Episode 27 - Nitro and Heritage Minutes with Melanie Ng

Today we’re discussing the 1992 Heritage Minute “Nitro” and its depiction of Chinese Canadian history, as well as Heritage Minutes more generally!

For those unfamiliar, Heritage Minutes are a series of 60-second short films intended to depict major moments in Canadian history. “Nitro” introduces viewers to the experiences of Chinese workers who built the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/EE3ISzalVuo.

To discuss this clip, I’m joined by Melanie Ng. Melanie is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Toronto, a museum educator with the Royal Ontario Museum, and a trained public school teacher. Her research focuses on clandestine Chinese migration to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries! In our conversation today, we get into the history of Chinese migration, what aspects of Chinese Canadian history this Heritage Minute reveals and what it obscures, and the genre of Heritage Minutes themselves.

For those who would like to learn more about the history of racist immigration restrictions in Canada and abroad (which we discuss in the episode), check out Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’s book Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Those interested in the history of Canada’s Chinese community should also check out Lisa Rose Mar’s Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Also check out the RepresentASIAN Project, which discusses Asian representation and seeks to elevate Asian voices in popular media: https://representasianproject.com/!

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