Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence

Photo of Yasmin Jiwani

Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence

Interview by Gloria Filax

Dr. Yasmin Jiwani is an Associate Professor in the Communications Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. Dr. Jiwani holds a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia, a MA in Sociology from Simon Fraser University, and a PhD in Communications from Simon Fraser University. Dr. Jiwani’s research interests focus on the intersecting influences of race and gender within the context of media representations and violence against women. Prior work experience includes the National Film Board of Canada and seven years as the principle researcher for The FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children, a Vancouver based institute. Dr. Jiwani is an active member of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality (R.A.C.E.).

Photo: Courtesy Concordia University

When I spoke with Dr. Jiwani, she was busy organizing the 9th Annual R.A.C.E. conference Compassion, Complicity & Conciliation: The Politics, Cultures and Economies of “Doing Good”¹ at Concordia University June 5-7, 2009. The keynote speakers were Steven Salaita and Andrea Smith and the opening plenary is titled “Compassion, Complicity & Conciliation: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission”.

book cover Aurora: Good morning Yasmin. I want to thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to talk to me about your book Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender and Violence. Your book is important in nuancing both the denial of the deeply racist structuring of Canadian society and especially how this impacts girls and women of colour in immediate and crucial ways and how racism works through denial. I recently heard you speak at the CAUT Recasting Equity conference and your eloquence and logic demonstrate a superb analysis of racism and how it works in Canada.

Jiwani: Thank you for your kind remarks.

Aurora: Before we get into discussion regarding your book would you be willing to share some of your previous work and your intellectual background?

Jiwani: For sure. I had moved to Montreal a year before I began writing Discourses of Denial. For the seven years prior to that, I was principle coordinator and researcher for the FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children. This is a centre in B.C. that is feminist, does research and education development, and is an action² network. FREDA is one of five centres that had been set up with funding from Health Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to look at issues of violence against women. These centres were actually set up as one of the fulfillments of a recommendation by the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women that had looked at violence against women and children, particularly violence against women. The Panel had come up with their report, dubbed in the feminist community as a $10,000,000 panel on violence against women and essentially advised what we in the activist community already knew. The Panel’s findings were that more research needed to be done and that this research should be done in collaboration with community groups.

I worked at FREDA for seven years and my interest in the work that I did at FREDA was pretty much influenced by issues around anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and those kinds of perspectives. Before that, I worked at the National Film Board (NFB) promoting films by women and about women. I had done things like going into different areas of the province of BC and the Yukon organizing community screenings and making the work of women or about women more accessible. I had a sense of community activism in BC and the Yukon because of this work. Before that, I was also very much involved in the anti-racism movement, particularly around issues of race and representation. It was my activist work that kept me very sane in an insane world. At the time I was doing my dissertation at Simon Fraser University looking at issues of race and representation in Canadian television news. The environment at Simon Fraser University at the time was dominantly white, particularly in the social sciences and not so much in the hard sciences, that there were very few people of colour. Whatever students of colour there were often international students.

book cover In terms of this diasporic (http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/title/) framework for Canadian women of color in a department that was often all white, there was nothing to link up to my or our experience. There were no faculty around that could even speak to my experience and knowledge. It was in this sense that the world of activism kept me sane in an insane world.

Aurora: I really found your book intellectually challenging yet convincing. You have positioned your experiences at the NFB, Simon Fraser University, and FREDA as ways in which you personally and immediately experienced the effects of deeply racist structures. Tell me more about this.

Jiwani: I remember having questions, which are still being asked—like “prove that racism exists.” If you are a lone body and a marginalized, racialized body, both in terms of gender and race, then you are in that peculiar position of being the ambassador, so to speak, but also sort of having to have a conviction about your own reality that is very hard to maintain in the face of so much denial. I think Discourses of Denial was actually born out of the amount of denial that I faced in virtually everything, every aspect of the work that I was doing. It was a denial of my intelligence. It was a denial of my capability. It was a denial of the truth that I was speaking to. It was a denial across the board of me, what I knew, and what I experienced and that is where community became really important to me. My activist community provided me with the benchmark of validation and affirmation so that I knew I was not really insane or alone.

Aurora: ... you did not receive validation or affirmation from your colleagues at the university?

Jiwani: No. And that is how so much of my intellectual work became tracing the kind of racist discourses that were present in “the news.” I was doing television news and there was little written on racism and Canadian news reporting at the time. Tracking the news stories involved sitting there analyzing what came after what, how the issues were framed. It became really clear to me that there was this incredible discourse of denial which is textured around cliches like “color blindness”. Discourses of denial use clich’s or in literary terms, tropes, like “blame the victim” (Jiwani, p. 59). Another trope is “if you don't measure up, it's your fault.” Denial uses all of these things. Denial even uses a trope of ignorance, saying that with the right amount of education, you can change and become successful like white people. It was very revealing for me to go through this process and see that no matter how much one attempts to educate people about how racism is structured through the news, language, our everyday existence, denial of racism is what happens. Denial is not the only thing and much racism rests on the structural underpinnings of racism. Education simply becomes the grease of racist workings and sometimes education legitimizes racism. Education is just one of those things, that sort of ideological superstructure if you will, that is used to perpetuate a given set of relations of power.

Aurora: How do equity, equity policy, and institutional equity practice, educational measures to counter racism, become a way of denying and managing racism and non-white people? How does equity become an anti-phrase or part of the ideological apparatus, referenced above as superstructure, covering all kinds of things that are not to be talked about, countenanced, built into recommendations?

Jiwani: Well it is very much about denial, not talking about what is happening. I think part of the issues around equity and equality is the obfuscation. It is the notion that equity means equality and vice versa. That, to me, is the most revealing thing. Yet you cannot have equality without equity. You need resource distribution. You need access and those structural aspects—money, time, support and other resources—have to be there in order to have equality. That was my disappointment with CAUT. The commitment to allocating resources was not there at CAUT's Recasting Equity or in the ensuing recommendations.

Aurora: I have another question arising from what you just described as your intellectual background and your community roots. Has the whiteness of the institutions changed any? Have you observed any change even small change? Or is the hierarchy the same old, same old?

Jiwani: No, it has not changed. The thing is, that when institutions hire or promote people of colour into those positions, often times they are put in a position of having to walk a line. It is the same kind of thing as contingent citizenship. Both share an experience and sense of contingent belonging. The unspoken rule is that “we will only accept you if you play our game.” Thus people in these contingent positions often have to engage in subversive activities in order to be able to maintain their connection and to walk their truth, so to speak. This is one of the things I learned from working in the feminist movement and that is that the feminist movement would not have been able to accomplish as much as it did, even if so much has been undone, without feminists in the bureaucracy. These feminists in the bureaucracy, some authors have called these feminists femocrats, actually had a role to play even as they were “contingent citizens” of the institution they worked within. It was through their institutional role that they were able to push a certain kind of agenda albeit within the latitude and limits that were imposed on them as contingent workers.

Aurora: Both insiders and outsiders have the same interests in social change but have different strategies towards accomplishing change. And often times it is very difficult for outsiders to the institution to see the work that insiders have accomplished.

Jiwani: Yes, in maintaining the institution and one’s position within real difficulties arise because in the face of everything, one of the things that takes place is a divide between community activist and community bureaucrat. And often this becomes a way in which the institution or the State engages in divide and rule, divide and conquer. In pitching groups against each other, they are very likely not going to work with each other because they have this suspicion about each other's vested interests. In looking at the feminist movement, particularly in the anti-violence sector, one of the things interesting to me was to look at feminists in the Department of Justice. We as feminists in the community would make certain recommendations which would then be taken up by the feminists inside the bureaucracy. These women in the Department of Justice were feminists and not just false or career feminists. In fact they would take our recommendations further. They would actually become the advocates inside. And when I think about the law and I think about all of the different legislative mechanisms that were pushed ahead, I cannot see any of those changes happening without the feminists inside the Department of Justice and the work they accomplished on the inside.

Aurora: Both insiders and outsiders to institutions are necessary actors for effective social change.

Jiwani: Yes, both are necessary. Too often, what happens is that the inside people are condemned, academics are condemned and there is a reification about community and grassroots as where the real work of change happens. This becomes a very dangerous kind of game. I am not saying that there are no bureaucratic or career feminists who do pay lip service. I am not saying that there are no academics who steal community work, but if one were to position the end goal in terms of social justice and equality, then I would say that implementing social justice and equality should be the marker of success. This should be the defining aspect even though there are bodies sacrificed along the way. And I cannot think of a single social movement where people have not sacrificed themselves. I am not saying this is the way to go—to ignore those who take advantage, but if you are faced with an oppressive system, what choices are there at times except to sacrifice for the greater good?

Aurora: And sacrificing for the greater good makes for difficult choices yet if you deny or repress what you know this is kind of a death sentence. Repressing what you know about oppression for a career or because the sacrifice is too great is a dead end. Because you are giving up yourself and you're giving up people like yourself when you give up on a social movement for change and the role you can play in change even though is hard work that seems to have no end.

Jiwani: That's right. For me, it is refusing to deny my own experience and reality. And the work at FREDA was really that kind of trying to build a bridge between community and academia in a way that would secure the interests of community so that individual women and groups of women would not feel like they were intellectual property having their lived experiences stolen to make someone else’s research and career. But bridging this divide would also allow academics within a powerful institution, because academia remains a powerful institution, to effect change. A part of this was the challenge of how to have this knowledge validated as knowledge.

Aurora: Those not working in the anti-racism movement did not necessarily believe that racism is so deeply embedded in academe as everywhere else.

Jiwani: Yes, the denial is pervasive everywhere. Because I worked in the anti-racism movement and given my own experiences within academia, one of the things I worked at was how to get the people who were talking about what I was talking were validated as knowers and what we were talking about validated as “knowledge” so that we would actually be heard.

Aurora: Dominant forms of knowledge deny what is called subjugated knowledges in that what counts as important or worth knowing is materialized through denial of subjugated knowers and knowing.

book cover Jiwani: Yes, here is an example. I remember that when a book from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in England under the leadership of Stuart Hall was published - the book was titled The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, it was an important early book within cultural and media studies on race and racism. I remember retrieving that book from a garbage bin that was put out in the sociology department outside the office of a particular professor at my university. I picked up the book and I said may I have this and he said yes, you can, it is garbage. I said why and he said, oh, they are just so biased. Well, that book is a classic in critical race studies, but this incident reveals how that kind of knowledge, that kind of subjugated knowledge as in repressed, denied, disappeared or effaced knowledge, was actually treated by academics. So it became really incumbent, I felt, to try to bring this kind of subjugated knowledge into a place where it would be validated and venerated, but not necessarily fetishized.

Aurora: Do you think this kind of knowledge has been validated?

Jiwani: Certainly within the feminist community and women's studies, women’s experiential knowledge has. But as far as critical race studies are concerned, I am not so sure.

Aurora: But within academia more generally is there validation in regards to how embedded racism is in what counts as knowledge, as important knowledge?

book cover Jiwani: I think it has, too. Certainly I see all kinds of things...it's certainly not a knowledge that has achieved the pristine status as say scientific knowledge, but certainly it has entered academe even if contested. The academic realm has become a site of struggle and contestation. Just the other night I went to hear Ward Churchill at Concordia.

To have somebody like Ward Churchill actually speak at Concordia University, to have his truth put into public space at Concordia and his challenge to the academic institution at the University of Colorado where a jury determined he was wrongly dismissed, suggests that even though it is a constant battle, we are there in academe, as opposed to not being there³.

Aurora: There are spaces opening?

Jiwani: We are not completely erased, even though there are all kinds of mechanisms at play to attempt to erase this knowledge, the fact is it is still there. And Ward Churchill’s experience over the past 7 years is proof to the lengths that university administrations and the state will go to erase the presence of critical academics whether Native American or members of other racialized groups.

There are other mechanisms at play as well. These include the whole credibility or recognition structures that inhere in academic institutions. What counts as “legit” knowledge is the kind that is reproduced in scholarly journal articles and the like. Articles and books that are not produced in the same fashion or through the same kind of avenues are not considered legitimate and hence remain in the substratum of subjugated knowledge.

Yet another aspect is the hiring and retention of faculty of colour. While there has been some improvement—I now see more faces of colour than before—this is far from equitable or even reaching equality. And of course, faculty of colour are also typecast—those that do “race” work are considered as not so credible or as just focusing on their vested interests even though these interests are or should be of concern to all. It is the same kind of thing that feminist scholars used to encounter—that is, before they got integrated and assimilated into academe.

Then of course, there are informal networks that are crucial for academic survival and success. These include group projects and funding opportunities. Without adequate support, it is difficult to survive as a lone body unless there are others who work in solidarity with you.

Aurora: And at times survival or just being there in academe is as simple as having a body of intellectual work to draw on. I would like to turn to the intellectual work you draw on. Because many of our readers are either not familiar with or will want to know something about the intellectual work you draw upon, will you discuss the key thinkers you draw from, and tell us about the specific discursive techniques that you use in your analysis, for example ex-nomination, naturalization and universalization.

Jiwani: Discourses of Denial draws on the work of Foucault, but it is also heavily informed by the work of Teun van Dijk. His work is actually incredibly accessible. One can download virtually all of his articles on the net. He is one of those rare intellectuals who makes his mission to make this work accessible. His work is very much influenced by a sort of community take, in the sense that it looks at subjugated knowledge and he argues that critical discourse analysis is not a methodology, it's a movement. Van Dijk sees critical discourse a movement that seeks social justice. As a social movement it seeks to bring out that which is subjugated, that which is suppressed, that which there is a tendency to erase. It is an attempt to being cognizant or framed within the question of power. It looks at issues around power and abuse in the sense of who is being abused and why. Much of my formation is actually based on or influenced by his work. As well, a significant influence is Edward Said’s work on Orientalism — a classic in post-colonial studies. That was for me, a superb example of how canons of knowledge are legitimized so that they influence the ways in which dominance is expressed, communicated, sanctioned and naturalized.

Aurora: You are an intellectual and a social activist. In a strong sense the intellectual and the activist feed each other.

Jiwani: Yes. As well, I must say that this is one of those things that I saw right at the outset in van Dijk’s Discourses is that I am what would be called an intellectual bricoleur. A bricoleur is someone who messes around, who goes into different terrains, picks whatever they want, attempts to mesh it. I am not somebody who could be described as a core rhetorician, or my training is in this particular domain. What I do is I treat knowledge as a way in which I can understand the world and understand what is happening in the world, vis-à-vis my experiences vis-à-vis other forms of colonial experiences. In this work and certainly even in all of the work that I have done thereafter, what I've done is look at questions of power. I ask who has the power to enforce a particular world view or who has the power to generate and make us believe in all kinds of fictions so that we will conform and therefore fit in.

Aurora: The idea of relations of power echoes the work of post-structural feminist thinking as well.

Jiwani: Yes, and this is where Foucault's work becomes really important as well, in terms of these regimes of truth. Stuart Hall's work becomes really important in terms of the notion of common sense knowledge. How much of what it is that we do and we believe is a result of something that we simply take for granted and that we don't interrogate in the way it should be interrogated⁴.

Aurora: And you take the for-granted and interrogate it.

Jiwani: A lot of my work is informed by these scholars and forms of scholarship (feminisms, Foucault, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon) but where critical discourse analysis comes in is, it gives me a way in which to decode those power relations. When I look at a news text or I look at an interview, then I would look at things like, who gets to speak first of all. In a news text, it would be what van Dijk calls accessed voices or who gets to speak, who is actually interviewed, what words (and whose) are quoted. And then, how are the words framed? Are they framed as coming from community groups? Are they framed as experts, like academics? Are they framed as Army personnel? Within this decoding, you see a hierarchy playing itself out in terms of the most credible voices. The structures of credibility in both news accounts and in everyday acts suggest where the power lies. The very framing, the kind of explanatory frameworks that are put forward in these stories, tell you whose framework they communicate - which kind of common sense knowledge is privileged, the dominant or the subjugated, what do the stories and the framework resonate with and whose interests are served by the stories, that is who benefits. Ultimately it becomes a sociological question of in whose interest is a particular story generated at a particular point in time.

Aurora: So you make your analysis work through a series of questions about how media representations are framed.

Jiwani: Asking the critical questions about framing is the different way in which I try to tackle both text and interviews. In part, in doing the interviews, particularly my interviews with young racialized women and girls, the aim was explore why they do not talk about racism in their lives. In all of the literature that I'd read, a lot of this literature was on studies that had been conducted where the interviewers were white, many of the young women interviewed would not talk about race. They would talk about cultural conflict. They would talk about negotiating a tricky reality, all of these things, but they would never name race and racism as part of their daily experience. So when I went into interviews, I asked them up front, what are the kinds of experiences of violence you have had? Then, based on that, I would ask if they would describe this as a form of racism. My reasoning was because part of the problem is that in the movement of knowledge and in the movement of the regimes of truth is a sort of subject formation of ourselves as individuals who become docile citizens because we internalize the kinds of truths that are given to us. For these young women, part of the regime of truth was internalizing the very denial of racism and persistence of race as a crucial way of categorizing humans. And just like the Recasting Equity conference we discussed earlier, for young racialized women the fact is that race and racism are not named, not mentioned, but are there.

Aurora: How does your description of the ideal, typical Canadian of the "law abiding, rational white, middle class person who speaks the dominant language and embodies national mythologies that are then performed accordingly," how does that produce this imagined community that is Canada as a multi-cultural, peaceful, democratic, equality-loving open nation, tolerant, etc? In other words, tell me about white normativity⁵ in Canada.

Jiwani: White normativity in Canada actually is the backdrop. It's exnominated. By exnominated, I mean that it is not something that is named. Instead, it is the background. It id a background that is strictly taken for granted and against which difference appears as very different, even exceptional. So it is that taken for granted stock of knowledge that is so ingrained that it is very difficult to dislodge, partly because it rests on a national mythology. The mythology is that Canada is white and therefore the normal Canadian is white. That is the first foundational myth - that Canada is white. This foundational myth effectively erases Indigenous people and it erases Canada’s history of colonization.

Aurora: Another form of denial.

book cover Jiwani: Yes, it is a very smart move because once done, there is an established point of departure that does not exist in reality, but exists in the mind. It exists as a myth that is completely installed and made real by all of these material signs and the material signs are, as my colleague, Joanne Lee (University of Victoria) points out everywhere. For example in Victoria the myth is materialized in all of the signs of the colonial heritage suggesting where this nation came from. In Ottawa the myth is present in terms of all the sort of material signs, the material evidence of this nation state as having come into existence out of nowhere while having these close ties to Britain. Nevertheless what is now Canada came from a kind of nothing, the idea of there-was-nothing-here. It works as, Sherene Razak points to, as this mythology of Canada as an empty land that was simply there for the taking, the land that became Canada just needed to be discovered—by white people.

Aurora: I am familiar with and learned all the “foundational” stories in my own education from kindergarten to high school and beyond.

Jiwani: You see this even in terms of other similar mythologies perpetrating themselves in all kinds of ways like the ridiculous notion of the Americans going to the moon and planting the American flag there to suggest that the moon now belongs to them and that they were the first to discover it. It is this kind of terra nullus argument that Canada (and the moon) is an empty land. Onto this formation of the myth of the nation of Canada comes the second layer of the mythology. This second layer involves the stories about the people that own this land and who or what kind of people these are.

Aurora: This kind of layering reminds me of the notion of excavation of an archaeological site. The detritus of the making of the Canadian state is what you are excavating and the exclusions that the state is premised on.

Jiwani: Yes, because who we are to be as a Canadian always emerges, the self always emerges in opposition to another and so the “Canadian” self emerges in opposition to a number of others. One of the excluded others to the “Canadian” self is Indigenous people. A second other or being that is a normalizing discourse pulses through the colonial powers in the sense of the home or motherland’a white, Anglo, Great Britain, but as well the Americans to the south. These constitute the layering of what counts as the nation-state Canada as well. The third layering is a solidification or the congealing of a national identity of an “us” based on common traits that are the most privileged-traits, being white for example, and these became absorbed into a fabric of nation-ness. This stratum I would say comes from those settlers, the white settlements and how they perpetuated and perpetrated notions of what constitutes whiteness. Obviously whiteness does not constitute Indian-ness. So whatever was the Indian is not white⁶. In terms of settler colonies, the Indian was represented as savage because settlement involved encroaching on land and it involved actually a brutal encapsulization of the land. Anything to do with the Native was basically considered to be the opposite of who “we” as in Canadian were. It is this third stratum that has congealed notions of whiteness by the settler colonizers and the nature of and kinds of traits that were valued. For example, the western European notions of what counts as reasonable, the notion of the fair-minded, the notion of civility, the notion of not being emotional, but being balanced are all examples of valued characteristics. All of these sort of traits then became congealed or hardened—through a highly ideological motivation of invasion and conquest—because you could only say that you were fair and just and so forth if you could maintain the semblance of these traits as highly different from the Other, that is the Indian.

Aurora: This layering of what and who counts as Canadian underpins the Indian Act in Canada and the policy of assimilation towards Aboriginal peoples.

Jiwani: Yes, it then became a question of how do we rationalize the very policies arising from the Indian Act, for example residential schools - how do we rationalize taking away Aboriginal children from their parents and the imposition of Christianity onto people who had their own cosmology and religious beliefs. All of that happened through the discourse of civilizing the other based on an assumption of the superiority of the White Canadian settler society in relation to the inferiority of the Aboriginal Other.

Aurora: You build on earlier work done by, for example, sociologist John Porter’s 1965 The Vertical Mosaic. What Porter found in 1965 continues but with differing cultural groups and contexts. How does this layering link up with other immigrant groups to Canada?

Jiwani: All of the migrant groups that came along and that were brought into the country to perform different pieces of labor became sort of wedged into different locations in the hierarchy—not at the top but not at the bottom. Thus what I have argued continually is that the hierarchy still exists. It is that hierarchy that becomes effaced, or denied, in many of the dominant discourses. We don't see, for instance, that within that hierarchy the native population is at the bottom. We do not see that above the Aboriginal population are all of these other racialized groups, and on top of this are the groups in more dominant forms of power that have been absorbed into the status quo. Once you look at it in terms of this hierarchy, then it makes sense that part of the process of this circulation or perpetuation of power is the inferiorization, or deliberate and systematic process of demeaning or making an individual or group into a second class⁷, of different forms of exploitation, different relations of power, one on top of the other. It's like we, as stratified others, become instruments of power ourselves in terms of how much we download or oppress others beneath us. Therefore, we all become complicit in the process and the rewards of this complicity are suggested to us in terms of these fictions of belonging, of being able to become the quintessential Canadian citizen.

Aurora: In my recent work I look at white normativity (as well as other forms of normativity or dominant group identity) in the province of Alberta. And identity is very much hooked into belonging. As social beings we all want to belong. But the myths will ensure that many of us do not belong because we are the wrong race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and so. Another phrase you use in your book Discourses of Denial that I think is important is “multiculturizing race” (see Canadian Multiculturalism site). What do you mean by multiculturizing race?

Jiwani: I think that in Canada, in the UK, and in other parts of the Western world, one thing that takes place is the combining of or conflation of race and culture. Rather than talking about race and racism, the impetus is to talk about these in cultural terms. When you talk about race and racism in cultural terms culture become fossilized. What this means, fossilization, is that cultures are represented as relics of the past. Cultures are exoticised so they are broken into pieces and one piece symbolizes or represents the whole culture.

Aurora: This is rather astonishing when you think about it. It is as astonishing as trying to fit 10,000 years of Aboriginal cultures into a 5,000 square foot museum exhibit—this happens in Canada all the time as if all Aboriginal cultures are the same, have never changed and that we can compress 10,000 years into such a small space. Would this happen to English culture?

Jiwani: Exactly! Not only is there a static conception of culture which takes away from its dynamism because culture is a lived reality, but one of the things that happens is that aspects of culture become accentuated so that the culture itself becomes a stereotype of culture like a museum piece. You see this in terms of the way in which certain forms of culture or formations of culture are permitted and others not permitted. For instance, restaurants become one site of this sort of consumption of the exotica because “cultural” food becomes a way in which we distinguish one culture from another culture. It becomes a way in which some cultures become domesticated. Exoticized and fossilized cultures become safe enough to consume because they are contained in these little restaurants so that the cultural practices and the people who embody these practices are not so threatening when they are cooking up exotic dishes. Where they become threatening is when they become sites of criminalization.

Aurora: Multicultural policy in Canada is both held up as a major accomplish and as something to be vilified.

Note: see Library of Parliament-Canadian Multiculturalism

Jiwani: There is a very strong argument that has emerged recently within Canada denying any kind of favor or support for multiculturalism. But this argument is really dangerous because it is predicated again on these fictions of belonging. The argument is that we cannot recognize any kind of human difference because the nation state has one and only one favored citizen, one prototype which everybody has to fit into. So there are all kinds of incentives along the way to do this and as an example, we see it playing itself out in Quebec. This is the idea that there is one Quebec nation and that any kind of difference is intolerable because it is difference from the norm that divides. The reality is that differences divide when there is no real belonging and differences are made divisive precisely because of the kind of barriers that are set up against integration. One does not choose to be different simply because of being different. One can choose some forms of difference particularly in a postmodernist kind of world where difference is validated and valued. In the case of choosing, difference becomes just an identity marker. For example, you can become a Goth or you can become a Rastafarian. These differences are validated. They are seen as giving you a particular kind of unique identity.

Aurora: And often these chosen identity markers buy into forms of consumer culture as one purchases the clothing or car or whatever commodity that will confer the identity. These forms of identity fit within a neoliberal, capitalist economy in that choices made to consume, through consumption, are linked to individual identity but these are forms of identity not dangerous to the economy or therefore the nation-state.

Jiwani: The dangers of identity are elsewhere. For example collectivized differences become a sore point for the state because those differences now have to be reckoned with and managed. They have to be contained. They have to be neutralized in whatever way because collectivized differences threaten the norms of what and who counts as the nation and the proper citizen. Claims that are made on the grounds of collective differences become an anathema to the state and that is where this whole issue around multiculturalism as a pitfall for developing a sense of nationalism and nationhood emerges as a counter response. When I was writing Discourses of Denial, that argument hadn't come to the forefront as much as it has now. My critique was against multiculturalism that basically just simple exoticised different cultural formations, but didn't really look at the dynamism of culture and completely erased diasporic realities. The fact is that now there is a transnational economy in a globalized world, which means many people come here from different places that have previously been colonized. Part of this is predicated on the notion that even the people that were allowed to come into this country, those who are racialized Other, were allowed to come in because of colonialism and the vast reaches of the British and other European empires. So these were bodies to be used, abused and tossed out.

Aurora: Canada has a history of repressing “racialized others” including Indigenous cultures, the “Yellow Menace” in which Chinese men were imported to work on the railway but were not allowed to bring their families and paid very poorly, and given contingent status in Canada. This continues.

Jiwani: Now, racialized Others have become contained through this prism of multiculturalism which does not really give collective rights, but simply exoticises or brings some remnants of culture up at a particular point in time to be “celebrated.” For me the damage is done to those inside the Othered culture. If the State privileges and favors the retention of only some particular traits of a culture rather than the dynamism of a culture, what does this mean for the person who is living within that cultural group?

Aurora: This sets up a dynamic of dominant or normative group identity, favored by the state, in relation to a subjugated group.

Jiwani: Precisely. And we are confronted with power relations that disadvantage racialized Others because the dominant group is represented by the people who are set up by the State. To manage racialized Others the State funds to promote and favour only specific aspects of the racialized culture which become the visible markers of that subcommunity or that cultural group. And racialized Others within that group who adhere to this exoticization of the culture become the spokespeople and they then determine what counts as culture and who can speak as an expert about their culture. Culture stagnates. The critical interrogation and fluidity that is necessary in cultural revival and cultural evolution stagnates. The life of a culture is instead contained and marginalized⁸ within racialized groups.

Aurora: And what happens to dissent and critique within these racialized cultures?

Jiwani: What happens is that people like me, from the different groups that I belong to, end up walking the borders all the time. People like me are doubly and triply marginalized because our culture is to fit a particular mold of what that culture is supposed to represent in the Canadian multicultural mosaic. In this model the idea of social relations premised on unequal access to power, status, and resources is completely erased. It is as if this mosaic is on a flat plane and that we all have equal access to speak, to money, to time, but in fact it is very much a hierarchy in which some people and cultures have far more power, legitimacy and all that accrues to these in terms of money, prestige, and time. This is where the problem emerges for me.

Aurora: For example, in forcing a culture to be static around things like patriarchy as the norm or like trying to force a language to be static when in fact social relations and language - like life - change over time and space.

Jiwani: Exactly. If we look at representations of Native culture, it's like saying all right you can come and celebrate the opening of the Olympics, but we are not going to cede you any territory.

Aurora: Colonization and the various forms it takes bring me to the theme of rescue which figures strongly in your book as well. To me this is another way of thinking about pastoral power and how benevolent forms of violence lurk in discursive practices. How does rescue discourse work in racialized relations? If you could just talk a little about how you conceive that and how you've written about it?

Jiwani: Rescue is a very symbolic trope in colonial discourse and colonial power in the way in which the empire manages to exert itself, particularly in terms of Great Britain. For me, there is a deeper element behind it and that is the notion that when you rescue, you are putting yourself in a position of superiority vis-à-vis the Other because it allows you to extend a hand to try to save someone. You're in that position of power over another which is very different from not- rescue, but instead is simply aligning oneself or collaborating or forming bonds of solidarity. Forming bonds of solidarity is more like if you go through this I go through this as well which is a very different kind of rationale.

Aurora: Solidarity and collaboration are more like, in psychological terms, empathy rather than pity.

Jiwani: Yes, with a rescue motif, part of it is a re-establishment of the superior/inferior power relation. To me, historical arguments are the foundational elements of the grammar of race and rescue is part of the colonizing imperative which included Christian missionaries. But the other part of the rescue is that it is that intervention is clothed in silk. It is like a power in a silken glove. So the idea is to rescue, but in rescuing, you're actually intervening and lifting something, the person you are rescuing, to bring them within your own orbit. So that's the difference. There is a big difference in rescuing as opposed to going into a situation to enable people to come into their own. A recent article of mine takes up this theme — “Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press” in University of Toronto Quarterly, 78 (2), 2009: 728-744.

Aurora: Gendered violence is a large part of your argument in relation to rescue. So how does gender work in rescue discourse?

Jiwani: There is a definite gendered dimension to rescue. The gender dimension within colonial literature is the element of going out to rescue native women, indigenous women in all parts of the world. This idea was predicated on the plank of European or the colonizer’s superiority. Western women were in a superior position. Eastern women were not, so Western women felt compelled to go out and rescue their Eastern sisters, but it was also very much a side of the colonial ploy of going in with the interest of civilizing the Other/s, civilizing the Native. It's the discourse of civilizing that becomes very much an important trope permitting a kind of rescue motive. Civilizing discourse, that is bringing the superior culture to the inferior culture, carries the rescue motive. There is another part of it too. This is something that Zizek talks about when he says that when we go out there to save the other, part of it is that we see aspects of ourselves in the saving that affirm ourselves. It is like in the act of rescuing, we are actually having a sense of affirmation that we are indeed good human beings because look at what we are doing. Part of rescue is self-affirmation. Part of it is also the idea of bringing those Others into our realm, making them like us. When I look at the rescue motive as it plays out in Afghanistan, part of the thing is to get these women to become like us. If we get these women to become like us, then they will perpetuate our mentality, our way of seeing the world.

Aurora: But there are conditions attached to rescue discourse as not all Others are worthy — that is according to the discourse and concomitant practice.

Jiwani: Yes. In looking at these stories, one of the things that is so interesting to me is the notion of how these women are portrayed vis-à-vis the portrayals of Indigenous women in Canada. Here my work goes into the whole terrain of what constitutes worthy victimhood. Who is the deserving versus who is an undeserving victim. The Afghan woman becomes the deserving victim because she is made to be like us. She is named. She is given agency. She is shown as resisting the Taliban. She does all kinds of things to keep herself and her family alive. All of these things we acknowledge as part of us. They resonate with us. The “us” is of course the dominant group. When we look at Aboriginal women, there are all kinds of themes of culpability that jump out in representations and portrayals, for example Aboriginal women are doing it to themselves. They are putting themselves in harm's way. They are not like us.

Aurora: It is like the discourses of gender and violence that cast women or girls as asking for it, (sexual assault) - look at how they dressed or they were drinking or walking around after dark!

Jiwani: So now these representations play up against each other. In the background is the normative white woman/women. She is not named. If the white woman is ever named, it is only for instance, a Sally Armstrong who comes to help save Afghan women. And the white woman becomes⁹ the bearer of Western values of egalitarianism. She's a mythic character because she is this ambassador of the West in terms of sexual equality, liberation and so forth, which are still myths and we know that. The white woman is ex-nominated or absent, she works as a background against which these two cases—Aboriginal and Afghan women—play off against each other.

Aurora: And through the media and other representations, Afghan women are deserving of rescue while Aboriginal women in Canada are undeserving.

Jiwani: Exactly, to me, there is a deeper and even greater impetus behind all of this and that has to do with the whole history of colonization. If we go back and look at the history, particularly here in Canada, one of the things that becomes really apparent is how there was an attempt to break down Indian nations, Aboriginal nations, by removing power from the women, vesting it in the men, taking away the children (because if you take away the children, then a nation cannot reproduce itself), but also destroying the women. You can see this playing itself out in different wars elsewhere as well, for example in the former Yugoslavia. The idea that Muslim women in Yugoslavia were impregnated by Serbian men and once impregnated the women could belong neither to their group nor to the Serbs. So they were effectively cast out. The situation is that if you cannot get these women to assimilate and make them your own, then the other mechanism is to cast them out. Whatever you do, it plays itself (and I am talking deterministically now, but I don't think it is so deterministic) out through different policies. It is refracted by different conditions, but if you then make these women unacceptable and marginalized, cast them out of society so that they do not reproduce then you cannot have these nations reproducing.

book cover Aurora: Or you drastically reduce the capacity to reproduce. But you also shame a nation by violating the women. The gendered violence against non-white women is pronounced but ex-nominated white women are the background discourse. This is similar to what happened to the Korean, Filipino and other South Asian women who were made to be “comfort” women to the Japanese during WWII.

Jiwani: Exactly. If you think about it, there is another side to it which is why some of my interest is now going into the area of masculinity. What happens on the flip side? If you consistently portray¹⁰ the men of a given cultural group or a religious group as barbaric, as traditional, as caught in a time warp, so to speak, as incredibly patriarchal, what happens? Well, one thing that happens is that the backdrop appears to be very egalitarian and the white or westernized men appear to be very progressive. But the other side of it is now you can turn around and say, we don't want these kind of men in the country which effectively allows the women to remain outside the culture and accessible in all kinds of ways. This effectively then stops a group from reproducing itself and therefore reproducing their culture.

Aurora: Yes it breaks down the culture. And breaking down culture is explicit in the strategy of residential schools for children in Aboriginal cultures, to break down the reproduction of Aboriginal culture through assimilation policy. But as well, another important point, is that both white women AND white men are exnominated from the discourses of colonization—both are the background.

Jiwani: If you think about women as nation, women's body as nation, then what happens when a nation cannot reproduce itself? Culture dies.

Aurora: We are running out of time and I wanted you to talk about some of your strategies for countering the media and the stereotypical representation in the media.

Jiwani: In terms of strategies for countering media representation, one of the biggest things is having a multiplicity of voices to counter these monolithic images because a lot of these groups are considered to be monolithic. They are seen as homogenous. So the more voices we have, the better it is, but that is not going to happen easily. It began to happen and certainly did not happen out of the goodness of the heart of all these media institutions. It actually happened because of economic issues and market considerations.

Aurora: What do you mean?

Jiwani: It is a structural issue for the media but as well it is interesting to see how the state has become so influenced by economic considerations that now it is sort of the interplay between what was at one time considered to be separate domains, the government and industry. These were considered to be separate and now they are completely interwoven. Civil society was supposed to be the counter. Well, with the kind of neo-conservative governments that we have had, no matter what clothing the neo-cons wear, civil society has actually been completely wiped out of the equation. Diverse opinions and cultural values depend now on the goodwill of those involved in activism and activists are usually without any kind of funding. Activists have little to no structural leverage. In teaching alternative media and a number of other courses like that, my students do make media that is incredible, but to get their alternative media to rupture the dominant frame, the stranglehold that there is, is incredibly difficult because of the lack of resources. There is no counter power to leverage economically and financially against the conglomerate that is now the state and the media industry.

Note: See article, Canada's Media Monopoly.

Aurora: Do you think the internet is a useful place where there are disruptions?

Jiwani: Very much so. The thing is how many people have internet?

Aurora: Yes, the problem of resources. Who, what groups have the internet.

Jiwani: That is one thing and the other is that on the internet, virtually everything is on a flat plane. It's like having racist and anti-racist websites side by side and it's your choice what you join. There isn't even that hierarchy as there is in print media. That makes it very dangerous because it now becomes, and you see this coming out in the classrooms, “my opinion.” It's my opinion. Well, I'm sorry but opinion is not an informed judgment or research. Intellectual and scholarly work is necessary more than ever as is excellent, critical education. These are also strategies to counter racism and other inequalities.

Aurora: We have run out of time Yasmin and I want to thank you for an intellectually stimulating hour.

Notes:

1 “Global political activism, official apologies, charity, advocacy and solidarity campaigns, ‘rescue’ missions, truth and reconciliation hearings, private philanthropy, ‘humanitarian’ interventions.The politics, cultures and economies of doing good seem to have gained a redemptive, sanctioned and empowering status, which has elevated actions and actors above critical scrutiny. Substantial scholarship has focused on, and sometimes celebrated, the work of humanitarian organizations and individuals involved in international interventions and the provision of domestic organizations aid. Yet, few studies have critically interrogated their role. This conference problematizes these interventions with the aim of examining the negotiations that individuals and organizations undertake to circumvent the appropriation of their involvement and work. At the same time, the conference is intended to explore the ramifications of such interventions with respect to the possible ways in which they serve and reinforce existing power structures and relations.” (9th Annual Critical Race & Anti-Colonial Studies Conference: Compassion, Complicity & Reconciliation, Conference Programme, p. 5, June 5-7, 2009).

2 “It is the normalization of violence that renders it invisible, or visible only under certain conditions and with prescribed definitions. Hence, the violence of colonialism, of nation building, are made invisible. Similarly, the violence of racism, sexism, ableism, and other structures of domination are veiled from view, leaving only the most explicit traces of victimization, which are subsequently subsumed and marginalized in the subjugated discourses of the communities so affected.” (Jiwani, 2006, p. 9).

3 In July, 2009 a judge will determine if Ward Churchill will be reinstated to the University of Colorado. http://www.wardchurchill.net/

4 It is this normative White standard that determines the categorization of racialized minorities within the social order and that ultimately influences how they are perceived and treated by others. The White eye, then, is the power of Whiteness communicated through the discursive strategies of exnomination, naturalization, and universalization. (Jiwanit, 2006, p. 32)

5 I think it is important for white Canadians to hear and as importantly, to understand what bell hooks refers to in her work “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination” as a form of special knowledge held by Black people (or people of colour) to help cope with and survive in a White supremacist society. Hooks links white people, and her context is the United States of America, to “the mysterious, the strange, and the terrible” and as forming a kind of terror to Black people. (bell Hooks, 1992)

6 ... the rhetoric is hollow, as the recent report filed by Amnesty International (2004) on violence experienced by Aboriginal girls and women reveals. As a colonial and colonized nation, Canada puts forward a public face that is part of its own mythology — the innocent, moderate, middle power (Razack 2004) that boasts a multicultural complexion and a multiracial workforce, a nation signified by its image of a peaceful kingdom amid the havoc and turmoil characterizing the rest of the world (Jiwaini, 2006, p. 112).

7 “... discourses are relational: they work in concert to maintain a structure of power. The subordination of one group—its inferiorization and the naturalization of that inferiorization—can be recognized only if it is constructed in relation to another group whose privilege and assumed superiority are either taken for granted or continually reaffirmed. It is this structured dominance that is normalized and that, through common sense strategically casts the Other as the site of all that is disavowed.” (Jiwani, 2006, p. 203)

8 “Concomitantly, most discourses on race utilize coded words such as ‘immigrant,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘alien,’ ‘terrorist,’ and the like to refer to people of colour. Such words cover up and obfuscate the central defining and regulating relations of power and reify these categories as authentic absolutes against which the normative Canadian is implicitly defined as the White, law-abiding, citizen of the nation.” (Jiwanit 2006, p. 14)

9 “As in every society, women who challenge the normative order are subjected to punitive measures.” (Jiwanit, 2006, p. 169)

10 The inferiroization of Muslim men is achieved by representing them as emotional, irrational, deceptive, resentful, untrustworthy, and above all, childlike. This later rendering emasculates these men— reducing them to weak, vulnerable, and conquerable entities. Another part of this strategy of emasculation is to render these men more feminine — [the] feminized portrayal of Osama bin Laden coalesces a number of signifiers and connotations, producing an overall picture of bin Laden as the beguiling yet ultimately menacing arch-villain who is cold, calculating, ruthless, and sinister — all characteristics, incidentally, that are commonly associated with women of colour in colonial literature and popular culture. (Jiwani, 2006, pp. 191-192)

Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence

Notes:

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