ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the hipsters within the political and cultural currents of 1990s Canada. By drawing upon Edward Soja's discussion of glocalization, the chapter shows how the hipsters' privileging of the post-industrial landscape synthesizes the local and global, and hence problema-tizes many of the critiques launched against them. Embedded within the journalism, essays, and interviews the chapter analyzes is the suggestion cultural nationalism failed to protect hipster writing due to the conflation of urban with global. While they undeniably document the emergence of the global city, they nevertheless politically align themselves with the boomer literati and seek to update the national mythology so that it may remain relevant in the era of globalization. There is a parallel demand to distinguish our urban advocates from their successors: the millennial hipsters. The peak was a peak of cultural nationalism that reached a crescendo sometime around 1980 and has now been dissolved into this miasma of trivial hipness and Toronto-dominated, American-dominated writing.
