Orientalism at Home: The Case of "Canada's Toughest Neighborhood"

r nt l t h : th f n d t h tn hb rh d

Chris Richardson

British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 27, Number 1, 2014, pp.75-95 (Article)

P bl h d b L v rp l n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/bjs.2014.0004

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British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 doi:10.3828/bjcs.2014.5

Chris Richardson

Orientalism at home: the case of ‘Canada’s toughest neighbourhood’

This article examines representations of Jane-Finch, a community in north-west Toronto deemed ‘Canada’s toughest neighbourhood’ by The Globe and Mail in 2007. By exploring how the dominant news media negotiate a sense of Canadian identity in contradistinction to this margin-alised space, the article highlights the insights that Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) creates when translated into a Canadian context. I argue that by applying Said’s conceptual framework to Canadian communities such as Jane-Finch, scholars stand to learn much about the myth of what it means to be Canadian and how the mainstream news media reproduce this (self-)knowledge.

Keywords: crime, discourse, gangs, journalism, Orientalism, media studies

Orientalism at home

For a writer to use the word Oriental was a reference for the reader sufficient to identify a specific body of information about the Orient. This information seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid; it seemed to have an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical location. (Said 2003: 205)

Introduction

In the mid-afternoon of 23 May 2007, Jordan Manners was shot in the chest inside C.W. Jeffreys Collegiate Institute in north-west Toronto. The previous Friday, Manners had celebrated his fifteenth birthday with friends and family. The festivities took place in the neighbourhood of Jane-Finch where Manners lived with his mother. The day after the shooting, Jane-Finch appeared in virtually every Canadian newspaper from the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal to The Vancouver Sun. As newspapers detailed Manners’s death, the line favoured when describing the neighbourhood was ‘the Jane-Finch corridor [is] a poor area of Toronto noted for years for

76 BRITISH JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES

its high crime rate’.1 Other newspaper articles described the community as ‘blighted’ (Bielski 2007: A13), ‘troubled’ (Leong and Coutts 2007: A3), and ‘a very tough neighbourhood’ (DiManno 2007: A1). Though this story is a sad one, it is also a familiar one for many Canadians. Jane-Finch, as one journalist writes, ‘has become a catch-all phrase that suggests poverty, gangs and racial division’ (Friesen 2006: A15). Like ‘the Orient’ of Edward Said’s landmark study, Jane-Finch has become a signifier that, far from reflecting a geographical landscape, constructs a space that is in a perpetual state of disarray. It is known to most Canadians as a space that is inherently racialised, dangerous, violent and backwards. As I explore in this article, however, perhaps this marginalisation within dominant Canadian discourses reveals more about how Canadians construct national identity than it does about the neighbourhood of Jane-Finch.

In their chapter entitled ‘Recasting the Social in Citizenship’, Isin et al. argue that ‘rather than starting with differences and asking how to label and classify them, we must explain how they are constructed and by whom, and when and why they become salient’ (2008: 10). In short, they call on contemporary scholars to ‘examine how processes of inclusion and exclusion affect membership in … bounded and unbounded collec-tivities’ (p. 10). Numerous fields are responsible for the ways in which such processes play out within the context of Canada and other nations, not the least of which is the representation of ‘Canadian-ness’ in the dominant news media. Scholars such as Cohen and young (1981), Gans (2004), Herman and Chomsky (2002) and Tuchman (1978) have explored how media outlets defend the ideological positions of the powerful, focus disproportionally on ‘deviant’ communities and subcultures and deploy shared professional values that frame news in very specific ways. These inquiries adopt methods aligned with media ‘effects’ research, content analysis and media production observation to support claims that the news media contribute to the perpet-uation of dominant social arrangements and close off alternative views. As Ferrell, Hayward and young (2008) argue, however, ‘what is required now are new modes of analysis that utilise aspects of the[se] approaches without reproducing their old formulae and outdated dualisms’ (p. 129). While there is no doubt a need for innovation and advancement into the study of how groups form their conceptions of inclusivity and difference, I argue that perhaps an important and valuable way of understanding this relationship has already been established, albeit with a different subject matter as its original focal point.

In this article, I discuss how Edward Said’s conceptual framework in

77ORIENTALISM AT HOME

Orientalism (1978, 2003) can help readers and media scholars understand and interrogate representations of marginalised Canadian communities like Jane-Finch and explore how language, culture and everyday material practices work to (re)produce ways of ‘knowing’ the Other, even when it is located within Canada’s own borders. Through ideologically driven descriptions of the neighbourhood and the use of ‘expert’ sources, Canadian newspapers have helped to construct this space much like Orientalists were able to construct and to ‘know’ the East in certain ways. Thus, Said’s work in Orientalism provides a valuable theoretical framework for approaching the processes that have constructed Jane-Finch in the popular imagination of many Canadians by drawing attention to the subtle ways in which subjectivities are formed through the creation of Others and applied to representations of physical spaces. Applying Said’s outline to spaces/places within Canada, however, is not simple. As I explore, translating Orientalism into a Canadian context creates helpful insights as well as specific challenges. Consequently, I begin by situating the community of Jane-Finch within a specific historical, political and social formation. Second, I elaborate the ways in which Said’s work on Orientalism can benefit not only the study of the construction of the East, but also an understanding of marginalised communities within Western countries. This revised approach is then deployed in the analysis of a major newspaper article on Jane-Finch to highlight the efficacy of Said’s framework and to demonstrate how it can assist future explorations. Finally, I conclude by assessing the value of utilising Orientalism’s framework within the Canadian context while underlining certain perils of which researchers must beware.

In The World, the Text and the Critic, Said (1991) argues that, as critics of texts, we can often ‘show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place’ (p. 2). He argues that ‘texts are worldly’ and, even if they appear otherwise, they are part of ‘the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted’ (p. 4). Like all neighbourhoods, Jane-Finch is a product of historical developments, government policies, and socialising practices. Many factors have played a role in creating what the dominant Canadian news media now refer to as ‘Jane-Finch’ and it is worth briefly exploring them before analysing the representations of its contemporary existence.


Situating Jane-Finch in the world

In his call for a contrapuntal reading of the cultural archive, Said asserts that we must ‘look back … with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and those of other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (Said 1993: 51). Thus, I present here a brief glimpse of the historical context in which any criticism of representations of Jane-Finch must be situated. By examining this history simultaneously with dominant contemporary depictions in the Canadian press, one stands to better understand the process that constructs Jane-Finch as an inherently criminal space, a process that effaces the historical in favour of the ‘natural’, which is, of course, always a product of history. Thus, what I present is not the history of Jane-Finch but a history – one that exists alongside the dominant narrative of the neighbourhood, but not in place of it.

Five hundred years ago, the area east of Humber River that is now part of North york was inhabited by Iroquoian communities. Longhouses, some 36 meters long by 9 meters wide, peppered the landscape from roughly 1400 to 1550 (From Longhouse 1986). Many years after these groups left to explore other regions of Ontario, European settlers arrived in about 1800. The first Lieutenant Governor, John Simcoe, offered free lots of 200 acres to any ‘law abiding Christian who was capable of manual labour’ (p. 7). One of the first English settlers, arriving in the late 1830s, was John Boynton, who built a house near Concession Road 5 (later Jane Street) and the Emery-Elia side road (later Finch Avenue West). The area continued to develop into the twentieth century with churches, schools and farms scattered along dirt roads.

The real boom in the Jane-Finch area came after the Second World War. In the 1960s, major roads were paved and widened while the city and the private sector constructed dozens of high-density apartments to meet the needs of the growing population. In a decade, the population exploded from 1,301 in 1961 to 33,030 in 1971 (p. 7). While Jane-Finch grew exponen-tially, city services and acceptance of the new immigrants from Africa, Asia, South America and the West Indies did not. In the 1970s, The Globe and Mail compared Jane-Finch to ‘a ravaged section of New york’ where ‘racial problems are not restricted to those between blacks and whites … but involve all ethnic groupings in the area’ (Moon 1979: 4). By the 1980s, newspapers such as The Toronto Star reported headlines like ‘Jane-Finch … resents its stereotype as a concrete jungle of social breakdown’ (DiManno 1986: F1).


Mainstream newspapers presented Jane-Finch as a paradox: ‘An immigrant enclave where people of diverse colour and background sometimes clash, but not a black hole of racial confrontation on the brink of rioting’ (p. F1). The area was known as ‘a place where you can score cocaine, hash and acid easily … but not one giant drug emporium peopled with dopeheads and drug overlords’ (p. F1). Regardless of the neighbourhood’s many connotations, Jane-Finch was without a doubt ‘synonymous with trouble’ (p. F1).

In 2005, a higher than average number of shootings in Toronto led many newspapers to use the phrase ‘the summer of the gun’ (Richardson 2007: 66). At this time, the Toronto Sun published a seven-part series detailing the now-infamous neighbourhood. The title of this series was ‘Life and death in Jane-Finch’ (Clarkson and Godfrey 2005: 31). The Globe and Mail installed a reporter in Jane-Finch one year later with a mandate to cover its trials and tribulations (Richardson 2007). Joe Friesen, who had sporadically covered issues in the community since 2005, spent five months working out of a make-shift office on San Romanoway in the centre of Jane-Finch. Friesen attempted to make sense of the infamous neighbourhood, relaying a human side to the often dehumanising images readers were used to seeing. ‘Those who live here say the stereotypes obscure a complex, resilient community struggling to emerge from years of neglect’, wrote Friesen (2006: A15). In some respects, Friesen’s work for The Globe and Mail was a major step forward. But such reports did not always liberate the community from the stigmas it has had pressed upon it. Sometimes, these well-intentioned investigations further segregated ‘them’ from ‘us’. Under the guise of tearing down barriers, newspapers and journalists often erected bigger, less visible ones between ‘truly Canadian’ communities and those ‘other spaces’ like Jane-Finch (Richardson 2007, 2008, 2011).

Today, the majority of Canadian newspaper readers would likely have trouble picturing anything but an immigrant ghetto synonymous with poverty, violence and crime in Jane-Finch. The metamorphosis from Aboriginal community to pioneer village to the feared and criminalised space represented in contemporary newspapers is a story that is rarely told, but it remains an important narrative if one is to challenge depictions of this locality as naturally immoral, poverty stricken and dysfunc-tional. While the neighbourhood continues to grow and change, the conception of ‘Jane-Finch’ in the dominant Canadian news media seems to have congealed. Like ‘the Orient’ that Said meticulously interrogates, a combination of experts and institutions perpetuating fixed discourses and self-fulfilling prophecies has helped to freeze this space in a specific image.


Jane-Finch has forever been and forever will be a depraved and crumbling area – ‘Canada’s toughest neighbourhood’ as The Globe and Mail proclaimed in 2007 – or at least that is how the prevailing journalistic story seems to go.

Said’s theoretical framework

For Said, the way the West discusses, depicts and ‘knows’ the East is far from objective. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Said argues that how one speaks about ‘the Orient’ does much more than simply describe it. This discourse helps to produce it. No matter how ‘objectively’ one speaks of the Orient, Said argues, ‘no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his [sic] own circumstances’ (2003: 11). One’s position ideologically and culturally affects how one sees and depicts physical and conceptual spaces. Following this line of thought, ‘Jane-Finch’ – like ‘the Orient’ – exists not so much in reality as in Canadians’ agreed-upon knowledge of reality. Before exploring the implications of this framework for Jane-Finch, however, I would like to examine how Said originally envisioned this process.

As Said writes, ‘Orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient – its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness – into a separate and unchal-lenged coherence’ (p. 205). In this passage, a similarity resonates between Said’s critique of Orientalist practices, Foucault’s theories of power and knowledge (1980, 1995, 2006) and Roland Barthes’s model of mythology (1972). The language used to depict the Orient works only in relation to other texts, which situate it within what Foucault would call ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault 2006: 34). Such representations, which can seem unbiased and natural, nevertheless connote socially constructed concepts similar to Barthesian myth. The irreducible element within Said’s work, however, is his model for performing this kind of examination of power–knowledge and myth on a geographical level. This is the value of Said’s work and one of the ways in which he goes beyond the frameworks set out before him. This grounding in geography is the indispensable aspect of Orientalism that I argue allows scholars to interrogate more deeply the marginalisation of certain Canadian communities. One must begin with an acknowledgement of Foucault’s influence on Said, however, to fully appreciate this framework.


Factoring in Foucault

Foucault’s writing on discursive practices and power–knowledge relationships, more than any other work, helped to lay the theoretical foundation for Orientalism. As Gregory argues, ‘Said’s engagements with Foucault are neither uncritical nor unchanging, but throughout his writings he retains a considerable respect for Foucault’s spatial sensibility’ (1995: 455). Early in Orientalism, Said mentions Foucault’s concept of discourse, writing that ‘without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient’ (2003: 3). For those interested in marginalised spaces like Jane-Finch, Said’s nuanced elaboration of how representations depict, manage and produce knowledge of people and places is quite valuable. Building on this theme, Isin has argued that ‘at the root of the occidental conception of citizenship lies the invention of the oriental city as its Other’ (Isin 2002: 5). These authors are careful to point out, however, that this Other cannot be assumed to pre-exist concepts of citizenship. Such an Other is internally produced during the construction of citizenship. In other words, the largely unchallenged notion that occidental citizenship was constructed by distinguishing Europeans from ‘Orientals’ would more correctly be expressed as the process of creating Others such as ‘Orientals’ to introduce conceptions of citizenship. While this idea is familiar to many Canadian scholars, it generally appears in works focusing on international relations. I suggest, however, that this process occurs on a much more local level. Jane-Finch, while located inside Toronto, works in much the same way as those countries thousands of kilometres away to evoke a sense of citizenship among dominant Canadians while symbol-ically stripping many local residents – even those who have been living in Jane-Finch for multiple generations – of their Canadian status.

The relationship of power and knowledge is an important one within Orientalism as it is in Foucault’s work. Hall summarises these similarities succinctly:

Said’s discussion of Orientalism closely parallels Foucault’s power–knowledge argument: a discourse produces, through different practices of represen-tation (scholarship, exhibition, literature, painting, etc.), a form of racialised knowledge of the Other (Orientalism) deeply implicated in the operations of power (imperialism). (2003: 260)

As a geographic space, ‘the Orient’ is assimilated into various disciplines.


Said suggests that ‘the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks’ (2003: 40). It is something that the West judges (within the law), studies (within curriculum) and disciplines (within schools and prisons). One must therefore examine not only the discourses that produce knowledge of the Orient, but also acknowledge the heterogeneous apparatuses that aid in its formation and reproduction. I take dominant Canadian newspapers to be one such apparatus while acknowledging that, of course, a more fully articulated understanding of these power–knowledge relationships must take into account other apparatuses such as educational, legal, medical and political bodies and institutions. The scope of this article, however, does not allow for a prolonged analysis of the myriad apparatuses within this process and the complex ways through which they (re)produce one another. The media apparatus within Canada provides a point from which Canadians look out onto ‘the Other’.2 In terms of Jane-Finch, newspapers and broadcasts are the only access for the majority of citizens who will never venture there themselves. This separation allows for a high degree of autonomy for the dominant news media to create and elaborate in detail this imagined space. Even though Jane-Finch does not exist in a faraway location – in some cases, Jane-Finch is only a few kilometres away from readers and audiences – it takes on a mythical status much like ‘the Orient’.

Isin draws attention to the dialectical relationship between Oriental and Occidental notions of citizenship and polity, arguing that ‘the more we learn about them, the less is the distance that separates the Orient from the Occident’ (p. 60). Within Said’s study of the Occident’s representations of the Orient, however, there is an assertion that ‘no dialectic is either desired or allowed. There is a source of information (the Oriental) and a source of knowledge (the Orientalist)’ (Said 2003: 308). In this sense, representations of such differences perpetuate the distance between these spaces rather than bringing people closer together. Similarly, news about Jane-Finch is derived from events and experiences in the neighbourhood, but it is the profes-sional journalist who provides and disseminates knowledge by relaying the observations of politicians, lawyers and especially law enforcement. In this way, dominant discourses are elaborated through disciplinary formations that work to distance the average reader from this increasingly foreign space.3 Orientalism, in this sense, is most similar to Foucault’s work during the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically his idea of panopticism in Discipline and Punish (1995). As Said later admits, ‘the parallel between Foucault’s carceral system and Orientalism is striking’ (1991: 222). The relationship, then,


between the ‘good citizen’ and the ‘criminal’ is essential to understanding how the Orient is conceptualised spatially and intellectually in Said’s work. It is also critical for conceiving how Jane-Finch figuratively disciplines Canadian readers who, by observing this criminalised neighbourhood through mainstream media, become self-regulated in a parallel way to Foucault’s notion of panopticism.

Orientalism in ‘Canada’s toughest neighbourhood’

Shortly after 15-year-old Jordan Manners’s death, The Globe and Mail published ‘Where boundary issues turn deadly’ (Friesen 2007). As one of the most in-depth features relating to Jane-Finch at the time, the article presents a paradigmatic example of how myth and discourse play vital roles in the dominant Canadian news media’s ability to understand and ‘know’ marginal spaces within its borders. Building on Clifford Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ (2000), the interrogation of a single media text may be limited in its generalisability, but stands out significantly in the ‘qualitative studies whose detail and depth offer the opportunity to explore subtle shadings and multiple meanings’ (Lule 1995: 200). Through a reading of this text inspired by Said’s framework, it becomes evident how valuable Orientalism may be for scholars seeking to better understand such represen-tations within Canada.4

‘Where boundary issues turn deadly’ is not about Manners’s killing in 2007, but about the place in which he was killed. The event, as the reporter points out, is ‘remarkable only because [the shooting] happened at school’ (Friesen 2007: A16). What Friesen does, however, is remarkable for another reason: here he attempts to (re)map the area as it pertains to gangs, doing explicitly what many articles have done and continue to do implicitly, which is render the area understandable to outsiders as a criminalised space in which residents need to be explained by an authority figure who enters the area and renders it explicable. Said writes that Orientalism ‘formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West’ (2003: 166). Similarly, I suggest that Friesen enters the neighbourhood and (re)produces a simulacrum of Jane-Finch in a popular newspaper for his national readership.5

As early as the teaser on the bottom fold of page A1, a place is mentioned where things are ‘deadly’. Under a photograph of a shadowy, hooded black man in front of a chain-link fence with the Palisades apartment complex in


the distance, The Globe and Mail proclaims that Jane-Finch is ‘a place where guns are abundant and gang turf determines who can go where’ (‘Where the gangs rule’ 2007: A1). In short, it is ‘Canada’s toughest Neighbourhood’ (p. A1). This hyperbolic designation is repeated on pages 16 and 17. Thus, while the headline constructs a seemingly dangerous space, the front page and subsequent mentions of ‘Canada’s toughest neighbourhood’ leave little doubt about the peril Jane-Finch presents. This story is in ‘Canada’s national newspaper’,6 The Globe and Mail, so one can assume the paper presents an important issue for Canadians. Seemingly, the problem is that Canadian cities, as citizens are often told by newspapers, are falling prey to violence and degradation. Thus, the first myth, signified before a single word of the article need be read, is the problem of urban decay. This problem is a familiar one and needs little explanation, as each year many similar stories further this myth as an inevitable occurrence in urban areas.7

How Friesen presents himself in the article is telling. Near the beginning, he states, ‘last year, I spent three months writing about Toronto’s Jane-Finch neighbourhood … after Jordan’s shooting death, I returned’ (2007: A16). In this paragraph, he goes on to establish an expertise, ostensibly proving why he should write this story. Unlike many journalists, Friesen uses the first-person pronoun. He also refers to the victim as ‘Jordan’ instead of following the common journalistic practice of referring to the subject by his last name. This technique illustrates that Friesen is well established in the area. Friesen posits himself in the same way Said writes that Orientalists relied on the idea of ‘expertise’ to be able to make truth claims about the places they studied. Said describes these experts as translators of a ‘barely intelligible civilisation’ who ‘sympathetically portray’ and ‘inwardly grasp’ the place and its people (2003: 222). These experts, aside from building a body of Orientalist knowledge, frequently advised on government policy. It is interesting to note that at least two reports, one from the City of Toronto (Armstrong, Hough and Zade 2005) and one from the United Way of Greater Toronto (2006) rely, at least in part, on stories written by Friesen during this earlier period. This link demonstrates that such articles, regardless of intention, are used to justify political decisions involving Jane-Finch much like Orientalists’ expert opinions were used to justify political decisions in the East.

After establishing his expertise, Friesen presents his findings and implicit recommendations. These are summarised in the subheading of the article, ‘With the map redrawn by gangs … access to vital youth programs is blocked for those who need them most’ (2007: A16). To begin, the problem


of ‘deadly’ streets is established. The finding is that the solution is already in place – ‘vital youth programs’ already exist, according to the article. The problem is that ‘gangs’ have redrawn the map and that access is ‘blocked’ by the very group of people who need to attend these programmes. Friesen seems to argue that this is not the fault of anyone outside Jane-Finch. Instead, it is due to a ‘self-imposed segregation’. In a way, the problem is solved, at least for the casual Canadian reader. Jane-Finch is ‘deadly’. But there are government-funded programmes in place. The problem is these programmes are not being attended by the people who need them most. And this is an internal problem perpetuated by Jane-Finch residents who are unwilling to work within the structures of the programmes. This finding, however, relies on three myths to which the story alludes.

The first myth is the ‘savage foreigner’. Jane-Finch is presented as a foreign place, full of foreign citizens, thus de-emphasising the ‘Canadian’ aspect of the problem and focusing on its Otherness. The concept of Orientalism is perhaps most valuable here for helping the reader understand identity formation in this context. Said argues that the West’s gaze upon the Orient was what enabled Europeans to shape a strong collective sense of identity. Contrasting themselves to the ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ ways of the Orient, Said argues, Europeans defined themselves as sophisticated and rational beings. Similarly, in the Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2005), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that ‘the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters’ (p. lviii). It is a popular idea in cultural studies, stemming from theories in psychoanalysis and linguistics, that one can only define oneself in relation to an Other (Hall 2003; Lemert 2004). And, as Said writes, the Orient is one of Europe’s ‘deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (2003: 1). In The Globe and Mail article, Friesen writes that for residents north of Finch Avenue, the south side ‘might as well be in another country’ (2007: A16). While this is, of course, a hyperbolic statement meant to illustrate the stark division within the neighbourhood itself, it also highlights how easily borders can be found or created symbolically, even to the extent of creating virtual countries within countries. The phrase also illuminates an underlying assumption in Friesen’s argument. In this article, Jane-Finch residents are clearly not the intended readers. Instead, they are positioned as the Other about whom mainstream Canadians are reading.

In explaining ‘how the ’hood came to be’, Friesen makes reference to ‘Somalians’, ‘recent immigrants from the Caribbean’, ‘Sierra Leone’ and ‘Ghana’, and refers to experimentation in urban planning that led to the


‘opening up of Canada’s immigration policy to non-whites’ (pp. A16–17). When referring to these immigrants, the myth of the uncivilised Other is on the cusp of many sentences. Friesen describes a ritual of placing coins on gravestones, depicting the event as if it took place in some distant African setting. He writes that the boys ‘fussed over the flowers, trying to make them stand upright in the dry, cracked earth’ (p. A16). This choice of detail evokes a sense of desolation in stark contrast to the common myth of Canada’s rich natural landscapes and calls to mind images of parched earth and famine-devastated African villages that North Americans are often exposed to through the media (Lister and Wells 2001). In writing of the casual manner in which two boys ‘ just met on the plane from Sierra Leone’, Friesen draws attention to un-Canadian identities and seems to imply that there are few individual differences between the boys since they are both African. Thus, the article frequently conjures images of the savage Other; someone who lacks the knowledge and manners to be a proper Canadian and must therefore be taught.

The second myth, predicated upon the first, is the ‘broken family’. Friesen quotes a boy as saying ‘he’s not my real cousin anyway’ (p. A17). Shortly afterward, the journalist describes a girl who arrives at a basketball game with a ‘woman in her 40s’ who may or may not be the girl’s mother. The older woman accuses a boy of ‘abandoning the pregnant mother of his child’, to which the boy reacts sceptically. Not only does this contrast traditional family values in Canada with residents of Jane-Finch, it also alludes to the threat of promiscuity and lax sexual behaviour of the Other. The logical expansion of this idea is the threat of miscegenation and the black male predator, a trope explored extensively by such authors as Dines (2003), Dyson (1993), Jones (1993) and Wiegman (1993). Finally, when referring to a boy named ‘Ice’ who refuses to sell drugs, Friesen writes, ‘unlike most of his friends, Ice lives with both of his parents’ (p. A17). In this sentence, Friesen seems to attribute the boy’s higher moral stance to his position within a nuclear family. As Muzzatti and Featherstone (2007) write, ‘while reporters do not make up facts, they do select facts’ (p. 44).8 It is precisely the ‘facts’ Friesen chooses relating to the families of these young men that bathe the story in a heavily constructed myth. With these choices of details, the article builds upon the myth of the broken family and wanton sexuality of the Other as contributing factors in this problem of urban social breakdown within Canada.

The last myth is the spread of the ‘American inner-city gang’ into Canadian streets. As Friesen points out early in the article, most northern


Jane-Finch residents ‘consider themselves Bloods, an identity borrowed from the gang wars of Los Angeles’ (p. A16). With this description, Canadian readers will recall the moral panics of gun-crazed Los Angeles gang members with red and blue bandanas that became a media spectacle in the 1980s and 1990s – only now the threat is that such events could become a reality in north-west Toronto (see Bing 1989; Johnson 2003). In a 1989 Harper’s article, Bing writes of the mediated Blood–Crip war, saying that ‘it would be hard to write a morality play more likely to strike terror into the hearts of the middle-class’ (p. 51). The photograph on page A17 anchors such imagery by depicting a young man in an oversized 2Pac T-shirt, thereby relaying connotations associated with infamous hip-hop icons linked to the gang wars in Los Angeles. These references to gangs exemplify the kind of dialectical reinforcement to which Said alludes when writing of how ‘the experiences of readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in turn influences writers to take up subjects defined in advance by readers’ experiences’ (2003: 94). Friesen sees what he has already read about in relation to US inner cities, and by writing these observations for the newspaper he influences what Canadians will likely see in such spaces. Though there may indeed be gang activity in Jane-Finch, the myriad popular culture connotations associated with Bloods and Crips stack myth upon reality in this case.

These myth-based constructs are cemented with the map on page A16. A satellite image of Jane-Finch appears with indications of each gang’s territory. In essence, The Globe and Mail submits visual proof that these gangs, based on constructs emanating from US inner cities, have overtaken a section of Toronto. This visual myth is most successful because of its ability to hide the constructed nature of the image. The photograph, while captured from satellite equipment, is nevertheless a construction just as a drawing or a written description would be. As Kuhn writes, ‘photographs are coded, but usually so as to appear uncoded’ (Kuhn 1985: 27). Most important in this instance is that The Globe and Mail takes the mythology of the Bloods and Crips and gives it an empirical value by literally mapping the area and defining where it exists. In superimposing this map on the city and dividing it by gang territory, the newspaper visually negates any non-gang residents in these areas. The individual resident is placed under erasure, leaving the reader with an almost monolithic group of foreign criminals occupying this space.

Said presents an interesting explanation of how geographical spaces


take on mythic connotations using the metaphor of a house. Referring to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1994), Said writes,

The objective space of a house – its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms – is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with … a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. (2003: 55)

Continuing this metaphor, I argue that the news media are among the contemporary ‘poets’ who help form cultural understandings of spaces within Canada. They add layer upon layer of myth to the house. This process is all the more intense because of the supposed ‘objectivity’ of journalism. One expects figurative and emotional language from traditional poetry, but mainstream journalism continues to situate itself as objective, unsentimental, and free of bias as best it can. Though informed readers may be sceptical – as they should be – of these claims of unobstructed factual authority, a newspaper is still presented and interpreted in a different way from poems and other creative works. Thus, the mythical layering is more potent within mainstream journalism because the reader is less likely to read these works with the same interpretive and analytic eye as those texts with more artful prose.

Learning from Orientalism

‘Where boundary issues turn deadly’ renders Jane-Finch a criminal space. Many myths – such as the uncivilised Other, the ideal of the nuclear Canadian family and the spread of US gang wars – help to explain this dominant reading of the community. And with this explanation of a seemingly chaotic situation, the space is simultaneously (re)produced and subordinated much like the Orient is (re)produced and subordinated by the Orientalist through ideologically loaded descriptions, expert explanations and the reproduction of socially constructed ways of knowing.

While the scope of this article does not allow a detailed discussion of all the problems one faces in using Said’s framework to study representations of spaces in Canada, I would like to highlight a few concerns. Much criticism of Orientalism has been directed at the very nature of Said’s work (Butz 1995; Clifford 1980; Driver 1992; Lowe 1991; young 1995). In examining the


essentialising practices of Orientalism, Said stands accused of essentialising the Orientalists. young writes that ‘any account of “Orientalism” as an object, discursive or otherwise, will both repeat the essentialism that [Said] condemns and, more problematically, will itself create a representation that cannot be identical to the object it identifies’ (1995: 128). Said’s criticism of Orientalists’ representations becomes itself a representation of this process of ‘knowing’ the Orient, which fits into certain (alternative) discursive formations and further perpetuates constellations of power and knowledge. Furthermore, Butz points out that Orientalism can be viewed merely as a way of essentialising the West. ‘Orientalism resembles the Orientalist texts it critiques’, writes Butz, ‘by using an imaginary Orient as a vehicle for talking, once again, about Europe’ (1995: 65). Building on this critique, it follows that a study of the dominant Canadian news media’s represen-tations of Jane-Finch must itself represent such depictions and therefore perpetuate the dominant discourses in one sense or another – even if the intention of such a study is to challenge them. I would propose, however, that the objective of scholars and other readers should not be to escape representations but to acknowledge the inevitability of representations and to approach this relationship in a self-reflexive way.

Any work on representation will inevitably have to represent the representations that are being criticised. Said writes that the real issue ‘is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer’ (2003: 272). This problem is evidently a major concern in his book. If ‘the Orient’ does not exist outside of discourse, and there is nothing with which one can refer to the East without perpetuating the myth, what can one do? young notes that Said ‘refuses to be drawn in to this argument, on the grounds that … to provide an alternative to Orientalism would be to accept the existence of the very thing in dispute’ (1995: 127). It seems that all one can do in this situation is follow Said’s example by referring to ‘the Orient’, but without acknowledging its existence beyond its discursive construction. Only by bracketing the term and noting that it is being examined as an object of discourse can one interrogate the concept without presupposing a true essence or origin to which these discourses refer. This step, however, does not deny material practices or events that occur in the Middle East (or in Toronto), nor does it make their consequences any less real. There is still crime and violence in Jane-Finch, for example, but the idea of Jane-Finch as a mythical, criminal


space is the kind of essentialising representation that must be called into question in any critical reading of the dominant Canadian news coverage of this space. While there is indeed a material underpinning for the ideas that are (re)produced in the media, such representations are themselves motivated, ideological and not simply a mirror held up to the geographical area that is represented. As I have alluded to above, I believe the goal in this sort of analysis is neither to avoid representations of Jane-Finch nor to argue that they are all sinister. Rather, as Foucault suggests in The Archaeology of Knowledge, ‘in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things’ (2006: 54). By loosening the hold of some of the taken-for-granted assumptions relating to representations of Jane-Finch in the dominant Canadian news media, one begins to see that the social stratification in Toronto and other cities across the country are neither natural nor inevitable and must not be represented as such. The objective is not so much to contrast representations of spaces like Jane-Finch with the ‘reality’ of the situation, whatever that may be, but to highlight what the representations are in contrast to what they could be. With the analysis of representation comes the possibility of challenging and altering the material conditions that are largely able to perpetuate themselves unimpeded because they seem fixed, expected and inescapable in the dominant discourses.

Conclusion

The emergence of Jane-Finch as Canadians know it today developed alongside the massive influx of new immigrants settling in the area in the 1960s and 1970s. With this population came an interest from the dominant news media, which depicted the neighbourhood first as a breeding ground for vandalism (‘Jane-Finch area’ 1978: A4) and then as a violent, menacing space ‘where the gangs rule’ (‘Where the gangs rule’ 2007: A1). Recent articles on the neighbourhood demonstrate that diverse discourses intersect within the coverage of Jane-Finch, but virtually all of them position the area as Canada’s Other (see O’Grady, Parnaby and Schikschneit 2010; Richardson 2007, 2008, 2011). Most journalists swoop in during episodes of violence, taking quotations, shooting photographs and assessing the landscape. Afterward, they present their reports to readers using certain tropes and stereotypes – not always consciously or intentionally – which ground Jane-Finch within specific shared understandings of how and why


this space is un-Canadian. This process perpetuates a sense of national identity negatively, in contradistinction to this marginalised community and its residents (i.e., Canada is not Jane-Finch). Finally, Jane-Finch is frequently mapped; placed within grids of specification – sometimes quite literally – to domesticate the community in much the same way the Orient was filtered by the West ‘through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews’ (Said 2003: 166). Canadian readers are left with a specific ‘knowledge’ of this disavowed population that exists within the country’s own borders. If this knowledge of Jane-Finch has any meaning, to borrow a turn of phrase from Said, it is to remind readers of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time.

Ultimately, by applying Said’s framework in Orientalism to marginalised Canadian communities such as Jane-Finch, scholars stand to learn much about the internal play of what it means to be Canadian and how the dominant news media reproduce this (self-)knowledge within the country. I argue that the next step must be to formulate strategies for understanding how counter-knowledges can be found and deployed to challenge such imbalanced power–knowledge relationships and to develop and integrate these strategies within Canadian studies curricula and research agendas. Perhaps looking back to Said and his canonical work from the beginning of the twenty-first century will provide some of the crucial insights necessary for establishing the new methods and conceptual frameworks that scholars continue to call for in order to better comprehend the symbolic and cultural distinctions that construct Canadian identity within its borders.

Notes

1 ‘Charges laid’ 2007: A4; ‘Many ethnic’ 2007: A3; ‘Teens charged in school’ 2007: A3; ‘Teens charged in T.O.’ 2007: A3; ‘Two 17-year-olds charged’ 2007: A9. While some publications omitted the word ‘poor’ from this description, others used variations such as ‘an area of Toronto, which is known for its high crime rate’ (‘Ottawa denies’ 2007: A3) and ‘an area of Toronto … notorious for its high crime rate’ (‘Arrests’ 2007: A6; ‘60 arrested’ 2007: A3).

2 Throughout this discussion, I refer to ‘the Orient’ and ‘Jane-Finch’ virtually interchangeably rather than highlighting in each selected passage that Said’s theoretical work on ‘the Orient’ represents only an analogue to the discourses on Jane-Finch. This is not to say that the characteristics or representations of ‘the Orient’ and Jane-Finch are the same in any other way. I am therefore taking Said’s specific theory of a historical relationship and using it to comprehend a more general theory of how discourse (re)produces geographically specific places and cultures.


3 Not only do journalists represent the interests of their own disciplinary fields, as Cohen and young (1981), Ericson, Baranek and Chan (1989, 1991), Gans (2004) and Herman and Chomsky (2002) have demonstrated, the corporately owned news media are particularly adept at echoing the power–knowledge formations of the dominant law enforcement, legal, medical and political institutions.

4 This ‘thick description’ attempts to dig deeper, below the surface of representational forms to better understand how power–knowledge relationships are imbedded within even the simplest everyday newspaper story. For a broader analysis of the myriad media texts surrounding the event, see Richardson 2007, 2008, 2011.

5 Of course, Friesen is not the only person to do this. For an elaboration, see the earlier section entitled ‘Situating Jane-Finch in the world’ as well as O’Grady, Parnaby and Schikschneit 2010, and Richardson 2007 and 2008.

6 This description is not the opinion of the author but an acknowledgement of how the newspaper positions itself in relation to other daily publications. On the top-left section of the newspaper, below the title, the tagline ‘Canada’s National Newspaper’ is etched in ink upon each printing.

7 Though little has been written on this myth in a Canadian context, Dreier (2005) presents a valuable exploration of the media obsession with urban decay and how the issue is often constructed as a race and class problem in an American context.

8 Tuchman (1978) highlights this point brilliantly with a quotation from Abbie Hoffman that introduces the study: ‘The headline of the Daily News today reads BRUNETTE STABBED TO DEATH. Underneath in lower case letters “6000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake” … I wonder what color hair they had’ (p. v).

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Orientalism at Home: The Case of "Canada's Toughest Neighborhood"

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