ABSTRACT
In this essay, I seek to “show and tell” how even those children’s books that potentially trouble multicultural clichés of pluralism in Canada are overlaid and read within naturalized codes of racial hegemony. As both feminist and poststructuralist critiques emphasize, readers inhabit multiple and contradictory social positions from which they make sense of their worlds; nonetheless, it is crucial to examine how official multiculturalism, as a national Canadian ideology, permeates reading practices wherein textual representations of race and ethnicity are managed through Eurocentric normative ideals. Thus, the commonsense understanding of Canada as a national space where we-are-all-the-same-in-side, and therefore as “equal, and as Canadian as the white kid down the street” (Yee 348), orchestrates normative interpretive paradigms through which the category of otherness, as an essentializing depository of difference, is stabilized.
