Internment Of Japanese Canadians Research Articles

Forced displacement and migrants' location choices: Evidence from the Japanese-Canadian experience during World War II

This paper examines whether a forced displacement of an ethnic group can lead to long-run changes to their spatial distribution and whether this shock can also lead to changes in where new migrants settle. I use the Canadian government’s internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, as well as their post-war forced resettlement, as a natural experiment. I find that the policy led to dramatic resettlement patterns; areas where Japanese Canadians were removed from had far fewer Japanese Canadians after World War II, with this effect persisting for decades. Despite these displacement patterns, I find that both the pre-war and post-war settlement patterns drive where new Japanese migrants settle within Canada, suggesting that the disruption of the connections and networks formed by Japanese migrants before World War II were not fully dismantled by the Canadian government’s wartime policies. Reinforcing this mechanism, I show using Facebook’s social connectedness data that Japanese population shares from both 1931 and 1951 predict whether a Canadian Census Division is more socially connected with Japan today. The results from this paper show that, despite Canada’s forced dispersal of its Japanese population across the country, networks and forces that connect Census Divisions to Japan and draw in new migrants continued to persist.

Reconsidering the Past

Those in power often use carefully constructed historical narratives to justify past injustices. Nevertheless, with the rise of postmodern literature, including historiographic metafictions, fiction authors have challenged traditional historicism while problematizing historical justifications for past injustices. Joy Kogawa uses postmodernist literary devices in her novel Obasan, presenting her novel as a work of historiographic metafiction. However, the political, social, and historical contexts in which Kogawa uses such devices reveal that Obasan’s historiographic metafictional qualities self-reflexively evoke a reconsideration of the official historical accounts that attempted to justify Japanese Canadian internment.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Carefully Considered Words: The Influence of Government on Truth Telling about Japanese Canadian Internment and Indian Residential Schools

Formal apologies and compensation are well-used modes of reparation for survivors of historical injustices in Canada. Examples of historical injustices, which took place in Canada, include the internment of Japanese Canadians and Indian Residential Schools. Truth telling is a central element of reparations movements which refers to processes used to uncover and reveal a formerly denied or ignored part of history. This paper opens up critical space for understanding how government influences and limits truth telling. Based primarily on analysis of archival documents of the Canadian federal public service about Japanese Canadian redress in the 1980s, the paper demonstrates that the government was highly invested in limiting the story of the internment and managing risks regarding compensation. I demonstrate that the government emphasized isolating redress from the claims of other “ethno-cultural” groups and argue that the government’s statements on the internment erase Canada’s oldest and ongoing historical injustice – the appropriation of Indigenous lands by settler governments and practices that attempt to eliminate Indigenous peoples from their lands.

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON ETHNICALLY TARGETED INTERNMENTS: A STUDY ON THE CHINESE INDIAN AND THE JAPANESE CANADIAN WARTIME EXPERIENCES

Purpose of the study: The purpose of the study is to provide a new theoretical interpretation of how nation-States have exercised control over targeted ethnic communities through the repressive act of camp internment. It uses two major global historical events as the frame of reference: the internment of the Chinese ethnic community in India during the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, and internment of the Japanese ethnic population in Canada during World War II.
 Methodology: This study draws on Michel Foucault’s theories on “biopolitics” to analyze the States’ mechanisms of control during wartime periods. The Foucauldian framework of “biopolitics” is used as a theoretical tool to develop a concurrent study on the internment experiences of the two ethnic groups, and provide a new understanding of the conceptualization of this regulatory decision enforced by the government.
 Main Findings: The findings show the internment as an expression of State-regulated biopolitical control, in which groups of people come under the administration of a power whose sole function is to subjugate their lives and bodies by detaining them in camps. It concludes that a mass internment decisions, usually taken under the pretext of “national security,” undermines the democratic set-up of a nation.
 Applications of this study: Taken together, findings of this study contribute to scholarly discussions in the field of social sciences and humanities. It will be of particular interest to those engaged in a contemporary interpretation of discriminatory actions against minority communities in the larger global context. It, however, carries a relevance beyond scholarly discourses – it warns us against replication of such unwarranted episodes in the future.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: Unlike most biopolitical studies regarding authoritarian regimes, this one develops the arguments through internment cases that occurred in the world's two leading democracies. Though Japanese Canadian internment has been studied widely, Chinese Indian study is still nascent. Analyzing these episodes together under theoretical paradigms throws new insights on the State's exertion of power upon a targeted population in a modern democratic system.Japanese Canadian Internment

Repositioning the Narrative of the Japanese Canadian Internment through Multidirectional Memory

Repositioning the Narrative of the Japanese Canadian Internment through Multidirectional Memory

Nationalism, an Emancipatory Project? 1968 and After

Nationalism, an Emancipatory Project? 1968 and After Pamela McCallum (bio) During the summer of 1968 I was employed as a student assistant in the office of the local hospital in a small southern Ontario city. There was one other student, a young woman who would be entering her senior university year in the fall. I had just finished my first year at the University of Toronto, and we spent coffee breaks in conversation sharing impressions and experiences. Her major was French, and one day she commented that she had just spent her third year abroad in Paris. I imagine my eyes must have widened: “You were in Paris in May?!” “Yes,” her answer came, “and it was horrible. I was fortunate to get a flight out before the airport closed.” It’s hard to believe my disappointment was not palpably visible. I must have said something noncommittal because our working relationship did not change, nor did our coffee-break conversations, but the thought I had not voiced was insistently loud in my head: I would have stayed for the revolution. My reaction was undeniably bound up with youthful romanticism: Paris was the City of Light in the nation of Enlightenment. I was especially drawn to the slogan “sous les pavés la plage” [under the cobblestones, the beach], whose metaphor, unraveling into visions of utopia, attracted a young woman committed to reading and studying literature. That builders’ sand, hard-packed under a paving stone, could transform in imagination into an expansive space of possibility and freedom, suggesting new, undreamt-of futures, was irresistibly compelling. I was years away from encountering Ernst Bloch’s theorizing of utopian hope, but the inventive figuration of that image conjured up dreams of unrealized potential. It was clear that the American war in Vietnam sought to intervene in the national self-determination of that far-off country. For Canadian students the question of nationalism was especially vexing. On the one [End Page 62] hand, it was obvious that postwar nationalisms were to be welcomed: the emergence of newly independent nations from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, the struggles for national liberation in others. The Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portuguese African Colonies (TCLPAC), focusing on Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, was a powerful presence on the University of Toronto campus, with speakers, debates and films. Most of all, the national question took the form of Québec’s right to self-determination. By the end of the ’60s, claims for Québec sovereignty had emerged in the form of the Parti Québecois, which eventually won the 1976 provincial election under René Lévesque, and in the more militant Le Front de la Libération de Québec (FLQ), whose actions in 1971 would push Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act.1 On the other hand, it seemed disquieting to advocate nationalism as an emancipatory project in a developed Western context. Canadian capital engaged in exploitative investments at home and within the developing world; of particular interest in the late 1960s were the loans the hugely successful Canadian banking industry made to governments across Latin America. The 1967 celebrations of the centenary of Confederation (the creation of the Dominion of Canada within the British Empire) had been unproblematically buoyant and optimistic, with no references to dark moments of history: centuries of oppression of indigenous peoples; exploitation of Chinese labor in building the transcontinental railways and the west-coast forest industries; the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, in which Sikh migrants were denied entry to Vancouver; the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, all of which should have been but were not yet a part of general knowledge. And, if Québec had sensitized us to progressive claims of nationalism, were not Anglophone Canadians the villains in that narrative of self-determination? A possibility of disentangling the tensions and contradictions around nationalism came into view with the emergence of the Waffle movement in the social democratic parliamentary party, the New Democratic Party (NDP). The odd name was suggested, in John Bullen’s account, when someone, “responding to an uncertain position on the question of public ownership...

Forgetting Asian Canadian Experimental Performance: Haruko Okano and Fred Wah’s High(bridi)Tea

In this article, I argue that High(bridi)Tea issues an important challenge to the developmental narratives of both dominant and “marginal” accounts of Canadian history and memory, including a still-formulating, pan-ethnic “Asian Canadian” history and memory that has been in the process of unfolding since the late 1960s. Developed and presented at the turn of the twenty-first century, after the federal government’s 1988 apology for Japanese Canadian internment but before apologies for restricting, and then eventually barring, Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1947, High(bridi)Tea recalls the painful multigenerational effects of national exclusion and internment on Chinese and Japanese Canadian subjects during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, as a participatory performance event staged around the rituals of presenting, serving, and consuming tea in real-time, High(bridi)Tea articulates this history not just along the lines of narrative or thematic content, but through an embodied and social relational exploration of the high tea service as commemorative cultural ceremony in the present.

Impermanent Apologies: on the Dynamics of Timing and Public Knowledge in Political Apology

Political apologies are commonly imagined as gestures of finality and closure: capstone moments that summate public knowledge. One manifestation of these assumptions is the position that apologies should be timed to come only after appropriate investigation into the wrongdoing has been completed. This article takes a different view, for two reasons. First, even apologies that seem based on robust knowledge can come to seem incomplete or inadequate in the light of subsequent learning and knowledge. Second, because apologies are complexly embedded in longer-term processes of activism and response, they can contribute to their own unravelling by encouraging further consideration and inquiry. We develop these arguments by considering two Canadian cases that illustrate these dynamics: apologies that addressed, respectively, the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians and the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools.

A tree house in Tokyo: Reflections on Nikkei, citizenship, belonging, architecture, and art on the 75th anniversary of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment

ABSTRACT This think piece discusses the continuing influence of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment, which commenced 75 years ago in 1942 and also affected Nikkei from 13 Latin American countries. Contextualizing the Canadian case, the essay explores the lives of Raymond Moriyama, a Nikkei architect interned despite his Canadian birth and citizenship, and William Allister, a White Canadian Prisoner of War (POW) of Japan, and their mutual attempts to overcome bitterness through their architecture and art. The article explores the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo designed by Moriyama as a tree house, reflecting Moriyama’s belief that a tree house is a special place where the human spirit can dwell and soar. The Canadian Embassy in Japan as a tree house proclaims possibilities of addressing historic wrongs and embracing diversity. North American Nikkei attempts to prevent further injustices against others are related to the contemporary context in which some North American voices advocate a registry of Arab Americans. The essay asserts that the official Redress acknowledgements by the United States and Canada in 1988 that the internment of people of Japanese descent was wrong stand as a precedent against such targeting of specific groups.

Eating Japanese food in diaspora as identity building: The case of a Japanese Canadian church

ABSTRACTIn the life of a Japanese Canadian Christian church, food – especially Japanese cuisine – occupies a central place in parish life. Food not only nurtures members of the congregation physically but it serves as a focal point for collective identity formation. In the community where the majority of members are still survivors of Japanese Canadian internment during World War II, I argue that by planning, preparing, and serving food, women constantly create and maintain the imagined homeland in a Canadian diaspora. Based on 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper illustrates the ways in which food serves as a symbolic means to create a homeland and define women’s position within that cultural creation. The paper also illustrates the ways in which ‘race’ is experienced in dynamic ways in relation to the group’s shifting position in the global arena by contrasting the bitter experience of Japanese Canadians during World War II with the recent popularity of Japanese food.

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

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.

Can Muslims Fly? The No Fly List as a Tool of the “War on Terror”

The securitization phenomenon is based on a racialized logic that predates 9/11 and has roots in the discourse of Orientalism, the practices of European colonialism and, in the more recent times of the 20th century, the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. This article analyzes the “no fly list” as a counter-terrorism tool used by the Canadian government in the “war on terror.” It situates the analysis in the political context of the securitization of Muslims, the social and political processes that construct them as threats to the nation. It examines the evolution of the “no fly list” since 2001 and analyzes its impact on Muslims in Canada, drawing on well-publicized cases. It critiques the list's effectiveness based on the distinction between information and knowledge as tools to fight the “war on terror.” The “no fly list” contributes to Islamophobia through disproportionately profiling racialized Muslim and Muslim-looking passengers as members of a suspect community.

Social inclusion of Japanese Canadians: a view from Toronto

Although generally an immigrant-friendly country with high immigration levels, Canada also had racially-motivated policies of discrimination, as seen in the mass internment of Japanese Canadians (JCs) during the Second World War. Today, JCs constitute a relatively small ethnic group, mainly made up of descendants of pre-war immigrants, as well as post-war immigrants and their offspring. With the highest rate of mixed unions among any ethnic group in Canada, JCs and the issues that they face are very diverse. Drawing from the experience of the Japanese Social Services in Toronto, a reconstituted case of a JC senior is presented and discussed. Implications for social work practice are presented.

Matthew Evenden.Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-electricity during Canada’s Second World War.

The phrase “Canada’s Second World War” conjures many images. There are the high politics of Canadian-American continental defense exemplified by the Ogdensburg Agreement (1940) and the Hyde Park Declaration (1941), as well as the 1943 and 1944 Quebec City conferences between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill (with Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King playing host). Events between 1939 and 1945 that touched Canada are evoked: Japanese-Canadian internment; the disastrous Dieppe Raid; the conscription crisis; and women in the wartime workforce. In this list of World War II touchstones, however, few would include the expansion of a hydroelectric producing network. That is, until now. Matthew Evenden’s fine study digs deep, in fact into the geologic history of the nation, to unearth a new element of Canada’s contribution during the global conflict. Moreover, it provides a wedge into the study of the environment and warfare in Canada’s past, an area seldom explored by environmental historians.

Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by rights-based movements of 1960s and 1970s, Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a collective self, or Canadian identity, through which to challenge representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist policies as Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Canadian Internment, and Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating nation-state as primary interlocutor of Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as field increasingly becomes drawn into academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that focus on domestic identity politics, and promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot shake up systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to think about formation of Canadian through imperialism and and to see Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a diasporic can highlight links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where Opium Wars had disrupted local economy [and] provid[ed] much of push for emigration (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, paradigm can productively complicate history of Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Canadian identity. Lai argues that tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to pressures of state incorporation currently informing Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to recirculate logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms (23). This logic becomes all more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, 2010 Maclean's article entitled Too Asian suggests that the trope of 'yellow peril' has been reinvigorated in national imaginary (Lai 17). …

Oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice

Foreword Steven High Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Practice Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki PART I: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFETIME OF LISTENING Section Introduction: Henry Greenspan 1. From California to Kufr Nameh and Back: Reflections on Forty Years of Feminist Oral History Sherna Berger Gluck 2. On and Off the in Shifting Times and Circumstances Julie Cruikshank and Tatiana Argounova 3. Politics and Praxis in Canadian Working-Class Oral History Joan Sangster PART II: ENCOUNTERS IN VULNERABILITY, FAMILIARITY, AND FRIENDSHIP Section Introduction: Hourig Attarian 4. The Vulnerable Listener Martha Norkunas 5. Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview Alan Wong 6. Going Places: Helping Youth with Refugee Experiences Take Their Stories Public Elizabeth Miller 7. Not Just Another Interviewee: Befriending a Holocaust Survivor Stacey Zembrzycki PART III: THE INTERSECTION OF ETHICS AND POLITICS Section Introduction: Leyla Neyzi 8. Can Hear Lois Now: Corrections to My Story of the Internment of Japanese Canadians - For the Record Pamela Sugiman 9. Third Parties in 'Third Spaces': Reflecting on the Role of the Translator in Oral History Interviews with Iraqi Diasporic Women Nadia Jones-Gailani 10. If you told me you wanted to talk about the '60s, wouldn't have called you back: Reflections on Collective Memory and the Practice of Oral History Nancy Janovicek 11. The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa Monica Eileen Patterson PART IV: CONSIDERING SILENCE Section Introduction: Erin Jessee 12. Toward an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History Alexander Freund 13. The Heart of Activism in Colombia: Reflections on Activism and Oral History Research in a Conflict Area Luis van Isschot 14. I don't fancy history very much: Reflections on Interviewee Recruitment and Refusal in Bosnia-Herzegovina Anna Sheftel Afterword Alessandro Portelli

Nina Lee Aquino, Ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary AsianCanadian Drama

NINA LEE AQUINO, ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Volumes I and II. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. Vol. I xi + 307pp; Vol. II xi + 279pp. NINA LEE AQUINO and RIC KNOWLES, eds. Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Volume I. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011. xvi + 276pp. The twelve plays collected in two-volume set of Love + Relasianships, first comprehensive collection of Asian Canadian drama, vary widely in terms of their stories, aesthetics, and production histories. Many of them are what editor Nina Aquino describes as theatrical milestones (ix): for example, M.J. Kang's haunting Noran Bang: The Yellow Room was first play written in North America depicting contemporary Korean diasporic experience. Miss Orient(ed), a biting satire of Filipino beauty pageants by Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, marked entry of Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop into realm of professional Toronto theatre. And pioneering playwright R.A. Shiomi's detective story Yellow Fever was first professionally produced Asian Canadian play (first staged in San Francisco in 1982, play received its Canadian premiere in 1983, by Canasian Artists Group in Toronto). These and other dramatic works bring us into broad terrain of contemporary Asian Canadian politics, raising formative questions of exclusion and racial violence, diaspora and immigration, transnational community, gender and sexuality, and stereotyping and media. Winston Christopher Kam's Bachelor-Man addresses queer identities and masculinity in context of 1923 Exclusion Act and bachelor communities of Chinese labourers. In The Plum Tree Japanese Canadian internment leaves its scar on present-day characters and defines their sense of home, land, and country. Jean Yoon's whimsical valentine to Yoko Ono, Yes Yoko Solo and Leon Aureus's hard-hitting Banana Boys both explore how cultural stereotype and expectation affect young identities and relationships. The range of stories attests to fact that there is no one definitive Asian-Canadian experience, and raises important questions about theatrical representation of diverse and multinational identities. Set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Marjorie Chan's China Doll imagines how Ibsen's A Doll House might inspire a young woman with bound feet. Hiro Kanagawa's riveting Tiger of Malaya depicts Manila War Crimes trial of General Tomoyuko Yamashita. The complexities of intimacy, recognition, and communication are poignantly staged both in Betty Quan's family drama Mother Tongue and David Yee's engagingly varied vignettes, Paper Series. Such unruly identities and stories don't fit neatly into any one ethnic or racial box. At same time they test easy claims about universal human experiences by emphasizing how racial, ethnic, cultural, and national differences matter. In Marty Chan's Maggie's Last Dance neither concerns nor identities of thirty-something characters dealing with romantic fallout of their high school years are recognizably Asian Canadian; at same time, characters compare their anxieties about love to Quebec separatism, referencing most visible fracture in Canada's national identity. This subtle allusion to disunity is openly interrogated in anthology of critical essays, Asian Canadian Theatre. Its essays reflect how politics of race in present-day Canada are shaped by policies of contemporary multiculturalism, and how questions about representation and visibility are markedly different from those of a generation ago. Editors Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles note how official multicultural script (ix) demands a certain kind of conformity: the very mechanisms of visibility that allow it to emerge also paradoxically might undercut its power to change and critique (viii). …

In Search of Someday: Trauma and Repetition in Joy Kogawa’s Fiction

This essay brings to the forefront the work by Joy Kogawa that preceded and followed her watershed novel Obasan (1981), which privileges the perspective of a traumatized child to narrate the internment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War. The objective of the essay is to address an overlooked pattern of repetition and revision that can be traced across these multiple texts—a sequel, Itsuka / Emily Kato; a revision for children, Naomi’s Road; and a thematic follow-up, The Rain Ascends—all of which were revisited by Kogawa after their initial publication. Drawing on pivotal work on trauma and memory, the essay considers to what extent Kogawa’s larger story of oppression, dispersal, and forgetting is unconcludable.

Dangerous (Internal) Foreigners and Nation-Building: The Case of Canada

In this article we develop a theoretical framework attuned to the relationship between discourses of security, race/racialization, and foreignness. Applying this framework to three historic instances of Canadian national insecurity (Japanese-Canadian internment, the Front de libération du Québec crisis, and the Kanehsatake/Oka crisis), we argue that “foreignness” is produced and regulated in historically specific ways with consequences for how “the nation” is viewed. We demonstrate how this is especially evident in relation to racialized constructions of “internal dangerous foreigners.” Our framework and findings invite larger disciplinary consideration of the post-September 11 security environment both in and outside Canada.