Martyrdom, collective memory, and the contested penal authority of racial state institutions
| Author | Bonar Buffam |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520950126 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Martyrdom, collective
memory, and the
contested penal
authority of racial
state institutions
Bonar Buffam
University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
Recent work in postcolonial and border criminologies has called for more extensive
consideration of the complex temporal and geographic dimensions of penal authority.
This article explicates new dimensions of the modern state’s penal authority by
analyzing the execution and remembrance of Mewa Singh, a Sikh anticolonial activist
convicted of killing Canadian immigration agent William C Hopkinson in Vancouver in
1914. Because Hopkinson was embedded in racial immigration enforcement against
Indian populations as well as intelligence gathering about anticolonial activities, his death
galvanized fields of penal authority that spanned the imperatives of the Canadian nation-
state and the British Empire. Using archival and observational data, this article tracks
how the significance of Mewa’s execution has been articulated through these penal
fields as well as through recent practices of memorialization undertaken by local Sikh
and Indian communities. Insofar as these mnemonic practices frame Mewa’s death as a
sacrifice necessitated by state racism, my analysis illuminates the complex temporal
parameters of penal fields of authority as well as the manner in which they are
conditioned by racial borders and boundaries.
Keywords
Collective memory, colonialism, postcolonial theory, punishment, race
Corresponding author:
Bonar Buffam, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, ART 306-1147 Research Rd, Kelowna BC,
Canada.
Email: bonar.buffam@ubc.ca
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(3) 317–334
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520950126
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Introduction
In 2015, a number of civic organizations in Metro Vancouver engaged in a public
campaign to commemorate the centenary of Mewa Singh’s execution by Canadian
state authorities in 1915. Mewa was part of a sizable group of Punjabi migrants
who came to Canada before the federal government passed laws in 1908 that
precluded Indian populations from entering the country and from acquiring sub-
stantive citizenship (Mawani, 2018). Mewa had been executed for the murder of
William C Hopkinson, an immigration agent and court translator who played a
significant role in the surveillance and legal regulation of Indian anticolonial move-
ments in the region. These anticolonial movements, which were active along the
West Coasts of Canada and the United States (US), included organizations such
as the Ghadar Party, a group that campaigned against British rule in India
(Sohi, 2014).
To commemorate the centenary of Mewa’s execution, the Ghadar Party
Centenary Celebration Committee coordinated a petition to have the
Government of Canada overturn his conviction for murder and declare him a
martyr. Insofar as this campaign tried to upend the historical record of Mewa’s
legal and moral guilt, it has worked to sever his legacy from the discursive and
moral ambits of criminal law and reframe it against the exigencies of racial and
colonial rule. By tracking how Mewa’s conduct has been configured across histor-
ical and contemporary contexts, this article suggests that such public practices of
memorialization not only complicate the racial state’s authority over political vio-
lence but also the temporal parameters of its penal fields of power.
Although the original research for this article centers on an ostensibly minor
episode in Canadian history, my analysis of its political dimensions is intended to
develop new analytical terrain in critical penology by extending its engagements
with theories of racial governance, postcoloniality and collective memory. Mewa’s
murder of Hopkinson was conditioned by racial state practices
1
that subjected
Sikh and Indian populations to disenfranchisement, immigration restrictions,
and intensive processes of surveillance. Following Goldberg (2002: 104), I conceive
of state practices as racial by virtue of the ‘structural position they occupy in
producing and reproducing, constituting and effecting racially shaped spaces,
places, groups and events, lifeworlds and possibilities, accesses and restrictions,
inclusions and exclusions, conceptions and modes of representation’. When Mewa
killed Hopkinson, the racial state’s governance of Indian populations was guided
by the imperatives to (1) establish and maintain Canada as a white nation-state;
and (2) extend the duration of British rule over India in the face of anticolonial
movements (Mawani, 2018; Mongia, 2018; Sohi, 2014). By showing how these
imperatives intersected in Mewa’s execution, this article offers new insights into
the racial scales of punishment that have tethered contemporary nation-states to
the logics and infrastructures of empire.
This article also contributes to the growing chorus of postcolonial criminologies
that reckon with the residues of empire on contemporary penal imaginaries and
318 Punishment & Society 23(3)
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