Exploring Relationships between Time, Law and Social Ordering: A Curated Conversation

This interdisciplinary and international 'curated conversation' focuses on the relationship between time, law and social ordering. Participants were drawn from law, sociology and anthropology in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands. Their research is inspired by, and engaged with, feminist theory, post- or anti-colonial perspectives and/or critical race theory. In an extended written conversation lasting several days (and later edited), participants reflected on how questions of time have emerged in their research, the ways in which they have struggled with conceptual or methodological dilemmas to do with analysing time in relation to law or social ordering. The conversation focused in particular on how constructions of race are co-imbricated with dominant temporal idioms and practices and the challenges this poses for researchers interesting in unpicking the knotted relationships between race, colonialism, and specific legal technicalities or approaches

Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race

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

The savage Indian and the foreign plague, mapping racial categories and legal geographies of race in British Columbia, 1871-1925

grantor: University of TorontoThis dissertation explores how the myth of British Columbia as a white settler society was socially, legally, and spatially constituted from 1871-1925. Drawing from a wide range of archival sources, including government and missionary correspondence, police court records, trial transcripts, maps, and photographs, I examine how the exclusion of Aboriginal and Chinese peoples--two communities who were racially marked in distinct ways and subjected to unique forms of regulation--enabled state and religious administrators to assert a "pure" British identity in the province. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the desire for white supremacy in British Columbia was largely constituted geographically. Government officials, I contend, relied on a variety of segregationist strategies in their efforts to carve up the province into racially marked districts. This process commenced with the enactment of reserves and was followed by the initiatives of government and non-government administrators who in various ways supported the social and legal creation of racialized spaces. In much the same way that Indigenous peoples were managed through the reserve system, Chinese immigrants came to be governed through the formal and informal spatial confines of Chinatowns. Racism was not only about keeping whites up and the "lower orders" down. Instead, it was also about placing whites and communities of color in their "proper" 'spaces'. The making of distinct racial geographies was never a forgone conclusion, however. Racialized areas were not entirely closed off from white society, nor was segregation always a desired goal at all times and by all colonizers. To begin with, the boundaries that separated reserves, Chinatowns, and white cities were porous and permeable. Although government authorities and missionaries enacted a series of legal and quasi-legal policies through which to police racial borders, spatial governance was often frustrated. While Native and Chinese peoples sometimes overtly resisted spatial boundaries and at other times simply ignored them, the competing and contradictory colonial agendas of state, church, and capital meant that many whites also challenged the making of particular racialized geographies. The spatial organization of race proved to be a constant struggle for government and religious authorities in Canada's most westerly province.Ph.D