Documenting Expo’67: A Documentary Assemblage and Construction of an Inclusive and Multicultural Canada

When they said that the past is another country, they must have been imagining Canada in
\n1967. That summer, Canada hosted Expo’67, an extravagant and futuristic international exposition,
\nenchanting the world with its cosmopolitan eclecticism. Intimately Canadian, this occasion also celebrated
\nthe country’s 100th birthday and symbolized a turning point for Canada into a more inclusive
\nand multicultural society; many Canadians argue that, in fact, Expo’67 came to define Canada itself.
\nBut what exactly was Expo’67, how did it enchant the world, and how did it come to define Canada
\nas an inclusive and multicultural place? This article argues that the documentation – that is documents
\nand documentary practices – of Expo’67 helped the ideas of Canadian inclusiveness and multiculturalism
\nto emerge. First, Exp’67 was one grand document: it was an assemblage of documents that,
\nwhen put together in a unified whole, allowed for the idea Expo’67 to emerge. Second, practices with
\nthese documents, from their production, deployment, handling, reading, inscribing, and use, helped
\nspread the idea of Expo’67 to the world, allowing those individuals not in Montreal experience Expo
\nthemselves. And, third, the promotion of these documents within and across Canada helped entrench
\nthe idea and fact of the country being an inclusive and multicultural society. Applying documentation
\ntheories to Expo’67 – Bernd Frohmann’s constitutive effects of documentation, Bruno Latour’s map,
\nNiels Windfeld Lund’s documentation of an art museum exhibit, as well as Janine Marchessault’s
\nconcept of the ‘media city’ and Benedict Anderson’s idea of the ‘monument’– helps illuminate the
\nnumerous roles and effects that documentation had on this spectacular occasion. Documentation was
\nan integral component of Expo’67, and without it, Expo’67 would have been only a transient dream
\nrather than a physical reality working upon the international dreams of the world and the national
\nimaginings of Canada.

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