Interdisciplinary book probes multicultural narratives in Canada
As part of Musagetes’ and the Guelph Black Heritage Society’s ongoing People of Good Will project, Saturday, Jan. 24 saw Publication Studio’s launch of Model Minority – a book compiled of newspapers, essays, photographs, and other ephemeral and archival materials from Toronto’s Gendai Gallery.
The gallery’s project, also titled Model Minority, is an intermedia approach to thinking about how Canadian multiculturalism operates in the contexts of urban spaces, settler-colonist discourse, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the pervasive idea of the “model minority” – an idea predicated on racist exceptionalism and, according to the program, “a problematic concept that intersects deep within the ambiguity of the existing condition of multiculturalism in Canada.” The book was edited by Chris Lee and Maiko Tanaka, and features contributions from filmmakers Angad Bhalla and Min Sook Lee, artists Alvis Choi, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, and many more thinkers and artists.
As an exhaustive compilation of archival data, critical research and multidisciplinary practices, a salient aspect of the book, the project, and its creative process is discovering these kinds of “hidden histories” that are absent – sometimes purposefully – from contemporary dialogues on multiculturalism. One such hidden history comes in the form of Richard Aoki, a member of the Oakland Black Panther party – one of the people who first armed Huey Newton, Jr. and Bobby Seale’s revolutionary efforts, and was revealed to have been an FBI informant since the Panthers’ inception.
Another history revealed in this publication is a tradition of Chinese-Indigenous solidarities during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in which tens of thousands of Chinese workers died in its building.
“What you are about to read are vignettes of another world that are difficult to fact-check,” writes Tings Chak, a scholar, architect, and designer based in Toronto. In her text “Remembering Absent Histories of Chinese-Indigenous Solidarity,” Chak points to oral and written stories of Indigenous people aiding Chinese workers during the railroad’s building.
“The railroad” is a key theme in this publication and the discourse it aims to establish – the British Methodist Church – now Heritage Hall – is part of a history of helping escaped slaves resist captors and survive their journeys to Canada – a history that the People of Good Will project successfully attempts to relive and breathe life to. The publication of this exhaustive, important book signals a vital re-purposing of histories and cultural narratives in the context of settler-colonist discourse in Canada and the United States, and probes the problematic thinking of Canada as a passively multicultural society with a sharp critical eye and an intense empathy for these historical and current problems.