“Powell Street is dead”: Nikkei Loss, Commemoration, and Representations of Place in the Settler Colonial City

Abstract

This article highlights the stakes of commemorating and representing loss in the settler colonial city. Focusing on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians living in Vancouver’s Powell Street neighbourhood before 1942, it contributes to existing scholarship on the internment and dispossession periods by critically examining Japanese Canadian reflections on the loss of place in the midst of as well as after their forced removal. Drawing primarily on the New Canadian newspaper in the 1940s and 1950s, this article demonstrates how Japanese Canadian writers mourned Powell Street’s “death” by describing the neighbourhood as ghostly and in ruins after their departure. Using discourses of urban settler colonialism from the mid-twentieth century, writers conveyed the injustice of the Nikkei community’s erasure within the newspaper and asserted a Japanese Canadian claim to the neighbourhood despite state efforts to deny such a claim. At the same time, this article argues that the New Canadian’s representations of Powell Street reflected participation in what Ann Stoler calls “ruination”, whereby Japanese Canadian commemorations became imbricated in the settler colonial logics and processes that pathologize the Downtown Eastside and its residents. Taking seriously the political work of commemoration, the article concludes that urban dispossessions and their representations must be viewed as overlapping, intersecting, and at times, compounding processes.