The Chameleon Character of Multilingual Literacy Portraits: Re-Searching in “Heritage” Language Places and Spaces

Abstract

The portrait of Canada as a welcoming place for immigrants can be traced to different immigration waves and political climates. Human geographer Soja’s (1996) concept of “third space”—a new space between collectives and individuals and historical periods-offers possibilities for exploring relationships among spaces, identity politics, and heritage languages. To understand children’s locations in multiple spaces, we draw on the Lefebvre/ Soja tradition within the theoretical landscape of critical human geography. Relevant here are Lefebvre’s (1991) three different kinds of spaces: espace perçu-perceived physical space, espace conçu-conceived, mental, or imagined space, and espace veçu-third space as directly lived through social practices. Conceptualizing children’s identity construction as a recursive process necessitates a double perspective-looking at local literacy moments in their daily living and the more global, political discourses in which they may be located. To articulate a vision of diverse spaces where locations of possibility are open for children to “speak” and “be,” we draw on Bakhtin’s (1990) dialogic concept of self, which creates an active response to the utterances of individuals, their social and temporal worlds. We use chameleon as a metaphor to characterize our attempts to draw portraits of multilingual children’s literacy practices and identity construction in diverse spaces. We also use it in the postmodern sense to signal the paradoxical, elusive nature of identity in global times as fluid and discursively constructed in ways that are not always visible, easily recognizable, or politically and personally valued. Yon (2000) maintains that diaspora “as a theoretical concept…helps us to think about culture and cultural processes as forged through transnational networks and identifications” (pp. 17-18). Braziel and Mannur (2003) argue that “Diaspora remains, above all, a human phenomenon-lived and experienced” (p. 8).

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