Franz Boas and Friends? Not Really

Blackhawk, Ned, and Isaiah L. Wilner. 2018. Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The editors of this volume proclaim their intention to demonstrate the revolutionary influence of Indigenous thinkers on the ideas of Franz Boas, but the work falls far short of their aim. Despite the inclusion of a number of interesting contributions dealing with remarkable individuals, with one exception none of the fourteen papers attempts to make such a case.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.