Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the ongoing construction of their territory. Chinatown and the Chinese,
place and identity, were it seemed in transparent collusion; what was con-
cealed was the European idea, instituted through power, that quarantined
a population with little capacity for resistance among the desolate shacks
and bunk-houses of Canton and Shanghai Alleys and Dupont (later
Pender) Street, huddled against the tidal marshes, rail yards and polluting
industries along the ocean inlet of False Creek.
The manipulation of space in the interests of power has been a repetitive
strategy of white settler societies. The native land reserve was predicated
upon the goal of containment (Harris 2002), and so was the even more inva-
sive and aggressive regime of apartheid in South Africa, which conjoined
law, segregation and racism in a desperate and ultimately futile expression of
exclusion (Western 1997). Critical race studies have sought to denaturalize
the often opaque but always present and commonly malfeasant union of
race and space in colonial societies (Stasiulis and Davis 1995; Razack 2002;
Kobayashi 2004). If 'the constitution of spaces reproduces racial hierarchies'
(Razack 2002:1), then Chinatown was surely an ideal type of race/space
manipulation. It was monitored, regulated, disciplined and harassed by
successive politicians and state officials for interests that were rarely its own.
They castigated its culture of poverty, but failed to observe or at least
acknowledge the wider structures that impinged upon such a culture. To see
Chinatown, as many did (and do), simply as an exotic landscape of differ-
ence, shaped by ethnic particularity, is to miss a reading of the external
forces that formed it, and in some measure continue to do so.
Wing Chung Ng (1999) has offered a gentle rebuke to this argument, for
critical race studies can impose their own intellectual vice upon social rela-
tions, over-interpreting the reach of power, neglecting the contradictions
and contingencies within the practice of hegemony, overlooking internal
acts of agency and resistance.
2
So when an amnesty on illegal immigration
was declared in 1960, over 11,000 Chinese Canadians, or 20 percent of the
1961 national population, made use of it to regularize their status over the
next decade (Hawkins 1988: 133). Evasion of surveillance is a primary
weapon of the disempowered. Ng (1999: 6) questions interpretations where
'Chinese people are often portrayed as no more than hapless victims of
racial prejudice and discrimination'. Anderson would most likely agree, for
in a later self-critique of her topic she is less sure of its 'tidy totalities' (1998),
in particular its painting over the divisions of gender and class within over-
seas Chinese society. Ng (1999) goes on to chronicle the internal daily life
of Chinatown in the post-1945 period which he views through the optimis-
tic lens of the cultural politics of voluntary organizations and identity for-
mation. While he locates internal conflicts, this theme could reach much
further, for as Aihwa Ong (2006: 128) has dramatically observed there has
been a more exploitative side to the internal working life of Chinatowns as
a site of 'indentured servitude for poor and disenfranchised co-ethnics'.
