Real and imagined encounters among Aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations produced racial anxieties that underwrote crossracial contacts 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 the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who aspired to restrict crossracial encounters. By connecting genealogies of aboriginal-European contact with those of Chinese migration, this book reveals that territorial dispossession and Chinese exclusion were never distinct projects but two conjunctive processes in the making of the settler regime.
Drawing on archival documents and historical records, Colonial Proximities historicizes current discussions of multiculturalism and pluralism in modern settler societies by revealing how crossracial interactions in one colonial contact zone inspired juridical racial truths and forms of governance that continue to linger in contemporary racial politics. It is essential reading for students and practitioners of history, anthropology, sociology, colonial/ postcolonial studies, and critical race and legal studies.
Table of Contents:
1 Introduction: Heterogeneity and Interraciality in British Columbia's Colonial "Contact Zone"
2 The Racial Impurities of Global Capitalism: The Politics of Labour, Interraciality, and Lawlessness in the Salmon Canneries
3 (White) Slavery, Colonial Knowledges, and the Rise of State Racisms
4 National Formations and Racial Selves: Chinese Traffickers and Aboriginal Victims in British Columbia's Illicit Liquor Trade
5 "The Most Disreputable Characters": Mixed-Bloods, Internal Enemies, and Imperial Futures
Conclusion: Colonial Pasts, Entangled Presents, and Promising Futures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
