Travelling Concepts: Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe

Abstract

‘Diversity,’ denoting cultural and ethnic, but also socio-economic differentiation and increasingly stratification, has become a keyword in both the social sciences and cultural studies. In political theory and the social sciences in general, ‘diversity’ provides a framework in which to discuss issues of multiculturalism, migration, sub-state nationalism, indigenous people, and questions of citizenship and citizenship rights; equally important in cultural and literary studies, if with different foci and often with recourse to the related terminology of ‘difference,’ ‘diversity’ claims theoretical and analytical currency with regard to constructions of identity, the canon, and understandings of ‘ethnic,’ ‘multicultural,’ or ‘postcolonial’ literatures and cultures. Since the 1980s, both fields, the social sciences and cultural and literary studies, have been marked by significant shifts in what ‘diversity’ means, in which contexts, and to what effects.