Talking About Identity: Encounters in Race, Ethnicity, and Language

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Canada’s obsession with identity and difference is explored in essays
that confront stereotypes and racism, and address difference, privilege,
and biracial and bicultural identities, among other issues. Adrienne
Shadd, a fourth-generation Canadian, writes about the
African-Canadian’s perpetual otherness. Susan Ship, a non-religious
Jew and an anglophone born in Quebec, struggles to define herself as
both a Jew and as a Québécoise in a culture of exclusion, while Guy
Bedard looks at the ambiguities underlying the concept of “pur
laine.”

Unlike similar collections, this book also analyzes “the norm” by
examining the role of whiteness and the intersections of class and race.
Luis M. Aguiar, the son of working-class Portuguese immigrants, writes
about his own struggle in the bourgeois, anglophone world of academe.
Leslie Saunders, a white academic who teaches
African-American/African-Canadian studies, critically examines her
complex and sometimes controversial role in shaping the self-knowledge
of African-Canadian students whose history has been suppressed by the
very institutions she represents. Talking About Identity is one of the
best of the most recent books on identity in Canada.