Abstract

Using early Canadian immigration promotion as a point of departure, this thesis examines one historical and one contemporary site of what it proposes to call immigration spectacle (following Anne McClintock). It argues that immigration spectacle is a social practice of settler postcolonialism specific to the former British dominions, emerging from the settler need to imagine and people the nation through colonial settlement. The settler trajectory of immigration spectacle is traced through two contexts--early Canadian immigration promotion (1850-1930) and the 1999 reopening of Halifax's Pier 21. Chapter 1 theoretically situates immigration spectacle at the convergence of settler postcolonialism and imperial spectacle (McClintock). Chapter 2 examines how early immigration promotion constituted an institutional practice of nation (Anderson). Chapter 3 considers how the national memorialization of Pier 21 is enacted as much through settler forgetting and traumatic silences as it is through institutional memory (Renan). The memorialization of Pier 21 is framed as a contemporary actualisation of the colonial traces of early immigration promotion, particularly through the spectacle of the desirable immigrant that continues to inform immigration policy and politics.

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