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THIRD SPACE: AN INTERCULTURAL NEGOTIATION OF SOUTH ÁSIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA diasporic filmmakers and artists to challenge the culture that creates a public perception that views South Asia through what I see as "inauthentic modes/ channels" of information: the lack of representation or if-then conjecture through stereotypes and an outlook that finds historical roots in the colonial perception of non-Western cultures. In my earlier work," I observed this outlook reminiscent of American films where South Asian identities have been infamously explored through few general tropes. Such tropes are based on the exotic nature of South Asia depicted by the Bollywood song and dance routine and the third world poverty. Other stereotypes are the relegation to few handful career options for South Asians (engineers, doctors, cabbies and store clerk.) The problem with such tropes is that they explore South Asian identity only through the one-dimensionality of postcolonial “others,” creating non-Western “oriental” identities. Such identity constructions in popular culture contradict lived experiences of the South Asian diaspora. CANADIAN Mass-MEDIA In the separation of First and Second Space, often known as “home” and “away” to minorities, from the mainstream Canadian perspective, First Space includes marginal ethnic areas and its inhabitants, a part of the landscape that doesn’t have the agency to be subsumed in Canadian cultural narratives. The Canadian mainstream culture facilitated in the Second Space is about finding identity in its exports to the collective global culture, or involved in cultural imports from America, to be part of a mainstream North American culture. Mass media in Canadian society resonates with a lack of collective identity: a reference to the cultural dualism in which only some of the population responds to English mass-media, while a significant portion remains uninfluenced by it. The process of creation of the Canadian community and its inability to form a distinct mass-media culture resonating with its multicultural ethos can be seen to be due to its proximity to the United States, and thus influenced by its economic and cultural imperialism.” Multicultural media, often ethnic or third media are seen as pivotal strands in the Canadian mediascape for the dissemination of media to populace either in English or French. Languages associate with diasporic cultures and the 2 Anushray Singh, “South Asian and The West: Identity, Multidimensionality and Public Gaze”, in Intersections Cros-Sections 2019, 48-55, Toronto, Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture at York University and Ryerson University, https://iscsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ISCS_2019ConferenceProceedings.pdf (accessed 20 March 2020). Jean Francois Staszak, Other/Otherness, International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, 2008, 1-3. 22 John A. Irving, Mass Media in Canada, The Ryerson, 1969, 225. + 149 +
