| Abstract
|
:
|
July 2007 saw the opening of Canada's largest Hindu temple. The monumental structure, located in a suburban-industrial neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, cost nearly forty million dollars to build, every dollar of which was raised by the temple's congregants, and was constructed largely through the efforts of volunteers. Built according to ancient architectural principles prescribed in Hinduism's oldest sacred texts, and made almost entirely of marble stones individually handcrafted in India, it is the fourth temple of its kind in North America, and the fifth in the Western World. Prime Minister Stephen Harper attended the opening, and declared Canada's new "architectural wonder" a symbol of our country's ethnic and religious pluralism. As the Canadian public celebrated the construction of the BAPS Mandir, they simultaneously chronicled the story of another Hindu community in the Greater Toronto Area in a much less reverential tone: the campaign led by the Hindu Federation to secure a waterfront site in one of GTA's parks for Hindu funeral ceremonies. The campaign was roundly criticized in the name of environmental concerns and multiculturalism's failure to promote integration. This thesis explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which Canadian multiculturalism is constructed in official and public discourse with these two sites as a focusing lens. Determining how, in one moment the Hindu community is a source of pride, and in another, a source of pollution and anxiety, I look at the role of emotions and feelings in processes of inclusion and exclusion, and I trace the emergence of a new articulation of the relationship between ethno-cultural minorities, the nation and national citizenship. Further, I explore the way in which these two sites mediate discourses and articulations of multiculturalism by addressing the suburban locales in which they are situated, and the modes of urban citizenship these sites make possible. I develop the concept of "suburban multiculturalism" to account for the new realities and challenges posed by the transformations in Canada's urban, cultural and political environment.
|