Comparing my last week’s analysis on Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen with Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair’s “Dacing in a Mall” from The Winter We Danced, I have come across similarities between these works in their depiction of ‘spaces’. Kiss of the Fur Queen portrays a middle-class and urbanistic structure with its ground on cityscape. The work considers Indigenous cosmopolitanism in urban space and connects it to a postcolonial world and a diasporic experience. In “’Polluting the Body Politic’: Race and Urban Location”, David Theo Goldberg pointed out the issue about the ‘racialized space(s)’ and the idea of ‘spatial vacancy’, as these terms are used to denote the marginalized bodies who are expelled from white, middle-class areas to remain in poorer city spaces. Evelyn J. Peters writes in the article “Subversive spaces: First Nations women and the city”, that “Marginalized groups are likely to be excluded from these areas (ex. suburbs) because their differences are accentuated and seen to be deviant” (Peters, 666).

Interestingly, Highway and Sinclair both reclaim cityscapes for their community and undercut commodification of Indigenous iconography for civilizing purposes in their works. They eventually bring up the idea that cultural and ethnic elements in city planning would help to construct the unique image of a particular city, and their works also reveal how the use of that cultural ethnicity (through identity) create and implement a certain image. From the readings, I realize the utilization of culture for purposes of city marketing and image creation as a significant marketing strategy. In their works, ethnicity is used strategically in urban cultural setting, and this strategy allows for the individuals and group of people to communicate and interact with one another, which in the end help them to position themselves socially and ethnically. In that sense, the space becomes a symbol where the individuals (different ethnicities) are combined to articulate themselves and to implement their identity into social worlds.

References:

Goldberg, David Theo. “‘Polluting the Body Politic’: Race and Urban Location.” Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Print.

Peters, Evelyn J. “Subversive Spaces: First Nations women and the city.” Society and Space Vol. 16 (1998): 665-685.