Internment “Homes” as Material Texts: The Architecture of Canada’s New Denver Internment Camp

Abstract

Canada’s history of wartime civilian internment of the Japanese Canadian population approximates that of the US both in its colonial policies and its hostility to Asian immigration during the early twentieth century. In both these examples, exclusion and punishment was connected to the denial of ‘home’. But the facilities produced to accommodate internees in each of these nations differed: purpose built barracks in rigid urban grids were used in the US and work camps and extant buildings were repurposed and individual houses built in Canada. This paper examines how the idealised model of the settler colonial home is stripped of its values of individualism and security and reproduced as a sit..