Consumerism, taste and the new middle class in Malta

Abstract

After all, only history had made Canada "English." Wars and bickering between the French and the English, the European "discoverers" of the big country eventually lead to Britain taking control in the 19th Century. Movements for Quebec independence had always been there, but it was in the 1960s, that decade of all types of protest, when all seemed possible -for liberation, for women, for gays, for consumers, for freedom, and so on, that the recent Quebec drive for independence started. There was the so-called silent revolution in the 1960s where the emerging middle classes in Quebec sought a space of their own. They were sick of their society's stifling conservatism lead by the dominance of the right wing government of Maurice Duplessis's Union Nationale (1944-60). They had had enough of the Catholic Church's hegemony in all sectors of social and cultural life. Finally, they did not like the idea of subordination by English Canada. They considered themselves as intelligent and as worthy as anyone, anywhere and did not need to be guided, or lead by anybody. Was the same thing going on in Malta under Mintoff in the 1970s? Naively, perhaps, I had thought so. After all, Malta like Quebec had gone through British colonialism, subordination by foreigners (Anglo Canadians having economic control in the case of Quebec) and paternalistic local governments. The similarities I thought were striking, but obvious. Canada and Malta were the two countries I knew best (still do) so I could not help but compare. I noticed something was missing; however, Malta had not gone through anything like the explosive 1960s in Western countries. Where were the hippies, the sit-ins, and the demos? (Starace, 1998) For instance, a recent article, which appeared in a national newspaper, was particularly telling. In it, the author writes about his memoirs as a teacher-student during the late 1960s. He was part of a group known as il-ribelli (the rebels). They went against the grain by going down to Valletta making a bit of noise in a karozzin (horse-carriage) and meeting for late night snacks and chats on college grounds. An accompanying photo showed a group of eight male students dressed in torn T-shirts bearing such slogans as: "Don't roll your Rs," "I'm Joe, I love Mary," and best of all: "Make love, not riots." All the agitation that was going on elsewhere was given a quaint twist in Malta.