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THIRD SPACE: AN INTERCULTURAL NEGOTIATION OF SOUTH ÁSIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA membership and collective identity.?? The “third culture”, which is formed at intersections, can seep into mainstream consciousness and evoke questions crucial to understand the Canadian mosaic: What does it mean to be a Canadian? What does it mean to be bilingual or multilingual? What does it mean to be multigenerational, multi-ethnical and multicultural? The exploration of the cultural production of diasporic cinema, media and other artistic expression is often the construction of postcolonial cultural hybridity and Third Space. Cultural productions of the diasporic are often seen through a “narrative pattern,” which Bhabha envisages as “part of a process of choice and judgment." And that sense of choice and judgment is lost very often with generalized terms like cosmopolitan, planetary or nomadism."! Authenticity for minority representation in Western massmedia culture is especially perpetuated by the American negation of cultural knowledge produced in Ihird Space. Ihe intercultural communication between ethnic minorities and majoritarian Western cultures as discussed above is a process rooted in “ambiguity” and “ambivalence.” In his theory of Orientalism, Edward Said saw “ambivalence” relating to a colonial framework that has historically perceived non-Western cultures through “exoticism.” The making of “Others” — people hailing from the Eastern world of Asia, North Africa and the Middle East — as inferior to rational and patriarchal Western societies. When applied by post-colonial cultural studies in studying contemporary Western societies, this framework helps us understand popular culture and mediascape that often perpetuat “Eurocentric” ideals. In the South Asian postcolonial context, it’s the basis of socio-economic and intellectual classes, for example, one’s adoption and usage of English over native South Asian tongue is often encouraged. Or, it’s the favouring of light and fair skin over a dark/dusky complexion. Mimicking Anglophone culture and physical beauty standards is deeply woven in the fabric of modern South Asian postcolonial societies and is fervently displayed in mass-media culture in films, TV shows, and advertisements. I see personal poetics as a profound decolonization philosophy of South Asian belonging in cosmopolitans of South Asia as well as the Anglophone West. 2 Irving, Mass Media, 223. 30 Homi K. Bhabha, Diaspora and Home: An Interview with Homi K. Bhabha, Interview by Klaus Stierstorfer, Degruyter.com, 7 December 2017. 31 Bhabha, Diaspora and Home, 2017.
