Upcoming Event

The Vickers-Verduyn Speakers Series was established in 2011. The School of Canadian Studies has invited a wide range of scholars, activists and artists to address the ways in which their work potentially challenges or influences approaches to Canadian Studies research.

Art and Activism in Wartime Montreal

This talk will offer a re-reading of Montreal’s Automatistes, arguing that the movement was not composed of an isolated group of artists operating in a repressive society, but rather that it was a movement that emerged out of the possibilities and contradictions of a city living through the massive changes that accompanied the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

The paper will situate the group within a broader international history of the reception of surrealist ideas in the Americas during the 1940s, and will explore the central importance of a local context shaped by labour politics, Indigenous activism, migration, and jazz. In so doing, the paper will explore the complex ways in which artists engaged in debates about racial justice, democracy, and internationalism, reshaping the city’s cultural life in the process.

Dr. Sean Mills is professor and Canada Research Chair in Canadian and Transnational History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (2010), as well as A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec (2016). His new book, Montreal: Biography of a Contested City, is under contract with Oxford University Press.