Canadian Multiculturalism Research Articles

Speaking Back: Reading a Christian Denomination’s Vision for Diversity through the Eyes of its Children and Congregations

Abstract This article analyzes the United Church of Canada’s vision for becoming intercultural through data generated by qualitative research into the theological meaning-making of children within United Church congregations. The author provides an overview of the broader research project through which this data was generated and background information about Canadian multiculturalism and the United Church’s response to the challenges of multiculturalism, particularly its 2006 document, ‘A Transformative Vision for the United Church of Canada.’ The author presents three points of critique of this document that come into focus when analyzed through the lens of children within United Church congregations. These points include the important step of intentionally listening to voices on the margins, the document’s neglect of individuals and contexts that hold hybrid cultural identities, and its tendency to overlook congregations that are intercultural.

Multiculturalism in Canada

Starting from the paradox that stresses the image of a welcoming multicultural Canada on the one hand, while revealing (inadvertent) racism on the other, this article offers a critical discussion of the values of Canadian multicultural society today. After a brief overview of historical developments in immigration policies, the ideology of the Multiculturalism Act expressed in the metaphor of the cultural mosaic will be discussed, including a reflection on the importance of citizenship. This analysis is followed by a discussion of critical perspectives, often denouncing multicultural policies, and to conclude new ways of managing today’s complex diversity will be considered.

Football legend, role model, cultural ambassador, and true Canadian? A critical reading of the mediated legacy of Norman Kwong, the ‘China Clipper’

Norman Kwong was a Chinese Canadian football star with a ground-breaking career in the Canadian Football League in the 1950s before he reached unprecedented success post-retirement, most notably appointed as the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta in 2005. Acknowledging Kwong’s significant accomplishments, this paper offers a critical reading of Canadian mainstream media’s celebratory representation of Norman Kwong and his legacy, highlighting how his life stories, as constructed in the media, served to reaffirm the myth of Canadian multiculturalism. The paper concludes by pointing to an alternative interpretation of Kwong’s legacy, one that foregrounds the Chinese diasporic communities’ complicity and obligations in the settler colonial state.

Lady Aberdeen and the British origins of multiculturalism in Canada

Scholarly focus on British representatives in nineteenth-century Canada has often seen them as enforcers of a hegemonic English ethnic nationalism. This article challenges that view by showing that Lady Aberdeen, the wife of the seventh Governor General, and well known as an early feminist, was also a consistent advocate of a more pluralistic civic nationalism that supported minority religious, ethnic, and linguistic rights in Canada. It shows that her establishment of the Victorian Order of Nurses and Canada’s branch of the National Organisation of Women, along with many of her activities in partnership with her husband, were shaped by her beliefs about religious and ethnic co-existence as well as her feminism and anti-Americanism. In doing so it connects acceptance of diversity with longer-term trends in British governance: Lady Aberdeen’s approach to cultural and religious diversity within women’s organisations was an important precursor of official multiculturalism in Canada.

An Exploratory Study through a Life Course Perspective: Gambling among Older Chinese People in a Canadian Context

Gambling is a rising social issue in multicultural Canada, particularly in the Chinese population. This qualitative study aims to depict a collective picture of older Chinese gamblers through a life course perspective which includes five principles: human agency, lifelong development, historical time and place, timing, and linked lives. Fifteen older Chinese gamblers were interviewed in-depth for this study. Many older Chinese-Canadians reported an early onset to gambling in childhood and adolescense when experiencing extreme situations such as wars or poverty. They continued with gambling in Canada in their adulthoods in which they were occupied by extensive work and childrearing. After retirement, casinos seemed to offer a convenient place to escape from mental health issues and relational conflicts. Older Chinese adults’ gambling is further discussed through the five life course perspective principles. Trauma has played a role in this group’s lifelong development of gambling behavior. Human agency, historical time and place and linked lives interacted to contribute to the establishment of gambling behavior in later life that characterized as parallel play where older Chinese gamblers played in solitary rather than interacting with others. The study concludes by elaborating empirical limitations particularly on the lack of data on within-group differences often analyzed through timing.

Creating Canadians through Private Sponsorship

AbstractWe investigate how refugee sponsors and sponsorship groups approach their responsibility to “create new Canadians.” We set the stage by reflecting on the history of Canada as an immigrant-receiving, multicultural country, as well as on the role of acculturation attitudes of host community members in establishing the integration environment for newcomers in general. We use findings from nearly 60 interviews with sponsors in the Ottawa area to outline the different approaches that sponsors take. Approaches to sponsorship fall into three general orientations: paternalistic, passive paternalistic and mutualistic. These approaches manifest in the actions that sponsors take during the sponsorship process. In our discussion, we consider the implications of these approaches for the sponsor–refugee relationship, as well as the broader project of Canadian multiculturalism. We argue that mutualistic approaches best demonstrate welcoming acculturation orientations to newcomers, and that they are an important component of supporting privately sponsored refugees to become Canadians.

Negotiating Canadian multiculturalism During Quebecois Separatist Events of the Sixties: Between the “Italian Wop” and the “Flying Egyptian”

Over the years much has been written exploring the multiculturalism as a term. In the texts of Marco Micone and Saad Elkhadem under study the goal is to trace the nuances related to multiculturalism descriptively in practice during the period of growing unrest in Quebec in the 1960s which is dealt with in both texts. Through analysis of the writing of Canadian immigrant writers like Micone and Elkhadem, various questions impose themselves regarding the feasiblity for inclusiveness for people of diverse origins under the umbrella of multiculturalism. The need to traverse the primary and secondary affiliations and cultural tendencies of immigrants becomes pressing though in and of itself an elusive task. Elusive in the sense that designating the affiliations that are open to change and those that are not can be quite daunting. Competing histories in the lives of immigrants constantly foreground themselves. Immigrants upon coming to Canada bring along personal ethnic histories and language affiliations which complicate the workings of official multiculturalism. As a result, these histories and languages supposedly die as separate and unique structures and reappear in ghost form within multiculturalism, leaving immigrants in a liminal state which has been both considered productive and detrimental. Marco Micone’s play Voiceless People (1984) and Saad Elkhadem’s novella Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian (1990) explore the convoluted nature of identity construction and multiculturalism within Canada during the separatist period.

Challenging the Narrative of Canadian Multicultural Benevolence: A Feminist Anti-Racist Critique

Challenging the Narrative of Canadian Multicultural Benevolence: A Feminist Anti-Racist Critique

Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban: Mobile Media, Intimacy, and Augmented Whiteness

This article examines how everyday mobile media produce discursive and affective modes of closeness that circulate as part of the Canada-US border-making process under the Muslim ban. I contend that although the #WelcomeToCanada hashtag, which was made popular by Justin Trudeau’s tweets in response to the US travel ban, presents an inclusive, multicultural Canada that appears to contrast the white supremacist, xenophobic narrative of Donald Trump’s executive order, its performance of flexible Canadian borders actually renders ubiquitous, and therefore augments, the default whiteness of the heteropatriarchal national body imagined by liberal narratives of inclusion. I compare #WelcomeToCanada to Sikh Canadian comedian Jus Reign’s Snapchat story about the Quebec City mosque attack and suggest that his overly faced selfies reveal the violence of a colourblind state gaze that functions like so-called neutral algorithmic vision. Jus Reign’s excessive closeness to his smartphone performs an ambivalent rupture of the universalizing vision on which neoliberal multiculturalism is based, emphasizing the racist logics of facial detection technology even as he characterizes Islamophobia as a particularly US discourse.

Archiving the Affects of Canadian Multiculturalism

Archiving the Affects of Canadian Multiculturalism

Keeping the Black and Yellow Out of the Canadian Multicultural Mosaic

Keeping the Black and Yellow Out of the Canadian Multicultural Mosaic

Performing the Intercultural City by Ric Knowles

Reviewed by: Performing the Intercultural City by Ric Knowles Jane Moss Knowles, Ric. Performing the Intercultural City. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2017. Pp. 274 illus. US$75.00 hardcover, US$29.95 paperback. In the introduction to Performing the Intercultural City, Ric Knowles states that his book is intended to deal with what he calls the shifting ecologies of contemporary intercultural performance in Toronto (ix). He is interested in “the performative constitution of social identities and intercultural memories, the development of diasporic cultural forms, performative cultural mediation, and the emergent circulation of performance networks” (4). As part of a critique of both official multiculturalism and traditional intercultural theories, he seeks to understand how “individual gendered, raced, and classed subjectivities and community identities within the contemporary multicultural city are not just reflected or given voice but are constituted through performance” (2–4; emphasis in original). Adopting the frames of actor-network theory, rhizomatics, relational aesthetics and radicants, and heterotopics (5), Knowles focuses on the network of companies and actants that he identifies as constituting Toronto’s performance ecosystem. For him, this means analyzing the work of people of colour and companies that challenge the hegemony of whiteness on the city’s stages (17). Therefore, his definition of Toronto’s intercultural performance excludes commercial, mainstream, and classical theatre, as well as francophone and regional Canadian drama. He also excludes productions emerging from European diasporic communities, such as Jews and Roma, and communities of gender and sexual difference. These exclusions may disappoint readers, such as myself, who are drawn to the book’s title. In the two chapters of Part One, Knowles lays out his critique of official Canadian multiculturalism and government policies for funding the arts. He laments the commodification of ethnicity, the exclusion of First Nations, and the emphasis on cultural memory and heritage that seems aimed at managing diversity with nostalgia. The challenge he sees is to create new diasporic identities through performance in the contemporary urban environment. Two of the examples he proposes—Fish Eyes by a Bengali Canadian and Singkil by a Filipina Canadian—incorporate traditional dance forms in ways that he claims embody new diasporic identities. The Scrubbing Project, by mixed-race Indigenous women, attempts a collective healing of trauma and a renewal of cultural memories through performance. Body 13 brings together a group of immigrants from diverse non-European countries who work through difficult memories to forge new identities. For reasons that escape this reader, Chapter Two also includes a discussion of The Sheep and the Whale, a translation of a French-language play by a Moroccan immigrant to Quebec, which is about Maghrebian and sub-Saharan migrants trying to reach Spain on a Russian ship. Part Two examines the “development of culturally specific dramaturgical forms emerging from the histories and historicized bodies” as an “essential step in the [End Page 250] performative constitution of intracultural community identities in diaspora” (65). Chapter Three presents Filipino Canadian dramaturgy as developed by the Carlos Bulosan Theatre, founded in 1982 as the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop. Knowles begins with some historical background on the ethnic and religious diversity of the Philippines and Filipino immigration to Toronto, followed by brief descriptions of key productions in the evolution of a distinctly Filipino Canadian dramaturgy. Miss Orient(ed) uses the beauty pageant form to play with and undermine stereotypes. The collective creation People Power employs an episodic structure to tell the story of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the popular, nonviolent uprising that toppled the Marcos dictatorship. Going back to earlier historical periods, In the Shadow of Elephants dramatizes resistance to Japanese occupation and other colonial powers, using dance, music, and puppetry, and invoking precolonial belief systems. Chapter Four, “Indigenous Knowledge, Contemporary Performance: Dramaturgies of Decolonization,” covers a diversity of topics and productions whose connections to the Toronto performance scene often seem tenuous. In describing Native performance culture, Knowles includes works that draw from different First Nations and that cross national boundaries. It was not entirely clear to this reader how the pages on Indigenous mounds in Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oklahoma, or on a play centred on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Sideshow...

Sikh Diaspora Nationalism in Canada

AbstractA collective memory of the pre‐colonial, colonial and post‐colonial periods in India underpins Sikh identity and mobilization for peaceful protest as well as militant activity. Developing within a dominant Hindu socio‐political milieu, Sikh nationalism of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries can be viewed as reactive as much as it remained primordial and ethno‐religious in nature. Sikh nationalism among the diaspora Sikh community in Canada, which portrays a distinctive Sikh ethnic and national identity, as well as the accompanying call by many activists for the creation of an independent Sikh state (Khalistan) in India, saw a marked increase from the 1980s. Sikh diaspora nationalism in Canada has also nurtured a remarkable political and social mobilization for greater community awareness and political participation. An examination of Sikh diaspora nationalism reveals that ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism have become intertwined, existing in parallel. Canadian multiculturalism helped both to sustain the movement and to tame the associated militancy, opening up space for debate and accommodation. Canadian Sikhs have demonstrated remarkable economic and political success in creating a vibrant community in Canada, which is often overlooked by the mainstream media.

Боротьба української діаспори за багатокультурність Канади (1962–1971).

Боротьба української діаспори за багатокультурність Канади (1962–1971).

Multiculturalism and Diversity in Urban Revitalization

This article examines the uses of “diversity” in the revitalization of two public housing projects in Toronto, Canada: Regent Park and Lawrence Heights. Both revitalization plans emphasize a diversity of use, diversity of income, and diversity of culture. I argue the diversity of diversity serves as a legitimizing tool for the revitalization projects and that the use of the term is productively ambiguous and draws from the cachet of Canadian multiculturalism, without explicitly naming race and racial inequality. My analysis sheds light on tensions between the types of diversity, challenging the potential for the framework to address structural inequality via revitalization. While both diversity and mix (mixed income or diversity of incomes, for example) are generally taken-for-granted terms in planning discourse, promoting more equitable planning practices requires analyzing them more closely in context.

The centrality of neoliberalism in Filipina/o perceptions of multiculturalism in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT My research focuses on how Filipina/os respond to stigmatisation in Canada and the United States and how those responses are impacted by neoliberal ideology and perceptions of multiculturalism. The research uses in-depth interviews of 58 Filipina/o students in Toronto and Los Angeles to analyse the cultural repertoires available to them that enable or constrain a sense of belonging. Canada offers federally funded multicultural policies toward immigrant settlement and ethnic institutions, compared to the informal approach to multiculturalism in the United States. Nonetheless, the interviewees report that Filipina/os experience stigmatisation on a group level despite efforts to ‘fit in.’ I argue that the dual forces of Western neoliberalism and past colonisation in the Philippines influence tendencies toward either a decolonisation discourse that criticises social structures or a neoliberal discourse that focuses on agency. Perceptions of multiculturalism affect which tendency Filipina/os rely on to mobilise destigmatisation strategies.

Speaking welcome: A discursive analysis of an immigrant mentorship event in Atlantic Canada

This article offers an analysis of a business mentorship event in Fredericton, NB, which targeted immigrants sponsored through the New Brunswick Provincial Nominee Program (NBPNP)—an economic revitalization program designed to attract foreign business people and skilled workers to settle in the province. Applying Derrida’s concept of hospitality as a technology of whiteness, we examine the stated and implicitly understood expectations for the NBPNP, including the mechanisms at play for regulating newcomer’s behavior and comportment. We locate our analysis in the context of a regionally expressed Canadian multiculturalism, extending the relevance of our findings beyond Fredericton to Atlantic Canada. We ask: how do associated discourses of whiteness, multiculturalism and hospitality come into play to shape dynamics of power existing between hosts (settlement workers, various shadow state actors and mentor volunteers) and racialized newcomer guests? As a racialized threshold event, the Sip, Greet and Meet facilitated an exchange of hospitality such that the New Brunswick native hosts marked newcomers as perpetual arrivants, while holding the immigrants responsible for the success of their settlement in the Fredericton region. We show how the discourses regarding newcomers’ duties cleared nativist inhabitants of any accountability for the success of immigrant settlement. We also show how the process of welcoming conveyed a message that the future success of the local community, the province and even Atlantic Canada depended on the business class immigrants’ ability to serve as dutiful and grateful guests.

Creating Hybrid Identity: the Function of Epigraphs in The Wondrous Woo

Multiculturalism in Canada has created many hybrid identities among the children of immigrants. The novels of second-generation writers often reflect this reality. This presentation examines the function of epigraphs and its allusions to traditional customs, classics, and oral legends in The Wondrous Woo by Carrianne Leung. Miramar Woo, the protagonist and daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, imagines a world of magical realism in the suburbs of Scarborough to encapsulate the space that lies between Canadian and Chinese culture. The novel is divided into chapters with each chapter introduced by an epigraph associated with Chinese-cultural references which is suggestive—although separate from the main narrative. An epigraph ironically references Tomb-sweeping to show the importance of ancestry and juxtaposes it to make sense of death. Classical allusions to the Monkey King act as a tool to express views toward love interests. Oral legends of the Snake Sisters exemplifies sibling interactions. Furthermore, the omission of an epigraph in the novel’s final chapter performs the same function—to not only create tension, but also give perspective to Miramar’s fluid experience. The epigraphs perform as a structural framework that capture the essence of Chinese traditions and channels them towards Miramar’s experience as a “hybrid” Chinese Canadian. The significance of the epigraphs is not to emphasize dissonance in the reference, but rather the epigraphs act as a tool to show how Miramar understands the world as a Chinese Canadian in response to her alienation from dominant society.

The Chinese Diaspora in Canada

In this project, research is conducted through alternative research methodologies like artistic and visual research. The Chinese Diaspora and the themes pertaining to the topic are inquired through the investigation of archival images from the late 19th to early 20th century. The artist, as researcher, used the digital databases of Library and Archives Canada to conduct visual research on the Chinese Diaspora. The artist then uses historical images as a starting point for artistic research which questions the attitudes in which Chinese communities have been viewed by mainstream Canadian society and how such sentiments fit into Canadian whiteness and Canadian multiculturalism. Using both, painting and printmaking in her practice, Law examines historical images of the Chinese-Canadian diaspora’s history to investigate her own experiences as a racialized person and connects both historical and contemporary attitudes surrounding diversity. The process of artistic research is then presented as a series of print and paintings, cumulated in the 2019 Union Gallery installation, Unassimilable.

The Royal Commission and Rudnyckyj’s Mission: The Forging of Official Multiculturalism in Canada, 1963–71

This article discusses the forging of the concept and policy of official multiculturalism in Canada during the 1960s and early 1970s, which largely came out of the work of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In particular, it features the important role played by the linguist Jaroslav Rudnyckyj and by Ukrainian Canadians. The article argues that the term “multiculturalism” was coined and pioneered in Canada prior to its general use elsewhere and that a particular conjunction of demographic realities, and national and even international politics, made this possible.