Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Law and Society) - Softcover

Mawani, Renisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0774816341 ISBN 13: 9780774816342

Publisher: UBC Press, 2010

Synopsis

Encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations produced racial anxieties that underwrote crossracial interactions in the salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the white slavery scare in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Colonial Proximities explores these contacts as politically charged sites of racial knowledge production in need of colonial governance. Drawing on archival documents, legal cases, and commissions of inquiry, Renisa Mawani traces the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities, who sought to restrict interracial encounters in the interests of securing racial and national purity. By connecting genealogies of aboriginal-European contact and Chinese migration, Mawani reveals that territorial dispossession and Chinese exclusion were never distinct projects, but two conjunctive and overlapping processes in the making of the settler regime.

Colonial Proximities offers new prospectives on current discussions of multiculturalism and pluralism in modern settler societies, revealing how crossracial encounters in one colonial contact zone inspired a proliferation of juridical racial truths and forms of governance that continue to linger in contemporary politics, albeit in different ways.

About this title

Book Description:

Colonial Proximities traces the dynamic encounters among Aboriginal peoples, mixed-race populations, Chinese migrants, and Europeans in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia and assesses the juridical racial truths and forms of governance these crossracial contacts produced.

About the Author:

Renisa Mawani is an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0774816341
• ISBN 13: 9780774816342
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288