Is Multiculturalism Well-Package Idealism?: Asian Ethnicity in Canadian Television
Abstract:
By analyzing the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers (2006), I examine the bifurcate debates on multiculturalism: commodification and ideology. In particular, popular media’s manipulation and simplification of the visual representation of ethnicity in a multi-cultural society is discussed in this paper. In its attempt to include ethnic diversity, popular media tend to translate difficult and multi-layered issues into a universalized and oversimplified rhetoric of harmonious society, perpetuating a kind of tactical multiculturalism. In analyzing the commercial, I discuss the simplified, therefore problematic, role the ethnic subject is often assigned to play in order to portray Canada’s seemingly “perfect” image of multiculturalism at work. Discussing the commercial in light of rethinking the application of ethnicity as a commodified object, not as a self-identified subject, I borrow Rey Chow’s analysis of stereotyping and Jean-Luc Nancy’s articulation of “the inoperative community” in order to reexamine the ethnic subject’s dilemma, specifically the two fathers in the Tim Hortons commercial, concerning their relationship to mainstream Canadian culture and a broader societal functioning of multiculturalism.
Keywords: Multiculturalism, Ethnicity, Popular media, Stereotyping, Community, National Identity
I. Proud Fathers: Two Fathers’ Dilemma
In 2006, the Tim Hortons’ TV commercial Proud Fathers aired in Canada during the Turin Winter Olympics. The commercial is a sentimental story of unacknowledged love between a father and a son at a hockey rink. Amongst these overt representations of Canadian nationalism — hockey, Tim Hortons, the Olympics (all of which constitute problematic tropes intrinsic to Canadian identity) — the main characters in this heartwarming story are Chinese immigrants: the immigrant father, the “1.5 generation” son (this is the problematic generation, the in-between generation or hyphenated generation, the one that I belong to) and the second generation Chinese-Canadian grandson, who is “invisible” during this commercial. The commercial is basically a short film, portraying the hardship that immigrant families endure. There is an implied sense of authenticity, as the commercial starts with an opening text that reads “based on a true story.” In a flashback to the son’s childhood, the father prevents the son from playing hockey. He tells his son “you must study hard, not just hockey all the time” as he pulls him out of the street hockey game. The father continues pressuring the son to focus on his studies instead of watching the hockey game on TV. Later, however, we find out that the father secretly attended the son’s hockey games. As proof to the skeptical son, the father pulls out an old wrinkled photograph of his son in his hockey jersey (it is a bit of mystery how the son was able to play on a hockey team with the father’s strong disapproval). The son finally realizes that his father cared for him all these years. The commercial ends with the son expressing his gratitude towards his father’s deep and quiet love that he misunderstood as uncaring and disciplinary. At the end, of course, the commercial reminds us of the product that they are selling with a carefully composed shot of Tim Hortons coffee cups with the text “Every cup tells a story.” The family members’ newly found understanding towards each other comes together at this hockey rink with a cup of Tim Hortons coffee on a cold winter day. How easy it is to be one harmonious family!
It is worth noting that at that point in time Vancouver, B.C. (with the highest Asian immigrant density in Canada) had secured its position as the host for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Perhaps it was a strategic choice to portray a Chinese immigrant family in a central role in this commercial while Canadians were getting ready to “hype up” national pride. Let’s take a moment to pause and reflect upon the above sentiment, in which I just made a clear distinction between Canadian (white, “non-ethnic”) and ethnic Canadian (non-white, in the case of Proud Fathers Chinese-Canadian). This distinction leads to a view that different ethnic groups carry their own values and concerns regarding the shaping of their identity, apart from a national, unified, identity. Although it is impossible, and counter-productive, to state that there is only one unifying national identity, it is inevitable that there is such desire. However, can ethnic groups be part of the same desire? Or, can ethnic groups be part of the same desire while keeping their own distinctive values?
It is particularly difficult to suggest, or state, that there is one collective national identity for Canada, as Canada is not only a multi-cultural but also a multi-nation state with three constituent nations: Aboriginal, English and French. Eric Taylor Woods, in his discussion of nation and nationalism in a multination state such as Canada, emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the existence of multiple nations within one country in terms of maintaining unity:
If Canada were to successfully avoid breaking apart, it needed to cast off the vision that it was a nation state, as it had been represented since the 1960s, and instead recognize that it was a multination state (emphasis in the original, 271).
In this multination state, according to Will Kymlicka, immigrants have shown a high level of identification with Canada, “as high as amongst the majority native-born white English-speaking population.” However, interestingly enough, “[t]he only two groups that exhibit significant ambivalence about identifying with Canada are the two national minorities — the Québécois and Aboriginals” (2011, 284). Pan-Canadian nationalism, mainly referring to English Canada’s ideology, only provokes further conflict and division within Canada by excluding the Québécois and Aboriginal nationalisms. Therefore, many scholars, including Kymlicka, who support liberal multination federalism have emphasized the importance of keeping a sense of distinctive cultures in order to recognize the uniqueness of each nation’s culture and heritage. Kymlicka defines nations as “historical societies, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and societal culture” (Kymlicka qtd. in Woods, 273). Essentially, what he is promoting is to allow each nation to keep its own national unity by preserving its own distinctive culture: language, history, societal fabrication, etc. However, Woods is critical of this kind of co-dependent relationship between nation and nationalism, that is each nation’s distinctive cultural heritage defining its national identity: “Québécois nationalists represent French Québec, pan-Canadian nationalists represent English Canada, and so on. Indeed, for multinational federalists, nation and nationalism are virtually indistinguishable” (276). There is a danger of assuming one collective nationalism within one nation, as if all the members of that nation share the same outlook of one united, collective autonomy; this leads to “cultural essentialism.” Hence, it is, in Woods’ opinion, more relevant to disconnect the tie between nation, as “territorially bound, historically constituted”, and nationalism, in that the nation’s members “share certain collective desires, namely, the desire for collective self-determination” (Woods, 272). As long as the concept of nation and the ideology of nationalism are intertwined, the periphery nations, “generally distinguished from ‘ethnic groups’ arising from immigration,” are forced to share a collective desire for inclusion, not self-determination like that of Canada’s constituent nations (Ibid.). The father and the son in the commercial Proud Fathers are trapped in this systemic bond between nation and nationalism. As a result, they have to show their degree of support (or rejection) for the dominant culture in order to solve an identity dilemma: I am Canadian, not Asian-Canadian and I am Asian, never fully Canadian.
In contrast to my initial and simplified distinction between “Canadian” and “ethnic Canadian,” there seems to be difficulty arriving at a consensus on defining one unifying “Canadian identity.” In addition, what makes the commercial Proud Fathers interesting and worth a much closer reading is that the dilemma of belonging is not only between “ethnic” and “non-ethnic” groups, but also occurs among ethnic Canadians themselves — between the father and the son. The commercial’s portrayal of the two characters’ attitude towards hockey illustrates the level of assimilation that the immigrant family must bear; the son supports his young son’s interests in hockey, unlike his father who prevented him from playing it, as one example. Does this mean then, in this commercial, that the son has lost his “Chineseness” in exchange for becoming Canadian? The son speaks English without an accent, in comparison to his father who has a thick Chinese accent. Does this mean he is more “Canadian” than his father? The father is portrayed as an authentic Chinese father who carries “Chinese” values. Does this mean he will never become fully Canadian? However, the “authentic” Chinese father says “double, double” (lingo popularized by Tim Hortons patrons, meaning two creams and two sugars in a coffee) as he passes a cup of coffee to his son. The immigrant man is using a colloquial Canadian expression. The commercial also alludes to friendship between the father and the caretaker at the hockey rink by showing them sharing a cup of coffee in the past and continuing to do so in the present. They also know each other’s name. The caretaker, Charlie, is the one who knows the father’s “secret”, subtly indicating the Canadian man is the only one who knows the entire story. Does this indicate the father has been accepted as Canadian despite the fact that he is “different”? Perhaps, it is more beneficial for the multicultural society to have someone like him who keeps his Chinese values and accent to maintain his “Chinesness.” By keeping his ethnic/cultural difference clearly marked as Chinese, the end result of multiculturalism can be easily explained as a well-rounded construction of living harmoniously while maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-ethnic society.
Despite its attempt to create more inclusive society for those who are not part of Canada’s founding nations (referring to English and French), “multiculturalism was predominantly a way to deal with the ‘immigrant issue’” (Ibid.). Sneja Gunew further engages in the topic of multiculturalism and its use in multi-ethnic society:
… multiculturalsim deals with the management (often compromised) of contemporary geo-political diversity in former imperial centres and their ex-colonies alike. It is also increasingly a global discourse since it takes into account the flow of migrants, refugees, diasporas, and their relations with nation-states (22).
The policy aims to manage diverse ethnic groups in a cohesive and controlled manner. Kenan Malik questions the concept and application of cultural diversity in the multicultural society, as “the multiculturalist description of society is a highly distorted one, while the multiculturalist prescription creates the very problems it is meant to solve” (my emphasis, 362). While the descriptive nature of multiculturalism creates an idealized view of the society, the prescriptive function of multiculturalism institutionalizes diverse cultures as a fixed and controlled state of being. With this idealized view of multiculturalism, there comes the use of terms such as “woman of colour” and “visible minorities, “which once again serve to reinforce the notion of a legislative centre or norm” in order to institutionalize the workings of multiculturalism (Gunew, 25). Alana Lentin argues that the evolution of multiculturalism is driven by an artificial transformation of our understanding of ‘race’, replaced with ‘culture’, in order to avoid racial tension in the post-Second World War West:
Multiculturalism can be seen as an institutional policy that, by replacing an analysis of the link between racism and capitalism with a focus on the importance of cultural identity, depoliticized the state-centred anti-racism of the racialized in postcolonial societies ... As a policy, multiculturalism would have us see our societies as ‘race-free’ and culturally rich (380-81).
In what appears to be a post-racial age, the emphasis is on now on the terms such as ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘identity’, “as a means of bringing about a state of ‘racelessness’” (382).
Through his Asian specific lens, Naoki Sakai explains the initial formation of Asian Studies, a branch of Area Studies, as a natural default of the Western/ non-Western binary opposition: “Things Asiatic were brought to scholarly attention by being recognized as ‘different and therefore Asian.’ Then, tacitly from the putative viewpoint called ‘the West,’ ‘being different from us’ and ‘being Asian’ were taken to be synonymous in its anthropologizing gesture” (2000, 790). However, Sakai brings another level of complexity in the concept of difference. Considering the origin of the name “Asia” itself is a construction by the West, the outsider, for the purpose of setting a clear distinction of “being different from us.” he wonders who associates to the name “Asia” and identify themselves as “we Asians.” How Japan, for example, can be part of Asia after what the Japanese people had done to people in Asia during the fifteen-year Asia Pacific War? In this sense, should Japan, being the forceful invader, be considered to be in the same category as the West, the entity that is not the East? The absurdity of this arbitrary binary construction and division between the West and the East becomes even more evident when we acknowledge that the term West applies specific to Western Europe and North America, and excludes Eastern Europeans, or those non-whites living in the West for example African-Americans or Asians in England who have lived in the same social and cultural formations with the whites (796). Hence, he asks us to think about:
Can we continue to ignore the wide diversity of contexts in which the very distinction between the West and the Rest is opportunistically drawn, and the economic and social conditions that allow some people to afford to be “Western” while not allowing others? (emphasis in the original, 801).
The dilemma the father and the son have in the Tim Hortons commercial becomes a lot more complicated than simply deciding to which ethnic group they belong. Rather, the root of the ethnic dilemma is in question; what does it mean to be Asian or Asian-Canadian? At the end of the commercial, however, we discover that the father was secretly supportive of the son’s love for hockey. This restores the unity in this family drama; because the family members now share a common understanding and love for hockey, they are now one happy family living in a culturally diverse place. This harmonious unity is, nonetheless, possible only under the hegemony of Canadian values. The complexity of the issue has been simplified for the one united sense of belonging. The father’s ethnic difference is easily replaceable with a collective desire for inclusion. The swift representation of this transition is possible when ethnicity is treated as a “thematic concern.” The thematic tendency of ethnicity, as Rey Chow elaborates, leads to “the level of a more or less realist cultural content, so that, while ethnic details and characters may make interesting stories, they do not necessarily tell us anything new about writing or the act of representation per se” (Chow 2002, 51). Ethnic difference and cultural diversity are utilized simply as commodities for promoting a “success story” for the workings of multiculturalism.
Despite the son’s “Canadianness”, the commercial’s depiction of this family is a typical representation of ethnic others who are in need of being accepted by the dominant culture. Regardless how “Canadian” the son is, or has become, he remains an ethnic other who needs to work at becoming Canadian. In their paper entitled “Sociocultural Analysis of the Commodification of Ethnic Media and Asian Consumers in Canada”, Dal Yong Jin and Soochul Kim celebrate the fact that this Tim Hortons commercial portrays the Chinese immigrant family in a central role in the mainstream media:
Unlike the usual mainstream television commercials in Canada that typically portray Asians in the background or in groups, the Tim Hortons’ commercial [they are referring to Proud Fathers] introduces an intergenerational relationship in a Chinese-Canadian story and portrays an experience relating to hockey that every family in Canada can relate to (563).
Although I do not want to dampen the celebration of ethnic diversity in mainstream media, the statement such as the one Jin and Kim are making is troublesome and requires a second look at this kind of “feel-good” representation of multi-ethnic society. This kind of “all-ends-well” representation of the ethnic subject in a commercial like Proud Fathers is a constructed image that simply serves the purpose of the dominant society’s self-flattering moment of what it appears to be ethnic equality being achieved and practiced. In this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic web, the father and the son in Proud Fathers are stuck between two dilemmas: I am Canadian, not Asian-Canadian and I am Asian, never fully Canadian. When the authors refer to “an experience relating to hockey that every family in Canada can relate to,” I wonder what families they are referring to. We all know that not every family in Canada can afford to send their kids to hockey camps and sign them up for teams. Do they mean middle-class with economic comfort? The tradition of playing hockey resonates with different groups of people in Canada, which perhaps requires having to grow up in Canada. In that sense, are they excluding immigrants who do not have the same kind of sentimental connection to hockey? Or are they indicating that by being part of hockey culture, you will finally achieve “every family” status in Canada? Does this Chinese family, in the commercial, finally become part of dominant Canadian society and its culture by accepting the importance of the tradition of hockey? This seemingly simple representation of Chinese-Canadian family in this commercial leads to complex issues of nation and identity, or national identity. In order for Canadian multiculturalism to work, it seems maintaining the representation of the Other, as different from Us, is a necessary tactic: “To accept the role of ethnic is also to accept a gentle marginalization, it is to accept that one will never be just a part of the landscape but always a little apart from it, not quite belongings” (Bissoondath qtd. in Wood and Gilber, 683). The dilemma continues to exist.
In the following sections, I am going to examine two elements that cause the dilemma with which the two fathers are faced: stereotyping, in terms of keeping and distinguishing difference, and a forced sense of unified community, in which the members of the community must submit to the top-down fabrication of togetherness.
II. Stereotyping in the inter-cultural relationship
As the commercial Proud Fathers portrays, we should believe that all Canadians are equal; that we, Canadians, admire hockey. The use of stereotype in this commercial perpetuates reductive representations of ethnicity for both immigrants and Canadians. However, the sentimental message that this commercial carries through is only possible, or I should say it only achieves it successfully, through the use of stereotypes. I want to contemplate the very precarious nature of stereotyping in studying inter-cultural relationships; on the one hand, the word stereotype has pejorative connotations and, in this case of the commercial, could refer to the generalization of inter-cultural representations, but on the other hand, it is an inevitable means through which we can understand different cultures, as an entry point to a foreign culture.
The term stereotype comes from a mechanical printing process in which a printer would pre-arrange a set of characters or words that repeat often throughout the printing process instead of re-setting the individual pieces of type set over and over again. Rey Chow focuses on this original coinage of the term, rather than viewing stereotypes as a problem in cognitive psychology, a state of mind that refers to incorrect generalization. She also shift our attention to the original printing function of stereotype, as “a deliberate process of duplication” (emphasis in the original; 2002, 54). By doing so, she elaborates on the possible function of stereotyping as a form of imitation that can be utilized for critically engaging with a given social or political order: “[i]f stereotypes are, as they are often characterized to be, artificial, exaggerated, and reductive, such qualities must be judged against the background of (the mechanics of) representational duplication or imitation” (Ibid.). The Chinese family in the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers is a product of a shallow stereotypical representation of an immigrant family. The commercial’s portrayal of an immigrant family’s struggle and generational gap, and also overcoming all those hardships, is not a unique one; it is rather familiar and predictable. However, I am not critiquing this kind of stereotypical rendition of immigrant family’s life in Canada per se. After all, it is a TV commercial that needs to appeal to a large audience. Rather, I am interested in the mass media’s use of stereotype in which the message of the commercial imitates a larger nationalistic rhetoric of multiculturalism; it duplicates the societal construction without being critical or creative. As it is an inevitable tool for studying inter-cultural relationships, stereotyping should not be simply dismissed as a negative representation of relations. Instead, the ways in which power dynamics influence the stereotyping process should be discussed: who is doing the stereotyping? who is being stereotyped? how is stereotyping being accepted and endorsed? As Chow points out in the case of the racist rejection of black people, it is equally common among Asians, both in Asia and within the US, “but often it is only white people’s stereotypes of blacks that receive media attention.” She continues by questioning “[c]ould this be because it is not only the stereotypes themselves but also the power behind their use that accounts for their perceived atrocity” (my emphasis, Ibid., 60).
Chow’s use of examples of Larry Feign’s cartoons explains the tie between the political power and the use of stereotype. Larry Feign is a cartoonist who worked at the South China Morning Post in the 1980s and 1990s. He was fired from the paper for an unknown reason, presumably for a political reason. In one of his cartoons, Ying Man, a young Asian guy is wearing a T-shirt with a non-sensical English phrase, and the caption reiterates the absurdity of the common display of misused English language: “English: once the living language of Shakespeare; now being bludgeoned to death by Japanese garment manufacturers.” Many of
Hong Kong’s cultural critics disliked Feign for his use of stereotypes in commenting on the postcolonial mess in Hong Kong, not quite Chinese and failed attempt to be British. Chow states one of those criticisms:
… such a derisive description at the expense of Asians could only have come from a gwailo, who (as is often the case in a place such as Hong Kong) is lamenting the destruction of a noble European language at the hands of yellow savages (90).
What the critic is not seeing, while he is busy blaming Feign “as just another racist Westerner” (91), is the other side of the illustration; while the young man is wearing a T-shirt with a nonsensical English phrase, the middle-aged Caucasian man, standing next to him, is wearing a nonsensical Chinese letter on his T-shirt. The contradictory humor in Feign’s cartoon is lost in this critic’s view. This kind of criticism on Feign’s work being pro-Western, anti-Hong Kong is an excellent proof of the critic himself being that same gwailo, the ignorant Westerner, that he is accusing Feign of. He doesn’t acknowledge, or incapable of noticing, the same bludgeoned application of Chinese language. This is the very precarious nature of stereotyping; even in critiquing stereotyping, one can falling into using another form of stereotyping:
By revealing that the political state, too, is no more than a user of stereotypes, Feign brings to light the fact that stereotypes are not so much about subjective cognitive processes as about power and competition: the injuries, violence, and aggression commonly attributed to stereotypes are not so much the intrinsic qualities of stereotypes themselves as they are the effects of those in power who must, in order to stamp out competition and preserve their own monopoly, forbid to others the privilege of stereotyping. To this extent, Feign has, precisely through his cartoons, committed the enormity of usurping this privilege from the political state (72-81).
Similarly, the critique of the commercial Proud Fathers’ use of stereotype should not be limited to the simplified representation of an immigrant family, but also in the way the tropes of Canadian nationalism are used. With these stereotypical representation of Canadian unity, the vicious cycle of copying the false original continues to produce deceiving representation of ethnic harmony in this multicultural society.
III. Inoperative Community
At a first glance, the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers is innocuous. It even tries to present a transition in traditional values between generations, attempting at a realistic reflection of changes within an immigrant family. However, the problem with this commercial lies in its subtle (or maybe it is not so subtle) way of marketing an idealized notion of Canadian nationhood by portraying the integration of generations of immigrants, as if all is well in this hockey rink. This kind of perfectly packaged image of a nation is what French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy sees as a problematic view, a falsifying message that has been manufactured. He challenges the homogeneous notion of society, the traditional sense of community (defined by race, nationality, patriotic narratives, etc.) and re-examines it through the lens of multiple singularities. The concept of multiculturalism seems to fit well with Nancy’s notion of community in that both concepts acknowledge the multitude of beings and accept the diversity that forms a society. However, upon closer inspection, the fundamental binding force in multiculturalism lies within the dominant power’s desire to unify the minorities. In contrast, Nancy’s articulation of the concept inoperative community relies on the absolute autonomy of singularity that is independent from the hierarchy of authority and essentialism, not only when it is suitable to the dominant power or when it fits the nation’s strategy:
A singular being does not emerge or rise up against the background of a chaotic, undifferentiated identity of beings, or against the background of their unitary assumption, or that of a becoming, or that of a will. A singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed (emphases in the original, 1991, 27-28).
Nancy emphasizes the co-existence of the Self and the Other within one being, singular plural. This is his understanding of singularity as a active organism of the inoperative community, the community that is formed by an anti-hierarchical mode rather than a falsely harmonious nationhood. Nancy promotes a sense of community that is aware of the existing conflict within the members of community: “[c]ommunity is made of the interruption of singularities” (31). Since Nancy’s notion of singularity advocates the shared being of the Self and the Other, the “interruption of singularities” could result in an unresolved sense of self. I believe that this sense of being unresolved should not be viewed as undesirable. Rather, this is a necessary step in order for the Self to actualize her identity by accepting conflict, interruption and dissimilarity. Instead of focusing on the unified collective sense of community, Nancy advocates the notion of unworkings of the being-in-common:
Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their being — their being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional (31).
This sense of unworking motivates the act of interruption for singular beings to pluralize oneself; in order to demarcate my true sense of identity, it is essential that I am fully aware of the disruption within my own hyphenations: Korean-Canadian, Ethnic-non-Ethnic, the East-the West.
In contrast, the perfect hockey rink that the commercial Proud Fathers is presenting as a place of conviviality is nothing but a manufactured image of Canada. The commercial adheres well to Canada’s public image as a multicultural and inclusive society. Its portrayal of a Chinese immigrant family is textbook perfect in terms of representing new immigrants’ struggles to overcome the hardship of adjusting in a new society. Two generations later, these new immigrants are all part of Canadian society, that is as long as they mimic their required (or assumed) Canadian-ness. This “perfect” integration of different ethnic groups is only possible when the minority mimics the majority. However, what the minority is mimicking is based on a fabricated illusion of “Canadian-ness”. In the end, both groups - the Chinese immigrants and the Canadians- have lost their authentic selves because of their effort to display a perfectly harmonious society.
I would like to present two artists who employ the concept of community in a contrasting manner: Rirkrit Tiravanija and Santiago Sierra. Tiravanija became known in art world with his “cooking” work in the 1990s. He transformed gallery spaces into working kitchens where he cooked and served food to the viewer/participants. The work attempted to question the conventions of art history and refuses labeling: “Is this sculpture?”, “Is this installation?”, “Is this performance?” Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term Relational Aesthetics, which puts the emphasis on social interaction rather than the objecthood and commodification of art work, and questions hierarchical relationship between the viewer and the artist/art work. Despite the participatory openness within the work, Claire Bishop challenges the democratic nature of Tiravanija’s work, as “the structure of his work circumscribes the outcome in advance, and relies on its presence within a gallery to differentiate it from entertainment” (69). The community that Tiravanija creates is within the frame of prescribed safety of the gallery setting with the gallery attendees. In contrast, Bishop brings forth Santiago Sierra’s work as an example of relational work that provokes unease and discomfort instead of belonging. In return, she believes that the work truly agitates the conventional sense of community. In Sierra’s work Wall Enclosing a Space (2003) for the Spanish pavilion in the Venice Biennale, he blocked off the entrance to the building, and only allowed viewers with a Spanish passport to enter the pavilion through the back of the building, where two immigration officers were inspecting passports. Upon entering the space, the viewer were confronted by an empty space with nothing but gray paint peeling off the walls and some left-overs from the previous year’s exhibition. Those who are allowed to enter the gallery building must be aware of the selective process that heightens the privileged citizenship which separates them from others who were denied the entry. Bishop articulates, borrowing Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of democracy as antagonism, the contrasting sense of community through this work; while Tiravanija work requires a unified subject in a preset community of conviviality, Sierra’s confrontational rejection of the viewer without a Spanish passport provides “a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other” (79). This view echoes Nancy’s notion of inoperative community, in which the presence of conflict and tension is necessary for a community to build its own identity. The ethnic subject (the Chinese family) in the Tim Hortons commercial has been produced with the final outcome, harmonious multiculturalism, in mind, in which the subject’s active identification that acknowledges constant flux has been ignored.
IV. Epilogue
I am sitting at a pub called Sam Ryan’s in Itaewon in Seoul, waiting for the Olympic gold metal hockey game to start. I can spot a bunch of white boys wearing Canadian hockey jerseys. The atmosphere is a familiar one, a typical Irish pub that you find on College street in Toronto: wooden furnitures, stools by the bar, dart boards in one corner, large TV screens scattered around the pub. This kind of interior is quite different from other Korean establishments. Everyone here speaks English. There is a group of Asian girls at the next table to us who are clearly displaying their “Canadianness”: wearing shirts with Canada on it, holding a pair of mittens with a Canadian maple leaf, talking about their hometown Vancouver, etc. I can hear them dropping a few words in Korean, with a slight accent. Perhaps, they are (ethnic) Koreans but were born in Canada. Why was I eager to come to this pub and watch the game with other Canadians. I don’t even like hockey. This pub reminds me of the hockey rink in the commercial Proud Fathers; regardless of my own lack of interests in participating in this event of national pride, I am part of this national unity. The only difference is that I am in Seoul. Is this essentially what it comes down to, needing to have a site of collegial gathering for ethnic groups to come together? Canadians are an ethnic group here. Olympics, hockey, beer: Is this a sign of globalized capitalism at work? Are we, then, all essentially actors playing our roles in a given setting and situation?
References
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October, Vol. 110 (2004): 51-79
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, trans. By S. Pleasance & F. Woods, les presses du réel, 2002
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002
_______. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, boundary 2, 25:3 (1998): 1-24
Goonewardena, Kanishka & Stefan Kipfer. “Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism, Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 (2005): 670-678
Gunew, Sneja. “Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism: Between Race and Ethnicity”, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 27, The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism (1997): 22-39
Kymlicka, Will. “Multicultural citizenship within multination states”, Ethnicities, 11(3), 2011, 281-302
____________. Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future, Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2012
Lentin, Alana. “Replacing ‘race’, historicizing ‘culture’ in multiculturalism”, Patterns of Prejudice, 39:4 (2005), 379-396
MacGregor, Robert M. “I Am Canadian: National Identity in Beer Commercials”, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2003, 276-286
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, trans. By Peter Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, S. Sawhney, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991
____________. Being Singular Plural, trans. by R. D. Richardson & A. E. O’Byrne, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000
Sakai, Naoki. “‘You Asians:’ On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 99, Number 4 (2000): 789-817
___________. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Szanton, David L. “Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States”, The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. By D. Szanton, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, 1-33
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference”, Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse, Inscriptions 3-4, ed. Deborah Gordon, 1988, np
<http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/v3-4top.html>
Wood, Patricia K. & Liette Gilbert. “Multiculturalism in Canada: Accidental Discourse, Alternative Vision, Urban Practice”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 (2005): 279-291
Woods, Eric Taylor. “Beyond multination federalism: Reflections on nations and nationalism in Canada” Ethnicities, 12 (3), 2012: 270-292
Abstract:
By analyzing the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers (2006), I examine the bifurcate debates on multiculturalism: commodification and ideology. In particular, popular media’s manipulation and simplification of the visual representation of ethnicity in a multi-cultural society is discussed in this paper. In its attempt to include ethnic diversity, popular media tend to translate difficult and multi-layered issues into a universalized and oversimplified rhetoric of harmonious society, perpetuating a kind of tactical multiculturalism. In analyzing the commercial, I discuss the simplified, therefore problematic, role the ethnic subject is often assigned to play in order to portray Canada’s seemingly “perfect” image of multiculturalism at work. Discussing the commercial in light of rethinking the application of ethnicity as a commodified object, not as a self-identified subject, I borrow Rey Chow’s analysis of stereotyping and Jean-Luc Nancy’s articulation of “the inoperative community” in order to reexamine the ethnic subject’s dilemma, specifically the two fathers in the Tim Hortons commercial, concerning their relationship to mainstream Canadian culture and a broader societal functioning of multiculturalism.
Keywords: Multiculturalism, Ethnicity, Popular media, Stereotyping, Community, National Identity
I. Proud Fathers: Two Fathers’ Dilemma
In 2006, the Tim Hortons’ TV commercial Proud Fathers aired in Canada during the Turin Winter Olympics. The commercial is a sentimental story of unacknowledged love between a father and a son at a hockey rink. Amongst these overt representations of Canadian nationalism — hockey, Tim Hortons, the Olympics (all of which constitute problematic tropes intrinsic to Canadian identity) — the main characters in this heartwarming story are Chinese immigrants: the immigrant father, the “1.5 generation” son (this is the problematic generation, the in-between generation or hyphenated generation, the one that I belong to) and the second generation Chinese-Canadian grandson, who is “invisible” during this commercial. The commercial is basically a short film, portraying the hardship that immigrant families endure. There is an implied sense of authenticity, as the commercial starts with an opening text that reads “based on a true story.” In a flashback to the son’s childhood, the father prevents the son from playing hockey. He tells his son “you must study hard, not just hockey all the time” as he pulls him out of the street hockey game. The father continues pressuring the son to focus on his studies instead of watching the hockey game on TV. Later, however, we find out that the father secretly attended the son’s hockey games. As proof to the skeptical son, the father pulls out an old wrinkled photograph of his son in his hockey jersey (it is a bit of mystery how the son was able to play on a hockey team with the father’s strong disapproval). The son finally realizes that his father cared for him all these years. The commercial ends with the son expressing his gratitude towards his father’s deep and quiet love that he misunderstood as uncaring and disciplinary. At the end, of course, the commercial reminds us of the product that they are selling with a carefully composed shot of Tim Hortons coffee cups with the text “Every cup tells a story.” The family members’ newly found understanding towards each other comes together at this hockey rink with a cup of Tim Hortons coffee on a cold winter day. How easy it is to be one harmonious family!
It is worth noting that at that point in time Vancouver, B.C. (with the highest Asian immigrant density in Canada) had secured its position as the host for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Perhaps it was a strategic choice to portray a Chinese immigrant family in a central role in this commercial while Canadians were getting ready to “hype up” national pride. Let’s take a moment to pause and reflect upon the above sentiment, in which I just made a clear distinction between Canadian (white, “non-ethnic”) and ethnic Canadian (non-white, in the case of Proud Fathers Chinese-Canadian). This distinction leads to a view that different ethnic groups carry their own values and concerns regarding the shaping of their identity, apart from a national, unified, identity. Although it is impossible, and counter-productive, to state that there is only one unifying national identity, it is inevitable that there is such desire. However, can ethnic groups be part of the same desire? Or, can ethnic groups be part of the same desire while keeping their own distinctive values?
It is particularly difficult to suggest, or state, that there is one collective national identity for Canada, as Canada is not only a multi-cultural but also a multi-nation state with three constituent nations: Aboriginal, English and French. Eric Taylor Woods, in his discussion of nation and nationalism in a multination state such as Canada, emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the existence of multiple nations within one country in terms of maintaining unity:
If Canada were to successfully avoid breaking apart, it needed to cast off the vision that it was a nation state, as it had been represented since the 1960s, and instead recognize that it was a multination state (emphasis in the original, 271).
In this multination state, according to Will Kymlicka, immigrants have shown a high level of identification with Canada, “as high as amongst the majority native-born white English-speaking population.” However, interestingly enough, “[t]he only two groups that exhibit significant ambivalence about identifying with Canada are the two national minorities — the Québécois and Aboriginals” (2011, 284). Pan-Canadian nationalism, mainly referring to English Canada’s ideology, only provokes further conflict and division within Canada by excluding the Québécois and Aboriginal nationalisms. Therefore, many scholars, including Kymlicka, who support liberal multination federalism have emphasized the importance of keeping a sense of distinctive cultures in order to recognize the uniqueness of each nation’s culture and heritage. Kymlicka defines nations as “historical societies, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and societal culture” (Kymlicka qtd. in Woods, 273). Essentially, what he is promoting is to allow each nation to keep its own national unity by preserving its own distinctive culture: language, history, societal fabrication, etc. However, Woods is critical of this kind of co-dependent relationship between nation and nationalism, that is each nation’s distinctive cultural heritage defining its national identity: “Québécois nationalists represent French Québec, pan-Canadian nationalists represent English Canada, and so on. Indeed, for multinational federalists, nation and nationalism are virtually indistinguishable” (276). There is a danger of assuming one collective nationalism within one nation, as if all the members of that nation share the same outlook of one united, collective autonomy; this leads to “cultural essentialism.” Hence, it is, in Woods’ opinion, more relevant to disconnect the tie between nation, as “territorially bound, historically constituted”, and nationalism, in that the nation’s members “share certain collective desires, namely, the desire for collective self-determination” (Woods, 272). As long as the concept of nation and the ideology of nationalism are intertwined, the periphery nations, “generally distinguished from ‘ethnic groups’ arising from immigration,” are forced to share a collective desire for inclusion, not self-determination like that of Canada’s constituent nations (Ibid.). The father and the son in the commercial Proud Fathers are trapped in this systemic bond between nation and nationalism. As a result, they have to show their degree of support (or rejection) for the dominant culture in order to solve an identity dilemma: I am Canadian, not Asian-Canadian and I am Asian, never fully Canadian.
In contrast to my initial and simplified distinction between “Canadian” and “ethnic Canadian,” there seems to be difficulty arriving at a consensus on defining one unifying “Canadian identity.” In addition, what makes the commercial Proud Fathers interesting and worth a much closer reading is that the dilemma of belonging is not only between “ethnic” and “non-ethnic” groups, but also occurs among ethnic Canadians themselves — between the father and the son. The commercial’s portrayal of the two characters’ attitude towards hockey illustrates the level of assimilation that the immigrant family must bear; the son supports his young son’s interests in hockey, unlike his father who prevented him from playing it, as one example. Does this mean then, in this commercial, that the son has lost his “Chineseness” in exchange for becoming Canadian? The son speaks English without an accent, in comparison to his father who has a thick Chinese accent. Does this mean he is more “Canadian” than his father? The father is portrayed as an authentic Chinese father who carries “Chinese” values. Does this mean he will never become fully Canadian? However, the “authentic” Chinese father says “double, double” (lingo popularized by Tim Hortons patrons, meaning two creams and two sugars in a coffee) as he passes a cup of coffee to his son. The immigrant man is using a colloquial Canadian expression. The commercial also alludes to friendship between the father and the caretaker at the hockey rink by showing them sharing a cup of coffee in the past and continuing to do so in the present. They also know each other’s name. The caretaker, Charlie, is the one who knows the father’s “secret”, subtly indicating the Canadian man is the only one who knows the entire story. Does this indicate the father has been accepted as Canadian despite the fact that he is “different”? Perhaps, it is more beneficial for the multicultural society to have someone like him who keeps his Chinese values and accent to maintain his “Chinesness.” By keeping his ethnic/cultural difference clearly marked as Chinese, the end result of multiculturalism can be easily explained as a well-rounded construction of living harmoniously while maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-ethnic society.
Despite its attempt to create more inclusive society for those who are not part of Canada’s founding nations (referring to English and French), “multiculturalism was predominantly a way to deal with the ‘immigrant issue’” (Ibid.). Sneja Gunew further engages in the topic of multiculturalism and its use in multi-ethnic society:
… multiculturalsim deals with the management (often compromised) of contemporary geo-political diversity in former imperial centres and their ex-colonies alike. It is also increasingly a global discourse since it takes into account the flow of migrants, refugees, diasporas, and their relations with nation-states (22).
The policy aims to manage diverse ethnic groups in a cohesive and controlled manner. Kenan Malik questions the concept and application of cultural diversity in the multicultural society, as “the multiculturalist description of society is a highly distorted one, while the multiculturalist prescription creates the very problems it is meant to solve” (my emphasis, 362). While the descriptive nature of multiculturalism creates an idealized view of the society, the prescriptive function of multiculturalism institutionalizes diverse cultures as a fixed and controlled state of being. With this idealized view of multiculturalism, there comes the use of terms such as “woman of colour” and “visible minorities, “which once again serve to reinforce the notion of a legislative centre or norm” in order to institutionalize the workings of multiculturalism (Gunew, 25). Alana Lentin argues that the evolution of multiculturalism is driven by an artificial transformation of our understanding of ‘race’, replaced with ‘culture’, in order to avoid racial tension in the post-Second World War West:
Multiculturalism can be seen as an institutional policy that, by replacing an analysis of the link between racism and capitalism with a focus on the importance of cultural identity, depoliticized the state-centred anti-racism of the racialized in postcolonial societies ... As a policy, multiculturalism would have us see our societies as ‘race-free’ and culturally rich (380-81).
In what appears to be a post-racial age, the emphasis is on now on the terms such as ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘identity’, “as a means of bringing about a state of ‘racelessness’” (382).
Through his Asian specific lens, Naoki Sakai explains the initial formation of Asian Studies, a branch of Area Studies, as a natural default of the Western/ non-Western binary opposition: “Things Asiatic were brought to scholarly attention by being recognized as ‘different and therefore Asian.’ Then, tacitly from the putative viewpoint called ‘the West,’ ‘being different from us’ and ‘being Asian’ were taken to be synonymous in its anthropologizing gesture” (2000, 790). However, Sakai brings another level of complexity in the concept of difference. Considering the origin of the name “Asia” itself is a construction by the West, the outsider, for the purpose of setting a clear distinction of “being different from us.” he wonders who associates to the name “Asia” and identify themselves as “we Asians.” How Japan, for example, can be part of Asia after what the Japanese people had done to people in Asia during the fifteen-year Asia Pacific War? In this sense, should Japan, being the forceful invader, be considered to be in the same category as the West, the entity that is not the East? The absurdity of this arbitrary binary construction and division between the West and the East becomes even more evident when we acknowledge that the term West applies specific to Western Europe and North America, and excludes Eastern Europeans, or those non-whites living in the West for example African-Americans or Asians in England who have lived in the same social and cultural formations with the whites (796). Hence, he asks us to think about:
Can we continue to ignore the wide diversity of contexts in which the very distinction between the West and the Rest is opportunistically drawn, and the economic and social conditions that allow some people to afford to be “Western” while not allowing others? (emphasis in the original, 801).
The dilemma the father and the son have in the Tim Hortons commercial becomes a lot more complicated than simply deciding to which ethnic group they belong. Rather, the root of the ethnic dilemma is in question; what does it mean to be Asian or Asian-Canadian? At the end of the commercial, however, we discover that the father was secretly supportive of the son’s love for hockey. This restores the unity in this family drama; because the family members now share a common understanding and love for hockey, they are now one happy family living in a culturally diverse place. This harmonious unity is, nonetheless, possible only under the hegemony of Canadian values. The complexity of the issue has been simplified for the one united sense of belonging. The father’s ethnic difference is easily replaceable with a collective desire for inclusion. The swift representation of this transition is possible when ethnicity is treated as a “thematic concern.” The thematic tendency of ethnicity, as Rey Chow elaborates, leads to “the level of a more or less realist cultural content, so that, while ethnic details and characters may make interesting stories, they do not necessarily tell us anything new about writing or the act of representation per se” (Chow 2002, 51). Ethnic difference and cultural diversity are utilized simply as commodities for promoting a “success story” for the workings of multiculturalism.
Despite the son’s “Canadianness”, the commercial’s depiction of this family is a typical representation of ethnic others who are in need of being accepted by the dominant culture. Regardless how “Canadian” the son is, or has become, he remains an ethnic other who needs to work at becoming Canadian. In their paper entitled “Sociocultural Analysis of the Commodification of Ethnic Media and Asian Consumers in Canada”, Dal Yong Jin and Soochul Kim celebrate the fact that this Tim Hortons commercial portrays the Chinese immigrant family in a central role in the mainstream media:
Unlike the usual mainstream television commercials in Canada that typically portray Asians in the background or in groups, the Tim Hortons’ commercial [they are referring to Proud Fathers] introduces an intergenerational relationship in a Chinese-Canadian story and portrays an experience relating to hockey that every family in Canada can relate to (563).
Although I do not want to dampen the celebration of ethnic diversity in mainstream media, the statement such as the one Jin and Kim are making is troublesome and requires a second look at this kind of “feel-good” representation of multi-ethnic society. This kind of “all-ends-well” representation of the ethnic subject in a commercial like Proud Fathers is a constructed image that simply serves the purpose of the dominant society’s self-flattering moment of what it appears to be ethnic equality being achieved and practiced. In this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic web, the father and the son in Proud Fathers are stuck between two dilemmas: I am Canadian, not Asian-Canadian and I am Asian, never fully Canadian. When the authors refer to “an experience relating to hockey that every family in Canada can relate to,” I wonder what families they are referring to. We all know that not every family in Canada can afford to send their kids to hockey camps and sign them up for teams. Do they mean middle-class with economic comfort? The tradition of playing hockey resonates with different groups of people in Canada, which perhaps requires having to grow up in Canada. In that sense, are they excluding immigrants who do not have the same kind of sentimental connection to hockey? Or are they indicating that by being part of hockey culture, you will finally achieve “every family” status in Canada? Does this Chinese family, in the commercial, finally become part of dominant Canadian society and its culture by accepting the importance of the tradition of hockey? This seemingly simple representation of Chinese-Canadian family in this commercial leads to complex issues of nation and identity, or national identity. In order for Canadian multiculturalism to work, it seems maintaining the representation of the Other, as different from Us, is a necessary tactic: “To accept the role of ethnic is also to accept a gentle marginalization, it is to accept that one will never be just a part of the landscape but always a little apart from it, not quite belongings” (Bissoondath qtd. in Wood and Gilber, 683). The dilemma continues to exist.
In the following sections, I am going to examine two elements that cause the dilemma with which the two fathers are faced: stereotyping, in terms of keeping and distinguishing difference, and a forced sense of unified community, in which the members of the community must submit to the top-down fabrication of togetherness.
II. Stereotyping in the inter-cultural relationship
As the commercial Proud Fathers portrays, we should believe that all Canadians are equal; that we, Canadians, admire hockey. The use of stereotype in this commercial perpetuates reductive representations of ethnicity for both immigrants and Canadians. However, the sentimental message that this commercial carries through is only possible, or I should say it only achieves it successfully, through the use of stereotypes. I want to contemplate the very precarious nature of stereotyping in studying inter-cultural relationships; on the one hand, the word stereotype has pejorative connotations and, in this case of the commercial, could refer to the generalization of inter-cultural representations, but on the other hand, it is an inevitable means through which we can understand different cultures, as an entry point to a foreign culture.
The term stereotype comes from a mechanical printing process in which a printer would pre-arrange a set of characters or words that repeat often throughout the printing process instead of re-setting the individual pieces of type set over and over again. Rey Chow focuses on this original coinage of the term, rather than viewing stereotypes as a problem in cognitive psychology, a state of mind that refers to incorrect generalization. She also shift our attention to the original printing function of stereotype, as “a deliberate process of duplication” (emphasis in the original; 2002, 54). By doing so, she elaborates on the possible function of stereotyping as a form of imitation that can be utilized for critically engaging with a given social or political order: “[i]f stereotypes are, as they are often characterized to be, artificial, exaggerated, and reductive, such qualities must be judged against the background of (the mechanics of) representational duplication or imitation” (Ibid.). The Chinese family in the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers is a product of a shallow stereotypical representation of an immigrant family. The commercial’s portrayal of an immigrant family’s struggle and generational gap, and also overcoming all those hardships, is not a unique one; it is rather familiar and predictable. However, I am not critiquing this kind of stereotypical rendition of immigrant family’s life in Canada per se. After all, it is a TV commercial that needs to appeal to a large audience. Rather, I am interested in the mass media’s use of stereotype in which the message of the commercial imitates a larger nationalistic rhetoric of multiculturalism; it duplicates the societal construction without being critical or creative. As it is an inevitable tool for studying inter-cultural relationships, stereotyping should not be simply dismissed as a negative representation of relations. Instead, the ways in which power dynamics influence the stereotyping process should be discussed: who is doing the stereotyping? who is being stereotyped? how is stereotyping being accepted and endorsed? As Chow points out in the case of the racist rejection of black people, it is equally common among Asians, both in Asia and within the US, “but often it is only white people’s stereotypes of blacks that receive media attention.” She continues by questioning “[c]ould this be because it is not only the stereotypes themselves but also the power behind their use that accounts for their perceived atrocity” (my emphasis, Ibid., 60).
Chow’s use of examples of Larry Feign’s cartoons explains the tie between the political power and the use of stereotype. Larry Feign is a cartoonist who worked at the South China Morning Post in the 1980s and 1990s. He was fired from the paper for an unknown reason, presumably for a political reason. In one of his cartoons, Ying Man, a young Asian guy is wearing a T-shirt with a non-sensical English phrase, and the caption reiterates the absurdity of the common display of misused English language: “English: once the living language of Shakespeare; now being bludgeoned to death by Japanese garment manufacturers.” Many of
Hong Kong’s cultural critics disliked Feign for his use of stereotypes in commenting on the postcolonial mess in Hong Kong, not quite Chinese and failed attempt to be British. Chow states one of those criticisms:
… such a derisive description at the expense of Asians could only have come from a gwailo, who (as is often the case in a place such as Hong Kong) is lamenting the destruction of a noble European language at the hands of yellow savages (90).
What the critic is not seeing, while he is busy blaming Feign “as just another racist Westerner” (91), is the other side of the illustration; while the young man is wearing a T-shirt with a nonsensical English phrase, the middle-aged Caucasian man, standing next to him, is wearing a nonsensical Chinese letter on his T-shirt. The contradictory humor in Feign’s cartoon is lost in this critic’s view. This kind of criticism on Feign’s work being pro-Western, anti-Hong Kong is an excellent proof of the critic himself being that same gwailo, the ignorant Westerner, that he is accusing Feign of. He doesn’t acknowledge, or incapable of noticing, the same bludgeoned application of Chinese language. This is the very precarious nature of stereotyping; even in critiquing stereotyping, one can falling into using another form of stereotyping:
By revealing that the political state, too, is no more than a user of stereotypes, Feign brings to light the fact that stereotypes are not so much about subjective cognitive processes as about power and competition: the injuries, violence, and aggression commonly attributed to stereotypes are not so much the intrinsic qualities of stereotypes themselves as they are the effects of those in power who must, in order to stamp out competition and preserve their own monopoly, forbid to others the privilege of stereotyping. To this extent, Feign has, precisely through his cartoons, committed the enormity of usurping this privilege from the political state (72-81).
Similarly, the critique of the commercial Proud Fathers’ use of stereotype should not be limited to the simplified representation of an immigrant family, but also in the way the tropes of Canadian nationalism are used. With these stereotypical representation of Canadian unity, the vicious cycle of copying the false original continues to produce deceiving representation of ethnic harmony in this multicultural society.
III. Inoperative Community
At a first glance, the Tim Hortons commercial Proud Fathers is innocuous. It even tries to present a transition in traditional values between generations, attempting at a realistic reflection of changes within an immigrant family. However, the problem with this commercial lies in its subtle (or maybe it is not so subtle) way of marketing an idealized notion of Canadian nationhood by portraying the integration of generations of immigrants, as if all is well in this hockey rink. This kind of perfectly packaged image of a nation is what French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy sees as a problematic view, a falsifying message that has been manufactured. He challenges the homogeneous notion of society, the traditional sense of community (defined by race, nationality, patriotic narratives, etc.) and re-examines it through the lens of multiple singularities. The concept of multiculturalism seems to fit well with Nancy’s notion of community in that both concepts acknowledge the multitude of beings and accept the diversity that forms a society. However, upon closer inspection, the fundamental binding force in multiculturalism lies within the dominant power’s desire to unify the minorities. In contrast, Nancy’s articulation of the concept inoperative community relies on the absolute autonomy of singularity that is independent from the hierarchy of authority and essentialism, not only when it is suitable to the dominant power or when it fits the nation’s strategy:
A singular being does not emerge or rise up against the background of a chaotic, undifferentiated identity of beings, or against the background of their unitary assumption, or that of a becoming, or that of a will. A singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed (emphases in the original, 1991, 27-28).
Nancy emphasizes the co-existence of the Self and the Other within one being, singular plural. This is his understanding of singularity as a active organism of the inoperative community, the community that is formed by an anti-hierarchical mode rather than a falsely harmonious nationhood. Nancy promotes a sense of community that is aware of the existing conflict within the members of community: “[c]ommunity is made of the interruption of singularities” (31). Since Nancy’s notion of singularity advocates the shared being of the Self and the Other, the “interruption of singularities” could result in an unresolved sense of self. I believe that this sense of being unresolved should not be viewed as undesirable. Rather, this is a necessary step in order for the Self to actualize her identity by accepting conflict, interruption and dissimilarity. Instead of focusing on the unified collective sense of community, Nancy advocates the notion of unworkings of the being-in-common:
Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their being — their being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional (31).
This sense of unworking motivates the act of interruption for singular beings to pluralize oneself; in order to demarcate my true sense of identity, it is essential that I am fully aware of the disruption within my own hyphenations: Korean-Canadian, Ethnic-non-Ethnic, the East-the West.
In contrast, the perfect hockey rink that the commercial Proud Fathers is presenting as a place of conviviality is nothing but a manufactured image of Canada. The commercial adheres well to Canada’s public image as a multicultural and inclusive society. Its portrayal of a Chinese immigrant family is textbook perfect in terms of representing new immigrants’ struggles to overcome the hardship of adjusting in a new society. Two generations later, these new immigrants are all part of Canadian society, that is as long as they mimic their required (or assumed) Canadian-ness. This “perfect” integration of different ethnic groups is only possible when the minority mimics the majority. However, what the minority is mimicking is based on a fabricated illusion of “Canadian-ness”. In the end, both groups - the Chinese immigrants and the Canadians- have lost their authentic selves because of their effort to display a perfectly harmonious society.
I would like to present two artists who employ the concept of community in a contrasting manner: Rirkrit Tiravanija and Santiago Sierra. Tiravanija became known in art world with his “cooking” work in the 1990s. He transformed gallery spaces into working kitchens where he cooked and served food to the viewer/participants. The work attempted to question the conventions of art history and refuses labeling: “Is this sculpture?”, “Is this installation?”, “Is this performance?” Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term Relational Aesthetics, which puts the emphasis on social interaction rather than the objecthood and commodification of art work, and questions hierarchical relationship between the viewer and the artist/art work. Despite the participatory openness within the work, Claire Bishop challenges the democratic nature of Tiravanija’s work, as “the structure of his work circumscribes the outcome in advance, and relies on its presence within a gallery to differentiate it from entertainment” (69). The community that Tiravanija creates is within the frame of prescribed safety of the gallery setting with the gallery attendees. In contrast, Bishop brings forth Santiago Sierra’s work as an example of relational work that provokes unease and discomfort instead of belonging. In return, she believes that the work truly agitates the conventional sense of community. In Sierra’s work Wall Enclosing a Space (2003) for the Spanish pavilion in the Venice Biennale, he blocked off the entrance to the building, and only allowed viewers with a Spanish passport to enter the pavilion through the back of the building, where two immigration officers were inspecting passports. Upon entering the space, the viewer were confronted by an empty space with nothing but gray paint peeling off the walls and some left-overs from the previous year’s exhibition. Those who are allowed to enter the gallery building must be aware of the selective process that heightens the privileged citizenship which separates them from others who were denied the entry. Bishop articulates, borrowing Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of democracy as antagonism, the contrasting sense of community through this work; while Tiravanija work requires a unified subject in a preset community of conviviality, Sierra’s confrontational rejection of the viewer without a Spanish passport provides “a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other” (79). This view echoes Nancy’s notion of inoperative community, in which the presence of conflict and tension is necessary for a community to build its own identity. The ethnic subject (the Chinese family) in the Tim Hortons commercial has been produced with the final outcome, harmonious multiculturalism, in mind, in which the subject’s active identification that acknowledges constant flux has been ignored.
IV. Epilogue
I am sitting at a pub called Sam Ryan’s in Itaewon in Seoul, waiting for the Olympic gold metal hockey game to start. I can spot a bunch of white boys wearing Canadian hockey jerseys. The atmosphere is a familiar one, a typical Irish pub that you find on College street in Toronto: wooden furnitures, stools by the bar, dart boards in one corner, large TV screens scattered around the pub. This kind of interior is quite different from other Korean establishments. Everyone here speaks English. There is a group of Asian girls at the next table to us who are clearly displaying their “Canadianness”: wearing shirts with Canada on it, holding a pair of mittens with a Canadian maple leaf, talking about their hometown Vancouver, etc. I can hear them dropping a few words in Korean, with a slight accent. Perhaps, they are (ethnic) Koreans but were born in Canada. Why was I eager to come to this pub and watch the game with other Canadians. I don’t even like hockey. This pub reminds me of the hockey rink in the commercial Proud Fathers; regardless of my own lack of interests in participating in this event of national pride, I am part of this national unity. The only difference is that I am in Seoul. Is this essentially what it comes down to, needing to have a site of collegial gathering for ethnic groups to come together? Canadians are an ethnic group here. Olympics, hockey, beer: Is this a sign of globalized capitalism at work? Are we, then, all essentially actors playing our roles in a given setting and situation?
References
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October, Vol. 110 (2004): 51-79
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, trans. By S. Pleasance & F. Woods, les presses du réel, 2002
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002
_______. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, boundary 2, 25:3 (1998): 1-24
Goonewardena, Kanishka & Stefan Kipfer. “Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism, Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 (2005): 670-678
Gunew, Sneja. “Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism: Between Race and Ethnicity”, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 27, The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism (1997): 22-39
Kymlicka, Will. “Multicultural citizenship within multination states”, Ethnicities, 11(3), 2011, 281-302
____________. Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future, Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2012
Lentin, Alana. “Replacing ‘race’, historicizing ‘culture’ in multiculturalism”, Patterns of Prejudice, 39:4 (2005), 379-396
MacGregor, Robert M. “I Am Canadian: National Identity in Beer Commercials”, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2003, 276-286
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, trans. By Peter Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, S. Sawhney, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991
____________. Being Singular Plural, trans. by R. D. Richardson & A. E. O’Byrne, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000
Sakai, Naoki. “‘You Asians:’ On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 99, Number 4 (2000): 789-817
___________. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Szanton, David L. “Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States”, The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. By D. Szanton, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, 1-33
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference”, Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse, Inscriptions 3-4, ed. Deborah Gordon, 1988, np
<http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/v3-4top.html>
Wood, Patricia K. & Liette Gilbert. “Multiculturalism in Canada: Accidental Discourse, Alternative Vision, Urban Practice”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 (2005): 279-291
Woods, Eric Taylor. “Beyond multination federalism: Reflections on nations and nationalism in Canada” Ethnicities, 12 (3), 2012: 270-292