Theorizing the Local: Diversity, Race and Belonging in the City of Toronto

This thesis engages with critical race and postcolonial theories to explore how race is reproduced and organized through diversity discourse in the City of Toronto. The central question of my research is: which historical conditions and practices, tied to what kind of truth-claims, are re-articulated and justified by diversity discourse? The focus of this study is an examination of how power is negotiated and transformed through multiple conceptual and embodied schisms into the re-production and justification of particular truths which, in turn, provide conditions for the possibility of diversity discourse in the present. My research involves two phases: interviews with 15 racialized City of Toronto staff to explore their multiple positionings in the active subjectivization and instrumentation of diversity discourse, and a detailed genealogical review of past and present diversity-related documents from the City of Toronto to expose the illegitimate accounts of diversity discourse. In this second phase, I begin to reflect diversity in the City as a series of events, bending to the will of political and racial forces and their effects. I draw and expand upon critical discourse analysis to analyze how the uses and understandings of diversity by racialized staff get taken up and reproduced through formal City documents. This helps me to outline the complex conditions of power and resistance, and how they are negotiated by racialized City of Toronto staff in and through the institution.

In my analyses, I demonstrate how diversity discourse limits the belonging of racial Others in the City of Toronto, whereby they become articulate(d) subjects only to the extent that diversity is reiterated, reproduced, and cited by them, and through them. I also explore how diversity discourse invites negotiations of belonging via being bound with deeply affective longings to be not-strange, not-raced, with the understanding that the various subjectivities that are caught up in processes of yearning are reproduced through diversity discourse as racialized subjects. Finally, in my conclusion I attend to the ideas of complicity, contradiction and refusal in diversity work, as mechanisms of disruption. I also reveal my own complex and produced positionings in this diversity work, as one who seemingly stands outside the research, in order to expose my own complicities in the very violence which I seek to make visible and disrupt.