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Angie Wong, Lakehead University

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Section 1: Paper 5

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We make and give gestures of apology every day, Canadians doubly so. Yet, grand acts of apology for more serious and sustained matters, such as historical and contemporary injustice against those with the least amount of social power, require far more ethical consideration and transformation than simply saying, “I am sorry.” Since the early 2000s, several political parties of the Canadian government have taken up the trend of making a spectacle out of national apologies to historically oppressed groups. Engaging with the concept of the settler colonial triad to theorize the histories of early Chinese arrivants’ experience, this work departs from the 2006 House of Commons apology made to Chinese Canadians on behalf of former PM Stephen Harper and explores the paradoxical operations behind state-sanctioned apologies, including the use of benevolence and hospitality as crisis management tactics resultant of Canada’s settler colonial configuration. Within this contradictory relation, those who identify as Chinese Canadian may find themselves questioning their belonging, given the historically- fraught social strategies used for the making of Canadian subjecthood. State-sanctioned apologies function to consolidate settler colonial reality and constitute a return to normalcy, which is why critical race scholars and scholars of settler colonial studies must look beyond unilateral relationships with the state.

Comments

Angie Wong is a critical race scholar and second-generation Chinese born in Canada. Wong is currently a professor of Women’s Studies at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Reliant upon critical race theory, philosophy, settler colonial studies, and transnational feminisms, Wong continues to research the experiences of Asian women and histories of Chinese racialization in Canada in a forthcoming book project on the Chinatown community of Calgary, Alberta. Wong obtained a BCC from the University of Calgary (2012). Her MA (2014) and PhD (2018) in Humanities are from York University where she conducted the first extensive philosophical and critical race analysis of the small and powerful grassroots magazine publication, The Asianadian, under the supervision of Chinese Canadian and postcolonial scholar, Lily M. Cho. Wong’s approach to pedagogy and research is interdisciplinary, political, and cross-cultural.

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A Sorry State of Affairs: Chinese Arrivants, Indigenous Hosts, and Settler Colonial Apologies

We make and give gestures of apology every day, Canadians doubly so. Yet, grand acts of apology for more serious and sustained matters, such as historical and contemporary injustice against those with the least amount of social power, require far more ethical consideration and transformation than simply saying, “I am sorry.” Since the early 2000s, several political parties of the Canadian government have taken up the trend of making a spectacle out of national apologies to historically oppressed groups. Engaging with the concept of the settler colonial triad to theorize the histories of early Chinese arrivants’ experience, this work departs from the 2006 House of Commons apology made to Chinese Canadians on behalf of former PM Stephen Harper and explores the paradoxical operations behind state-sanctioned apologies, including the use of benevolence and hospitality as crisis management tactics resultant of Canada’s settler colonial configuration. Within this contradictory relation, those who identify as Chinese Canadian may find themselves questioning their belonging, given the historically- fraught social strategies used for the making of Canadian subjecthood. State-sanctioned apologies function to consolidate settler colonial reality and constitute a return to normalcy, which is why critical race scholars and scholars of settler colonial studies must look beyond unilateral relationships with the state.