In this talk, Dr. Renisa Mawani (UBC Sociology) explores the connections between racism, health, and nation by revisiting D'Arcy Island through the contemporary Covid-19 pandemic. Located in Haro Strait and off the coast of Vancouver Island, D'Arcy Island was a leprosy colony where Chinese men in British Columbia were sent to be “quarantined." The colony was established in 1891 and operative until 1924. During this period, 49 men - mostly Chinese - were sent to the Island to await deportation or death, whichever came first. Dr. Mawani uses D'Arcy Island to examine how racial anxieties regarding Chinese migration underpinned concerns around health and nation historically, and ask what this case might tell us about the contemporary pandemic and the deeply rooted structures of racial violence that underpin it.
Following the talk, Dr. Laura Ishiguro (UBC History) and Ms. Naomi Louie (UBC History) will provide commentary and analysis on the lecture and relate it to the ongoing fears about the Covid contagion in Canada.
Date: Thursday, December 10, 2020
Time: 7:00PM - 8:30PM
Location: Virtual Session via Zoom
The 2020 Paul and Eileen Lin Commemorative Lecture is co-sponsored by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC (CCHSBC), Vancouver Public Library (VPL), SFU Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research (SFU ITCR), UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (UBC ACAM), and UBC Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Canadian Studies (INSTRCC).
Following the talk, Dr. Laura Ishiguro (UBC History) and Ms. Naomi Louie (UBC History) will provide commentary and analysis on the lecture and relate it to the ongoing fears about the Covid contagion in Canada.
Date: Thursday, December 10, 2020
Time: 7:00PM - 8:30PM
Location: Virtual Session via Zoom
The 2020 Paul and Eileen Lin Commemorative Lecture is co-sponsored by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC (CCHSBC), Vancouver Public Library (VPL), SFU Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research (SFU ITCR), UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (UBC ACAM), and UBC Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Canadian Studies (INSTRCC).
Speaker
Photo Credit: UBC
Dr. Renisa Mawani is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia which is located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam ( xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. She is the author of Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Contacts and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (2009) and Across Oceans of Law (2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for History (2020). With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014); with Sheila Giffen and Christopher Lee she is co-editor of “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures” published in Journal of Intercultural Studies (2019); with Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, and Satwinder Bains, she is co-editor of Unmooring the Komagata Maru (2019); and with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (2020).
Respondents
Photo Credit: UBC
Dr. Laura Ishiguro is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty with Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies at the University of British Columbia. An historian of settler colonialism in northern North America (Canada) and the British Empire, with a particular specialization in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of British Columbia, she is the author of Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia. Her first book is a detailed study of thousands of British family letters written between the United Kingdom and British Columbia, elucidating the critical, entwined, and otherwise unexamined role of trans-imperial families and the everyday in the making of a white settler society.
Ms. Naomi Louie is a first year Master of Arts history student at UBC currently studying with Professor Henry Yu. Her research focuses on the influence that disease policy and disease rhetoric has had on immigration to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2019, she wrote and defended her undergraduate thesis at UBC, which covered the 1892 cholera outbreak in New York City and showed how racialized rhetoric and quarantines were used to further entrench immigration exclusion.