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Número 9 / DICIEMBRE, 2019 (109-123)

FLICKERING BODIES: MAPPING

MULTICULTURALISM AND INSURGENT

CITIZENSHIP IN WAYDE COMPTON’S

BLACK VANCOUVER

CUERPOS PARPADEANTES:

CARTOGRAFIANDO

MULTICULTURALISMOS Y CIUDADANÍA

INSURGENTE EN EL VANCOUVER

NEGRO DE WAYDE COMPTON

Fernando Pérez García

UO189253@uniovi.es

Recibido:

18/03/2019

Aceptado:

05/06/2019

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Número 9 / DICIEMBRE, 2019 (109-123)

Abstract

We live in a moment of hardening of nationalist discourses against

immigration and racial minorities. In this conservative climate, Canada

prevails as a benchmark for multicultural integration. However, there are

voices within the nation that question this image of harmony. The case of

the Black Vancouver community has not yet been studied in depth in

this regard. This article of reflection aims to contribute to the debate on

the relations of the nation-state and subaltern groups, and how they

manifest themselves in the multicultural city. Vancouver has been chosen

as a paradigmatic space because of its transcultural character built on

indigenous lands. The object of study was the literature of Wayde Compton

author and black activist of the city. Stemming from theories of the socio-

spatial dialectic of Edward Soja and Leonie Sandercock, this article

analyses the connection between the city, its representation in literature and

its effects on social relationships. The work of Compton and its parallelism

with the geo-history of Vancouver and subaltern ethnic communities were

analysed. The result reaches a reading of Vancouver as a (post)colonial city

and space of subaltern multiculturalism, regarding the official Canadian

model, and colonialism that has made invisible to the Black Vancouver and

the indigenous communities.

Keywords: Black, Vancouver, literature, space, multiculturalism.

Resumen

Vivimos en un momento de endurecimiento de discursos nacionalistas sobre

inmigración y minorías raciales. En este clima conservador, Canadá

prevalece como referente de integración multicultural, sin embargo,

existen voces dentro de la nación que cuestionan esta imagen de armonía.

El caso de la comunidad negra en Vancouver aún no ha sido estudiado en

profundidad en este aspecto. Este artículo de reflexión pretende contribuir

al debate sobre las relaciones de la nación-estado y grupos subalternos y

cómo se manifiestan en la ciudad multicultural. Se ha escogido Vancouver

como espacio paradigmático por su carácter transcultural, construida

sobre tierras indígenas. El objeto de estudio fue la literatura de Wayde

Compton, autor y activista negro de la ciudad. Partiendo de teorías de la

dialéctica socio-espacial de Edward Soja y Leonie Sandercock, este artículo

analiza la conexión entre la ciudad, su representación en la literatura y sus

efectos en las relaciones sociales. Se analiza la narrativa de Compton y su

paralelismo con la geo-historia de Vancouver y comunidades raciales

subalternas. Como resultado, se llega a una lectura de Vancouver como

ciudad (post)colonial y espacio de multiculturalismo subalterno, frente al

oficial canadiense y al colonialismo que ha invisibilizado al Vancouver

Negro y a las comunidades indígenas.

Palabras clave: Negro, Vancouver, literatura, espacio, multiculturalismo.

FLICKERING

BODIES: MAPPING

MULTICULTURALISM

AND INSURGENT

CITIZENSHIP IN WAYDE

COMPTON’S BLACK

VANCOUVER

CUERPOS

PARPADEANTES:

CARTOGRAFIANDO

Y CIUDADANÍA

INSURGENTE EN EL

WAYDE COMPTON

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INTRODUCTION

Terminal City, Hollywood North, City of Glass.

These are just a few of the nicknames for the city

of Vancouver, some reflecting on its geohistory or

its architectural aesthetic. However, perhaps

Leonie Sandercock’s metaphor of the Mongrel

City better describes Vancouver as the urban space

in which difference, multiplicities and plurality

shall prevail over the fears of the so-called decline

of the Western Civilization (2013:2). In a time of

hardening nationalist discourses, it stands for

the possibility of building a community of

togetherness in difference, and whose identity is

multiple.

The forces of globalization are shaping the cities,

making them interconnected, re-structuring and

re-shaping them both economically and

demographically. It is the case of Vancouver as the

bridge between America and Asia through the

Pacific but also as a dividing line between Canada

and the United States through the 49th parallel. Its

status as a multiethnic, multiracial and culturally

diverse cosmopolis also comes with anxieties and

fears: psychological, economic, the fear of the

Other and of those deemed as un-belonging.

Canada stands as a benchmark when it comes to

integration and coexistence between different

cultures, yet there are some discordant voices

indicating otherwise.

The case of Vancouver’s Black community and

their claims have not yet been studied in-depth.

This article argues that the analysis of the literature

of these communities, their representation of the

city and their relationship with the urban history

can result in a form of creole multiculturalism

different from the state model. Although being

involved in “positive ways in addressing the

challenge of integrating migrants from different

cultures, engaging in the active construction of new

ways of living together” (Sandercock 2013:8), it is

essential to frame Vancouver in a racialized liberal

democracy to understand its cultural landscape

and spatial struggles.

Black presence in Vancouver is tightly related to

space. Space is emphasized by Compton and

other Black Canadian writers like George Elliott

Clarke, especially those spaces defined by

indigenous Black Canadian spaces that disrupt

the myths of the nation-state, i.e., the false

assumption that Canadian Blackness is recent

and of Caribbean origin.

Compton’s efforts on the recovery of Black

geohistory and cultural landscape in Vancouver

both through his literary production and the

foundation of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial

Project (H.A.M.P.) reinforces the idea that

“people invest places with social and cultural

meaning and [urban geohistory] can provide a

framework for connecting those meanings into

contemporary urban life” (Hayden 1995:78). He

goes beyond the task of recovering an invisible

history as he explores “an emplotment within

meaningful interpretive geography [in which] the

present is researched for its insights in

reinterpreting the past and for the sites from

which to act to re-contextualize the future” (Soja

1996:192). His recovering of Hogan’s Alley

memory works to spatialize Black Vancouver’s

history.

Compton is known for his concern to recover and

re-map the invisibilised historic Black presence in

Vancouver, thus problematizing the given ideas of

state multiculturalism and foundational narrations

“in ways that question fixed ideas of nationhood,

identity and belonging (…) crucially rooted in the

textured urban spaces of Vancouver” (Leow

2012:49). This rootedness in the local context of

Vancouver is what makes Hogan’s Alley, the late

immigrant, multi-ethnic neighborhood a crucial

element in Compton’s work and Black Vancouver

history. If nations, as imagined communities,

assume apparent homogeneity of their members,

the racial, cultural and political tensions that

participate in the systemic hierarchy of citizens

expose the violence with which an artificially

created homogeneity is forced.

Wayde Compton has coined the term

Afroperipheralism to describe the situation of

Black Vancouver: the feeling of invisibility and

isolation on the margins of the Black diaspora,

the search for local roots and racialized spaces,

and at the same time rejecting modernist,

exclusive discourses and cultural politics and

those representations that cannot be applied in

the local context of Vancouver. This puts them

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in the uncomfortable situation between total

assimilation or writing against elision, but it also

provides an open space that allows more radical

experiments on identity.

METHODOLOGY

Through the lens of theories of urban space and

multicultural planning, this article of reflection

will analyze the problematic relation between the

city of Vancouver and the multiethnic minorities

shaping it. Stemming from the modernist urban

planning, the construction of fear of the Other and

insurgent citizenship have been involved in the

processes of urban renewal that extend this

inequality to the social space.

This article of reflection will analyze this relation

through the eyes of Wayde Compton, one of the

leading literary figures of the city and whose work

focuses on the Afroperipheral Black community

of Vancouver and the subversion of narrow

discourses on race and multiculturalism. Critical

reading of The Outer Harbour (2014) will prove

useful to analyze how subaltern cosmologies

disrupt the hegemonic understanding of space. In

this book, the city becomes another character

exploring identity, gentrification and racial issues

with a speculative dystopic tone that is sadly

becoming real in the current Vancouver constant

urban renewal and Indigenous land rights.

Edward Soja’s theories of space allow for the

understanding of Vancouver as a space that is

neither neutral nor a mere outcome of the socio-

historical and cultural events, but that it has also

played an active role in them:

all social relations remain abstract and

unrealized until they are concretely

expressed and materially and symbolically

inscribed in lived space [and they do so

through the social production of space,] a

continuous and contentious process that is

filled with politics and ideology, creativity

and destruction, and with the unpredictable

interplay of space, knowledge, and power.

(Soja 2003:275)

Another contribution of these geographers to the

theories of space was the idea that the role of urban

planning in the city has been to regulate and

discipline subjects through space, as an ordering

tool treating the city as a disordered, polluted

Other.

Multicultural planning theories show that in

multicultural contexts, there is always a

hegemonic culture whose narrative and practices

are embedded in the system and official narrative

in a more or less explicit way. These biases are

embedded in the legislative fabric of the state and

legitimized by their uncritical application. The state

reproduces these conditions of racial stratification

through its ideological and repressive apparatuses:

bureaucracy, legislation, social service agencies or

housing policies (Sandercock 2013).

Those public workers, urban planners and

developers part of the dominant culture and

political apparatus, rarely recognize dominant

cultural norms and practices that clash with other

coexisting cosmologies. These stories of progress

invisibilise the role of urban planning as a tool for

surveillance and control certain bodies in space,

struggling with counter-hegemonic practices.

While official multiculturalism favored the

preservation of ethnic culture, the neoliberal

policies increase the material conditions of

inequality for racialized minorities. The dominant

liberal ideology presents itself as neutral, adopting

non-white groups within the Eurocentric

framework. The symbolic celebration of cultural

difference has the effect of displacing claims of

exclusion by racialized communities.

On the other side there is a response to these

conceptions of space as a neutral entity. Through

coexistence and transcultural activism, citizens

articulate platforms like Militant Mothers of

Raymur or Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project

(Compton 2010) that can disrupt the dominant

perspective, claiming ownership or improvement

of their spaces.

Bearing this in mind, this article of reflection will

understand that the city inhabitants are “continually

produced and reproduced by the forms of the city

and that the form of the city is actively and

continually constructed (and de/reconstructed) by

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its citizens” (Epstein 1998:212-213).

This spatial approach will be completed with

Barbara Hooper’s notion (cited in Soja 1996) of

a representational practice of somatography: a

hierarchical differentiation of the flesh which

orders ambiguous substances of matter as political

meanings and territories. Thus, the body is turned

into a mediated space transformed by

representations and cultural interpretations, into a

social and lived space intervened by the workings

of power (Soja 1996:113). The body becomes a

subject of social discourse, an imaginary obsessed

with the fear of that which cannot be controlled,

with things that are out of place, polluting the city

and the spatial practices to lock or destroy these

elements.

Stemming from this theoretical framework of

socio-spatial dialectical theories of space and from

the role of racialization or somatography in the

configuration of the city and its racial trajectory,

this article of reflection will offer a contextual

background from which Compton’s work emerges.

After that, this article will analyze his latest work

and how it represents the transcultural relations in

and through the urban landscape of Vancouver.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

HOGAN’S ALLEY AND THE

RACIALISED CITYSCAPE

While Vancouver tops rankings of most-livable

cities and it is praised for its urban planning

model, Vancouverism, they do not mention the

B-side of urban renewal and the decline of multi-

ethnic working-class neighborhoods. Compton

addresses these issues and the situation of the

Black community, many members of which lived

in Hogan’s Alley, part of Strathcona in East

Vancouver. They paid the price of the razing of

their homes for the construction of the Georgia

and Dunsmuir viaducts in the late 1960s, part of

a project to build a freeway that was ultimately

stopped thanks to citizen’s protests:

Punning on the term ‘urban renewal,’ there

was a ‘Negro removal’ -the destruction of

the politically weakest community of a

city for a large modernist planning scheme,

portrayed as slum clearance. The city

might have been saved, but from the

perspective of the black community, this

part of the city was shamelessly sacrificed.

(Compton 2010:84)

Hogan’s Alley was a specific site of Black

Residence, but also home to Italians, Asians, First

Nations people, and others. It is more precise to

say that Hogan’s Alley had a Black community

within it, and one that was significant enough that

we can refer to the neighborhood itself as a

racially-identified space. It was a progressivist

space understood as a product of interrelations; a

sphere of possibility in which different trajectories

coexist and always under construction, in the

process of being made (Massey 2008). In what can

be called spatial capital, members of different

communities joined forces in SPOTA, an

interethnic, transcultural activist group to fight

back the cities’ campaign of hypersimulation to

present Strathcona as a slum. What was at stake

was not only their home but their very constitution

of being –the ways they perceived space,

themselves and others, the modes of experience,

their sensibilities shaped by the urban experience.

Unluckily, by the time the project was canceled,

part of Strathcona, including Hogan’s Alley, had

already been razed.

As it has been mentioned above, the process of

somatography of Black bodies in Vancouver and

the destruction of Hogan’s Alley are key to

understand the vision of the city and its spatial-

cultural myths articulated by Compton in his

works, reshaping the future of Vancouver by re-

telling new stories about the past.

The reasons for the destruction of Hogan’s Alley

could be traced back to two complementary

discourses that worked together: fear-fueled

somatograpy and modernist notions of progress.

Fear can be understood as the spatial result of

power relations if we include if we include

Elizabeth Grosz’s point on the city’s form and

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structure as:

the context in which social rules and

expectations are internalized or habituated

in order to ensure social conformity or

position marginality at a safe or insulated

or bounded distance (ghettoization). This

means that the city must be seen as the

most immediately concrete locus of the

production and circulation of power.

(Grosz 1992:250)

In 1960s Vancouver, the demonized and racialized

Black bodies of the Hogan’s Alley residents

represented the pollution, the social unrest, crime

and the obstacle on the way of progress contributing

to the creation of this “common sense” (Omi &

Winant 2015:111).

Another approach was that the modernist idea of

progress and order over spatial chaos. Hogan’s

Alley cheap land, inefficient land use, older

housing stocks and working-class residents were

the characteristics the government needed to prove

that blighted areas existed in Vancouver to gain

access to NHA infrastructure funds (Lee

2007:392). This perspective corresponds with Jill

Wade’s vision about the long-standing housing

problem Vancouver suffers up to the present- day

due to the lack of affordable dwellings in Metro

Vancouver and the lack of middle-income

dwellings to house middle-income families (Wade

1994:48).

The acceptance of the modernist Eurocentric

discourse based on colonialist ideas of the Other,

supported by the process of somatography was

the basis for further action. The myth of the

construction of a modern city for everyone

allowed political actors to erase the Black presence

materially and symbolically from Hogan’s Alley

and deem it invisible for decades from the heart of

the modern metropolis.

After the razing of Hogan’s Alley, the Black

community dispersed throughout the city, which

contributed to the feeling of isolation and

invisibilisation, bringing a political vulnerability

as a consequence:

A scattering, an integration, partly forced,

partly wanted, has made for no place, no

sit, no centres residential or commercial,

no set of streets vilified or tourist-friendly,

and no provincial or federal riding that a

politician would see as black enough ever

to rate the wooing of a community vote.

(Compton 2010:105)

Compton’s work becomes this way a struggle of

memory against forgetting. Through his poetry, he

becomes an archeologist and an architect, re-

creating spaces for the readers to inhabit, with his

poems and prose reflecting on the urban landscape

and contemporary construction responding to

these non-places.

(POST)COLONIAL RE-

SPATIALISATIONS

The already mentioned somatography of Hogan’s

Alley and the invisibilisation of Black

Vancouverites become a crucial element in his

latest work, The Outer Harbour, through the

creation of fictional racialized spaces, imaginary

urban geography superimposed on the actual one

and manifesting the yearning to counter this

under-representation. This is reflected in the

Pauline Johnson Island subplot, which relates the

emergence of a volcanic island in the outer harbor

of the city, coming out of the sea. On this island

subplot, Compton visibilises the materiality of

racial exclusion in Vancouver, and how it affects

not only the Black community but is most virulent

against First Nations peoples in the region. The

emergence of the island reconfigured an already

racialized space. It altered the physicality of the

city, but it also brought to clear focus the legacy of

unjust geographies, the occupation of First

Nations unceeded lands, the marginal spaces of the

refugees, the racialized and the abject bodies

deemed unassimilable.

Ironically, the federal government claimed

possession and turned it into a protected zone, a

national site for research and names is after a

writer and performer popular in the late 19

century who was the daughter of a Mohawk chief

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of mixed ancestry and an English mother.

The trajectories taken by social interactions in

each space-time, are crucial in the process of

identity formation. A given moment, along with

the understanding and negotiation of the

surrounding space, history and the correlation of

forces, will lead to the construction of an individual

cosmology or a unique manner of relating to the

surrounding space-time. The resulting multiplicity

of cosmologies can be considered coexistent to the

extent that they share a physical space, but in the

field of socio-political practices, they might be

antagonistic.

Depending on the correlation of forces, one

cosmology or another will become hegemonic,

despite other insurgent cosmologies trying to stop

it, becoming entangled in the process (Harvey

2017:181). This interconnection can be seen in the

Pan-Indian activists that occupy Pauline Johnson

Island in The Outer Harbour. This group struggles

against a model of racialized liberal capitalist

democracy that tries to expand its cosmology of

accumulation of capital through the colonization

and commodification of new spaces (populated or

not) with the consequent disciplining of the space.

Pauline Johnson Island becomes a microcosm

where the colonization of British Columbia is

replicated. This formerly unpopulated space will

be claimed by the city council and the federal

government without even discussing if it should

remain First Nations land. In the present, cities

like Vancouver are not only multicultural insofar

as multiple races, cultures and ethnicities coexist,

but they continue to maintain a colonial present

through the discourses of fear and threat that

contain and control the different First Nations

peoples, on whose unceded lands the city of

Vancouver rises.

In this story, the main characters are Fletcher, an

Indian boy adopted by whites, and his girlfriend

Jean, who is pretty much Black. They decide to

gather some friend and organize “some kind of

intervention, occupation, (…) get in on the anti-

colonial ground (…) a country with a less than a

two-year timeline. Its ancient past was under the

ocean” (Compton 2014:34-36) echoing not only

the invisibilisation of Black history in Vancouver,

but also the settler colonialism, modernist planning

and urban renewal that shaped the city, as the

island shape seems unnatural, “as if it had been

designed rather than born [and soon] a pop can

will wash up on its shores and it will be officially

colonized” (Compton 2014: 36-37).

Jean sees their plan as “a kind of retort to the

Vancouver she has known (…) all the where- are-

you-froms and all the where-are-you- really-

froms; (…) being preemptively estranged (…) The

plan was something to capsize for” (Compton

2014:37).

Jean sees the opportunity to claim this island as an

open space where those racialized and estranged

bodies can build a new community, a new home

place of belonging non-existent in Vancouver.

Once in the island, she takes an empty bottle, folds

a drawing into it and buries the bottle with the

expectation of creating a new history, authentic

First Nations glyphs from one of the minor coastal

islands.

It does not take much time for the police to arrive

with helicopters moving ferociously fast, throwing

leaflets telling them literally how to surrender in a

place that makes them illegal by being there,

insurgent citizens not recognized by the other pole

of the power relation. Their mere presence in the

unclaimed island and their own recognition as

members of a unified community stranger to the

formal hegemonic citizenship problematizes the

dominant notion of citizenship as national identity

and the role of the nation-state as a form of

political community (Holston 1998:51). Parallel to

the trajectory of settler colonialism in Canada,

First Nations peoples were constructed as an

obstacle to progress that had to be destroyed,

either by assimilation or genocide, to gain access

to their lands and resources.

Fletcher tries to win some time for the press to

arrive by writing a message on the sand in what

appears to Jane as “gliding across a ballroom floor.

Soft shoe or Indian-style, she cannot decide.

Either. Both (…) The island first dance.” (Compton

2014:46) reflecting the hybrid and transcultural

social landscape of Vancouver, in which the

notion of formal and substantive citizenship is

continuously problematized, revealing the

paradoxes of the official foundational narrative of

the city.

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In the face of this defiance to the dominant

cosmology, the State response to discipline space

results in the police raid and the subsequent killing

of Fletcher, the insurgent leader. In Vancouver, the

small number of the Black community allowed

them to avoid the most virulent forms of systemic

racism, but the Chinese and First Nations did not

have the same luck (Compton 2010). In the case of

the First Nations peoples, not only were they

stripped from their ancestral lands, but their rituals

(which defied the cosmology of capital

accumulation) were prohibited and prosecuted,

even isolating them from certain professions and

mainstream Canadian legal services.

Even today, Indigenous peoples face a notorious

history of racial profiling and spatial violence.

Episodes like the Trans Mountain Pipeline crisis

in 2018 reveal the problematic accommodation of

Indigenous cosmologies within the dominant

frame. Over 150 First Nations and Chiefs signed a

treaty opposing the project and the exploitation of

their ancestral unceded lands. Indigenous rights

are depicted as an obstacle to (mainstream

Canadian) progress (Maynard 2017).

Pauline Johnson Island erupts. This climatic

eruption reflects the destruction of the subaltern

spaces and how the socio-spatial dialectic operates,

with the identity and the formation of space being

co-consecutive trajectories. The violent seizing of

unceded lands points to settler colonialism and the

failure of reconciliation policies in Canada. These

policies cannot be isolated from the geohistoric

context from which they arise, in a nation marked

by European colonization and expansion and the

maintenance of a colonial ideology that marks the

government and the hierarchy of space, indigenous

communities and institutions.

Reconciliation policies point to a possible future

of repairing past damages but always from the

maintenance of a settler cosmology and European

order. This does not mean a true reparation or

deconstruction of the geohistoric sedimentation

process, but the acceptance of a present that

maintains a colonial order and for which an

apology is meant to suffice. For Blacks and First

Nations peoples, reconciliation should only be the

beginning of a process to rethink the hierarchy of

space and institutions through colonial lenses

to argue that the idea of humanity is the fruit of

multiple perspectives and the European is just one

of them (Walcott 2016:76).

The Boom covers the next years after the violent

repression in Pauline Johnson’s Island, and as it

happened in the 60s, despite the protests and

commemoration events, the government decided

to rezone the area for private development,

ignoring the local life. In this case, to build a tower

of luxury condos called ARRIVAL in a sarcastic

reference that “boldly blends the pioneer spirit of

Canada’s heritage with 21

-century bravado”

(Compton 2014:109).

Colonizing an already inhabited and claimed island

is rewritten as a discovery, pioneering experience.

The only language that matters it is that of urban

development, mirroring the actual housing crisis

in Vancouver and its constant rezoning of the

cityscape to build more high-middle class

unaffordable housing while homelessness and

fentanyl-related death crisis rise in East Vancouver

(Pablo 2018). Real state plans replace words.

Despite the official recognition of cultural rights

of Indigenous populations within the national

political framework, these recognitions represent

a new language to speak of the same colonial

situation of dispossession of lands and resources.

The island becomes a symbolic one: the only

refuge from crime at this side of a fairytale castle

pit. A closed community with restricted access in

what used to be public space, now privatized. It

reflects the gradual change of public spaces into

security housing developments with clearly

demarcated borders, with walls and controlled

entries to prevent an alien invasion. The big

quartz glass towers are based on a design that

gives priority to vertical growth and excessive

concentration in the heart of the city sacrificing a

more open, horizontal and more human urban

space. It is also a response to the fear of the city

as fear of the Other, an implicit belief that safe

spaces can resolve social interactions. In the

worst case, even well-intended safe spaces can

deny and repress social difference and diversity

(Epstein 1998:211).

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HOLOGRAPHIC CITIZENSHIP

AND MULTICULTURALISMS

In the final story, The Outer Harbour, we are told

that Jamie Langenderbach creator of a Vancouver-

based live-action role-playing game called The

Secret Commonwealth after a centuries-old

Scottish guidebook about mythical creatures, is an

employee in Enfortech, a firm that develops non-

lethal crowd control devices and has ties with the

government. He is secretly using his game design

experience to create a paramilitary device, using

the live action role-playing game to test-run it.

The game uses “an imaginary spatialisation of the

Lower Mainland into ‘realms’ (…) divided into

warring factions with battles played through

Langenderbach’s algorithm. These imaginary

cantons are superimposed over the topography of

real-life Vancouver and its outlying suburbs”

(Compton 2014:161). Racialised neighborhoods

like East Vancouver, Chinatown, Strathcona

(where Hogan’s Alley used to be) are designated

as a series of subterranean caverns called the

Shadow Realm, bearing in mind that this was the

location of the first immigrant and racialized

neighborhood which suffered a process of neglect

and industrialization.

The idea of a paracosmic Vancouver works as a

mean to create and navigate through urban

imaginary racialized spaces superimposed on the

actual city. We are presented with the other side of

the coin: a parody of the simcity, the conceived

space operated by the hegemonic power. We see

how it reads the human geography and space of the

city, showing once again that no space is neutral,

but a correlation of forces in the lived space.

The game is basically always running, and

although the face-to- face meetings that

players hold monthly during the spring and

summer in parks and camp-grounds are

important, their movements online also

extend play into a real-time, 24/7 digital

experience –at home, at work, at school,

always. The storylines (…) are carefully

crafted by Langenderbach behind the

scenes (…) [H]e can and does manipulate

the results he desires. (Compton 2014:162)

At this stage, paracosmic civilian vs. government-

imposed discourses through Enfortech, parallels

multiculturalism-from-below versus Western

liberal state multiculturalism.

State multiculturalism, according to Walcott

(2016) tries to contain the multiplicity of

trajectories and cosmologies that share the urban

space, so they do not overflow on the postcolonial

wound, the transnational migratory flows and the

persistent systemic racism in Western metropolis.

State multiculturalism, adopted by Western liberal

democracies, is read as a racial contract to manage

and neutralize post-WWII struggles for social and

economic justice by racial and cultural minorities,

and to constrain the movement of mainly non-white

migrants into national spaces, which had formerly

imagined, represented and performed themselves

as entirely white. State multiculturalism sought to

contain such uprisings through policies centered

on identity and culture while maintaining and

retaining the power to authorize and legitimize the

material relations of the nation-state.

This applies not only to the official multiculturalism

or the cultural relativism that dissolves Black

subjectivity in a universalist melting pot but also

to the narrow cultural essentialism that promotes

polarizing discourses such as Black Nationalism

or Afrocentrism.

Langenderbach’s appropriation of the LARP

means the disruption of a real-and-imagined space

“for those who feel themselves to be outcasts and

misfits . . . where people came to feel enveloped in

an atmosphere of acceptance, which remained the

subculture’s best feature. It was a place where the

weird was welcome” (Compton 2014:163). This

virtual world, this paracosmic Vancouver

superimposed on the real city was appealing to

those who do not conform with the dominant

concept of citizenship in racialized liberal

democracies and looking for an atmosphere of

acceptance in safe communities.

The island was bought by the federal government

and turned into Pauline Johnson Island Special

Detention Facility, a prison for immigrants

classified as Individual and Collective

Displacement Phenomenon. The island has

become a carceral space, yet the conversion of the

residential tower into detention housing is barely

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perceptible.

The island as a carceral space has two symbolic

layers: First, it symbolizes oppressive hegemonic

discourse of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism. And

second, it symbolizes an urban space, a prison

archipelago where people have restricted mobility

through space and is closely guarded despite the

appearance of free movement.

These ideas are clarified through Barbara Hooper’s

concept of somatography (quoted in Soja 1996),

body-writing, a hierarchical differentiation of the

flesh, the understanding of the human body as a

highly intervened space, transformed by

interpretations and cultural representations, a

social space.

Every society produces its own order, its

own spaces, its own bodies, cities and

texts, socially produced spaces, always in

process, always flowing . . . Body and city

are the subjects of a social/civic discourse,

of an imaginary obsessed with fear of unruly

elements . . . These acts of differentiation,

separation and enclosure involve material,

symbolic and lived spaces . . . bodies cities

and texts . . . and are practiced as politics of

difference, as segregation and separation.

(Soja 1996:114)

They and we are dichotomously spatialized and

enclosed in an imposed territoriality of apartheids,

ghettoes, fortresses and other trappings that

emanate from the center-periphery relation.

Hegemonic power universalizes and contains

difference in real-and-imagined spaces (Soja

1996:87). Racialized immigrants are dehumanised

and held back based on meanings ascribed by

somatography to notions of race, nation and space.

“Each year, an average of eleven thousand

migrants, a large number of whom are racialized,

are held in immigration detention in Canada,

including over eight hundred children” (Maynard

2017:166). Immigration detention centres, unlike

prisons, represent administrative punishment for

not having adequate documentation or when

considered illegal human beings. Since it is not

punitive incarceration, they do not have legal

guarantees as a right to a lawyer since there are no

charges or trials against them. The incarceration of

these migrants reflects the impact of unwanted

migrations in the discourses of liberal democracies

and human rights. It shows that the interests of the

liberal state are not really the people and highlights

the B-side of globalisation.

Thus, the called Individual and Collective

Displacement Phenomenon has multiple

interpretations:

First, as the departure from liberal multiculturalism.

In Canada, official multiculturalism is the state’s

liberal response to racial, ethnic, and cultural

diversity, in that it attempts to respond to ethnic

particularities as a step towards achieving

integration, into a universal, inclusive national

culture. Official multiculturalism assumes the

national culture as the existing, normative, national

culture of the hegemonic whiteness, while it does

not address racism systematically (Lee & Lutz

2005:17).

It is a discourse that does not recognize racialized

bodies as part of the foundational narrative of

Canada, framing them in the discourse of Canada

as an anti-slavery Canaan but fails to recognize

Blackness as Canadian in the Western provinces,

particularly in Vancouver. Compton defines this

departure as the roots of Aphroperipheralism: a

challenging, but creative position rejecting the

transplant of Afrocentrism or African-Americana

to British Columbia and also the white scripts of

nation-building or the vapidness of liberal

multiculturalism: it is the resistance to both

assimilation and elision.

Secondly, the transformation of the island into a

detention centre also points to First Nations

peoples relocation and Canadian colonialism. The

racialization and discipline across the Canadian

space, and in this case, the Vancouverite, is marked

by its settler colonialism trajectory. The forced

relocation of First Nations peoples into

reservations and residential schools was the first

stage of dispossession of their territory and their

political attachment, thus giving way to the

extraction of resources and establishment of settler

societies.

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More recently, the focus has shifted to the penal

system to continue the colonial control of space and,

despite constituting a five per cent of the Canadian

population, Indigenous peoples represent a quarter

of the prison population (Maynard 2017:85).

Statistics by the VPD show that Blacks make up

1% of the population and 4% of reported street-

checks; while Indigenous people make up 2% of

the population and 15% of reported street-checks

and 39% of homeless people in Metro Vancouver

(Manojlovic 2018)

A second interpretation of the island as a carceral

space is the rejection of the urban modernist

discourse of progress through constant renewal,

the formation of transcultural, intersectional

movements to claim the right to the city, the right

to difference. A space of radical openness. These

bodies flicker literally:

the inmates appear to have the free run of

the building. There’s a yard they are

allowed access to, but in shifts. It’s fenced

in, . . . I got the sense it was routine to find

migrants outside and on other parts of the

island . . . Entire groups of migrants

disappeared and reappeared outside the

walls of the facility, and had to be escorted

back in. They disappear from their various

units and appear all together beyond the

walls of the building, standing in a crowd.

(Compton 2014:170-171)

Rezoning the unassimilable, abject bodies are sent

to a remote, inaccessible space, separated from the

rest of the city with barriers, in this case, the sea,

under disciplinary control. This spatial isolation

has its counterpart. One girl, the only inmate that

had learned to speak English, being mistaken for a

holographic immigrant, she is locked in this prison

due to the citizens’ hysteria against the racialized

bodies. The isolation of the island, reflecting the

uneven urban development and lack of basic

services, prevents the girl from receiving medical

assistance, and she dies from an asthmatic crisis.

This aspect mirrors the isolated conditions of

neglected neighbourhoods, carceral urban spaces

to control racialized bodies and those considered

aliens. In the case of Vancouver, the depiction of

Hogan’s Alley as a blighted slum prior to its

demolishment (Compton 2010). The death of this

girl, from the point of view of the imprisonment of

racialized immigrants, is not unusual given that

“at least fourteen have died while behind bars

since 2000” (Maynard 2017:171).

The holographic projections were developed as

part of the Multiple Perception Immobilization

Device, providing the police with a non-lethal

security solution for crowd control. The said

device:

projects holographic images of people into

a crowd, causing a perceived doubling or

tripling of the crowd density, in turn causing

rioting individuals to perceive themselves

as surrounded by far denser crowd that is

the case. The device initially scans the

subjects, making composite holograms by

recombining facial features, clothing, etc.

so that its seeded projections closely

resemble the demographics of the targeted

crowd . . . the rioters become distracted,

slowed, and ultimately vulnerable to other

pacification measures. (Compton

2014:181)

For the people in the crowd, it is impossible to

discern the holographic three-dimensional bodies

from their real companions and the effect is:

like standing in the middle of a sea of

people, and though I could pass through the

hologram, and realized projections were

being used, the realism of the imagery was

enough to make me hesitate significantly,

and after colliding with more than one

person I’d taken for fake, I moved more

slowly and uncertainly, which is the

machine intended function . . . I saw a

particular ‘person’ in the crowd and

immediately felt a sense of recognition,

seeing some of my own facial features as it

passed. (Compton 2014:188)

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Canada officially proclaims multiculturalism: a

space that neither others nor represses racial

mixing and simultaneously eviscerates restrictive

creations of identity. Being multiracial equals a

prediction to struggle with carving a space in this

official Multiculturalism that overemphasizes the

cultural pattern while ignoring the presence of a

racialized geography. As it was said at the

beginning of this article, the situation in Vancouver

is a special one, characterized by a high degree of

interethnic exchange and the lack of a central

Black community.

In After Canaan, Compton(2010) asserts that the

average Black person in B.C. seems to be a light-

skinned, mixed-race person. He dwells upon this

topic and the act of passing, which is commonly

burdened on the person whose race is being

questioned, while the mis/perception of race is the

responsibility of the viewer. Borrowing from

biology, Compton adapts the term pheneticizing,

denoting classification according to an assessment

of physical appearances rather than the

identification of shared ancestry.

The holographic bodies are not real; they are

simulations and a particular type of somatography

created by the apparatuses of the State, Power and

official Multiculturalism that, even though might

seem real, they are just void images that paralyze

the progress of the citizens who claim a space. It

can be interpreted as a clash for a racialized space

in the city, between state liberal multiculturalism

versus a growing multiculturalism-from-below,

which allows for more rhizomatic and complex

identities, as opposed to simplistic stereotypes and

racialization of bodies.

It also reflects a struggle against a discourse and

weapons that seem to be verging into the

simulation and fable, like the media depiction of

Hogan’s Alley prior to its demise, a matter of

illusion failing in the light of verisimilitude.

Compton effectively satirizes on the fictional

character of racial definitions and as he does with

Aphroperipheralism, and struggles against

compulsive control procedures: Fragmentation,

mutilating the information so it fits into a code;

homogenization to express the information in a

predictable code; and repetition, reducing

differences to small variations of the same item.

An adaptation of the concept of urban psychasthenia

in a postmetropolis such as Vancouver will prove

accurate to analyse the failure to recognize the

differences between the citizens’ bodies, the

holograms, and end up assigning them the status

of immigrants instead of recognizing their space

within the national narrative.

Defined as a disturbance between the self

and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is

a state in which the space defined by the

coordinates of the organism’s own body is

confused with represented space. Incapable

of demarcating the limits of its own body,

lost in the immense area that circumscribes

it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to

abandon its own identity to embrace the

space beyond. […] This simulation effects

a double usurpation: while the organism

successfully reproduces those elements it

could not otherwise apprehend, in the

process it is swallowed up by them,

vanishing as a differentiated entity.

(Olalquiaga 2014:31-32)

Psychasthenia helps us situate the holograms and

racialized bodies in a place where the powers of

conceived representations of space find new ways

to reproduce its dominance, also affecting the

lived space, especially the increasingly

camouflaged racialized Black body in Vancouver.

As a consequence, there is a growing incapacity of

our minds to map not just the city, but also the

bodies and multiculturalism-from-below that

inhabit it.

At the end of the book, we see the ghosts of the

immigrant girl and the dead Pan-Indian activist

looking at the city burning in the distance. They

take a boat row towards the ruins to take another

one like them. They find a hologram, now called

composite, indicating a mixture of features, as in

the multicultural city or the multiracial bodies that

disrupt liberal multiculturalism, and gives it

agency, no longer a ghostly image.

The holograms escape the categorization of

individuals as unitary, coherent and already

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constituted subjects, and they hold multiple, open

and porous subjectivities always in the process of

formation. They take him to the island. As they row

away from the city, they are exceeding the range

of the projectors and thus the government reach for

definition, so the composite starts flickering then

disappears, only to appear again when they reach

the island.

The girl is “excited to be a knowing guide and

takes the composite by the hand to show him the

detention center, the research facilities, the other

shores, the people who can’t perceive them”

(Compton 2014:193). The three are ghosts,

invisible to the others around them, yet they are

still in that lived space. Like Vancouver’s Black

community and First Nations peoples, they are

there, fighting against erasure and elision,

occupying a figurative island for the immigrant,

racialized bodies. This voices from the borderlands

“inhabit and embody the new cultural politics of

difference, complicating that politics with

intersectionalities of race, class, ethnicity, gender,

and sexual preference formations of ‘difference’”

(Sandercock 2013:26-27).

Despite this dystopian ending, there is still hope.

There is an opportunity for Afroperipheralism and

multiculturalism-from-below to create a space of

radical openness to keep claiming a space in the

city, an open, progressive space informed with the

possibilities of the psychasthenia. “At dawn he and

she and the newcomer will make plans to

rendezvous with those yet to come. They will

discuss what it means to regroup” (Compton

2014:194).

CONCLUSIONS

To conclude, in the struggle for the right to the city

of Vancouver deeply related to identity, space and

the body act as metaphors in the reformulation of

cultural identity. Compton’s stories destabilize the

ideas assumed of Canada as a white, benevolent

and just nation by building spaces of resistance

rooted in the nation.

While they question it, they involve it ethically

to develop ideas of nationality, belonging and

citizenship, and as Black and First Nations

individuals are configured within the urban and

national geohistories. Confused in a city of glass

with transparent borders and an invisibilised body,

Black identity fluctuates between opposite

possibilities.

On the one hand, there is a psychasthenic

dissolution into space, disappearing into the

cityscape. Without a body, identity adheres to any

scenario like a disposable costume. On the other

hand, Black identity can take advantage of this

border-crossing feature, reverting the

psychasthenic process before the final step of

dissolution, enjoying more extensive borders. This

means to fight against fragmentation and rigid

categorization. The battle for this vanishing body

is manifested in the fight for the territory.

In the case of Black Vancouver, there is an

extremely hybrid identity lacking a specific

cultural space that cannot be defined on the basis

of national origins or other inherent relations of

belonging, but according to the network of

relations that this group and individuals establish

in their everyday life and their actions in the real-

and-imagined Vancouver.

This is where Wayde Compton’s stories point to:

rejecting the choices that modernist discourses

imposed upon the activist Black subject. It points

to the adoption of a space that is simultaneously

central and marginal; an identity that is not

informed by a narrow cultural nationalism.

It is marginality that one chooses as a site of

resistance; an open space of possibility from

which to articulate their sense of the world,

claiming a space of ones’ own in the city and in

the national narrative while being inside and

outside at the same time. Associations like the

United African Communities of B.C. represent

Africans establishing capitalist networks for the

development of African-owned businesses and

claim spaces for these communities through

everyday life practices (Creese 2011).

Transcultural associations defend the integration

of subaltern cosmologies against the dominant

ones in the City of Vancouver: Hogan’s Alley

Trust achieved ownership of space in Strathcona

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to use it for residential, cultural and commercial

purposes instead of speculation. In 2019 this work

paid off with the opening of Nora Hendrix Place, a

52-unit temporary modular housing development

primarily for Black and Indigenous homeless

(Green 2019).

The result of this analysis of Compton’s work is

that the production of space cannot be understood

only from the dominant prism. It needs the

perspective of those insurgents who question the

stratification of society through space and build a

counter-hegemonic cosmology. It is about multiple

encounters and the transcultural interactions that

complete the story. Compton’s narrative weaves

complex networks of collaboration in the

interrelation of differences instead of assimilations

or exclusions presented by regressive discourses.

Compton’s cartography of Vancouver in The Outer

Harbour connects familiar Black narratives with

other racialized experiences of the city beyond the

community and ethnic-racial boundaries,

engaging with the lives of a multi-ethnic cast of

characters. Acknowledging the more racially

hostile experience of the Asian and First Nations

peoples in the B.C. context, Compton refuses any

unitary narrative of Black pride or uplifting,

instead articulating a narrative tapestry of diasporic

subjects within and beyond the Black community.

Compton radical open space allows for inter-

ethnic connections and a site of “political

encounters that reveal an ensemble of diverse and

interracial subject positions that, together, explore

the stakes of imagining more humanly workable

geographies” (McKittrick & Woods 2007:108).

In the current moment of global turn towards

conservative discourses on race and immigration,

a conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis

of Compton’s work is that beyond nationalist

discourses, the city becomes the space from which

to articulate alliances and emancipatory political

projects beyond the dominant geohistory. In The

Outer Harbour’s Vancouver, the metropolis is not

a space of resolution or closure, but a space of

possibility from which a multiculturalism-from-

below, driven by the intimacies of urban life and

transculturation might be possible.

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