Beyond the Multiculture: Transnational Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
Abstract
In Pico Iyer’s autobiographical travelogue The Global Soul (2000), Toronto functions as a kind of ideal space of globalization, a representation that perpetuates the myth of Toronto as the pioneering bastion of successful multiculturalism. The contradictions and problematic assumptions inherent in Iyer’s “global” Toronto are thrown into sharp relief when set against Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005). Focusing on the character of Quy particularly enables a more complex understanding of Toronto as a globalized urban space. The interpolation of Quy in the narrative constitutes a sustained examination of how multicultural Toronto is implicated in a distinctively unequal form of globalization. Such a reading of Brand’s novel reinforces recent critiques of global, multicultural cities articulated in Doreen Massey’s World City (2007) and Kit Dobson’s Transnational Canadas (2009).Published
2012-06-01
How to Cite
Leow, J. (2012). Beyond the Multiculture: Transnational Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. Studies in Canadian Literature, 37(2). Retrieved from https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/20989
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Permissions requests from authors to reprint their work in books or collections authored or edited by the author are granted gratis, with a requirement that acknowledgement of first publication in Studies in Canadian Literature is included in the publication. Permission requests from external sources are charged a fee at the discretion of Studies in Canadian Literature; 50% of this fee is given to the author.