BLOG #2: Hybridity

The concept of juggling multiple socially constructed identifications is analyzed is many discourses.  Cultural hybridity, ‘living on the hyphen’ (Wah 1996), or conflicting designations of nationality, racial identity, ethnicity, and citizenship are similar phrases for a common idea.  Syrine Hout termed it a “state of cultural in-betweeness” (2011); Fred Wah might agree on that tension of “hyphenation” (1996).  In the biotext Diamond Grill Fred Wah struggles with reconciling his familial, cultural, and personal connections to his China and Canada.  After working with archival materials including The New Canadian, a historical newspaper that was initially targeted towards the second generation of Japanese Canadians, I was able to see a relationship between the two situations.  Although Wah was born in the first year of the newspaper’s print his difficulty with hybridity of Chinese and Canadian identifications are similar to that of the Nisei.  The Nisei, or second generation Japanese Canadians, are the children of the Issei, first generation Japanese Canadians, or the first wave of immigrants from Japan to China.

Through an analysis of articles in The New Canadian, it becomes clear that many of the Nisei grappled with the BC Security Commission’s primary view of them as Japanese and the consequential treatment they were subjected to.  It was more than discriminatory treatment within society; there was “an issue of citizenship rights on legalistic, political, and symbolic levels” (Sarkowsky 2008) that directly affected their lives as well.

This topic was also taken up by Jiwani and Young in “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” (2006), although in a different context.  They spoke of women living in Downtown Eastside Vancouver and media representations that reduced them in terms of race, sex, class, and gender.  These women were primarily identified as Aboriginal women working in the sex trade, and it was argued that these representations promoted a continuation of hegemonic frameworks regarding these groups and the subsequent treatment of them.

Whether the concept of hybridity is analyzed in a context of early Canadian immigrant history or in a modern example of discrimination, it remains a conflict that can affect both the individual and society as a whole.

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