Billy Johnson

Billy Johnson, Publishing Place: Transatlantic Modernity and Periodical Culture on Canada’s East Coast. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Publishing Place makes a significant contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of Atlantic Canada through a close reading of six English-language, settler periodicals published in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s.  These periodicals, Johnson demonstrates, were influential in the discursive and contested imagining of ‘the Maritimes’ as a coherent region and some “envisioned alternative forms of identity and community”. Johnson’s innovative use of periodical literature, often neglected in literary and historical studies, shifts our understanding from the conclusions of previous scholarly works that categorized the East Coast as an “elsewhere of modernity”. Instead, Johnson explores the region intellectually as a dynamic site of transatlantic modernity.

The central argument is compellingly demonstrated by contrasting the competing visions presented across the periodical sources. For example, the geographic and intellectual mapping of many of the articles in Acadiensis is read in relation to the cosmopolitan literary modernism of Kit Bag (both appeared first in 1901). Perhaps most importantly, Johnson’s work highlights diverse voices including an extended consideration of the Afromodernism of Neith (1903), the magazine spearheaded by the Black Saint John barrister, Abraham Beverly Walker. Indeed, Johnson’s assessments of these early-century magazines show that colonial settler modernity in the Atlantic region was always diverse, contested, and transnational. The book’s second part focuses on magazines that responded to the Maritimes’ economic crisis of the 1920s.  Here Johnson juxtaposes the cultural range of The Dalhousie Review, the liberal individualist boosterism of The Busy East, and the Marxist anticapitalism of The Maritime Labor Herald.   Johnson reads these periodicals ‘whole’ – that is, illustrating the interplay and dialogue between the cultural and political content in each – and in so doing reconstitutes debates, exchanges, and reflections that not only raise significant questions about the way the region’s culture has been periodized and framed in the existing historiography, but also recover key aspects of how people in the Maritimes responded to global and regional events in their time.