Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance by Amber Dean (review)

The disappearances of countless indigenous women have only recently made their way into mainstream political discourses. Over the last decade, significant efforts have been made to raise awareness and inform the public about the legacies of settler colonialism and how these ongoing processes constitute certain disappeared lives as ungrievable (see Butler 2009). Amber Dean’s timely book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance, critically examines the discursive and material practices that allow both settlers and indigenous people to bear witness to the ongoing injustices that many vulnerable groups face, including the criminalization of sex workers and the racialization of those living and working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Through a critical analysis of visual representations of disappeared women in Vancouver, including memorials, paintings, films, and photographs, Dean critiques the politics of witnessing injustices of colonial and gendered violence (a remarkably passive and distant subjectivity) and, instead, offers the possibilities of “inheriting what lives on from the violent loss of so many women, which [she argues] requires us to recognize and grapple with the wider social context of settler colonialism that underpins these events” (7). Exploring the various ways of remembering and memorializing disappeared and murdered women, Dean not only weaves a feminist re-telling of personal experience with her own observations, she also pulls the reader towards this affective project of inheritance—employing the pronouns “we” and “us”—and examines how some of the techniques of humanizing and remembering disappeared and murdered women actually reproduce the very colonial narratives they seek to challenge.

The book begins with a historical mapping of the DTES as a space that is inextricably linked to the regulation and governance of indigenous women’s lives. This serves as the theoretical underpinning for examining how the disappearances of marginalized women in one of Canada’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods is governed through the regulatory practices of policing, development, and gentrification— mechanisms implicated in the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. Linking these modalities of colonial power to how settlers constitute the grievability of certain lives, Dean invokes the work of Sunera Thobani to explore how certain kinds of deviant femininity—including those in proximity to addiction, vagrancy, poverty, and sex work—effectively (and affectively) situate the subjectivities of disappeared women in contradistinction to the “exalted subjects” of the Canadian imaginary. This imagination, however, is mediated by representations of the DTES as historically linked to criminality and often imagined, both through media and print discourses, as a site of unrestrained criminality—a frontier that is always open to ongoing processes of colonization.

The imagery of a frontier that is always being (re)made through various techniques of governance, regulation, and representation sets up what Dean refers to as the city’s haunting colonial past (52). The haunting specters of the city’s deep colonial history shape the ways settlers remember Vancouver’s disappeared women. Drawing on the seminal works of Avery Gordon, Dean argues that “the following of ghosts is a practice of inheritance that requires a different approach to doing academic research” (59), one that draws our attention to the affective relations brought on by injustice, trauma, disappearance, and violence.

Chapters two and three centre on the ways photographs intersect with crimino-logical discourses surrounding indigeneity, sex work, and drug use, and ultimately create a ghostly imaginary of deviant behaviour that underscores the subjectivities of these missing women. For example, many of the police posters Dean examines and includes in the book are aesthetically framed as mug shots (and many of them are in fact mug shots), casting a shadow of criminality that haunts the viewer. But perhaps the most fundamental theoretical point Dean makes in her book rests in the notion that the visuality of murdered women signals a fundamental temporal positionality of both the victim and viewer. The viewer is situated temporally between the woman in the photograph, who is at the time of her...