Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (review)

Terrain of Memory is a powerful contribution to cultural studies and memory work, specifically focusing on the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre (NIMC) at New Denver, British Columbia, built in 1994. A sansei – third-generation Japanese Canadian – Kirsten Emiko McAllister has written an ethically grounded exploration of the Memorial Centre which honours the community and the elders of New Denver. As she demonstrates, the NIMC is ‘a public site of mourning and remembrance that contributes to the formation and reconfiguration of contemporary communities.’ McAllister reconstructs the conflicting investments that the community, the government, and the external contractors represented in the development of the Internment Memorial, the site of ‘a struggle over the interpretation of history’ that is captured in the euphemizing of the trauma of the ‘internment’ through the previously favoured government term, ‘the evacuation.’

McAllister has had a long history of participation in the Japanese Canadian community, beginning with her work for the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association in 1989. Inspired by human rights activism and by the settlement for redress negotiated by the National Association of Japanese Canadians, she has ‘defiantly argued against “the end of the community.”’ Fundamentally grounded in the pioneering work of the Asian Canadian activist scholarship of Roy Miki, Cassandra Kobayashi, Ann Sunahara, and Audrey Kobayashi, her new book conjoins the disciplinary critique of Michel Foucault, memory studies by Annette Kuhn, the hermeneutic meta-ethnography of Renato Rosaldo, and the discursive and temporal theorizing of Bakhtin. McAllister represents the cultural studies practitioner who organically evolves a disciplinary intervention, and she dramatically articulates the fraught self-fashioning of the participant observer whose research process is as much the subject of study as is the New Denver community that forms the heart of the Memorial Centre. She provides a candid and illuminating narrative of the process of transforming her academic writing self, a radical revising of her disciplinary identity and research methodologies. Employing an approach that scrutinizes with exacting honesty her moments of crisis, blockages, and breakthroughs, McAllister unfolds a scholarly activist praxis that is ethical, inventive, inimitable, and suffused with dramatic emotional struggle. She is especially conscious of distinguishing her work from ‘positivist’ historians who ‘do not critically reflect on their own investments in producing knowledge that reifies the past as facts waiting to be discovered.’

We learn that she is so self-critical of her ‘sociological gaze’ that she has anxiously petrified herself at one stage of her research. It is the elders who rescue her from this anxious immobility by cheerily initiating interviews and encouraging her to ‘get going with your project!’ Oscillating between a sense of being an outsider in New Denver and profound moments of shared emotional connection with new friends, her two successive summers of fieldwork in 1995 and 1996 permit her to accumulate a wealth of interviews, field notes, maps, photographs, documents, and new social bonds.

Another blockage occurs when she returns to Ottawa with boxes of research and then diverts the built-up emotional effects of her experience into intensive martial arts training. This ‘immersion in aikido was a way to work through traumatic post-memories,’ her means of ‘searching for a narrative form, a way of moving, a rhythm with the principal of mutual engagement that could bear, while transforming, what I had experienced.’

The second chapter, ‘Mapping the Spaces of Internment,’ provides a critical reading of the placement of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre. Crisply reproduced photographs supplement the visually evoked tour of the streets with accompanying descriptions of retail stores, grocers, and gas stations that provide contexts for the site of the memorial. Maps are read as organizers of social memory, as guides to the visible, but also as mechanisms that can ‘threaten to drain the site of potency, to reduce the site to easily consumable evidence for the tourist.’

The penultimate sixth chapter, ‘In Memory of Others,’ presents fascinating observations on the impact of the memorial on visitors, with selective elements from McAllister’s ethnographic field notes that are critically reframed with the...