GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University
Winter Term 2011-2012
Week 6
The Myth of the Multicultural City Part II:
The Place of Our Meeting with the Other
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
1
The Trouble with Tolerance
• In Imagining Toronto, I argue that Toronto is a new kind of
city, a city where identity emerges not from shared
tradition or even a common cultural language but rather is
forged out of a commitment to the virtues of diversity,
tolerance and cultural understanding.
• But how is it possible to reconcile notions of tolerance with
persistent racism and xenophobia?
• In philosophy, tolerance (or toleration) is a negative virtue:
A person (or entity) who ‘tolerates’ something or someone
may disapprove of certain beliefs or actions but will put up
with them conditionally. In this sense, tolerance is akin to
forbearance, a willingness to ‘endure’ something or
someone. A putting up with.
• Tolerance involves an intrinsic power dynamic: the power
to attack or destroy something but to refrain from doing so.
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
2
Criticisms of Tolerance
• Although tolerance has a long and fascinating
philosophical history, contemporary critics (e.g., Herbert
Marcuse, Iris Marion Young) associate it with twentieth
century Western liberalism and claim it is ideologically
convenient.
• In “Tolerance as an Ideological Category” (Critical Inquiry,
34: 660-682), cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek argues that
“Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between
cultures while making it clear that true tolerance is fully
possible only in individualist Western culture.”
• In Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada
(1994) Neil Bissoondath writes that “Canada has long
prided itself on being a tolerant society, but tolerance is
clearly insufficient in the building of a cohesive society. A
far greater goal to strive for would be an accepting
society.”
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
3
• Where Bissoondath rejects tolerance for being too narrow,
in “Boutique Multiculturalism” Stanley Fish attacks
tolerance for being too broad:
“the trouble with stipulating tolerance as your first
principle is that you cannot possibly be faithful to it
because sooner or later the culture whose core values
you are tolerating will reveal itself to be intolerant at
that same core; that is, the distinctiveness that marks it
as unique and self-defining will resist the appeal of
moderation or incorporation into a larger whole.
Confronted with a demand that it surrender its
viewpoint or enlarge it to include the practices of its
natural enemies—other religions, other races, other
genders, other classes—a beleaguered culture will fight
back with everything from discriminatory legislation to
violence.”
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
4
• Bissoondath and Fish exemplify the classic dilemma of
tolerance: that ‘mere’ tolerance begrudges difference
while unconditional tolerance courts absurdity when it
encounters intolerance.
• Other critics, among them feminist, post-colonial and
Marxist scholars, challenge conceptions of tolerance on
the grounds that they privilege those who do the tolerating
(white, Male, Western Selves) over those who are only ever
provisionally tolerated (minority, women, immigrant
Others).
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
5
Reclaiming Tolerance
• Categories of privilege (race, class, gender) are neither
absolute nor stable.
• Existential threats (or perceived threats) flow in multiple
directions; e.g., the alleged ‘clash of cultures’ between
Islam and the West.
• Tolerance acknowledges that conflicts exist.
• Oppressor-victim narratives are subject to criticism (see
Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern speak.”)
• Rather than setting an impossibly high standard for cultural
acceptance, tolerance establishes the minimum
conditions for civility.
• The limits of tolerance (e.g., hate speech)
• Rather than being seen as a negative virtue, tolerance is a
remarkably elastic concept, one that is also already
understood and practiced in positive ways.
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
6
Why be Tolerant?
• An admission, first, that differences exist and that they are
not neutral.
• Regard for the autonomy of others
• A desire for peace (agreeing to disagree?)
• Empathy, generosity
• A wish for (or a fear of) reciprocity
• The possibility that one’s judgement might be wrong or
incomplete
• As a minimum standard of civility in an era in which
clashes of culture are invoked as root causes of conflict,
does it make room for more? Recognition? Acceptance?
Celebration?
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
7
“Inspired Adhoccery?”
• Fish argues that “multiculturalism will not be one thing, but
many things.”
• “We may not be able to reconcile the claims of difference
and community in a satisfactory formula, but we may be
able to figure out a way for these differences to occupy
the civic and political space of this community without
coming to blows.”
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
8
Tolerance in Toronto
• Tolerance acknowledges the tensions that exist among
cultural communities.
• This is particularly urgent in a city like Toronto where
contemporary immigration has made unlikely neighbours
of Croations, Serbs, Tamils, Sinhalese, Tutsis, Hutus, Sikhs,
Hindus, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Macedonians, Muslims,
Jews and manifold other diasporas.
• Tolerance is committed precisely to the kinds of
negotiations across culture that recue multiculturalism from
empty utopianism.
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
9
“The city is the place of our meeting with the other. … The city
is the privileged site where the other is and where we
ourselves are other, as the place where we play the other.
“
(Roland Barthes, 1986. Semiology and the Urban. In The City and the
Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, ed. Marc Gottdeiner
and Alexandros Lagopolous, 87-98. New York: Columbia
University Press.)
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
10
“The place of our meeting with the Other.”
•
•
•
Cultural theorist Roland Barthes describes the city as “the place of our
meeting with the other.” He portrays the city as “the privileged place
where the other is and where we ourselves are other, as the place where
we play the other.” (1986. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Gottdiener,
Mark and Alexandros Lagopoulos, The Citry and the Sign: An Introduction
to Urban Semiotics. New York: Colombia University Press. 96)
Barthes’ analysis gives rise to two obligations as we encounter others in
the multicultural city. The first is that our “meetings with the other” must
begin with a principled openness to cultural difference. The second is
that we learn to stop thinking of “the other” as foreign, alien, exotic or
otherwise detached from ourselves.
Both obligations are grounded in an awareness of the multicultural city as
a moral space, a terrain whose signposts are intersubjective as much as
they are spatial. Indeed, geographer Richard Howitt relies on philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas’ analysis of alterity and difference to argue that
contemporary cities are distinguished by “the need to both recognise
and traverse the distance between the self and the other, the need to
recognize that this is a separation that cannot be ignored, and that it is a
separation that must be transcended.” (Richard Howitt, 2002. Scale and
the other: Levinas and geography. Geoforum, vol. 33: 309.)
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
11
Four Conversations Across Culture
1. Writers who respond actively to intolerance (Austin
Clarke, Krisantha Bhaggiyadatta)
2. Restorative conversations, oriented toward reclaiming
identity from the obliterating effects of racial prejudice,
economic exclusion, cultural erasure and ethnic
spectacle (e.g., Toronto’s Aboriginal writers)
3. Writers inscribing their cultural narratives upon the city’s
landscape for the first time (e.g., Diaspora Dialogues;
Farzana Doctor’s novel Stealing Nasreen).
4. Communicating across difference (Dionne Brand’s novel
What We All Long For: Tuyen’s lubaio)
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
12
“Refugees. I wondered how many people wandering around
here were refugees. Was there some way to detect them?
Something in their clothes or gestures? What about the
Ethiopian man sitting by himself? He was too well dressed
and had an expensive briefcase besides. The woman from
India with a dot on her forehead? She looked too fat and
happy. The pink stooped man wearing an old coat and
hat? He might be too old. I changed benches and focused
on another group. The seminar woman said they lived like
ghosts and I imagined them, just like the Flash, vibrating at
a special frequency that made them mostly invisible. Then
anotehr thought hit me. Was it possible that among this
crowd there might be someone who could tell, and who
might be gazing at me this very minute?”
[Rabindranath Maharaj, The Amazing Absorbing Boy. Knopf, 2010.]
Week 6
9 February 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
13
Week 6
8 February 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
14