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A research report conducted with the Multicultural Council to survey Windsor's capacity to welcome immigrants and make recommendations for improvement

Interviews with racialized minority immigrant women activist-managers in immigrant service sector in Toronto, Canada demonstrate how women construct their activist identities. An antiracist postcolonial feminist framework is used to explore their narrative strategies and to show that their activist possibilities are constrained by their identities. Activism is limited to advocating for their ethnic community in multicultural politics that is structured by postcolonial “speaking” configuration that allows “native informants” to represent their communities as culturally alien and to authorize state management of racial and ethnic differences. The interviews also show the complexities of immigrant women’s political agency as they navigate the limiting politics.

This article approaches the study of incorporation of ‘visible minority’ immigrants in Peterborough, Canada by insisting on framing their experiences in the legacies of colonialism, racial and ethnic formations, and processes that spill over nation-bound discourses. It attempts to understand the postcolonial condition from the perspective of migrants inserting themselves in the West. Using a postcolonial lens on difference, immigrant narratives about experience of becoming settled in Canada are analysed as constructions of ethnic postcolonial resistance and accommodation. The article reveals how immigrants negotiate with being stigmatized as different. The agency of migrants is emphasized while paying attention to the discursive limits in the new space where they try to re-establish themselves. It explores how immigrants read into the inconsistencies of the Canadian multicultural story as their own experiences contradict it. Their challenge and counter-narratives are part of the reconstruction of migrant postcolonial history that allows them to normalize their presence in Canada and to suture their history to the Canadian one. Collective experiences and knowledge among immigrants in the local space are important in supporting their challenge to neo-liberal multicultural and exclusive national discourses.

Using Philomena Essed's theory on everyday racism, this paper explores how Chinese Canadian women interpret racism. It argues that differences in interpretation can be explained by examining personal biographies that attend to subjective experience and social context, and from which implications for anti-racist feminist epistemology can be drawn.