Bryan D. Palmer

Labour Protest and Organization in Nineteenth-Century Canada, 1820-1890

RECENTLY-PUBLISHED STUDIES of labour in nineteenth-century Cana da have expanded our understanding of the forms and extent of working class protest and organization.1 But we still lack an accessible concise depic tion of the general contours of conflict and union formation. Earlier region al tabulations of strike activity, moreover, are now clearly dated and their partial findings inadequate.2 The following data, drawn from a range of nineteenth-century sources and the findings of the scholarship of the last de cade, are presented as an attempt to begin to overcome these deficiencies and fill this void in our knowledge. Accumulated for Volume II of the Histor ical Atlas of Canada, they are presented here with caution and considerable qualification. Unlike the twentieth century, where statistics on strikes and unions were generated through the efforts of the Department of Labour, often with the interests of capital and the state in mind, the nineteenth century provides us with no formal source to consult on the numbers of strikes, lock

Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place.

In cities around the globe, immigrant populations are finding their identity by making music which combines their own experiences with the forms of mainstream culture they have come to inhabit. This book surveys a wide range of these musical fusions: Puerto Rican bugalu in New York; Algerian rai in Paris; Chicano punk in Los Angeles; indigenous rock in Australia; chanson Quebecois in Montreal; swamp pop in Houston and New Orleans; reggae, bhanra and juju in London; and zouk, rap and jazz in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Throughout, the text highlights the issues that unite inter-ethnic music fusions across geographic boundaries. It demonstrates that what might be interpreted as a postmodern process of meaningless juxtapositions of musical forms ripped from their original contexts may actually be a redeployment of tradional music to serve untraditional purposes. The book explores the ways in which ethnic difference in popular music enables musicians from aggrieved populations to enjoy the rewards of mainstream culture while boldly stating their divergence from it, and how it offers a utopian model of inter-cultural co-operation, at the same time making a spectacle out of ethnicity and reinforcing ethnic divisions. Some inter-ethnic music has become part of significant movements for social change. In other instances it has played a reactionary role. But in all the case studies in this book, inter-cultural fusion music displays the contours of ethnic anxiety in an age characterized by the rapid movement of people, capital and images across national borders.

The American Way of Seeing Class

This book has had the misfortune to appear at the very time when the concept of class is under sustained attack, historians of American labour are chastized for their atavistic focus on a social stratum many deny ever existed in any meaningful sense, and trade unionism in the United States of the Reagan-Bush years has sustained a decade of defeat. Montgomerys text, orchestrated around his insistence on the place and importance of class, has understandably played to mixed reviews within an academic milieu anything but impervious to the fashions and pressures of the moment. If some acknowledge the books impressive reach across the breadth of working-class experience in the years of industrial-capitalist consolidation and concentration, others turn each page with the cynicism and skepticism cultivated in the sure-footed apostatic retreats of the 1980s.1 This timing is both fortuitous and unfortunate. On the one hand, it is useful that Montgomerys sensible and sensitive insistence on the Critical place of class in the making of modern America appears at precisely the moment when many want to deny workers and class conflicts any presence in the life of the Republic, past or present. On the other, the complacent and arrogant revival of an interpretive politics of consensus and pluralism often sinks discussion of this book into a fruitless rejection of class as the illusory construct of a weak and intellectually