“It’s All I Know”: Navigating and Re(Negotiating) the Afghan and Canadian Identity

Ferdouse Asefi, University of Toronto

The Canadian government often promotes multiculturalism, diversity, and the welcoming of refugees as part of Canadian national identity and pride. Recently, the Canadian government surpassed its milestone of accepting 40,000 Afghan refugees since the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Within the larger confines of Canadian immigration, the Afghan diaspora is still a relatively recent immigrant group. The intended objective of the Multiculturalism Act is to embrace the diversity and contributions of racial and ethnic groups in Canada. Certain scholars view Canadian multiculturalism as a form of classification that serves to manage minorities and construct identities. Yet, the Act shows how limitations of multiculturalism stokes discourses of Muslim and Afghan otherness, particularly from effects of racialization perpetuated by the “War on Terror” that impacts the identity formation processes of many Muslims, Brown people, and immigrants. Canada’s participation in the “War on Terror” played a role in creating the current circumstances of Afghan refugees amid ongoing Islamophobic anxieties within the Canadian public sphere. The contradictions between ideals of diversity, openness, multiculturalism, and Islamophobic anxieties in Canadian politics and public opinion (re)shape and complicate what it means to be Afghan in Canada. Drawing on interviews with Afghans in Ontario, illustrate how the paradox meets the daily lived experiences of the community, their everyday interactions and experiences of racism, and how negotiating their identities is understood in the backdrop of the geopolitics in Afghanistan. In doing so, I examine what multiculturalism and diversity mean for those in the Afghan-Canadian diaspora, while residing in a nation that participated in the U.S. and NATO occupation of Afghanistan. I argue that that the diaspora is not a homogenous population as they work to demonstrate alternative identities and unsettle narratives of what it means to be Afghan and Canadian within a racial hierarchy that promotes ideals of multiculturalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 162. Minoritized Identities and the State