The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots: The Making of Sensibility Among Working Class Men

This research explores how racialized sensibility emerged through the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver and links the riots in Vancouver to the riots in Bellingham earlier in the same year. It uses mixed methods to collect data on portraits, photographs, images, editorials, and documents, employing archival ethnography to read documents along and against the grain (Stoler, 2002; 2012) to make sense of the time period and the sensibilities that underpinned the riots. Archival ethnography helps bring to light the accounts, conversations, and dialogues of colonial agents and actors, and to interpret missing data in the archive. Missing data in the archive consists of historical documents that are overlooked, misinterpreted, or destroyed. My thesis also accounts for gaps, silences, and erasures in the archive by applying critical fabulation to rearrange and reconstruct intersecting viewpoints (see Hartman, 1997; 2008; 2019). To provide a thicker analysis of archival documents, this research interprets olfactory and auditory senses as integral to the making of these riots (see Simmel, 1908/2002; see Campt, 2017; see Lee, 2010; see Mawani, 2009; see Russell, 2019; see also Blaikie, 2002). It is only through the process of combining mixed-methods, theory, and practice that the missing data in the archive can be reimagined and written as part of the historical narrative.

DOI: 10.14288/1.0418611