Cultural confessions: Law and the racial scrutiny of the Indo-Canadian home in Metro Vancouver

Abstract

In Metro Vancouver, the recurrence of gang violence involving young South Asian men has spawned a series of public explanations about a new threat to public safety: the ‘Indo-Canadian gangster’. This article explicates the racial force of a specific exposé on the putatively ‘cultural’ origins of the Indo-Canadian gangster which identifies the domestic realm of the city’s South Asian populations as the principal cause of this gang violence. By tracking the trajectories of this exposé and other texts that take similar confessional forms, this article provides important insight into the differential capacity of texts to attract public attention and to persuade, by virtue of the narrative forms they assume as well as the semantic content of the knowledges they mobilize. On the one hand, this article documents the tropes of cultural inertia that characterize public knowledges of the ‘Indo-Canadian home’, which is configured as a domestic space that is culturally insulated from putatively Western norms of civility and legality. On the other hand, it explains how this exposé acquires its epistemic force from the confessional form of the knowledges it circulates, which acts as a mechanism of cultural interpellation for South Asian actors who are positioned to renounce and disavow the pathologies of Indo-Canadian culture.

Sacred distinctions: Law and the political regulation of Sikh Gurdwaras in British Columbia

“…By 1908, racial concerns about the growing number of people migrating from India, China, and Japan instigated legal changes that dramatically curtailed immigration from the Indian subcontinent (Johnston, 2014). Racial immigration and citizenship laws, which persisted in more manifest forms until the 1960s, have had enduring effects on local Sikh and South Asian populations, limiting their growth, restructuring Punjabi family forms, and reworking their conditions of civic and political action (Buffam, 2018;Indra, 1979;Mawani 2012;Nayar, 2012). Across these different periods, local Sikh communities have been embedded in diasporic political processes 3 In 2016, 365,705 residents of BC identified as "South Asian," which represents 8% of the total population.…”

“…Since the 1980s, local Sikh and South Asian populations have been subject to intensified surveillance, scrutiny, and legal intervention as they have been implicated in different patterns of criminal and political violence. On the one hand, the rise of gang violence attributed to young South Asian men has inflamed concerns that ostensibly “Indo‐Canadian” neighborhoods are succumbing to crime and lawlessness (Buffam, 2018; Frost, 2010; Johal, 2007); by 2006, a poll showed that Vancouver residents were more likely to blame crime on “East Indians” than any other “ethnic group” (Buffam, 2018). On the other hand, local gurdwaras have been associated with diasporic Khalistani movements that sought to create an independent Sikh nation‐state in Punjab.…”

Martyrdom, collective memory, and the contested penal authority of racial state institutions

“…'To be martyred', Eagleton (2018: 91) explains, 'is to allow one's death to be taken into public ownership, undergoing a form of semiosis in which one's body is converted into a sign.' The practices that commemorate Mewa as a martyr have been undertaken within a public context that projects criminality and danger onto South Asian men by virtue of their racialized association with the violence of local gangs and Khalistani groups (Buffam, 2018). Within this context of racialization, the petition to pardon Mewa enjoins its audience to consider and challenge the racial authority that law has been afforded in deciding the categorical distinctions between criminal, political, and religious conduct.…”

“…. In foregrounding racial governance and racial state power, I do not conceive of race as a biological dimension of individual bodies but as a relation of power that shapes how people are differentiated and governed according to taxonomical vocabularies, including biology, culture, and aesthetics(Buffam, 2018;Goldberg, 2002;Hesse, 2004;Mawani, 2009).…”