Let’s All Fit into This Multi-Culture Anyway: (Re)Producing and Challenging Canadian National Identity
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Samah Sabra in
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The socio-cultural, spatialized, and historically-contingent processes through which discourses of national identity and belonging are (re)produced and/or challenged are sites of personal(ized) and collective struggles. Starting from this premise, I explore how research participants narrate the often tense relationships between engagements with national(ist) identity discourses, nation-building projects, and feelings of in/exclusion. Critical scholars have convincingly shown Canadian multiculturalism to be a state-orchestrated nation-building project which buttresses and reproduces an exclusionary, racialized, and hierarchical national identity. Based on ethnographic research with a group of immigrant, firstgeneration Arab-Canadians, I call such an easy categorization into question. Throughout fieldwork, research participants tended to represent multiculturalism as an inclusionary discourse and worth-while nation-building project which increases their sense of (national) belonging. Such comments, I argue, do not reflect an uncritical embrace, embodiment, or reproduction of ‘the state’s’ version of national identity. Indeed, in some contexts research participants used the discourse of multiculturalism to support versions of Canadian national identity as inherently inclusive while in other contexts they related instances of individualized and systemic racism to discuss processes of racialized exclusion. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the implications of these narratives of and engagements with multiculturalism for scholarly understandings of Canadian national(ist) identity discourses.