MANAGING CONTRADICTIONS OF MULTICULTURALISM: NARRATIVES OF BELONGING AND BEING CANADIAN AMONG CANADIAN MIDDLE EASTERN WOMEN

This thesis investigates experiences of belonging and being Canadian among first-generation Canadian Middle Eastern women through one-on-one interviews with 13 women. Since the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, Canada has recommitted to bolstering discourses of multiculturalism. There have been, however, lasting impacts from mainstream discourses that followed 9/11, which positioned Middle Eastern women as imperiled and Middle Eastern culture as backward. Additionally, liberal multiculturalism in Canada has done little to address systemic racism, and instead encourages a superficial level of acceptance. Contradictions of multiculturalism can be found in the narratives of these women, who sometimes repeat discourses that do not benefit them. Conversely, women who have access to discourses that position multiculturalism as ideological, have a difficult time expressing a Canadian identity and display a critical understanding of their experiences. These narratives are considered in a wider context of how race and racism structure Canada today.

MANAGING CONTRADICTIONS OF MULTICULTURALISM: NARRATIVES OF BELONGING AND BEING CANADIAN AMONG CANADIAN MIDDLE EASTERN WOMEN

This thesis investigates experiences of belonging and being Canadian among first-generation Canadian Middle Eastern women through one-on-one interviews with 13 women. Since the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, Canada has recommitted to bolstering discourses of multiculturalism. There have been, however, lasting impacts from mainstream discourses that followed 9/11, which positioned Middle Eastern women as imperiled and Middle Eastern culture as backward. Additionally, liberal multiculturalism in Canada has done little to address systemic racism, and instead encourages a superficial level of acceptance. Contradictions of multiculturalism can be found in the narratives of these women, who sometimes repeat discourses that do not benefit them. Conversely, women who have access to discourses that position multiculturalism as ideological, have a difficult time expressing a Canadian identity and display a critical understanding of their experiences. These narratives are considered in a wider context of how race and racism structure Canada today.

The Anti-Jewish Narrative

According to the mainstream narrative about race, all groups have the same innate dispositions and potential, and all disparities—at least those favoring whites—are due to past or present racism. Some people who reject this narrative gravitate toward an alternative, anti-Jewish narrative, which sees recent history in terms of a Jewish/gentile conflict. The most sophisticated promoter of the anti-Jewish narrative is the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Jews have a suite of genetic adaptations—including high intelligence and ethnocentrism—and cultural practices that lead them to undermine gentile society to advance their own evolutionary interests. He says that Jewish-designed intellectual movements have weakened gentile identity and culture while preserving Jewish identity and separatism. Cofnas recently argued that MacDonald’s theory is based on “systematically misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” However, Cofnas gave short shrift to at least three key claims: (a) Jews are highly ethnocentric, (b) liberal Jews hypocritically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles/gentile countries but racial purity and separatism for Jews/Israel, and (c) Jews are responsible for liberalism and mass immigration to the United States. The present paper examines these claims and concludes that MacDonald’s views are not supported.

Language rights and groups of immigrant origin

In this article, I aim to analyse language rights in relation to groups of immigrant origin. Liberal democracies are reluctant to consider immigrant groups as subjects entitled to the same set of language and cultural rights enjoyed by national minorities. However, the trend towards increasing levels of immigration is configuring new cultural and language correlations within territorial boundaries that provoke responses that problematise a fixed conception of language rights. Drawing on theories of liberal multiculturalism, I examine the case of claims for language recognition in the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla and its normative implications. In these territories, factors such as size, concentration, and the historical ties of Arabic- and Berber-speaking communities challenge conventional approaches to minority groups’ rights based on a national versus immigrant minority distinction. I argue that these approaches are not satisfactory for language claims in these two cities and that a contextual approach is better suited to conceptualising the recognition of language rights.

Judges and International Competitions

This chapter continues to emphasize embodied critiques against liberal multiculturalism and post-raciality by turning to large-scale commercial competitions and their increasing role in rejuvenating street dance globally. The chapter focuses on the World Hip-Hop Dance Championships (HHI), which enlists judges to watch more than 3,500 dancers from over fifty countries. With an analysis of judges and their practices from 2012 to 2014, the chapter shows that their standardization euphemizes racial, gender, ethnic, and technical difference. At the same time, the chapter reveals dance criticism that undermines the stereotype of Filipinos as naturally gifted dancers in the cultural imaginary. Discourse around dance judging enables discussions of how multiple ethnic traditions are codified similarly amidst a vexed desire for hip-hop universalism.

Aesthetic Elisions: The Ruins of Palmyra and the “Good Life” of Liberal Multiculturalism

Palmyra's capture and destruction by ISIS resonated widely with an international audience. Drawing on Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and affect theory's key insights on object attachment, this article argues that the attachment to Palmyra manifests desire for a particular “good life” of an idealized liberal multiculturalism: a virtuous cycle of trade and tolerance represented by aesthetic flourishing. This widely circulated representation is grounded on excisions of power and inequality. I analyze the political stakes of such excision through the invisibility of Tadmor, positioned as a neighboring town rather than an afterlife of Palmyra in this representation. Through Tadmor, we see Palmyra as entangled in economic inequality and consolidation of power and complicit in their elision through its aesthetic representation as a multicultural haven. At stake is the question of what it means to attach the desire for coexistence to this representation of Palmyra at the detriment of places like Tadmor. While this paper makes its key intervention into the affective terrain and limits of a current global political moment, my argument also contributes to discussions of the global production and circulation of affect, bringing into view its attachment to sites and spaces.