Franca Iacovetta. <i>Before Official Multiculturalism: Women’s Pluralism in Toronto, 1950s–1970s</i>.

In 1971, Canada adopted a multiculturalism policy to acknowledge cultural diversity within a bilingual system. In contrast to the melting-pot ideology of the United States, its liberal pluralism promoted ethnic distinctions to strengthen national citizenship through the image of the immigrant mosaic. Unlike contemporary Western Europe, Canadian multiculturalism served less as a form of containment and surveillance than assimilation through recognition. In this theoretically sophisticated and densely packed account, feminist scholar Franca Iacovetta offers a more expansive chronology by returning to the post–World War II years, when Western and Eastern European refugees entered in growing numbers and Cold War anti-Communism shaped their reception. Her case study of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto (1952–1972) highlights the power of its women staff and volunteers in forging multiculturalism as an idea and an experience before it became official policy. Against a scholarship that slams such institutions as either agents of social control and the commodification of culture or as humanitarian alternatives to exclusion and coercive assimilation, Iacovetta complicates the institute project. She does so without condemning the efforts of those who sought to improve the lives of Poles, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, and others who settled in Toronto, the city that became Canada’s financial and multiethnic capital. She makes no excuses for the institute’s lacunae; she is quick to contextualize its European focus in light of an erasure of Indigenous peoples, neglect of Asian and Caribbean immigrants, and tensions over Quebecois. It is possible, she admits, that persistent lack of funding and then the demise of the institute, many of whose activities government agencies took over by the 1970s, accounts for its inability to serve later racialized immigrants. Nonetheless, she judges as “naïve, [its] ‘handicrafts and human rights,’ or’ multicultural spectacle as democratic internationalism’ approach to anti-racist work” (288).

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