“Powell Street is dead”: Nikkei Loss, Commemoration, and Representations of Place in the Settler Colonial City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article highlights the stakes of commemorating and representing loss in the settler colonial city. Focusing on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians living in Vancouver’s Powell Street neighbourhood before 1942, it contributes to existing scholarship on the internment and dispossession periods by critically examining Japanese Canadian reflections on the loss of place in the midst of as well as after their forced removal. Drawing primarily on the New Canadian newspaper in the 1940s and 1950s, this article demonstrates how Japanese Canadian writers mourned Powell Street’s “death” by describing the neighbourhood as ghostly and in ruins after their departure. Using discourses of urban settler colonialism from the mid-twentieth century, writers conveyed the injustice of the Nikkei community’s erasure within the newspaper and asserted a Japanese Canadian claim to the neighbourhood despite state efforts to deny such a claim. At the same time, this article argues that the New Canadian’s representations of Powell Street reflected participation in what Ann Stoler calls “ruination”, whereby Japanese Canadian commemorations became imbricated in the settler colonial logics and processes that pathologize the Downtown Eastside and its residents. Taking seriously the political work of commemoration, the article concludes that urban dispossessions and their representations must be viewed as overlapping, intersecting, and at times, compounding processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".