Cultural confessions: Law and the racial scrutiny of the Indo-Canadian home in Metro Vancouver

Abstract

In Metro Vancouver, the recurrence of gang violence involving young South Asian men has spawned a series of public explanations about a new threat to public safety: the ‘Indo-Canadian gangster’. This article explicates the racial force of a specific exposé on the putatively ‘cultural’ origins of the Indo-Canadian gangster which identifies the domestic realm of the city’s South Asian populations as the principal cause of this gang violence. By tracking the trajectories of this exposé and other texts that take similar confessional forms, this article provides important insight into the differential capacity of texts to attract public attention and to persuade, by virtue of the narrative forms they assume as well as the semantic content of the knowledges they mobilize. On the one hand, this article documents the tropes of cultural inertia that characterize public knowledges of the ‘Indo-Canadian home’, which is configured as a domestic space that is culturally insulated from putatively Western norms of civility and legality. On the other hand, it explains how this exposé acquires its epistemic force from the confessional form of the knowledges it circulates, which acts as a mechanism of cultural interpellation for South Asian actors who are positioned to renounce and disavow the pathologies of Indo-Canadian culture.