The Nation Dreamt Whole: Mid-Century Canadian Political Fantasy and the NFB’s “- -Of Japanese Descent”: An Interim Report (1945)

Abstract

Through an analysis of the NFB’s 1945 film“--Of Japanese Descent”: an Interim Report this article explores aspects of a specifically Canadian mid-century political imaginary characterized by very particular economic and racial anxieties. Faced by the emergence of new political economies—fascist and communist models that seemed capable of re-imagining the nation—as well as a broad sense for a debility or limit proper to capitalist liberal democracy, many people in this period began to fantasize about openly post-liberal Canadian futures. At the same time, the Canadian state was attempting to manage and control a narrative of national identity in the context of new flows of non-white immigrants. “--Of Japanese Descent”—a film produced by the Canadian state to positively re-frame the internment of Japanese Canadians during the war—attempts to resolve both vectors of anxiety simultaneously. The internment camp comes to be imagined as a kind of post-liberal utopia, a space of national fulfillment and purpose de-linked from the risks and aporias of liberal capitalism. What we call the “liberal concentration camp”, then, models an alternative, idealized Canadian future while simultaneously functioning as a kind of school or machine for the naturalization of “inadmissible” Japanese bodies. However, even as the film channels fascist and communist desires—for national oneness and economic solidarity respectively—it operates as a means of preparing the Canadian viewer for the re-integration of interned Japanese into their communities and in this sense is a very early snapshots of the limits and contradictions of liberal state multiculturalism in Canada.