Straddling the Cultural Divide: Second‐Generation South Asian Identity and The Namesake

Abstract

Canada is in the process of another major shift to its ever-changing multicultural image. According to the 2006 Statistics Canada census data, one-in-five people in Canada is foreign-born, an increase of 13.9% between 2001 and 2006 (Statistics Canada 2007). Such an immigration surge is unprecedented in a quarter of a century. This increase is four times higher than that of the Canadian-born population. This surge also comes at a time when the country grapples with acts of overt racism that fly in the face of Canada’s reputation for tolerance (Grant 2007). 1 This shift is likely to have profound consequences for Canada’s educational, cultural and economic future. For the first time, the proportion of the foreign-born population born in Asia and the Middle East surpasses the proportion born in Europe. As of last year, more than half of immigrants continued to come from Asia and the Middle East, but a growing number also came from the Americas and Africa. If the trends continue, by 2030 Canada’s population growth will stem solely from immigration (Grant 2007). Because of the recent influx of immigration in Canada, it is crucial that educators pay closer attention to questions of cultural identity among second-generation Canadian students. 2 Especially within this ever-changing demographic of Canadian culture, South Asians have become a visible and integral part of Canada. 3 I use the term ‘South Asian’ realising that its construction as an identity, rather than geographical description, is in many ways relevant only to the Canadian context. For example, in Canada one would call someone from India, a South Asian, but in Britain that person would be called Black or Asian, in Trinidad, Indian, and in the United States, Asian. The process of migration has important implications for a redefinition of what it means to be Canadian as well as South Asian. The changing racial and ethnic composition within Canada’s borders has led to much angst and controversy over the definition of ‘Canadian’. In a discussion of Canadian and South Asian discourses of cultural protectionism, Amita Handa (2003, 5) suggests, Second-generation youth in Canada are particularly troubling to these discourses because their presence points to the ruptures and contradictions between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. Young South Asians struggle to fashion an identity that speaks to their experience of being South Asian in Canada. In doing so, they often unsettle and resist certain mainstream definitions of both South Asian and Canadian. The children of the post-1965 wave of immigrants are less visible in the media, and in academic literature. Although this group of second-generation Canadians have moved into adulthood and created their own social, personal, professional and familial spaces, their ethnic and national identity development has not been adequately researched. Exploration of second-generation Canadian identity is timely