Mass capture against memory: Chinese head tax certificates and the making of noncitizens

Abstract

This paper examines a complex bureaucratic process of remembering that was central to the Chinese head tax system in Canada known as C.I.9s (Chinese Immigration 9). The C.I.9s constitute the first mass use of identification photography in Canada. Unlike any moment in its prior history, the Canadian Government isolated one specific group of people, purely on the basis of race and ethnicity, in order to identify each individual member of that group through the creation of a massive apparatus that would systematically correlate their identity with a photographic image. This system was developed so that the government of Canada could remember these migrants in order to continue to exercise the processes of their exclusion from citizenship. Using the theoretical work of an early internet pioneer on surveillance, Philip Agre, and new media theorist, Wendy Chun, I suggest that the C.I.9s function as a technology of mass capture through which noncitizens are made.

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