Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities |
Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90
Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto
This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’. The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.
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Tags: Minelle Mahtani, Social Identities, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race Nation and Culture