Authenticity, absence, and pedagogy on a historical injustice bus tour

Abstract

This article explores how memory practices at sites of historical injustice are shaped by authenticity and absence. It explores a case study of a weeklong bus tour which visited over 15 historic sites dedicated to memorializing the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Drawing on the concept of dark tourism, this article explores how the bus tour was simultaneously a planned pedagogical experience, and part of a larger and sustained set of memory practices dedicated to maintaining and cultivating the cultural memory of injustices faced by Japanese Canadians. The article illustrates how these memory practices helped establish a pedagogical authority for some attendees and facilitated certain ethical engagements with the difficult past while avoiding and excluding others. It also demonstrates how the practice of dark tourism is implicated in larger conversations about the erasure of settler colonialism at sites of memory in Canada.