Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Asian Canadian Critical Practice as Commemoration

119 Responsibility annuls the call to which it seeks to respond by necessarily changing it to the calculations of answerability. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Responsibility” (58) I this chapter was written as a response to the 100th anniversary of the 1907 Anti-Asian riots in Vancouver. On 7 September 1907, the Asiatic Exclusion League held a rally outside city hall that attracted around 10 percent of the White population living in the city at the time.1 The League was joined by labour unionists from the United States who, two days earlier, had violently driven out some 700 Sikhs from Bellingham, Washington. As the speakers’ rhetoric grew increasingly heated, the crowd marched to nearby Chinatown and began to smash windows and vandalize properties. As it moved into Japantown, the mob found Japanese residents armed and prepared to defend their neighbourhood, and a two-day standoff ensued. While there were no known deaths, there were many injuries on all sides and extensive property damage. According to historian Erika Lee, By 3:00 a.m. [on 8 September 1907], virtually every building occupied by the Chinese was damaged. In the Japanese quarter, fifty-nine properties were wrecked and the Japanese-language school was set on fire. Two thousand Chinese were driven from their homes […]. The Canadian government later estimated $13,519.45 and $25,990 in estimated losses for actual and resulting damage among Japanese and Chinese in Vancouver respectively. (31) Asian Canadian Critical Practice as Commemoration Christopher Lee 120 christopher lee Although it was not the first incident of mass violence directed against Asians in British Columbia, the 1907 riots was a watershed event that represents the culmination of over a half century of anti-Asian racism in Canada. When British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, the new province was a remarkably diverse, albeit already racialized, society that included First Nations (then the majority of the population), White (mostly Anglo) settlers , and other groups such as the Chinese.2 The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, accomplished in no small part using Chinese labour, facilitated an additional influx of White settlers that would drastically alter the racial demographics and politics of the province. As ideologies of White supremacy, encapsulated by the popular slogan “White Canada Forever,” continued to gain dominance, numerous attempts to disenfranchise Asians and restrict their entry ensued.3 Such measures included the head tax on Chinese immigration (first imposed in 1885 and incrementally raised until the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act effectively halted further immigration), the 1908 Gentleman’s Agreement by which Japan voluntarily restricted the emigration of its nationals, and the Continuous Passage rule, which stopped all immigration from the Indian subcontinent, passed the same year. These measures exemplify a wider atmosphere of racial terror under which the daily lives of Asians in Canada were marked by mistreatment, exploitation, and violence. Much more can be said about this history as well as the riots themselves, but the purpose of this chapter is not historiographic. If the history I have sketched indicates the range and depth of anti-Asian racism at the turn of the century, the fact that I am recounting it in the early years of the twenty-first century turns this chapter into an act of commemoration in its own right. The purpose of this chapter is to think through and beyond specific projects of commemoration (including those related to the 1907 riots) in order to address the ethics of commemoration more broadly. How should we understand the responsibility to commemorate, and how is temporality reconfigured through such a call? I pose these questions as a way of framing what I will be calling Asian Canadian critical practice, the constellation of political, intellectual, artistic, and activist projects that have organized (sometimes loosely) around the term “Asian Canadian” in recent years. The stakes of this term has been extensively discussed and debated; here, my purpose is not to insist on its validity and coherence but to simply recognize that it has acquired considerable currency and relevance in contemporary discussions about racialization.4 With regard to the 1907 riots, which affected South Asians, Chinese, and Japanese, the term is especially useful for drawing our attention to how the asian canadian critical practice as commemoration 121 history of these groups have been closely intertwined due to the racial hierarchies established in a White settler colony. In fall 2006, a consortium of arts organizations, academic institutions, labour...