Dr. Lisa Mar

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Dr. Lisa Mar

Location

Toronto 43° 39' 12.53" N, 79° 23' 2.16" W Academic and Education Academia/Research Religion Asian Heritage Month Person

Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies

Associate Professor Lisa Mar, Department of History, University of Toronto Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George Street, Room 2074 Toronto Ontario M5S 3G3 CANADA Phone Number 416-978-3363

lisa.mar@utoronto.ca

Associate Professor Ph.D., Toronto, 2002 Immigration, Asian American, U.S. & Canada, 20th century

About: Lisa Rose Mar's fascination with immigration began with her childhood as the Chinese-European daughter of Canadian immigrants to the United States. Intrigued by her family's stories of migrations from China, England, Eastern Europe, Canada, and South Africa--and puzzled by the often limited conceptions of immigrants in public school curricula--she became a story-teller of immigrant lives which cross oceans and continents. Her work joins histories of the United States, China, and Canada, as well as interdisciplinary immigration and ethnic studies.

Before accepting the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies, Dr. Lisa Rose Mar taught about immigrants and Asian Americans at the University of Maryland, in the past and present. Her research interests are in immigration, politics, and culture. She often employs transpacific and transnational perspectives that bring together the United States, China, and Canada.

Publications

Dr. Mar is the author of the book, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Brokering Belonging traces several generations of Chinese "brokers," ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. Before World War II, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Dr. Mar's study of Chinatown leaders shows how politics helped establish North America's first major group of illegal immigrants. Drawing on new Chinese language evidence, her dramatic account of political power struggles over representing Chinese Canadians offers a transnational immigrant view of history, centered in a Pacific World that joins Canada, the United States, China, and the British Empire.

Review of Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 by Lisa Rose Mar (review) Lawrence Lam

From: Canadian Ethnic Studies Volume 44, Number 2, 2012 pp. 162-164 | 10.1353/ces.2012.0004 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The author has provided an engaging and insightful analysis of the pivotal roles of the Chinese brokers and how the process of brokerage has mitigated the adverse impact of Canada’s racial policies on this disenfranchised group during the exclusion era, 1885–1945. Drawing upon various sources of documents, especially the underutilized Chinese language historical documents such as the Chinese language newspapers, the author shows how these Chinese brokers with their acquired Chinese and English capability, acting as leaders and intermediaries, operated, navigated, and negotiated with the Anglo constituencies. These interactions and transactions revealed that the politics of the Anglo and Chinese worlds were inextricably linked. The Chinese did not merely and passively react to the discriminatory policies and practices. Instead, in their responses to the largely anti-Chinese era, they took action to shape and re-shape their own immediate living milieu and the surrounding society. The examination of these brokers’ work shows that in spite of being defined and redefined by the Anglo hegemony as a uniquely Chinese race, marginalized and stigmatized inferior stock living in an ethnic ghetto, these brokers displayed ingenuity in responding actively to the “politically complex Anglo of prejudice” and reinserting “Chinese Canadians as part of a more integrated political history” (6). The author’s analysis has also raised questions about the depiction of the Chinese as sojourners which should have been indelibly linked to European hegemony in an Anglo settler society.

Brokering Belonging is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1—Negotiating Protections—documents the rivalry of two influential Chinese brokers and how they help the Chinese immigrants to evade the head tax by forming alliances with Canada’s ruling political party. Chapter 2—Arguing Cases—demonstrates these brokers, while being barred from practicing law, acted as “Chinese legal interpreters” in cases contending the discriminatory laws and justice system and appealing to the Canadian and British Empire courts for reification. Chapter 3—Popularizing Politics—examines the emerging new generation of Chinese brokers (charismatic brokers who’re intellectuals, labor leaders and civil rights activists) and how they, in addition to challenging the power of the traditional merchant brokers and legal interpreters, organized a year-long protest against the public school segregation and joined forces with other anti-colonial protests against the British colonialism in China and India. While the activities and organized and co-coordinated protests of these new Chinese had provoked backlashes from some Chinese and Anglo business leaders and elites, they had, nonetheless, effectively brought ordinary people into brokerage politics. Chapter 4—Fixing Knowledge—provides a fascinating analysis of how these brokers managed to portray the Chinese as committed and dedicated to become settled and assimilated into the wider society. It reveals vividly how these new intellectual brokers attempted to reshape and reconstruct the discourse about the Chinese in Canada and the United States by taking an active role in the very first major academic survey of East Asian Immigrants’ opinion in 1924 conducted by Robert Park, Chicago School of Sociology, University of Chicago. These brokers organized in a community campaign to strategically place themselves as interviewees for the study, and successfully convinced the researchers to see the Chinese, not as sojourners per se, but as “a patient and diligent model minority” (8) and as “tragic marginal men” (8). Chapter 5—Transforming Democracy—examines the brokers’ continuing negotiations and interactions with Anglos during the Second World War. With the unpopular war policies, contested issue of conscriptions, the brokers lobbied and mobilized Chinese Canadians to take part in the Canadian labor unions. By joining forces with other labor unions to protest tax regulations and to demand equal pay, and to boycott military services, the combined efforts have resulted in persuading the Canadian labor unions to combat racial discrimination, and with the political changes in China (the rise of political power of the Communist Party), a new era of Chinese Canadians—aliens to citizens—was on the horizon.

For those academic researchers interested race relations, ethnic studies, ethnic communities, and those interested in taking a critical look at the history of Chinese settlement in Canada in which different classes and sectors interact, interpret and manage their identity and the social construction of the vision and...

Current Research: Dr. Mar is currently working on two book projects related to Chinese immigrants: a study of Second World War experiences, and a history of Chinese American religious life. Dr. Mar has published articles relating to transpacific Chinese migration history, domestic violence in immigrant contexts, comparative U.S.-Canadian history, and immigrant family life. She is also involved in a digital initiative to document Maryland's immigrant history. She has held several prestigious fellowships, among them an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and The Queen's Fellowship of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Teaching Interests Dr. Lisa Rose Mar teaches about immigrants and Asian Americans, in the past and present. Her research interests are in immigration, politics, and culture. She often employs transpacific and transnational perspectives that bring together the United States, China, and Canada.

Selected Publications

Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)

"Beyond Being Others: Chinese Canadians as National History," BC Studies (Winter/Spring 2007/2008): 13–34.

"Asian Canada: An ‘Alternate Asian America'?" in Brian Niiya, Henry Yu, and Franklin Odo, Eds., Asian Pacific American History Collective Website, published on-line with support from the Ford Foundation at http://www.apachp.org, Spring, 2005.

"The Tale of Lin Tee: Madness, Family Violence and Lindsay's Anti-Chinese Riot of 1919" in Franca Iacovetta, Frances Swyripa and Marlene Epp , Eds., Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant Women, Minority Women and the Racialized Other, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, 108-129.

"Remember Us: A Search for Chinese Roots in Canada," published in Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1993 . San Francisco, California: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1993, 1-24.