Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

Cartographies of violence, women, memory, and the subject(s) of the internment

grantor: University of TorontoIn this thesis, it is argued that the expulsion of Japanese Canadians from the Canadian west coast and their incarceration, dispossession, and displacement in the 1940s were critical acts in Canadian nation-building, acts that served to further the notion of Canada as a space of white supremacy. These nation-building processes, aimed at producing a hegemonic notion of nation and citizenship, were also intrinsically violent. Yet in order to reproduce the notion of Canada as a benevolent country, violence of such enormous consequence must be forgotten through various processes and the thesis examines how certain representational discourses contribute to the forgetting of the enormity of the violence and its long-term effects. Through interviews with eleven women who were incarcerated and their daughters, I trace how memory of this history is mobilized and transmitted across generations. Using a contrapuntal spatial analysis, I examine how women describe the spaces of incarceration. I illustrate how memory and subjectivity are heterogeneously and relationally produced through seemingly disparate yet interconnected incarceration sites. also argue that this production of subjects must be seen as contingent upon interlocking systems of domination and emphasize that hegemonic social relations of white supremacy, male domination, class, heteronormativity, and physical/mental ability arrange subjects relationally and hierarchically. Throughout the thesis, I problematize the predominant notion of the "silent" Japanese Canadian subject. The focus upon the "silent" subject must be critically examined in relation to a racializing and en-gendering Western gaze of domination and the forgetting of the silences of the many non-Japanese Canadians who devised, enforced, witnessed, and benefited from these multiply situated violent practices. The discourse of the "silent" subject is concretely interrogated when I examine the ways in which knowledge of this history is transmitted to children of families who were incarcerated. Also undertaken through this study is an interrogation of the liberal humanist subject underpinning hegemonic notions of nation, citizenship, and subjectivity. This analysis is applied, for example, in illustrating how interpretations of testimonies may presume and reify the liberal subject. The thesis also acknowledges how women contest domination and challenge us to re-imagine the subject, citizenship, and nation.Ph.D