Demonstrating Identities: Multiculturalism, Citizenship, and Tamil Canadian Identities

Looking at political demonstrations that occurred throughout 2008 and 2009 in Toronto, this article explores popular understandings of diasporic identities within a Canadian multiculturalism framework. It also examines second-generation Sri Lankan Tamils’ (SLT) (re)negotiations of these representations in forming and informing their identities. Drawing on Kathleen Hall’s (2002) framework, identities are understood as constituted through processes of power, discourse, and representation. Through a critical discourse analysis of newspaper editorials and narrative explorations of second-generation Canadian Tamils, this article investigates how diasporic identities are incorporated into the wider Canadian polity. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with second-generation Tamil Canadians (ages nineteen to twenty-nine). I argue that popular constructions of diasporic identities and Canadian national identity as understood within a multiculturalism framework are not entirely in concurrence with Tamil diasporic minorities’ own identity narratives. The resultant “othering” causes feelings of marginalization and undermines notions of social citizenship. Concurrently, resistive practices by the second generation embodied by the political demonstrations of 2008–2009 contest “Canadian” identity as promoted in hegemonic representations by dominant elements of society, including the state. Divergences that emerge between the resistive discourses of second-generation Tamils and “mainstream” integrationist discourses demonstrate the need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of how Canadian multiculturalism and citizenship might incorporate the transnational political and cultural practices of its citizens.