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RINALDO WALCOTT

The Book of Others (Book IV): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

THE MULTICULTURAL MOVE TO LANGUAGE

It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced

the Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to

change the fundamental character of the modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, the

policy’s intent was to manage the non-French and non-English peoples of the

nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of the Royal Commission on

Bilingualism and Biculturalism’s (B and B Commission) production of the “other

ethnic groups” of the Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission’s

work simultaneously cemented the idea that French and English/British ethnicities

constituted the founding “races” of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52).

Furthermore, the move to language rather than ethnicity for the white French and

English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to the

nation, all the while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62).

Indeed, the late Robert Stanfield, the Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader,

stood to endorse the policy by saying that, “I wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker,

that the emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack

on the basic duality of our country” (234). The duality that was already assumed and

came to be enshrined in the bilingual and multicultural articulation of the nation-

state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law.

MULTICULTURALISM AS RACIOLOGICAL THINKING

Eve Haque’s Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and

Belonging in Canada returns us to the origin scene of the Canadian nation-state’s

formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to

provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced the modern

context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque’s engagement with Canadian

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multiculturalism focuses squarely on “the Preliminary Report and Books I (The

Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of the Other Ethnic Groups)”

(7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for the effects of Book IV continue to mark

Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque

begins her study with Jacque Parizeau’s 1995 outburst that “money and the ethnic

vote” were the reasons that the “No Campaign” was narrowly successful in the last

referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how

deep structures of language, culture, and race continue to shape contemporary

Canadian politics, the public sphere, and the national imaginary. This shaping of the

contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that

places two languages outside the boundaries of race and ethnicity, only to be

remarked by their accent as cultures – the founding cultures of Canada. Indeed,

Haque’s work seeks to unmake such remarking as the troubling work of race and

raciological thinking.

Furthermore, it is Haque’s argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully

operated and operates in a space where public policy as “biologically based racial

exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable” (6). The dis-

turbing impact in the aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in

for race and raciological thinking and practices in new and sustained ways more

than forty years later.

It is precisely the manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose

discussions of “race” and racism in Canada that makes Haque’s contribution and

reading of the historical documents so important to contemporary debates on

multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque’s analysis in part points to the reasons

why the term “barbaric cultural practices” is currently used by the Government of

Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural practices in the Canadian citizen-

ship guide (Zine 2012, 18). In addition, it also provides ample material to under-

stand how debates about reasonable accommodation and “common values” in

Quebec have been explicitly articulated through cultural difference, even though

they have plainly centered on the same non-white peoples from South Asia and the

Middle East. The vernacular language of culture marks them as racial selves in need

of guidance from enlightened national subjects (see Leroux, this dossier).

Furthermore, a number of scholars (Bilge 2013) have mounted arguments demon-

strating how Islam comes to be racialized in these debates.

BOOK IV: THE OTHER ETHNIC GROUPS

Haque’s return to Book IV is crucial in terms of the ways in which it seeks to produce

modes of citizenship grounded in the language of linguistic integration as an alibi

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for racial designations. Indeed, the question of language, despite being front and

centre in Book IV in terms of the phrase “official linguistic communities” − meant to

mark those who are neither French nor English/British as Other − can be under-

stood as an attempt to designate whether one must integrate or not.

Language functions as a transporter of sorts. In its use as a mode of integration,

language use is not merely a mode of communication, and it is not just speech. It sig-

nals a commitment to a form of citizenship, and language becomes performative of

an ideal citizenship form. The language-performance-citizenship process revolves

around the foundational understanding of the nation as bicultural and therefore

white in its origins, an argument Haque makes evident throughout her study (18-21,

135, 181, 185).

That so-called “other ethnic groups” might also share as their only language

English or French poses significant problems for the national imaginary. As such,

new ways of imagining these racialized francophones or anglophones (e.g., immi-

grants from the Black Caribbean) as foundationally outside the nation are needed in

the first instance (“two founding races”), followed closely by symbolic efforts to

affirm their belonging inside the nation (“multiculturalism”). The B and B

Commission must invent specific forms of public policy to regulate the operation of

language and race in the Canadian nation.

Significantly, Book IV works to produce new modes of thinking citizenship for

the national imaginary; these modes of thinking understand non-white Canadians

only through the logics of post-WWII immigration and must therefore deny the

existence of non-white Canadians prior to Confederation. Indeed, Haque’s work

helps us to understand one of the most violent policy initiatives of the post-WWII

era in Canada. Multiculturalism as state policy must actively deny Asian, South

Asian, and Black Canadian citizens’ belonging prior to WWII. Such a denial is then

solidified via the logic of 1960s-era benevolent immigration practices. What is phe-

nomenal about this accomplishment is that most immigrants post-1960s fall for the

romance story of a benevolent multicultural Canada. Indeed, it is in the aftermath

of 9/11 that a serious reckoning with this particular move makes itself most force-

fully felt. Haque’s analysis illustrating how the move to benevolent multiculturalism

was and is possible through the ways in which language comes to mark whiteness as

constituting the legitimate nation and non-whiteness as marking an invasive other-

ness is very productive.

THINKING THE STATE, THINKING MULTICULTURALISM

Haque’s return to the B and B Commission as the stage that gives birth to Canada’s

multiculturalism has been well documented by others (e.g., Day 2000; Mackey

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2002). What Haque offers that is quite different from many other commentators,

however, is her analysis of the stakes of citizenship that arise from multiculturalism

so conceived. Haque’s close readings of Book I: The Official Languages (139-85) and

Book IV: The Cultural Contributions of the Other Ethnic Groups (186-237) provide an

in-depth analysis of how the white settler state sought to secure its hegemony

through “the group rights accorded to official language communities” (8) – of which

there are only two. It is precisely the ways in which the French and English languages

work in the policy to provide cover for French and English/British ethnic rule that

distinguishes Haque’s work from other conversations on multiculturalism and the

Canadian nation-state. More specifically, Haque’s analysis of the B and B

Commission asks readers to recognize how “language was identified as a fundamen-

tal element of culture by the commission and mobilized as an essential component

of culture for the ‘founding races,’ even as it was deemed to be a private and periph-

eral element of culture for ‘other ethnic groups’” (6). Indeed, in Trudeau’s announce-

ment of the Multiculturalism Policy in the House of Commons, he assigned the

implementation of the recommendations flowing from Book IV to the Citizenship

Branch of the Department of the Secretary of the State, “the agency now responsible

for matters affecting the social integration of immigrants and the cultural activities

of all ethnic groups” (233).

Upon further consideration, two things are immediately evident: first, French

and English/British-Canadians are produced as without race/ethnicity contra immi-

grants; and, second, citizenship is produced as requiring cultivation. Significantly,

then, the state apparatus exists to manage and determine what remains unsaid: that

the “other ethnic groups” require stewardship into Canadian citizenship, while it is

inherent for the French and the English/British. Haque’s work requires us to think

deeply about the practices and narrations of state formation.

Much of the critical scholarship on multiculturalism stops at the moment of cit-

izenship. What Haque offers us in her book is a requirement to entertain thinking

the state again. While much recent conversations and debates concerning multicul-

turalism in the post-9/11 world have turned their focus to citizenship practices and

hegemonic national identities (e.g., Razack 2004; Thobani 2007), Haque affects a

different move in this book. In particular, the demand that we think carefully about

how state apparatuses such as royal commissions or even more mundane commis-

sions of inquiry work to legitimize the state and to secure state power are central

aspects of the arguments that Haque provides in the achievement of Canadian mul-

ticultural policy and its eventual hegemonic ascendance and settlement into a nor-

mative ideological framework.

Thinking the state in its numerous new permutations remains crucial work

because even as scholars have turned to state policies in a post-9/11 world, one of the

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central evasions in analyses and debates around policies like security certificates and

anti-terrorism laws more broadly has been an absence of how such policies and

practices continue to secure the legitimacy of the nation-state as an entity for man-

aging movement, people, and belonging. Instead, much of the discourse and debate

has focused on containment and exclusion. While such responses are necessary and

needed, a reengagement with the state might demand more radical responses. Such

responses might require that we think of human life beyond the state. Reading

Haque’s work reminds me that different state formations are possible and, even

more importantly, that modern state formations in the West are so deeply racist that

their recuperation might be an impossible political act.

Over the years, Stuart Hall (2012) has consistently proposed an argument and

theory of a conjunctural analysis, which means that once a certain social and cul-

tural settlement occurs (e.g., Canadian multiculturalism), we create a new, produc-

tive space for fissures and social change. But Hall is also adamant that contradiction

is central to the ways in which these hegemonic settlements occur. One of the most

important ways in which Haque reads the post-B and B Commission settlement of

multiculturalism, is through its various contradictions, especially the contradiction

of Canada as an accomplished multicultural nation-state, where questions of “race”

have given way to concerns of culture that can always be settled through legislative

and juridical recourse. To account adequately for the force of the critique in Haque’s

work, I turn to post-9/11 multicultural settlement and call on Jacques Derrida’s

(2000) radical conceptualization of hospitality (see Haque’s discussion 8, 250, 252).

In Derrida’s conceptualization, there is an aporia between conditional hospitality

that welcomes the Other within the limits of the law, and unconditional hospitality,

which is the ethics of hospitality and therefore infinite and unlimited. This aporia,

where the impossibility of hospitality lies, is also productive in that the principle of

unconditionality can function as a driving force for the possible revision of the laws

of hospitality, such as immigration and multiculturalism policies.

Indeed, any reading of multiculturalism that takes Derrida’s work seriously can

only consider it a failed policy, since it does not extend a pure hospitality to those

whom it continues to invite. In fact, Haque demonstrates throughout her analysis

that from its very beginning, the B and B Commission had no intention of allowing

those racialized as others to participate or shape what the nation might become. By

turning to Derrida’s insistence that a “pure hospitality” might be a way to resolve

national tensions revolving around the place of the racialized stranger, Haque does

not just leave us with a criticism of multiculturalism as a failure, but rather suggests

a way forward that is challenging, risky, and full of possibilities. It is by making such

moves that Haque offers us a tour de force re-assessment of the emergence and role

of multiculturalism in forming the contemporary Canadian nation, and even more

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so, the state and its multiple racializing practices that are marked as otherwise.

Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework therefore stakes out new ground for

thinking about the achievement of Canadian multiculturalism as simultaneously

managing race and making it disappear − one of the central organizing principles of

the modern nation-state of Canada.

REFERENCES

Bilge, Sirma. 2013. Reading the Racial Subtext of the Québécois Accommodation Controversy: An Analytics of Racialized Governmentality. Politikon 40.1: 157–81.

Day, Richard J. 2000. Multiculturalism and the history of Canadian diversity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 2012. The neoliberal revolution. In The neoliberal crisis, eds. Jonathan Rutherford and Sally Davison, 8−26. London: Soundings/Lawrence and Wishart.

Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism in a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Mackey, Eva. 2002. The house of difference: Cultural politics and national identity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Razack, Sherene. 2004. Dark threats and white knights: The Somalia affair, peacekeeping, and the new impe- rialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Thobani, Sunera. 2007. Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Zine, Jasmin. 2012. Introduction: Muslim cultural politics in the Canadian Hinterlands. In Islam in the hinterlands: Muslim cultural politics in Canada, ed. Jasmin Zine, 1−37. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

RINALDO WALCOTT is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of

Toronto. His research interests include cultural studies, cultural theory, and queer

and gender theory. He is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black

Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997/2003), and editor of Rude: Contemporary Black

Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac Press, 2000). He has published widely on

multiculturalism and black diaspora debates, as well as on music, film, theatre, and

counselling.

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