| Focusing on four major traditional Chinese festivals, namely the Chinese New Year festival, the Dragon Boat festival, the Mid-Autumn festival, and the Dong festival, this dissertation explores the ways Chinese culture lives on in contemporary Toronto. Just as traditional Chinese festivals are rich sites for cultural negotiation in China, they continue to be so in Toronto, a city where diasporic Chinese come in quantities large enough to sustain and demand their presence. With the history of such festivals in the Chinese worlds and the histories of Chinese communities in Toronto as the backdrop, this dissertation analyzes the ways cultural identities are shaped, syncretized arts and music articulated, and Chinese culture dispersed in diasporic environs far removed from their origins during such festivals.; Since traditional Chinese festivals are constituted on a worldview that embraces the dynamic and interacting yin-yang, the innate corporeality such precepts embodies becomes the basis for cultural memory (re)enactment and gives flight to imagination. Where memory and imagination converge at festivals is where (1) disjunctures are negotiated, (2) identity and alterity are contested and affirmed, (3) boundaries are fixed, crossed, and blurred, and (4) ”home” is established, consolidated, and imagined. In the processes of negotiation, the finding and building of home are foregrounded, since the Chinese world is basically familial and generationally defined. At the point where a current local ethnic social phenomenon publicly imprinted calls for a framework of interpretation, I engage the notion of the classical Chinese garden—a sophisticated architectural-biomorphic construct—as the ground for the entire dissertation. Where the Chinese notion of home and festival—rituals and ritualized time and place that are highly symbolic of Chinese life itself—are inseparable, the garden elucidates their complex relationships.; In order to understand what Chinese festivals in Toronto mean to the diasporic community, I have attempted to bring Chinese history, cosmology, folklore, literature, philosophy and aesthetics together with critical theories of place, memory, festival, performance, gender, identity, ritual, nostalgia, public cultural productions and private celebrations, incorporating the philosophical conception of yin-yang into the interpretive paradigm. I have explored various kinds of tension (the dialectics and dialectical relations of institutions and individuals, multiculturalism as oppressive and liberatory, notions of home and history as fixed and changing, staying in and moving out of one's community, intense celebration and denunciation, to name a few). I conclude that while not all tension may be resolved, it is precisely through such tension that creative cultural reinvention takes place, making cultural productions such as contemporary traditional Chinese festivals immediate, alive (if not life-giving), and necessary. |
