Overview
In September 1945, Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had experienced internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. In Challenging Exile, Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that uprooted them from their homes, stripped them of their livelihoods and possessions, and proposed to exile them from Canada. And they analyze the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights in times of war and its aftermath. Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders, and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times.
Full Product Details
Author: Eric M. Adams ,
Jordan Stanger-Ross
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
Imprint: University of British Columbia Press
ISBN: 9780774872843
ISBN 10: 0774872845
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 15 October 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
""The pages of this book remind us that citizenship can never be taken for granted, that racialization may raise itself above the veneer of civility at the slightest provocation, and that we need to be ever vigilant as a society of the conditions under which we may lose the very things that make our nation.""-- ""From the Foreword by Audrey Kobayashi, professor emerit, Geography Department, Queen's University"" ""Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is a remarkable story, beautifully and sensitively told...a monumental achievement.""-- ""Douglas Harris, Allard School of Law, UBC"" ""The culmination of the authors' lengthy engagement with the treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War, Challenging Exile is both highly empathetic and sharply analytical...A superb contribution.""-- ""Philip Girard, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University""
""Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is a remarkable story, beautifully and sensitively told...a monumental achievement.""-- ""Douglas Harris, Allard School of Law, UBC"" ""The culmination of the authors' lengthy engagement with the treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War, Challenging Exile is both highly empathetic and sharply analytical...A superb contribution.""-- ""Philip Girard, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University""
Author Information
Eric M. Adams is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and has written widely on constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights, and legal education. He lives in Edmonton. Jordan Stanger-Ross is a professor of history at the University of Victoria and is the author of numerous works on the history of migration and race in North America. He lives in Victoria. Together, they were awarded the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for their joint scholarship with the Landscapes of Injustice partnership, examining the uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s.
