Sporting multiculturalism: Toronto's postwar European immigrants, gender, diaspora, and the grassroots making of Canadian diversity
| dc.contributor.author | Fielding, Stephen | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Stanger-Ross, Jordan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-04-30T16:34:22Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2018 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2018-04-30 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of History | en_US |
| dc.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy Ph.D. | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation offers an alternative lens to understand Canada’s gradual embrace of multiculturalism. Scholars have typically “worked back” from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s famous 1971 declaration to unearth the origins of multicultural legislation, focusing on departmental policies, intense lobbying by ethnic organizations, and changing attitudes during the sixties’ container of “third force” (of neither English nor French origin) activism. This story of Canadian multiculturalism is told from the grassroots level of immigrant leisure, where a pluralistic envisioning of English Canada was foreshadowed, renegotiated, and acted out “from below.” It argues that the thousands of European immigrant men who played and watched sports on Toronto’s sport periphery were agents of change. They created a competitive model of popular multiculturalism that emphasized cultural distinctiveness during a period of rapid social and political transformation and national self-reflection. By the 1980s, the first-generation immigrants and community leaders moved this model of competitive pluralism into transnational spheres and interacted with other diasporic projects when they sent their Canadian-born children on “homeland trips” to Europe to discover their roots in the context of sport tournaments. At the same time, popular multiculturalism moved into the mainstream when the City of Toronto appropriated soccer fandom as the example for its own rebranding as a metropolis of urban harmony and conviviality. This dissertation also studies how and why one immigrant community played an outsized role in the grassroots organization of diversity. Italians were the first to establish a profitable model out of ethnic sport, and the estimated 250,000 people who celebrated unscripted on the streets of Toronto after Italy’s 1982 World Cup victory, it is argued, produced a watershed moment in the history of Canadian multiculturalism. The World Cup party inaugurated new modes of citizen participation in the public sphere, produced the narrative with which Italians formed a collective memory of their post-migration experience, and prompted mainstream political and commercial interests to represent themselves to the public in the symbols and language of multiculturalism as sport. This dissertation also shows how the movement of a male-driven, competitive pluralism to the centre, sometimes accompanied by outbursts of rough masculinities, revealed the paradoxical problem that in the new vision of inclusivity, cultural distinctiveness had to be identified, maintained, and sometimes defended to survive. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2019-02-05 | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. “Migration as an Exercise in Sport: European Immigrants, Soccer Fandom, and the Making of Canadian Multiculturalism, 1945-1979.” International Journal of the History of Sport 34 no. 10 (2017): 970-991 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. "Currying Flavor: Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rise of Indian Food in the United Kingdom." In The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World. Ed. Russell Cobb, 35-52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. "Ethnicity in Trail, British Columbia, 1970-77." In Gender History: Canadian Perspectives. Edited by Willeen Keough and Lara Campbell. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. “The Changing Face of Little Italy: The Colombo Lodge Queen Pageant and Italian Identity in Trail, British Columbia, 1970-76.” Urban History Review 39, no. 1 (Fall, 2010): 45-58. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. “'We are Promoting an Up-to-date Image of Italy’: The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Italian Ethnicity in Vancouver, Canada, 1973-1998.” In Small Towns, Large Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans. Edited by Stefano Luconi and Dennis Barone, 186-209. New York: American Italian Historical Association, 2010. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. “Liberal Governance, Multiculturalism, and the Making of Ethnocultural Identities in Canada.” Journal of the Institute for the Humanities 4 (Spring, 2009): 87-97 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity, by Gerald R. Gems, Journal of American Ethnic History 37, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 83-4. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, by Simone Cinotto, AltreItalie: International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World 52 (June, 2016). Open Access. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of Righting Canada's Wrongs: Italian Canadian Internment in the Second World War, by Pamela Hickman and Jean Smith Cavalluzzo. BC Studies 182 (Summer, 2014): 234. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of InJustice Served: The Story of British Columbia’s Italian Enemy Italians during World War II, by Raymond Culos. BC Studies 182 (Summer, 2014): 235. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of Whoever Gives us our Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia, by Lynne Bowen, BC Studies 173 (Spring, 2012): 160-2. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada, by Sonia Cancan, H-NET Canada, 2011. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.bibliographicCitation | Fielding, Stephen. Review of For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Remaking of Canada in the 1960s, by Gary Miedema, H-NET Canada, 2008. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1828/9276 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.subject | Multiculturalism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Ethnicity | en_US |
| dc.subject | Postwar Canada | en_US |
| dc.subject | Migration | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sport | en_US |
| dc.subject | Gender | en_US |
| dc.subject | Diaspora | en_US |
| dc.title | Sporting multiculturalism: Toronto's postwar European immigrants, gender, diaspora, and the grassroots making of Canadian diversity | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |