Home and Native Land

Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada

Edited by May Chazan, Lisa Helps, Anna Stanley, Sonali Thakkar

Home and Native Land takes its vastly important topic and places it under a new, penetrating light – shifting focus from the present grounds of debate onto a more critical terrain.

The book’s articles, by some of the foremost critical thinkers and activists on issues of difference, diversity, and Canadian policy, challenge sedimented thinking on the subject of multiculturalism. Not merely “another book” on race relations, national identity, or the post 9-11 security environment, this collection forges new and innovative connections by examining how multiculturalism relates to issues of migration, security, labour, environment/nature, and land. These novel pairings illustrate the continued power, limitations, and, at times, destructiveness of multiculturalism, both as policy and as discourse.

Contents

Introduction
May Chazan, Lisa Helps, Anna Stanley, and Sonali Thakkar

Chapter 1: Disgraceful: Intellectual Dishonesty, White Anxieties, and
Multicultural Critique 36 Years Later
Rinaldo Walcott

Chapter 2: Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada
Clen Coulthard

Chapter 3: Settler Bodies, Colonial Claims: Biopolitics and Multicultural Visions of Settlement and Trauma in the Canadian West
Laurie Kristine Bertram

Chapter 4: Thinking With Our Feet: A Walk Through the Colonial Landscape
Caroline Desbiens

Chapter 5: The Proximity of Multiculturalism and Wilderness in Canada: A New Anti-Racism?
Andrew Baldwin

Chapter 6: Food, Fun and Dance: Complicating the Multicultural Imperative in the Arts
Natasha Bakht

Chapter 7: The “Multicultural” Writer in Canada
Afua Cooper

Chapter 8: The Colour of Poverty
Uzma Shakir

Chapter 9: Legislated Exclusions and Hyphenated Humans
Amina Sherazee

Chapter 10: Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Multi-pronged Struggles
Against the “Nation”
Nandita Sharma

Chapter 11: The Limits of Multiculturalism
Margaret Walton-Roberts

Chapter 12: Continuities and Discontinuities of White Supremacy in the Early 21st Century: The Uses and Abuses of Difference Under Official Multiculturalism in Canada
Grace-Edward Galabuzi

Chapter 13: Namecalling: Multiculturalism as the Ruling Apparatus of the State
Himani Bannerji

Chapter 14: Towards a Multicultural, Multiracial Canada: A Manifesto
George Elliott Clarke

About the Authors

May Chazan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa.

Lisa Helps is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, University of Toronto.

Anna Stanley is a lecturer in Human Geography, in the Department of Geography, at the National University of Ireland.

Sonali Thakkar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York.