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Social Science Emigration & Immigration

Unmooring the Komagata Maru

Charting Colonial Trajectories

edited by Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, Renisa Mawani & Satwinder Kaur Bains

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Aug 2019
Category
Emigration & Immigration, Post-Confederation (1867-)
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774860680
    Publish Date
    Aug 2019
    List Price
    $125.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774860659
    Publish Date
    Aug 2019
    List Price
    $89.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774860666
    Publish Date
    Feb 2020
    List Price
    $34.95

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Description

In 1914, the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver Harbour and was detained for two months. Most of its 376 passengers were then forcibly returned to India. Unmooring the Komagata Maru challenges conventional Canadian historical accounts by drawing from multiple disciplines and fields to consider the international and colonial dimensions of the voyage. By situating South Asian Canadian history within a global-imperial context, the contributors offer a critical reading of Canadian multiculturalism through past events and their commemoration. A hundred years later, the voyage of the Komagata Maru has yet to reach its conclusion.

About the authors

Rita Dhamoon's profile page

 

Davina Bhandar is a professor of Canadian Studies at Trent University.

 

Davina Bhandar's profile page

Renisa Mawani's profile page

Satwinder Kaur Bains' profile page

Awards

  • Commended, Best Edited Collection, Canadian Studies Network

Editorial Reviews

Unmooring is an important transnational text that sheds light on the history of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest as well as their present.

BC Studies, Issue 209

Overall, this book is a well-written, rich and complex exploration of an event that illuminates Canadian nationalism and racisms and the transnational disciplining of brown bodies across borders, as well as historical anti-imperialist and contemporary anti-racist and anticolonial struggles. As a book that makes a vital contribution to political science and, indeed, the social sciences more broadly, Unmooring the Komagata Maru deserves an important place in university classrooms and research libraries across Canada and beyond.

Canadian Journal of Political Science