Literature as a Technology of Commemoration at Expo 67

Abstract

This study highlights the significance of literature to Expo 67 and the tradition of world exhibitions. Like the world’s fairs before it, the Montreal exhibition promoted literature as a technology of national progress. Yet Expo 67 reflected simultaneously the contemporary anxieties about technology and nationhood expounded by George Grant in the 1960s in contrast with the celebration of nationalism and technological progress bound together in the tradition of world’s fairs. Though world’s fairs had depicted the educational utility of literature throughout their tradition, Expo 67 emphasized literature more than any world exhibition had to that point. Its theme, Terre des hommes, drawn from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s autobiographical narrative, its literature conferences and poetry performances, and the broader textuality of Expo 67 as a “total environment” were intended to deploy texts in promotion of the ideals of universal humanism. However, I find that poetry performances by Michèle Lalonde, George Clutesi, and Duke Redbird contradicted the event’s stated ideals by spotlighting the negative effects of technology and ongoing colonial violence. I argue further that large-scale literature exhibits at Expo 67 resisted the humanist ideals of the event by continuing the world exhibition convention of treating literary works as an educative technology of national progress. As a result, I find that Canadian literature at Expo 67 complicates the Canadian collective memory of the event and the 1967 Centennial Year.