Facing capital: Cultural politics in Vancouver

Recent global restructuring has resulted in the rapid movement of people and capital across domestic and international borders. In this period of "fast capitalism" the shock of modernity is manifold, as it is experienced in physical changes to the built environment, new economic linkages and relations of power, and disorienting shifts in cultural meaning. As previously defined boundaries are transgressed and established signifiers unmoored, there is a tremendous struggle over the reworking of new meanings. A key area of ideological contestation in this struggle has been the construction and negotiation of the idea of 'race.' Control over the meaning of race has tremendous implications for the ongoing legitimacy of the state, as well as for business interests involved in facilitating the articulation of global capitalisms.;In my work I examine the movement of people and capital from Hong Kong to Vancouver in the 1980s. The purchase of residential property and the rapid influx of large numbers of wealthy Chinese immigrants into Vancouver's west-side neighborhoods disrupted many established notions of home, community and way of life. Demolitions and the construction of so-called "monster houses" in these neighborhoods threatened the symbolic capital of this 'way of life,' a set of beliefs and practices predicated on the values of a British protestant elite. The physical changes in the built environment were linked with the arrival of the Hong Kong Chinese, and protest movements against change became imbricated in a racial discourse. Questions of architectural style, taste, landscape design and neighborhood character were bound up with questions of race, racism and cultural difference. Controlling the meaning of race thus became an increasingly desirable and contested form of ideological power, as it influenced urban development, capital accumulation and circulation, and the international articulation of Chinese and Canadian capitalisms.;In Vancouver, the struggle over the meaning of race led to the reworking of the ideology of multiculturalism. State and business efforts to build hegemony emphasized notions of a culturally plural 'way of life.' The ensuing struggle over the meaning of this way of life, including the meanings inscribed in the built environment, resonated as struggles over the meaning of society itself. What is Canada? What is it to be Canadian? These questions are central to the experience of modernity in Vancouver. In this work I examine meaning production in Vancouver in the context of rapid urban change. How are questions of identity reworked in the landscape and by whom? What is the role of the state in facilitating urban change? And, more specifically, how are meanings of race and culture produced, negotiated and reflected in the transformation of a suburban neighborhood?...