Navigating ‘Small Objects of Foreignness’

Too often, totalizing discourses about the nature of the global metropole attempt to control its social and political story and render it an idealized object rather than a space of discrete subjects and perspectives. Walking the city is an act of social experience that allows the urban wanderer to see what has previously been hidden or inaccessible. Urban rambling reveals the ways in which racial and ethnic minorities have been colonized and marginalized, and how their communities have been rendered invisible as well. This paper examines how the metrolingual and metro-cultural practices of cosmopolitanism combined with the micro-strategies of decolonization serve to provide a counter-place to the dominant space of the Toronto city landscape. I frame this investigation with Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For, as a narrative background, complemented by my own experience of aleatory urbanism through several Toronto neighbourhoods to explore the ways in which individual communities resist and re-negotiate the hegemony of settler-colonial municipal and linguistic practices.