"Under one Flag"? Race, Nation, and Migration in the Early Twentieth-Century

Abstract

My dissertation project on colonialism and immigration in Canadian history explores the complex intersections of discourses of race, nation, and empire. With an emphasis on the role of visual and popular culture, I locate Canada within transnational discussions about citizenship and civilization. Like emerging states in the "Anglophone colonial world", Canadians helped erect and maintain a "global color line", by passing racist immigration laws that discriminated between "white" and "non-white" migrants. Canadian "racial nationalists" used visual culture to justify immigration restriction and create identity and belonging, even as Canadian identity simultaneously trumpeted tolerance and enlightenment. In turn, anti-racists invoked national exceptionalist mythologies to opposed race-based immigration restriction. Looking back at a global era of nation-building, I locate Canada as an emerging nation-state in which Anglo-Canadians faced the challenge of creating a national identity within a racist global empire, and alongside a powerful Republic that was also virulently racist, but from which Canadians desperately wanted to distinguish themselves. Heated debates about race and national belonging also unearthed cleavages between "white" people in Canada, the United States, and within the British Empire, including distinctions of gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as competing and political and ethical sensibilities. Situated at the intersection of transnational and national history, my project explores how this complex case of nation-formation spawned subtle and dynamic racial discourses, an understanding of which will advance our understanding of race and racism in the twentieth century.