Urban Portraits of Identity: On the problem of knowing culture and identity in intercultural studies

Abstract

This paper draws from a larger ethnography that explores questions of culture, race and identity, against a backdrop of globalization and diaspora, among students in a Toronto High School. It constructs a series of 'portraits' of youth from their conversations with the ethnographer. These portraits highlight the fluid and slippery nature of the identities of youth as their identifications shift and as they insist upon being viewed as complex subjects. The identifications emerge as contradictory, ambivalent, imbued with tension and often surprising when, for example, Serbian identifies Spanish and Black becomes White. The challenge opened by this paper concerns not how we can come to 'know' the cultures and identities of cosmopolitan youth as stable entities but how we might engage their complexity and incoherence.