Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-49

Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-49 Stephanie Bangarth Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008. 296 pp. $34.95 paper.

VOICES Raised in Protest provides a comparative assessment of the incarceration of citizens of Japanese ancestry in Canada and the United States during the Second World War, with a particular focus on dissenting voices that emerged during this period. Bangarth posits that the differing constitutional framework of each country explains differences in the way the rhetoric deployed by dissenters evolved over time. She argues persuasively that the Bill of Rights in the United States allowed dissenters there to invoke civil rights as a basis for challenging the internment of Japanese Americans as unconstitutional, whereas the absence of a constitutional equivalent in Canada forced dissenters, over time, to base their challenges increasingly on broader appeals to universal human rights.

Bangarth contends that domestic policy pertaining to...