Talking Over Each Other: Diasporic Punjabi Artists and the Ideologies of Public Arts in Multicultural Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public arts in Canada are conceptualized as a reflection of the multicultural character of the country and the diversity of ethnocultural identities it hosts. Within the framework of multiculturalism, however, the Canadian state only recognizes two, sometimes three, official cultures: Anglophone, Francophone, and Indigenous. South Asians represent over 26% of the visible minority in Canada. Among South Asians in Canadian, Punjabis are the leading ethno-linguistic group, yet their place in Canadian culture, history, and heritage remains the subject of debate across the country, its provinces, and its urban centers. This dissertation examines historical, political, and social factors that generate power imbalances between Canadian public arts institutions pursuing diversity-based programming and diasporic Punjabi artists and musicians who face tokenism, essentialism, and censure as they find space within public arts. The goal of this project is to contribute to, through breakdown and analysis of the Canadian public art world, understandings of how visual art and musical expressions by racialized and diasporic artists are converted by the state and its public arts system into symbols of flattened ethnic identity and of multicultural diversity. Drawing from Arjun Appadurai’s theory of -scapes (1996), Sara Ahmed’s interrogation of institutionalized diversity (2012), Deborah Root’s (1996) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972) explorations of deterritorialization, and Howard Becker’s notion of art worlds (1982), I propose a structure of public arts -scapes that breaks Canadian public arts into five dynamic and multiscalar fields of activity: of policy, funding, curation, exhibition, and composition. I argue that Canadian public arts, as an economic and cultural sector, is built on a complex web of tactical negotiations and power struggles among and between agents and stakeholders of these five -scapes. Agents in each -scape use their involvement in public arts as performative proof of their societal aims, even if these outcomes contradict and/or hinder the production of artists’ works and the aims outlined in other -scapes. The introductory chapter of this project offers a historical, contextual, and theoretical review of multiculturalism and musicological writings on hybridity before introducing my theory of -scapes. Chapter two provides histories of Canadian immigration policy, of the national image and the development of multiculturalism, of the development of the Canadian public arts system, and of Punjabi migration to Canada alongside these developments. Chapter three examines two case studies of COVID-19 era top-down public arts projects in Toronto and Vancouver: (1) an all-Sikh public exhibition, titled chashm-e-bulbul (Eye of the Nightingale), in Toronto’s Bayview Village, held in fall of 2021 as part of the city’s Year of Public Art, and (2) digital programming commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vancouver’s Punjabi Market. Chapter four examines two grant-funded world music albums released by diasporic South Asian artists in Vancouver: sitarist and composer Mohamed Assani’s Wayfinder (2020) and rapper and emcee Ruby Singh’s Jhalaak (2020), a hip-hop collaboration with 19th generation qawwali/folk musicians from Rajasthan, India. Chapter five introduces models of exclusion and backdoor acceptance into Canadian arts through the example of Punjabi gangster music, a violent subgenre of Punjabi popular music. Using the music of late rapper Sidhu Moose Wala and lyricist and singer Chani Nattan, I show how the genre is portrayed by the Canadian government and media apparatus as a sign of a delinquent ethnic subject that must be disciplined to fit into society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".