Diasporic Spectrality: Minorities & Cultural Assertions in Canada, Australia and Beyond

This paper provides a critical introduction to a special issue of Australian Canadian Studies 23(2) 2005 - "Diasporic Spectrality: Minorities and cultural Assertions in Canada, Australia and Beyond" - guestedited by Gerry Turcotte and Gaetano Rando. The paper discusses the selection of papers that produced a coherent, though not uniform, picture of minority interests that examine the complex ways culture is “asserted” in contemporary times, primarily in the Canadian context, but understood within the larger story of migration, plurality and diaspora. As we worked through the contributions we found not only that they represented a wide variety of fields — from broadcast policy to Italian migration as expressed in literary texts; from Caribbean-Canadian literature to a wider Caribbean language of exile internationally; to notions of Indigenous diaspora as reflected in the life and work of Canada’s Alootook Ipellie — but also that key threads connected the material in “uncanny” ways.