Claiming Space, Racialization in Canadian Cities

Abstract

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 across diverse range of city spaces in Canadian metropolitan centers. Key to this collective contribution is an emphasis on the social analysis of as 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 in Canadian cities. As its main themes, it considers the various manners in which racial meanings become embedded in space, as well as people's claims to space. The authors also consider how the spatial configuration of Canadian cities are 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 people and dominant groups and institutions. She proposes claiming space, or new spaces, as a process whereby 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 starting point, and then move on to consider how specific 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 (p. 19) about the growth of the Chinese Canadian population in Richmond, British Colombia, in 1995. He argues that public concern was linked to 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 to both maintain their distinct identity and escape from racism and anti-Semitism within the broader society. For her, claiming is about both reinventing spaces and reconciling the tension between physical and symbolic space. In this respect, these spaces act as sale houses (p. 53) for their members. The relationship between diasporic identities and claims to is another issue examined by several authors. Anastasia Panagakos (chap. 4) explores the construction of nostalgic Greek identity in Calgary's Greektown. She indicates the importance of the Hellenic community center and its neighbouring landscape in providing sociable context within which ethnicity is recreated and identity remembered. …