In the Spirit of '68: Youth Culture, the New Left, and the Reimagining of Acadia by Joel Belliveau, and: Thumbing A Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada by Linda Mahood

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Spirit of '68: Youth Culture, the New Left, and the Reimagining of Acadia by Joel Belliveau, and: Thumbing A Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada by Linda Mahood Katharine Rollwagen In the Spirit of '68: Youth Culture, the New Left, and the Reimagining of Acadia. By Joel Belliveau. Translated by Käthe Roth. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. xii + 247 pp. Paper/PDF/e-book C$32.95, cloth C$89.95. Thumbing A Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada. By Linda Mahood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018. xii + 331 pp. Paper/PDF/e-book C$32.95, cloth C$89.95. On the surface, these two recent studies appear to present familiar images of Canadian youth cultures from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Thumbing A Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada examines young people who shared a desire for travel, risk, and adventure, and its colorful cover shows young women in jeans and T-shirts, thumbs extended under the blue sky. In contrast, In the Spirit of '68: Youth Culture, the New Left, and the Reimagining of Acadia focuses on the 1960s student movement in the Canadian province of New Brunswick; the young people in the black and white image on the front are earnest, with placards raised. The carefree hippie and the radical student are two well-worn '60s tropes, but neither Mahood nor Belliveau offer superficial portraits of their young subjects. Rather, both illuminate the broad implications of youth movements potentially dismissed as marginal because of the age of their actors or participants, and each demonstrates the ways that those in positions of power tried both to shape and to accommodate young people in the 1960s and early 1970s. Linda Mahood's Thumbing A Ride examines travel as a rite of passage, focusing particularly on the late 1960s and the 1970s in Canada, when hitchhiking was an important part of youth culture and "transient youth" had caught the attention of the Canadian state. In seven chapters, Mahood documents the changing perceptions and experiences of hitchhiking. In the decades following World War I, the car transformed youthful wandering and visits to a growing network of volunteer-run youth hostels into rites of passage for respectable working-class and middle-class youth. Journalists distinguished youthful hitchhiking from transience borne of economic necessity, and many viewed it as an educational life experience for adolescents. However, in the "long sixties," both [End Page 174] the popularity and perceived risk of hitchhiking increased. Mahood dedicates two chapters to young travelers' experiences on the road, and another three to the various attempts to contain and channel youth wanderlust. Joel Belliveau's focus in In the Spirit of '68 is on the shifting political culture among francophone students in New Brunswick from the late 1950s to the 1970s. Strikes and protests led by students at the Université de Moncton in 1968 have typically been interpreted as brief episodes in a broader Acadian nationalist movement, during which the Acadians (the historic, French-speaking peoples of the Maritime provinces) called for equal access to education and language rights. Belliveau reassesses the students' actions, tracing their discontent back more than a decade and demonstrating the influence of national and transnational youth protest on the students of New Brunswick. While Acadian students had embraced a nationalist ideology by the 1970s, in the 1960s they were moved by many of the same issues that concerned students across North America and Europe, including a mistrust of authority, a desire for greater autonomy, and a wish to democratize institutions. Student leaders embraced a liberal ideology as they demanded a voice in university governance. They rejected the conservative stance of Acadian cultural organizations and argued that Acadians must participate fully in the mostly Anglophone society. When state reforms to create greater socioeconomic equality did not meet their expectations, they not only adopted more radical forms of protest but also shifted to demanding collective rights for the Acadian community. In both cases, the authors foreground the influence of the baby boomers, contributing to a growing body of histories demonstrating how this generation reshaped society as they came of age. Increasing numbers of young travelers on Canadian...