Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975<\/em><\/a> examines how Vancouver was a key site for cultural transformations that spread across English-speaking Canada.<\/p>\nThe book was recently honoured with the Basil Stuart-Stubbs award, which is presented annually by the University of British Columbia (UBC) library to recognize the best scholarly book published by a Canadian author on a B.C. subject.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this book shows, I hope, is that there\u2019s always more to the story. There is more complexity to the art production in communities than we tend to assume,\u201d says Betts. \u201cCanada\u2019s culture isn\u2019t just Tim Hortons and hockey.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the decade he spent digging through archives, basements, attics and personal records in British Columbia and Ontario, Betts discovered an overwhelming amount of information about cultural groups in Vancouver, including Indigenous people, the modernist writers in the 1930s and \u201940s who established the writing school at UBC and the later modernist group, followed by waves of experimentalists, surrealists, feminists and neo-dadaists, alongside many interdisciplinary artists and writers. Teasing out the transnational connections and flow between these groups took time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were gaps between the groups \u2014 and even a little bit of competition between them,\u201d Betts says. \u201cThere were battle lines and some people didn\u2019t like each other, creating even more entrenched solidarity within these groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
His book explores how these writers and artists gradually began to turn away from colonial erasure to accepting a more humble place in the world, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinding nothing becomes another way to think and imagine that 1960s turn when, all of a sudden, they started to think about space and how to occupy space and reflect on that space without erasure. That\u2019s really an important shift in post-colonialism in Canada,\u201d says Betts.<\/p>\n
The book focuses on avant-garde writing of the period, which Betts describes as \u201cconsciously interdisciplinary, pushing new boundaries and creating new spaces for intersections of art and life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The volume incorporates more than 130 images of examples as well as original texts and interviews.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe story laid out in this book, which is at once coherent and many-dimensioned, represents a huge volume of research material that has been thoroughly examined and analyzed,\u201d says Susan Parker, UBC\u2019s University Librarian. \u201cThe book models what deft handling of complicated subject matter and materials should be. We are pleased to recognize Dr. Betts\u2019 book with the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Betts, the award is a positive reminder that academic research is a part of a larger conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look up from collecting such a massive amount of material and it is easy to get overwhelmed and forget you are working towards something,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can also forget that you are participating in a conversation with a wider community of people deeply invested in the area. After all that, it\u2019s really nice to know it\u2019s getting a positive reaction in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a decade in the making, but Gregory Betts\u2019 latest book is an award winner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":77193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,37,1,4,5],"tags":[192,76,384,5420,3325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77194,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77192\/revisions\/77194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}