“Multiculturalism” As Conceptualized in Canada and the United States
Contrasting Images: “Multiculturalism” as conceptualized in Canada and the United States Garth Stevenson Brock University Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, June 3, 2010. The assistance of SSHRC, standard research grant 410-2007-0379, in the preparation of this paper is gratefully acknowledged. 1 The word ―multiculturalism‖, now almost half a century old, continues to provoke discussion and controversy not only in North America, where it originated, but throughout the western world. Even had the word never been invented, the question of how rich western nation-states and their citizens should respond to the increasing cultural and ethnic diversity caused by immigration would provoke controversy by virtue of its intrinsic importance. Yet words and the meanings, favourable or unfavourable, that are attached to them may contribute to the structure, content and outcome of discourse. The meanings of words may change over time or may vary from place to place. Words may contribute to understanding or may, if their meanings are contested or ambiguous, be an obstacle to understanding. The word ―multiculturalism‖ is nowhere more prominent than in Canada, where it appears in the titles of federal and provincial statutes, and where its derivative, ―multicultural heritage‖, is even referred to, since 1982, in the constitution. Despite its sometimes contested status as a national symbol, the Canadian pedigree of the M-word is not entirely clear. Although the word ―multi-cultural‖ (with a hyphen) appeared on the agenda of a convention of the Canadian Ethnic Press Association in March 1962, the word ―multiculturalism‖ itself may have been invented by an American-born sociologist, Charles Hobart, who apparently used it in a speech the following year, not long after he was hired by the University of Alberta.
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