So, where are you from? Nation, Place, and Belonging

A guest blog by Gio Diokno, 4th year Theatre and Film Student, McMaster University

Over the course of the past year, I’ve been conducting research that looks into how self-representation can serve as a means to connect to others. Continuing in this vein, I’d like to connect some of my personal experiences to the politics taken up in Jin-me Yoon’s postcard series Souvenirs of the Self (1991), one of the works featured in This is Me, This is Also Me.

So where are you from?
– Milton.
No, I mean, where are you from?
– California.
Oh! So you’re American.
– No.
What are you, then?

The transcript above is an example of conversations I’ve encountered. You can tell when these types of conversations are innocuous inquiries about where one goes home for breaks and holidays, and when they’re invasive investigations into one’s background. I find these types of conversations extremely alienating, as though my identity is something to be scrutinized. It makes me feel as though I’m something foreign; something to be identified, categorized, and determined as “not your typical Canadian.”

Through her postcard series, Jin-me Yoon addresses the notion of bodies that appear foreign and that are subject to racialization. Racialization can be understood as how people’s bodies are associated with ideas based on race. In the postcards, Jin-me Yoon juxtaposes her body against landscapes and landmarks in the Canadian Rockies. Her body standing against the vast landscapes and the idea of these images as postcards establish a foreign tourist aesthetic. The images ask us to question how we read Jin-me Yoon’s body in relation to such tourist sites. What visual cues prompt us to read bodies as foreign in relation to a space? What do we associate with “fellow Canadians” versus “tourists”? Why are we compelled to make such distinctions in the first place?

Part of the issue lies within the concept of Canadian identity and how society views certain bodies to be included and excluded in this concept. With a New Brunswick university professor recently claiming that Asian Canadians are changing the British character of Vancouver[i], it isn’t difficult to see how certain bodies are read in different ways within the space of Canada. Most notably, the continued erasure of Indigenous groups in the discourse of “Canadian identity” is evident in how Asian migrants are viewed as invasive in relation to British settler culture, which stands as the historicized “standard culture” of Canada.