Unsettling Expo 67 : developmentalism & colonial humanism at Montreal’s world exhibition
At Expo 67, Canada’s Centennial Celebrations marquee event held in Montreal, three different sites grappled with the legacies of colonialism from multiple perspectives. The first site under study is the Indians of Canada Pavilion, which was replete with anticolonial messages about Canadian land theft to criticism of residential schools and Indian agents. At the opposite end of the Canada Complex stood the Canadian Pavilion, which retained a colonial discourse of reimagining Canadian and Indigenous representations within a wider discourse of global humanism. Canadian Pavilion representations of Indigenous peoples were continually used as a backdrop to a supposedly superior, more ‘developed’ settler society. The third site, the Du Pont of Canada Auditorium, played host to members of an international cohort of global intelligentsia during the Noranda Lectures and the Maclean-Hunter International Forum. The two speakers series featured articulations of western neocolonial ambitions on how best to reorganize local, national, and international societies, peoples, and cultures. At these three Expo 67 sites, colonial and neocolonial views on ‘development’ contrasted sharply with the anticolonial rhetoric of the Indians of Canada Pavilion and speakers such as Karl Gunnar Myrdal, Kushwant Singh, and Gabriel-Marie D’Arboussier. Analysing the three sites along the colonial/anticolonial dichotomy demonstrates how Expo 67 served as a site of localized discourse of colonial humanism and developmentalism in which each participating pavilion and presenter added their own perception of colonialism and development to a wider array of interlocking discourses on the value of human beings in globalizing societies.
Expo 67 Canada anticolonialism colonialism neocolonialism Indigenous peoples Canada humanism developmentalism globalization