Mapping Racial and Ethnic Studies in Canada: Retrospective and Prospective Views of Canadian Ethnic Studies Chairs

Abstract

Mapping Racial and Ethnic Studies in Canada:Retrospective and Prospective Views of Canadian Ethnic Studies Chairs James Frideres (bio), Shibao Guo (bio), Abdie Kazemipur (bio), Morton Weinfeld (bio), and Lloyd Wong (bio) Introduction (Shibao Guo and Lloyd Wong) Canada has always been diverse with respect to 'race' and ethnicity. In 1901, only three decades after Confederation, the English and French comprised 57% and 31% of the Canadian population respectively (Coats 1931, 134). Thus, 12% of Canada's population were non-French and non-British with the majority being other Europeans such as German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Russian, and many others. However, quite significantly, 25% of the non-French and non-British were racialized minorities and these included First Nations, Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks. Thus, the claims and discourse of many publications in recent decades of "the changing face of Canada" are based on an imagined early Canada being white, and English and French (deux nations). The early scholarship on Canada's already established racial and ethnic diversity essentially had a static conceptualization of ethnicity (Burnet 1976) and this was exemplified in the work of Hughes (1943) and Porter (1965, 1975). Jean Burnet's critique fostered in a more dynamic notion of ethnicity and conceptualized it in terms of social relations. In a special issue of the journal Sociological Focus, which examined studies in Canada, Burnet (1976) examined, through this dynamic lens, the policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. It should be noted that this special issue also featured many other prominent sociologists who examined topics related to immigration, race and ethnicity and these included Crysdale (1976), Clairmont and Wien (1976) and Richmond (1976). That same year Palmer (1976), who was one of the early editors of Canadian Ethnic Studies, provided a comparative analysis of immigration and ethnicity in Canada and the United States. By the late [End Page 1] 1970s and early 1980s, college and university courses on 'race' and ethnicity were standard fare with many of the popular textbooks being used with titles such as: Identities: The Impact of Ethnicity on Canadian Society (Isajiw 1977); Minority Canadians: Ethnic Groups (Krauter and Davis 1978); The Canadian Ethnic Mosaic: A Quest for Identity (Driedger 1978); Ethnicity in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives (Anderson and Frideres 1981); and Racial Minorities in Multicultural Canada (Li and Bolaria 1983). After this the floodgates were opened and the substantive area of ethnic studies started to flourish in Canada with a generation of scholars, most of whom were American- and British-trained, coming to Canada to study 'race', ethnicity, and immigration and to train a new generation of Canadian students. At the same time, the journal Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études éthniques au Canada was born in 1968, followed very shortly by the establishment of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association/Société canadienne d'études éthniques. In the following decades of the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, the literature in these areas exploded as scholars wrote about immigration, different ethnic/racial groups and the dynamics of their experiences in Canadian society. Over the past several decades, there has been a continual literature that examines race and ethnicity in Canada from a more general and critical perspective, and recently these include the summarizing work of Henry and Tator (2010), Hier and Bolaria (2012), Satzewich and Liodakis (2013) and Fleras (2017). Last year, in the fall of 2018, the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association held its 25th conference in Banff, Alberta with the theme of Immigration, Ethnic Mobilities, and Diasporic Communities in a Transnational World. Within this broad theme there was an invitation for theoretical and empirically-based papers on more specific topics such as: • The future of immigration, ethnic studies, and multiculturalism • Intersections of immigration and race, class and gender • Voluntary and forced mobilities: Refugees and the Canadian state • Youth, ethnicity, and identity in multicultural Canada • Ethnic communities, global diasporas and transnationalism in Canada • "Homelands": Memories, reconstructions, returns and directions forward • Citizenship and belonging in transnational spaces • Gender, class, and ethnic intersections in transnationalism • The future of transnational and ethnic mobilities in an unsettled world In addressing the first topic above, regarding the future of immigration, ethnic studies, and multiculturalism, a special roundtable session was created for...