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

Abstract

This article 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. Examining historically contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral history interviews conducted between 2011–17, the article focuses on the 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, the article reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives, both 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 postcolonial legacy of imperial cultures as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada.

Contemporary Perspectives on Ethnically Targeted Internments: A Study on the Chinese Indian and the Japanese Canadian Wartime Experiences

“…Moreover, because biopolitics is more concerned with populations than with individual human beings, the theory is most fitting here in describing the mass internment of the entire ethnic community in both countries. Earlier studies (and most of them) have interpreted the Japanese Canadian internment along the path of racism or racial attitudes (Edwards, 2017;Coloma, 2013;and Aoki, 2019); but this article argues that the topic of internment can be approached from a theoretical perspective, and completes the analysis by interpreting it in the lines of the biopolitical framework. In a nutshell, this article demonstrates that the internment of targeted ethnic communities is an expression of State-regulated biopolitical control, in which groups of people come under the administration of a (bio) power whose sole function is to subjugate their lives and bodies by detaining them in camps.…”