Eve Haque is the York Research Chair in Linguistic Diversity and Community Vitality. Her research and teaching interests include multiculturalism, white settler colonialism and language policy, with a focus on the regulation and representation of racialized im/migrants in white settler societies. She has published widely on these topics including Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada (UTP).
As a historically white settler colonial society and immigrant receiving country, Canada is not only built on the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples who were already living in the territories that would eventually become Canada, but it is a nation that has always relied heavily on immigrant and migrant labour for settlement, economic stability and growth. Canada’s dual white settler history is based on relations of English and French colonial control over its territories, which in the modern nation state have become transposed onto a linguistic hierarchy of national recognition and belonging (Haque, 2012).
In the middle of an ongoing global pandemic, the mobilities of various im/migrant groups both into and within white settler societies such as Canada have revealed as well as exacerbated this existing hierarchy of belonging; often acutely and lethally along racialized lines. In this presentation, I want to examine how immigration and migrant labour and capital – including that of international students – is central to Canada’s labour market growth and how language is a key technology of racialized entanglement which regulates mobility first as movement across borders, and second as representation through labour market mobility, and finally as the embodied practice of having the actual ability to labour. If, as Cresswell (2010) has argued, mobility is one of the major resources of 21st century life, I want to argue that its differential distribution produces some of the starkest racialized differences today. Thus, the question of linguistic justice is intimately intertwined with the genealogy of this racial differentiation and entangled in the coloniality of white settler histories in Canada specifically, as well as of the Americas more generally.
References
Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and planning D: Society and Space 28(1) 17-31.
Haque, E. (2012). Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Language, race and belonging in Canada. University of Toronto Press.