Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada

Abstract

For anyone concerned with US and Canadian cultures, multiculturalism inevitably turns into a crucial matter, sooner or later. The self-conceptions of both nations soundly rest upon processes of immigration and integration characteristic of former settler colonies—similar to Australia and New Zealand. At the same time, US and Canadian nation building came at the price of acts of exclusion that have had lasting effects—be it the European colonial powers’ confrontations with various Indigenous peoples or, in the case of the United States, the enslavement, oppression, and ongoing discrimination of African Americans. All these processes—essentially processes of globalization—have significantly shaped US and Canadian political structures and cultures. The two nations’ history and rhetoric of ethnic contact and conflict, however, also differ in important ways. ¹ Embracing its more positively valued metaphor of the mosaic, Canadian multiculturalist discourse has aimed at distancing itself from the trope of the melting pot, which was introduced by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). What tends to be forgotten, though, is that when Kate Foster’s Our Canadian Mosaic was first published in 1926, Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and others had already coined the term “cultural pluralism” and helped to establish the “salad bowl” metaphor, which has displaced the trope of the melting pot in the self-conception of the United States since the 1970s. ²