Transnational Cultural Capital: Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women’s Performance of Multiculturalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the politics of officially-sanctioned Canadian multiculturalism via an exploration of the experiences of Caribbean-Canadian women. Using a combination of performance theory, postcolonial and feminist theories, and the notion of hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida, the dissertation argues that, while ostensibly benevolent, state-sanctioned multiculturalism places onerous demands on racialized groups to perform their otherness. This, I argue, is the “price of entry” for multiculturalism’s conditional hospitality. I suggest that this price serves to radically limit the agency of the performer by simultaneously celebrating otherness (through exoticizing displays that render it as a spectacle to be alternately desired and feared) and containing it, limiting the capacity of those whose difference is celebrated to be viewed through any other paradigm than that of their spectacular difference. In making this argument I explore numerous specific sites of multicultural performance in which Caribbean-Canadian women participate: the literary-critical industry (exemplified by the celebratory treatment of the authors Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip and Claire Harris); Toronto’s Caribana festival (which I examine primarily in the context of visual representation and the development of a mode of gaze I term “tourism at home”); dub poetry (with particular reference to a matrilineal tradition that develops within Canadian dub poetry and renders it distinct from the performance of dub in other locations); the feminist monodrama (Trey Anthony’s ’Da Kink in My Hair and its TV adaptation); and finally, activism in response to emergent events. Intertwined in all these explorations are questions of space (I begin by exploring the extent to which “my” Canada is refracted through my experiences of my home city of Toronto), of black female bodies, and of agency. This final question becomes particularly salient as my project works towards a conclusion and asks what space is available to the performers of multiculturalism to resist or reappropriate the demand that they perform their non-Canadianness in order to be granted their Canadianness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.053 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".