Empire and the City: Anti-Colonialism in Sixties Montreal

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Montreal became the home of one of the most dramatic movements of popular resistance and rebellion in North America.  Activists and intellectuals in Montreal drew on Third World liberation theory and anti-imperialist analyses emanating from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in attempts to understand local power relations and the possibilities of democracy.  If in the early 1960s, organized labour played only a marginal role in the larger movement of contestation, by the end of the decade organized labour had the wind in its sails, becoming the dominant voice of the Quebec liberation movement and capturing the attention of radicals across North America.  At the same time that the labour movement began to radicalize, however, racially-based immigration laws were being replaced by ones that were ostensibly more open, and an increasing number of immigrants originating in Third World countries began to arrive in Montreal (and other North American cities).  Within the new diasporic communities, ideas of decolonization and of national liberation often burned with intensity, being sustained by what Arjun Appadurai has termed ‘new diasporic public spheres.’  In this paper I will explore the interactions between the Quebec labour movement (and especially the Montreal Central Council of the CSN) and Montreal’s radicalized racial minorities, two movements which have never (or almost never) been discussed together.  I will argue that the literature of Third World decolonization – a literature which enabled both movements to imagine themselves as part of a global struggle – also provided a theoretical opening for collaboration at the local level.