‘Familial looking’: Chinese Canadian vernacular photography of the exclusion period (1923–1967)

Abstract

This essay examines the roles of photographic and oral testimony in the construction of Chinese Canadian family identity during a period of discriminatory immigration laws and family separation. Extending Marianne Hirsch’s idea of the ‘familial look’, I argue that Chinese Canadians deployed photography to serve as visual proxies that could transcend physical border restrictions. By examining the interplay between visual and verbal cues and the entanglement of selective framing and storytelling, I posit that the strategic use of photography was a means of building a material trace of family presence in the face of absence and loss. However, as a medium where distance and absence are inherent properties, photography – when paired with oral history – also reveals gaps and discontinuities in the construction of memory. Containing and activating trans-temporal and transnational narratives, family photographs and oral histories act upon each other, changing the way we interpret each mode of articulating the past. Deployed as forms of énoncés, photographs in this period declared Chinese Canadians as members of a visible citizenry, in spite of barriers preventing their achievement of full rights as Canadians. This research draws from the development of the project Chinese Canadian Women, 1923–1967, an online multimedia resource and digital repository that brings together oral histories and photographic collections of families across Canada.