This Hampton project will be a cultural history of the cross-ethnic and cross-cultural worlds built by migrants in post-war British Columbia through the lens of performance. It will explore the mobile world of commercial entertainment that included traveling dancers, singers, and musicians who performed in nightclubs, bars, fairs, local organizations and clubs, and tourist sites in the urban centres of Vancouver and Victoria which connected outwards to small resource towns such as Port Alberni, Campbell River, Kitimat, Kamloops, Lytton, Cranbrook and Prince George. Performing groups and entertainers such as the Oriental Doll Revue, Gary Lee, Les Fouchees, Ziomara Martinez, and the Churumbeles catered to multiethnic audiences that included migrant, white working-class, and Indigenous community members who provided the labour that has historically supplied British Columbia’s resource industries.
This study asks the following questions: How did performers participate in both constructing and critiquing settler colonial imaginaries of race and gender, labour exploitation, resource extraction, and dispossession of Indigenous land? Within the multiethnic world of nightlife, how did performers navigate both the dangers of gendered and racialized violence and the possibilities of generative cross-racial and queer intimacies? What cultural forms and genres did performers develop in these shared spaces that catered to alternative imaginaries of migrant, diasporic, and queer belongings as well as Indigenous sovereignty? These questions will provide the basis for a larger study on the racialized and sexualized entertainment worlds within the cross-border region of the post-war Pacific Northwest. This project offers a historical and cultural approach to the study of cross-ethnic encounters, queer world-making, resource extraction, and labour exploitation, issues that continue to be of critical significance today.
