REFUGEE STATES: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada

REFUGEE STATES This page intentionally left blank Refugee States Critical Refugee Studies in Canada EDITED BY VINH NGUYEN AND THY PHU UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0864-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3867-5 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3866-8 (PDF) Cultural Spaces Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Refugee states : critical refugee studies in Canada / edited by Vinh Nguyen and Thy Phu. Names: Nguyen, Vinh (Associate professor), editor. | Phu, Thy, 1975– editor. Series: Cultural spaces. Description: Series statement: Cultural spaces | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210158530 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021015876X | ISBN 9781487508647 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487538668 (PDF) | ISBN 9781487538675 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Refugees – Canada. Classification: LCC HV640.4.C3 R438 2021 | DDC 305.9/06914 – dc23 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support from the University of Toronto Libraries in making the open access version of this title available. This book has been published with the support in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada 3 vinh nguyen and thy phu Part One: Historicization 1 Shifting Grounds of Asylum in Canadian Public Discourse and Policy 23 johanna reynolds and jennifer hyndman 2 Untangling the Strands of Memory: Historicizing the 1914 Komagata Maru Incident and the Concept of Refugeeness 55 alia somani 3 Erasing Exclusion: Adrienne Clarkson and the Promise of the Refugee Experience 71 laura madokoro 4 Petitions and Protest: Refugees and the Haunting of Canadian Citizenship 99 peter nyers Part Two: Conjunctions 5 Where Are We From? Decolonizing Indigenous and Refugee Relations 117 jennifer adese and malissa phung vi Contents 6 Queer and Trans Migrants, Colonial Logics, and the Politics of Refusal 143 edward ou jin lee 7 Producing the Figure of the “Super-Refugee” through Discourses of Success, Exceptionalism, Ableism, and Inspiration 173 gada mahrouse 8 Cross-Racial Refugee Fiction: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For 194 donald goellnicht Epilogue: The Exceptional and the Ordinary 215 thy phu and vinh nguyen List of Contributors 221 Index 225 Acknowledgments We are fortunate to be able to work closely with a number of wonder- ful colleagues, whose insights continue to inspire. This book was the result of a series of collaborative initiatives that began in 2017, and that culminated in the establishment of the research group, the Critical Refugee Studies Network Canada. We wish to thank members of this group, namely Edward Ou Jin Lee, Laura Madokoro, Gada Mahrouse, Anh Ngo, Peter Nyers, Alia Somani, and Y-Dang Troeung. We also wish to thank the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (based in California), whose groundbreaking work inspires our own. We thank the contributors of this collection for trusting us with their research and for being a part of this conversation. We are grateful to the participants at the very first workshop we convened to discuss “refugee states” and “states of refuge,” including Nadine Attewell, Elspeth Brown, Tamara El-Hoss, Chris Kyriakides, Shahrzad Mojab, Anh Ngo, Charmaine Nelson, and Heather Smyth, along with the contributors to this volume. For her support of this event, we thank Jennifer J. Chun. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We benefited tremendously from the guidance of our editor, Mark Thompson, and the careful, incisive reading of our friend Eleanor Ty, as well as our two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions helped us refine our ideas. Donald C. Goellnicht, who was a pivotal member of the Critical Ref- ugee Studies Network Canada and who was a dear, longtime friend, started this journey with us – indeed, without him, it’s unlikely we would have made it this far. He passed away, however, before we could go to press. We dedicate this book to his memory. This page intentionally left blank REFUGEE STATES This page intentionally left blank Introduction Critical Refugee Studies in Canada VINH NGUYEN AND THY PHU On 27 January 2017, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769 (Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States).1 Commonly known as the Travel Ban or the Muslim Ban, the Order suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days, placed an indefinite ban on refugees from Syria, and barred entry to anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa. The next day, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went on Twitter to proclaim: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”2 Fourteen minutes later, Trudeau tweeted a 2015 picture of himself greeting a Syrian refugee child at the airport. These two Tweets, a declaration of hospitality and visual evidence of this hospitality, exemplify Canadian “humanitarian exceptionalism,” a belief that what sets Canada apart from the US and other nation-states is its distinct benevolence and commitment to human rights. The well- timed public pronouncement was a strategic and politically expedient response to the devolving political situation in the US, which has gone on to implement Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, sepa- rate border-crossing parents from their children, and indefinitely detain asylum seekers in concentration camps. Trudeau draws on a tradition that defines Canadian liberal nationalism – qualities of generosity, hospitality, and tolerance – against our southern neighbour’s restrictive and ruthless actions. The president’s widely condemned racist and xenophobic Order provided the prime minister with an opportunity to exalt Canada as an open and welcoming haven to the global public. At a moment of American humanitarian failure, Canada asserted itself as a leader in refugee humanitarianism. The subsequent trending of the hashtag #WelcomeToCanada on Twitter attests to the ways that the 4 Vinh Nguyen and Thy Phu narrative of Canadian humanitarian exceptionalism proliferates in the age of viral social media. A belief in and promotion of the nation’s exceptionalism is not new. Canada’s international reputation has long been pegged to a narrative of beneficence towards refugees and migrants fleeing oppression, persecution, and unfreedom, which begins, so this story goes, at least as far back as the nineteenth century, when Canada served as a terminus in the Underground Railroad, providing freedom to fugitive slaves, and extends into the twentieth century, with the offer of sanctuary to displaced people from Europe fleeing the turmoil of the Second World War and American draft dodgers protesting the war in Vietnam, to highlight just a few signal moments.3 Indeed, this narrative was consol- idated in 1986 when the UN awarded the nation with a Nansen medal in recognition of aid to refugees in the aftermath of the wars in South- east Asia. The narrative persists despite numerous moments when Canada turned away rather than welcomed the people who arrived on its shores, including Indian migrants aboard the Komagata Maru in 1914, Jews fleeing Nazi persecution on the MS St. Louis in 1939,4 Chi- nese stowaways aboard container ships in 2001 and 2017, and Sri Lan- kan Tamils seeking refuge on the MV Sun Sea in 2010, to list just a few examples. A notion of exceptionality thus shapes national and global perception of the nation’s character, recently confirmed in a Pew Re- port, which noted that, in 2018, Canada “surpassed” the US for the first time, and “now leads the world” in refugee resettlement.5 To be sure, at certain moments of crisis, disaster, and war, Canada has opened its door, if only slightly, to many refugees.6 Rather than dis- miss the nation’s humanitarian tradition – which has benefited gen- erations of refugees, including the co-editors, who came to Canada as refugees – we are concerned with addressing the limits it poses for un- derstanding refugee history and assessing the political in Canada. The humanitarian tradition is limited because it obscures exceptionality’s varied operations, the terms in which refuge has been provided, the contexts in which it is denied, and the complex roles that refugees have played in nation-building or in the critique of state-centred notions of sovereignty. These varied operations demonstrate a vital point: Canada needs refugees to advance its cultural and political ends. The signifi- cance of the relationship between exceptionalism, dependence, and political expediency, between the Canadian nation-state and refugees, lies at the core of this book. Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada explores “refuge” and “refugee” as complexly related concepts that pivotally influence nation-building both within and beyond the nation’s borders. We focus Introduction 5 on how Canada has engaged, historically and in the present moment, with people seeking refuge and highlight the multiform ways that refugees have responded to Canada. The book examines the fraught yet generative encounters that produce refuge and refugees, explains the impact of these encounters in shaping “exceptionality” in Canada, and accounts for the ways that refugees themselves have critiqued official state narratives and sought different political alignments and forms of relationality. The exception is central to the political problematic that subjects like refugees pose, for they both press at the limits of and also come to de- fine state sovereignty and nationhood.

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