DISFIGURING CANADA: Laying siege to its single story
“Occupying the role of narrator, whiteness seeks to sets the stage of social meaning, deciding which characters to introduce and how. With unequivocal authority, it has shaped dominant narratives on residential schools, on the Komagata Maru incident, on Japanese internment camps and more recently, on boat arrivals of migrants from Vietnam, China, and Sri Lanka. Premised on a logic that renders whiteness natural and invisible, indigenous people as extinguished or extinguishable, and [im]migrants as dangerous and deportable, it’s the simplicity of this story and the consistency with which it’s told that make it so effective. “
