Introduction Free
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Published:February 2017
This introduction brings together the political economy of labor regimes with intimate affective economies to examine how they have become mutually constitutive features of late capitalism. What I describe is a global story of immigration, but also a story of racialization and gendering in the context of state-making and national identity. The practices of settlement services agencies contradict Canadian models of multiculturalism by teaching a Canadian mode of bodily comportment to new immigrants, thus reinscribing colonial notions of the uncivilized and wild Other in need of domestication. This phenomenon contributes to the changing character of the Canadian multicultural state, which focuses on culture while ignoring the real material interests of minority groups. Paradoxically, then, liberal Canadian governance in the postcolonial, globalized world continues to attempt to colonize and discipline the immigrant brown body.