would ultimately be as artificial as rainbow donut sprinkles, and as futile as scrubbing melted-on donut sprinkles off the seat of a car on a hot day. Steve Penfold’s The Donut: A Canadian History is an examination of Canadian business and culture through a mundane mass commodity. Penfold uses donut shops as a window into Canadian consumer society, car culture, mass institutions, and symbols of identity (8). He illustrates three trends in post-WWII Canadian historiography: the continuities between prewar and postwar developments; breaking down the periodization of the postwar era; and complicating the economic challenges of the 1970s (12-13). He presents five brief studies, framed by oral histories of donut shop entrepreneurs and customers, to show the cultural, economic, and social implications of the production and consumption of donuts.

Penfold’s first chapter considers the modernization of donut production, a trend that began prior to the war as part of the Second Industrial Revolution (19). Production was standardized and mechanized where possible, creating such peculiar images as the “Fordist” donut (24). Donuts were marketed as a way to reduce maternal labour, as a nutritious alternative to bread, and as a way to conserve resources for the war effort (37-38). In short, donuts expressed the ethos of modern production (48). Starting in the 1960s, as Penfold shows in his next chapter, donuts became part of postwar consumer culture through a “geography of convenience” (52). The postwar period began a symbiotic relationship between donuts and automobiles, with donut shops centered around “the geographic mainstream of postwar automobile commerce” (62). This culture also included a transition from tea to coffee (73), with donuts serving as a means of marketing coffee (76). Donut shops in this period focused on a middle market of consumers, as a practical food for the working-class male (81-83); however, chains adapted to local needs in an aim to reach a broader clientele (88), a trend that would continue for the rest of the century.

In his third chapter, Penfold considers the challenges of franchising, and its role as a retail revolution (98); businesses formed through social networks and immigrant groups (108), with donut shops serving as “a modern version of a cottage industry” (114). Penfold’s fourth chapter is a particularly compelling consideration of the Canadian foodscape, in which he presents a crowded “donutscape” on the Canadian map, with its nucleus in southern Ontario (131). By the mid 1970s, the Canadian foodscape was saturated with donut shops, which worked to serve a wider population by diversifying business; among the projects of the donut industry were integrating the sale of muffins and bagels into donut shops to attract health-minded customers (149). Donut shops also worked to improve their accessibility, through satellite locations, kiosks, and some attempts at donut trucks (153); by the 1990s, this included drive-thru locations (158-159). To appeal to middle-class women and families, many shops became smoke-free and renovated their premises for a bright, clean look (154). This resulted in some expressions of nostalgia, particularly among working-class men, for older donut shops where smoking was allowed and where lunch counters were the centre for personalized service (162).

Penfold’s final chapter considers the dominance of Tim Hortons on the donutscape—the “Hortonization” of donut lore, as he puts it (166), and the integration of donuts into Canadians’ national identity. The folklore of donuts built upon existing ideas of Canada, tangentially tying donuts to other Canadian symbols such as winter and hockey; Canadians incorporated donuts and donut shops into their existing ideas of communities (188). The hegemony of donuts was such that cities and towns vied to be Canada’s “donut capital,” citing their numbers of donut shops per capita as a point of pride (170). Donuts came to indicate honest, hard-working people (171), a representation that donut shops capitalized upon; where Canadians saw a cultural symbol, businesses saw an opportunity to further saturate a market, particularly in Ontario (180).

I can only conclude this week with Penfold’s own trademark phrase, “the situation was very complex.”

This had to happen.