Content area
Full text
THE NEW AFRICAN DIASPORA IN VANCOUVER: MIGRATION, EXCLUSION, AND BELONGING Gillian Creese Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011
In her book, The New African Diaspora in Vancouver: Migration, Exclusion, and Belonging, Gillian Creese offers the first study to explore the relatively small population of Black sub-Saharan Africans living in the Greater Vancouver area, comprising some one percent of the of the population. Creese provides the first substantial academic study of their immigrant experience. At the centre of her analysis are testimonies of sixty-one participants, both female and male, from twenty-one countries in Africa, who struggle to integrate into Canadian society. Two researchers-African im-migrants themselves-have collaborated with Creese on this project, with a goal to reinforce impartiality of the interviews.
Creese's case studies show that despite their desire for inclusion, immigrants are often racialized and perceived as the inferior "other" to the white Canadians. The author focuses on language issues of participants from Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth countries and utilizes Pierre Bourdieu's claims about erasure of linguistic capital of the immigrants, which shows the inextricable link between linguistic competence and...