Orienting Canada

A hard-hitting reconsideration of Canadian foreign policy that documents the dynamics of race and empire in the Transpacific from the 1907 race riots to Canada’s early involvement in Vietnam.

A hard-hitting reconsideration of Canadian foreign policy, Orienting Canada meticulously documents the dynamics of race and empire in the Transpacific from the 1907 race riots to Canada’s early involvement in Vietnam.

Colony to nation? Isolationism to internationalism? WASP society to a multicultural Canada?  Focusing on imperial conflicts in the Pacific, Orienting Canada disrupts these familiar narratives in Canadian history by tracing the relationship between racism and Canadian foreign policy.

Grounded in transnationalism and anti-racist theory, this book reassesses critical transpacific incidents, including Vancouver's race riots of 1907, the Chinese head tax, the wars in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945, the internment of Japanese Canadians, and Canada’s early intervention in Vietnam. Shocking revelations about the effects of racism and war into the 1960s are tempered by stories of community resilience and transformation. As a transpacific lens on the past, Orienting Canada deflects Canada’s European gaze back onto itself to reveal images that both provoke and unsettle.