Nikkei Memorial Internment Centre, view from inside Internment Centre building looking to outside garden. Picture taken by Martin Mullan at New Denver, August 2005

The history of Japanese Canadians is not so known outside Canada. The history of Japanese-Canadians is not well known outside Canada. However, by looking at the archives, it is possible to trace the presence of this diaspora in internment camps. Working on cultural memory through photographs and texts, Professor MacAllister reminds us of the glaring inequalities that exist between diasporas forced by history to live in unimaginable conditions. Professor McAllister gave us an interview in 2009 on the topic of cultural memory (see the interview published at http://www.sens-public.org/static/git-articles/SP798/SP798.pdf).

Kirsten E. McAllister is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching focus on political violence, racism, migration and diaspora and her approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on Memory Studies, Visual Studies, Ethnography, Critical Race Studies and Indigenous Studies. She draws on methodologies from Art History and Ethnography, as well as creative practices from Literary Studies and Autoethnography. She has conducted community-based research projects in national and transnational contexts. In Canada has examined WWII Japanese Canadian internment camps, focusing on memorials, photographic records, oral accounts, archival documents and other media of memory produced by members of the community. In a transnational context she has researched community-based art and asylum seekers as well as contemporary Asian Canadian artists who explore different sites of memory regarding war, military occupation, colonialism and environmental disaster. Her publications include Photography Acts: Locating Memory (2006 with Annette Kuhn); Terrain of Memory: a Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (2010); The Geography of Asylum: Art Activism and the City of Glasgow (under contract with Palgrave-MacMillan); and she is currently completing a co-edited collection of essays with Mona Oikawa and Roy Miki entitled, “After Redress: Indigenous and Japanese Canadian Cultural Politics” (source: https://www.sfu.ca/communication/people/faculty/kirsten-McAllister.html)

Language: English

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