Claiming Space, Racialization in Canadian Cities.
Saberi, Parastou
Claiming Space, Racialization in Canadian Cities. Cheryl
Teelucksingh, ed. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.
210 pp. $32.95 sc.
This interdisciplinary collection questions the assumption of
racial harmony in Canada and within the ideology of Canadian
multiculturalism. Emphasizing the proliferation of racial meanings in
Canadian cities, the book explores the complexities of race and space
across a diverse range of city spaces in Canadian metropolitan centers.
Key to this collective contribution is an emphasis on the social
analysis of space as a conceptual and interdisciplinary methodological
tool for examining the history and politics of racialization. In this
respect, chapters in this volume aim to provide evidence of
racialization in Canadian cities. As its main themes, it considers the
various manners in which racial meanings become embedded in space, as
well as racialized people's claims to space. The authors also
consider how the spatial configuration of Canadian cities are a part of,
and influenced by, racial domination and resistance.
In her introductory chapter, Teelucksingh develops the notion of
"racialized space" (p. 3) to consider the hegemonic social
relations between racialized people and dominant groups and
institutions. She proposes claiming space, or new spaces, as "a
process whereby racialized people attempt to create new identities and
alternative representations, [manifesting] their resistance to the
limits of the ideology of Canadian multiculturalism and the ongoing
power relations associated with racialization" (p. 3).
Contributors theorize differently with respect to race, racism, and
spatiality. However, they agree on the notion of "racialized
space" as a starting point, and then move on to consider how
specific racialized groups attempt to claim space. Ethnography,
discourse analysis, and archival analysis are used--in varying
degrees-by authors as methodological approaches to spatial analysis.
Glenn Deer (chap. 2) examines the media-constructed "moral
panic" (p. 19) about the growth of the Chinese Canadian population
in Richmond, British Colombia, in 1995. He argues that public concern
was linked to a locally established Anglo-European Canadian entitlement
to city space. He traces the roots of the panic in narratives about the
early "official" (p. 19) history of Richmond in the 1970s.
Kelly Train (chap. 3) highlights how Sephardic Jews in Toronto use
Sephardic Kehila Centre as an alternative religious space to both
maintain their distinct identity and escape from racism and
anti-Semitism within the broader society. For her, claiming space is
about both reinventing spaces and reconciling the tension between
physical space and symbolic space. In this respect, these spaces act as
"sale houses" (p. 53) for their racialized members.
The relationship between diasporic identities and claims to space
is another issue examined by several authors. Anastasia Panagakos (chap.
4) explores the construction of a nostalgic Greek identity in
Calgary's Greektown. She indicates the importance of the Hellenic
community center and its neighbouring landscape in providing a sociable
context within which ethnicity is recreated and identity remembered.
In contrast, Awad Ibrahim (chap. 5), Jenny Burman (chap. 6), and
Rinaldo Walcott (chap. 7) emphasize diasporic claims to space using new
and hybridized identities that reject notions of authenticity in terms
of identity, culture, and community. Ibrahim examines the linguistic
code-switching of continental Francophone African youth in a
French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, and Burman
theorizes the cultural politics of Toronto's
Afro-Caribbean-identified communities. They both argue that new claimed
spaces involve negotiating discourses of home and new locales that are
not necessarily nostalgic. Walcott analyzes Divas: Love Me Forever
(2001), an eighty-one-minute documentary that chronicles the lives of
six black drag queens in Toronto. He shows how these diasporic and
racialized characters use their labour and the multicultural context of
Toronto as a means to craft their lives beyond the reach of gender
conscripts, scripts, and confines.
Domenic Beneventi (chap. 8) analyzes the representation of
Vancouver in two novels: Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990)
and Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995). He argues that nationalist
mappings of Canadian landscape are an attempt at "evacuating"
(p. 136), both physically and symbolically, the racial Other (Chinese
Canadian) from the collective body of the nation.
Cathy van Ingen (chap. 9) explores aboriginal peoples' claims
to space and the reactions to the Enoch Cree Nation's casino
proposal in Edmonton's prestigious west end. Her analysis brings
forth the role of moral assumptions in the configuration of urban space,
demonstrating how new spaces are constructed through power struggles and
conflicts of interests.
The volume ends with Leeno Karumanchery's examination of the
implications of what he terms "everyday racial trauma" (chap.
10, 181) steming from the psycho-socially constructed experiences of
race and racial oppression by diasporic and none-white people in Canada.
"Racial trauma" is understood as a lived reality that
generally arises in contrast to, but alongside, the imagined physical
reality of Canadian social spaces as inclusive, equitable, and sale.
Claming Space is a well-written collective contribution. Authors
were loyal to the book's claim to provide evidences of
racialization in Canadian cities, thus it is a valuable scholarly piece
well worth reading by academics, graduate, and even undergraduate,
students (the latter with more effort) interested in the areas of
identity, race and ethnicity, literature, culture, and urban studies. It
should be mentioned that although the assumed racial harmony of Canadian
multiculturalism has been tackled, the assumption of cultural diversity
remains unproblematized. While the reader hears the voices of different
racialized groups in their claims to space, she/he is left with little
critical analysis of the forms of political consciousness manifested
within and through those claimed spaces.
Parastou Saberi; psaberiz@lakeheadu.ca
Department of Sociology, Lakehead University
