{"id":26449,"date":"2012-11-12T21:54:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T21:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26449"},"modified":"2012-11-12T21:54:43","modified_gmt":"2012-11-12T21:54:43","slug":"colonial-proximities-crossracial-encounters-and-juridical-truths-in-british-columbia-1871%e2%80%931921-review-allan-cho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26449","title":{"rendered":"Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871\u20131921 (review) [Allan Cho]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871\u20131921 (review) [Allan Cho]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Toronto Quarterly<\/a>
\nVolume 81, Number 3<\/a>, Summer 2012
\npages 690-691
\nDOI: 10.1353\/utq.2012.0090<\/a><\/p>\n

Allan Cho<\/a><\/strong>, Program Services Librarian
\nUniversity of British Columbia<\/em><\/p>\n

As part of a new collective at the University of British Columbia re-envisaging the landscape and boundaries of early Canada, Renisa Mawani\u2019s<\/a> Colonial Proximities<\/a><\/em> exemplifies a new wave of scholarship on \u2018Pacific Canada.\u2019 Focusing on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas interacted with each other and with First Nations peoples historically, the important work of these scholars examines the parallels beyond the histories of French-English Canada and to larger histories in North America.<\/p>\n

Situated in this intellectual context, Mawani argues that these early interracial encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, and other \u201cracial enemies\u201d provoked such deep concerns among colonial authorities that a production of a number of \u2018juridical racial truths\u2019 were needed to pave the way for modes of governance that eventually pervaded for the remaining century. As a contact zone saturated by interraciality, the colonial administrators sought a delicate balance of moral assimilation for its aboriginal populace and physical segregation of its Chinese settlers. Not only did fear of racial encounters promulgate accusations of either coerced or deliberate prostitution ever threatening to colonial morals, heterosexuality ultimately became a contested field among the colonial authorities that sought to regulate the social mores of its inhabitants.<\/p>\n

Unfurling a bio-political conundrum, this settler colonialism produced a paradoxical blend of assimilation and segregation intersecting at one of the colony\u2019s main economic engines, the salmon cannery industry. Could the economic fortunes that required an abundant supply of cheap labour from Chinese and aboriginal workers in the canneries justify the possibilities of this \u2018contagion\u2019 that would result from intimate contact between these races? Could the desire for racial purity within a racially mixed labour force even be possible?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whereas aboriginal women were seen as an internal danger to the colony, Chinese women were racial enemies who threatened the racial balance of its white populace. Liquor provisions further worked to augment racial divisions and fortify existing power structures dominated by European colonialists. The illegal liquor trade served to underpin the hostility that exacerbated the accusation of Chinese selling liquor to aboriginals, which required an \u2018interracial prevention.\u2019 Matters became complicated, however, when mixed peoples, the \u2018half breeds,\u2019 challenged and defied colonial taxonomies, as colonial authorities could no longer easily pinpoint those that it needed to control.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, these interracial exchanges among aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations engendered racial anxieties that sustained colonial institutions run by the Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who sought manifold ways to monitor these encounters through friendships, alliances, and even sexual relations. This legislation of race emerged as a common voice among the largely white administration. Lively debates and discussions eventually led to the creation of royal commissions, further solidifying colonial procedures and legislation that would systematically demarcate racial lines.<\/p>\n

Colonial Proximities<\/em> is an evolution of Mawani\u2019s doctoral dissertation, showing a maturation of ideas. This fresh and more fluid understanding of early Canada is one that seeks to examine the role of trans-Pacific migration in multiple directions throughout the Pacific region, highlighting the history of racism and exploitation of migrants and displacement of First Nations people…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871\u20131921 (review) [Allan Cho] University of Toronto Quarterly Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012 pages 690-691 DOI: 10.1353\/utq.2012.0090 Allan Cho, Program Services Librarian University of British Columbia As part of a new collective at the University of British Columbia re-envisaging the landscape and boundaries of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,19,459,8,3015],"tags":[12707,2137,12708],"class_list":["post-26449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-canada","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","tag-allan-cho","tag-renisa-mawani","tag-university-of-toronto-quarterly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}