Four Views on Ethnicity

TLDR: For instance, the authors describes how, when she went from being a Bortolotti to being a Hutcheon, her social and cultural interactions within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environment changed; my ethnic identity became encrypted, silenced, unless articulated by choice.

Abstract: 28 WHEN I WENT from being a Bortolotti to being a Hutcheon, my social and cultural interactions within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environment changed; my ethnic identity became encrypted, silenced, unless articulated by choice-a pointed lesson in the constructedness of concepts of ethnicity. Like me, Cathy (Notari) Davidson, Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick, and Sandra (Mortaro) Gilbert are crypto-Italian teachers of English. What we do not share, however, is nationality: they are Italian American, while I am Italian Canadian. I therefore may have a somewhat different experience of ethnicity and its encrypting.' Without a melting-pot ideology or a pluralist national identity to rally around, Canadians-be they British, Chinese, Italian, Pakistani, or Somali-have only the model of officially defined multiculturalism with which to construct their sense of self-in-nation. I first became aware of the different political associations of the word multicultural in Canada and the United States during the so-called culture wars. While political denunciations of multiculturalism-seen as a reconfiguration of national identity resulting from the perceived loss of a single common culturewere frequent enough in the United States, most often the term was used there in a more limited sense to define the dominant ideology on college campuses, which was said to be contaminated by political correctness. Dinesh D'Souza was not the only one who worried about the "ethnic cheerleading" implied in certain curricular changes (33); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., too expressed concern about potential "ethnic chauvinism" in the multicultural academy ("Studies" 288). Some scholars worried that multiculturalism's politics of difference might simply be another way of ensuring white supremacy (Wiegman); others voiced related fears that interest in ethnic studies would elide the historical realities of race through the use of a European immigrant paradigm as the master narrative of difference (San Juan 132).2 Nevertheless, in the United States, the