15. Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History

Iacovetta, Franca; Ventresca, Robert A.

doi:10.3138/9781442674462-017

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Rather than having the Italian community in Canada served a streamlined version of the events that occurred some 70 years ago, they deserve the entire picture to be utilized in academic historical research, which would include all of the evidence and interpretations that are available. Iacovetta and Ventresca (2000) argue that Italian-Canadians must be given the opportunity to informally reflect and debate on how best to understand this period of history without resorting to written political histories that neither touch upon nor attempt to understand the personal reflections that make up the other half of this historical tale.…”

Section: Methodology and The Use Of Oral Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

"Has anyone seen my ancestral language?" Italian linguistic suicide and the transmission of the Italian language in Canada, 1935-1947

Shadford¹

2021

Preprint

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Very little research, if any at all, has been conducted on the ancestral language retention of Italian-Canadians during World War Two. The aim of this research study was to compile a body of literature that would begin to support the notion that World War Two Italophobic policies inflicted by the Canadian government on the Italian-Canadian community could have negatively affected the intergenerational transmission of the Italian language in Canada, 1935-1947. In order to introduce the topic, a 'boxed-in' literature review was conducted by compiling research on Italian-Canadians during the war that spanned many topics. By grouping the material into specific themes, a structure for Italian lingusitic suicide began to emerge. Two sections on theoretical perspectives and oral histories precede an analysis of three interviews conducted in the Greater Toronto area that serve to bring reality and correlational evidence to the literature review.

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Section: Methodology and The Use Of Oral Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

"Has anyone seen my ancestral language?" Italian linguistic suicide and the transmission of the Italian language in Canada, 1935-1947

Shadford¹

2021

Preprint

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“…The entire BC Japanese Canadian community, numbering roughly 24,000 people, was interned from shortly after Japan's December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor until 1949; Canada also permanently dispossessed the community of all of its real estate and movable property (Stanger-Ross 2020). By contrast, only between 600 and 700 Italian Canadians were interned, a tiny fraction of the Italian Canadian population at the time (Iacovetta and Ventresca 2000). Their periods of confinement were for the most part of comparatively short duration.…”

Section: Saming In Italian Canadian and Ukrainian Canadian Redressmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…redress as was given to the Japanese Canadian community" (p. 23). However, two leading Canadian historians (Iacovetta and Ventresca 2000), both of Italian heritage, argued in an edited volume that was deeply critical of both the Italian Canadian and Ukrainian Canadian campaigns that the "National Shame" document "drew on selective evidence, ignored competing interpretations, and offered a simplified version of the past" (p. 381). Other contributors highlighted the Fascist organizing of individual internees (Perin 2000) and called attention to camp photos that showed internees with Fascist paraphernalia and making Fascist salutes (Scardellato 2000).…”

Section: Saming In Italian Canadian and Ukrainian Canadian Redressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One important factor was criticism from Italian Canadian and Ukrainian Canadian historians. The previous section noted the criticisms of the former (Iacovetta and Ventresca 2000;Perin 2000;Scardellato 2000). In terms of the latter, historian Frances Swyripa (2000) argued that the Ukrainian Canadian movement "sometimes exploited and even distorted history to meet a contemporary community agenda" (p. 356).…”

Section: Canadian Change: Historical Recognition In the 2000smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 1999, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress commissioned two Ukrainian Canadian scholars to create a significantly revised official redress submission to the Canadian federal government, which the authors then expanded into a book (Kordan and Mahovsky 2004). The book avoided the "concentration camps" terminology, acknowledging on the second page of its Introduction, and citing Iacovetta and Ventresca (2000) and Swyripa (2000), that, "Not all of the [earlier] criticism is unfounded, uninformed, or off the point" (p. 4). And, whereas a movement spokesman had argued in 1987 that "any apology or redress offered to .…”

Section: Canadian Change: Historical Recognition In the 2000smentioning

confidence: 99%

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Corrosive Comparisons and the Memory Politics of “Saming”: Threat and Opportunity in the Age of Apology

James

2024

Social Sciences

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This article contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of memory and historical justice studies by analyzing one, particularly troublesome kind of competitive comparison that sometimes happens in memory politics in the so-called age of apology. The article calls this kind of competitive comparison, “saming”. Saming involves the attempt, via far-fetched or otherwise wrongheaded comparison, to exploit the recognition of some well-known case of historical injustice. Further, saming involves pursuing this comparison in ways that both trivialize the original injustice and undermine the framework from which the recognition of that injustice derives. The article develops its arguments and analysis by studying Budapest’s House of Terror museum and two Canadian redress campaigns, which sought historical recognition for the wartime internments of persons of Italian and Ukrainian ancestry, respectively. Saming is a recurrent problem, ubiquitous and probably inevitable in memory politics because the recognition of historical injustice brings with it unavoidable and indeed often valuable incentives to comparison. Thus, the overall aim of this article is to analyze the threat of saming in order to better defend the cause of comparison in introspective collective remembrance.

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Recognition and Repentance in Canadian Multicultural Heritage: The Community Historical Recognition Program and Italian Canadian Memorializing

Gordon-Walker¹,

Hernandez

Ashley³

2018

Journal of Canadian Studies

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In this article, we examine the multiculturalization of Canadian heritage, and, in particular, the shift to a politics of repentance that has emerged in the past few decades, recognizing specific instances of violence and exclusion that occurred in the nation’s past. Understood in relation to a duty to remember (devoir de mémoire) and a growing global discourse of reconciliation, as well as locally specific demands for redress, this shift has occurred through a convergence of institutional and grassroots activities, and it is exemplified by the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP). To explore the implications of this shift, we analyze heritage projects, including both CHRP-funded and independently developed exhibitions and memorials, created in recognition of the discrimination and internment experienced by Italian Canadians during the Second World War. While these can be read as institutionalizing traumatic memories and promoting a legitimizing narrative of the Canadian settler nation-state, they also serve to enable communities to inscribe their own narratives in Canadian history.

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15. Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

"Has anyone seen my ancestral language?" Italian linguistic suicide and the transmission of the Italian language in Canada, 1935-1947

"Has anyone seen my ancestral language?" Italian linguistic suicide and the transmission of the Italian language in Canada, 1935-1947

Corrosive Comparisons and the Memory Politics of “Saming”: Threat and Opportunity in the Age of Apology

Recognition and Repentance in Canadian Multicultural Heritage: The Community Historical Recognition Program and Italian Canadian Memorializing

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