Abstract
This thesis has attempted to reimagine multiculturalism by investigating how the recent fiction of Dionne Brand represents the culturally dynamic process of multiculturalism. It has investigated the significant vibration of cultural differences represented in Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005). In this novel, Brand presents the overlapping stories of second-generation youths who are living in the downtown Toronto and searching for their longing in this cosmopolitan city. The story circles around four characters with different races, cultures, and class backgrounds, with a particular focus on Tuyen, who is a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who have never recovered from losing one of their children in the crush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. As a counterpoint to the stories of these four characters, Brand adopts a first-person perspective to tell the story of the fifth main character, Quy, who survives in various refugee camps and also in Thailand underworld. With the narrative shifts between Canada and the refugee camps back in Thailand, Brand represents a diasporic world that is parallel with the contemporary longings of the novel’s characters in Toronto. In what ways can characters with different cultures respond to their roles as representative multicultural others?????—and how could they assert themselves in this city? The critical project of rethinking the influence or impact of multiculturalism upon people with different diasporic experiences or genders is central to rediscover the very formation of multicultural nationhood in Canada, and contributing to this critical project is one of the main objectives of this thesis.There will be four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One will investigate the notion of “multiculturalism,” which includes not only an official dominant strategy in attempting to recognize and manage cultural difference within the nation but also more complicated debates provoked by the term “multiculturalism” and arguments brought up among writers and critics in this field. Here, more advanced issues pertaining to the term “multiculturalism” will be included: the problematical heterogeneity of diasporic issues as they intersect with multiple considerations of cultures and nations. In this respect, the introductory chapter will discuss Brand’s significant contribution to diasporic discourse in relation to the contours of multicultural development in Canada. Chapter Two will investigate Brand’s black writing with a focus on specific debates involving critics such as Rinaldo Walcott and George Elliott Clarke. In the context of multiculturalism, how and in what ways can Brand’s black writing articulate what Walcott calls “an attempt to provide some grammars for thinking blackness in Canada” (“Introduction” 13)? Chapter Three will investigate Brand’s representation of Vietnamese diasporic time and space, including life in multicultural Canada as well as Quy’s refugee life in Thailand’s underworld. This chapter will ask: how would the collision of different diasporic times and spaces represented in the novel help us to address what Brand, following Wilson Harris, calls the “layers and layers of experiences” (“Imagination” 144) as different diasporic subjects meet and interact in a “multicultural” space? Chapter Four will conclude this thesis and speculate upon how representations of diasporic agency would be able to relate to the project of creating a more realistic and life-respecting expression of existence in the context of dominant multiculturalism. This thesis attempts to open further thinking about Brand’s writing to understand the on-going struggles over—and transformations of—cultural debates concerning multiculturalism in Canada.