Voice Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–49 (review)

The American and Canadian governments never demonstrated the existence of a reliable threat posed by Japanese living on the West Coast in the 1940s. Nonetheless, in what would become one of the most notorious human rights controversies in North American history, the governments forcibly evacuated their own citizens during the Second World War from the coastal region, placed them in detention camps, and eventually relocated the evacuees in an attempt to assimilate them. Many of them, including Canadian citizens, were later deported to Japan. In Voices Raised in Protest, Stephanie Bangarth explores the similarities among the policies enacted by the two governments and how they cooperated in pursuing racially based policies. The author's study of state policies is a valuable addition to the literature, particularly her focus on the deportations – an issue that is too often overshadowed by the evacuation. But the real contribution of this study is Bangarth's examination of grassroots mobilization among whites and Japanese Canadians. Drawing on an impressive and exhausting array of archival sources from both countries, Bangarth goes to great lengths to document the complexities behind one of the first human rights campaigns in Canadian history. More than simply documenting the activities and positions of opposition movements, including an entire chapter on the legal cases surrounding the evacuation and internment, this book captures the nuances of the movement with a detailed exploration of divisions among the activists in the United States and Canada. Her emphasis on the role of churches in early human rights campaigns, the media's influence on state policy, the failure of other minority groups to support Japanese Canadians, and the relationship among Japanese and white activists also represent significant contributions to our understanding of these events.

A comparative approach is, on the surface, an intriguing idea. After all, both countries enacted similar policies and, as Bangarth demonstrates, activists and policy-makers shared information across the border. But the author is unable to demonstrate anything more than superficial cross-border linkages. To the author's credit, her research reveals how activists and politicians responded to the issue on the basis of social, political, and legal context specific to each country. Still, it is unclear why a comparative approach is necessary or even worthwhile in this case. The debate is presented essentially as two separate stories, and rarely does the author draw the two together (the Conclusion has two separate conclusions). What the book lacks is a clear statement of the benefits of comparative historical research and an attempt to embed the empirical findings within a comparative framework to justify linking the events in both countries.

The author's central thesis is also tricky. Canadian activists embraced human rights discourse in the context of the postwar international human rights movement, whereas, according to Bangarth, the Americans remained wedded to a civil libertarian approach to rights rooted in the Bill of Rights. If the book's central thesis is to revolve around a conceptual divergence, it should have included at least a few pages on the theoretical differences between civil liberties and human rights. The lack of a sophisticated discussion surrounding these conceptual distinctions leads the author to often reify the concept of human rights – it is presented as a tool or strategy emerging at the close of the war. But human rights are not a tool, in the way a petition is used to lobby a government. Instead, it is a discursive act that was embraced by historically marginalized peoples to articulate their demands for equal treatment. Activists adopted the language of rights to articulate ideas already embedded in the community, not as a weapon to be deployed strategically. Human rights provided a way to legitimate demands in a way that would resonate with the dominant populace. In addition, the book does not demonstrate a substantive difference in the Canadian and American campaigns except a shallow discursive distinction. Despite a brief mention of...