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THIRD SPACE: AN INTERCULTURAL NEGOTIATION OF SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA —t1o> ÁNUSHRAY SINGH" ABSTRACT Intercultural encounters are processes rooted in “ambivalence,” — crosscommunication 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). + 141 +
