How Canadians celebrate their identity — it’s all in the hyphen

On hyphenated identity (or, to use Lawrence Hill’s words, “who among us is not mixed up”):

John Diefenbaker, perhaps the first Canadian public figure to talk extensively about punctuation, was also passionately opposed to hyphenation.

He saw it not as a sign of disloyalty, like Wilson did, but as a manifestation of prejudice: memories of anti-German taunts during and shortly after the First World War launched the Tory prime minister on what he later called a “lifelong attack on hyphenated Canadianism.”

Diefenbaker thought two-part labels were a way of diminishing a group’s membership in the national community. To be “Ukrainian-Canadian” suggested you were less than a full citizen, in his view.

Not everyone shared this interpretation. As Peter C. Newman wrote in The Distemper of Our Times, his political history of Canada in the mid-’60s, many French-Canadians were happy with their hyphens. They saw Diefenbaker’s “One Canada” crusade as a veiled call for assimilation.

As the decade wore on, this celebration of difference spread. Hyphenation, with its way of patching together disparate things, increasingly came to be seen as an orthographic representation of the multicultural Canadian mosaic.

But the hyphen’s hold has been slippery. In the past 15 years, some academics have taken up a renewed critique of the symbol — they call it reductive, even alienating. Minelle Mahtani, a professor of human geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough, says that many of the mixed-race women she spoke to for a 2002 paper rejected hybrid identifiers like “Somali-Canadian.”

“These hyphens of multiculturalism, in effect, operate to produce spaces of distance, in which ethnicity is positioned outside Canadianness,” Mahtani wrote.

Still, for many, the hyphen remains a vital and flexible tool for representing themselves to the world.

In a recent essay for the website The Archipelago, the self-described “first-generation Canadian-Indian-Italian-American” journalist Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite called herself “a walking hyphen.”

There is a growing crop of Canadians punctuating their identities in novel, personal ways. By 2021, at the current rate of growth, a majority of the country’s population will shade in more than one box when they’re asked about ethnicity, according to a report by the Association for Canadian Studies.

Canada’s future is likely to be hyphenated. That means more bridges, more boundary posts, more magic carpets. For better or worse, it means more knots.

via How Canadians celebrate their identity — it’s all in the hyphen | Toronto Star.