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E-book
Author Cho, Lily, 1975- author.

Title Mass capture : Chinese head tax and the making of non-citizens / Lily Cho
Published Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2021]

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Description 1 online resource (xxvii, 244 pages)
Contents Mass Capture as a Technology of Non-citizenship -- Mass Capture against Memory -- Envisioning Kinship in Mass Capture -- Mass Capture and the Grammars of Persistent Representation -- Anticipating Citizenship and Mass Capture -- Coda: Shame about That Microfilm
Summary "Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain. Lily Cho explores how the CI 9s functioned as a form of surveillance and a process of mass capture that produced non-citizens, revealing the surprising dynamism of non-citizenship constantly regulated and monitored, made and remade, by an anxious state. The first mass use of identification photography in Canada, they make up the largest archive of images of Chinese migrants in the country, including people who stood no chance of being photographed otherwise. But CI 9s generated far more information than could be processed, and there is nothing straightforward about the knowledge that they purported to contain. Cho finds traces of alternate forms of kinship in the archive as well as evidence of the ways that families were separated. In attending to the particularities of these images and documents, Mass Capture uncovers the alternative story that lies in the refusals and resistances enacted by the mass captured. Illustrated with painstakingly reconstituted digital reproductions of the microfilm record, Mass Capture reclaims the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression, suggesting the possibilities for beauty and dignity in the archive, for captivation as well as capture."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 21, 2021)
Subject Chinese -- Taxation -- Canada -- History
Immigrants -- Canada -- Identification -- History
Identification photographs -- Canada -- History
Portrait photography -- Political aspects -- Canada -- History
Ethnicity -- Political aspects -- Canada -- History
Race discrimination -- Canada -- History
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration.
Chinese -- Taxation
Emigration and immigration -- Government policy
Ethnicity -- Political aspects
Identification photographs
Race discrimination
SUBJECT Canada -- Emigration and immigration -- Government policy -- History
Subject Canada
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780228009337
0228009332
9780228009344
0228009340
9780228009320
0228009324