Oldal 143 [143]
THIRD SPACE: AN INTERCULTURAL NEGOTIATION
OF SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA
—t1o>
ÁNUSHRAY SINGH"
ABSTRACT
Intercultural encounters are processes rooted in “ambivalence,” — cross¬
communication between/amongst cultures/people with dissimilarities in
languages, religions, and social structures. In the Canadian multicultural
“mosaic,” encounters between its native/mainstream culture and the ones
of its immigrants paradoxically create intercultural belongings as well as
conflicts. The paper studies these encounters through South Asian diaspora, the
biggest “visible minority” group in Canada. The artistic, cultural, linguistic,
political, religious, social performance of its members is a process rooted in
categories of spaces — observed and modelled over post-colonial cosmopolitan
and national identities of the South Asian diaspora: 1. First Space: co-ethnic
migrant networks facilitating South Asian minority discourses through
interpersonal transnational social capital; 2. Second Space: outside the latter
space, governed by discourses of mainstream Canadian culture; 3. Third
Space: temporal, created, facilitated and inhabited by actors relating to
discourses of both (1) and (2). I posit occupation and facilitation of the last
one, as an effective mode of intercultural communication, creativity and
practices relating to race, gender, colour, class, sexuality, religious and social
performativity: an expression of South Asia and Canada; minorities and its
host society; an ambiguous suggestive for a robust “multicultural” Canadian
mass-media culture facilitating the hybridization of mainstream/minority
cultures to produce hyphenated cross-cultural identities and “third cultures.”
THE CANADIAN MOSAIC
Minorities are constantly involved in a state of becoming, rooted in
alienation, cosmopolitanism, displacement, exile, globalization, nostalgia,
transnationalism and hybridity.” Canada is one of the world’s major
! University of Windsor.
? Maria Magdalena, The Third Space: Cultural Identity Today, Amherst College, https://www.
amherst.edu/museums/mead/exhibitions/2008/thirdspace (accessed 10 April 2020).
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