There is a tendency in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to racialize and criminalize
recently-arrived minorities. This acts as a barrier to successful integration between
newcomers and host groups. The difficulties inherent in these processes have been
exacerbated for Vietnamese settlers through the prominence they gained in the media and
public discourse during the Allied War in Vietnam, Operation Babylift and the Private
Sponsorship Programme. Through interviews and discourse analysis, I have come to
believe that the framing of Vietnamese 'refugee' bodies has provided an extraordinary
venue for Canada to produce, naturalize and reify the settler nation as humanitarian,
compassionate, enlightened, unified and permanent - as more than we truly are - in a
collective forgetting of the less press-worthy of our flaws. This discursive strategy
intersects and overdetermines the hi/multicultural settler state while also threatening to
undermine it. Thus, to a certain extent, Vietnamese (and other) refugee bodies resignify
from receptive, when/where the public is in favour of refugee sponsorship, to criminal,
when/where they are not. This discursive 'risky refugee' rides the contradictions of
liberal humanitarianism, marginalizing the formerly welcomed and undermining the
political will to support the refugee process.
There are strong interests in the Lower Mainland of BC who work tirelessly to
sponsor and support refugees, despite this fickle nature of self-serving public opinion,
pressuring the government to live up to its myth. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people in
Vancouver, in general, have struggled and fought to rid themselves of the myths created
through pejorative racialization and criminalization. My position in this thesis is that we
need to relax this space of very constricted possibilities for negotiations around identity
and space, acknowledging refugees as more than just under-educated, potentiallydiseased
and probably-criminal Others. Suggestions, in the final chapter, come directly
from interview material, as all study participants have had at least 20 years of refugee
support and advocacy. The more general conclusion, from theoretical, operational and
epistemological perspectives, is that we should work through all our diverse
vulnerabilities to re-imagine a multiculturalism more expansive than inclusive. I hope
my thesis will challenge the shaky short-term humanitarianism of the liberal state,
encouraging a more stable and genuine commitment to refugee support / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16783 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Webber, Graham |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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