National and Global Decolonial Practices: Asian and Indigenous Inter-referencing

ABSTRACT

This article puts local debates about settler colonialism and racialised migrants into dialogue with decoloniality with the hope of forging new critical approaches and making new political projects possible. I appeal to a global context in order to move beyond the impasse that has arisen on the national plane between settler colonialism studies which divides us into the homogenising categories of Indigenous and settler, and migrant studies which relies on a more nuanced understanding of both the transnational trajectories of migrants as well as the racialised spaces they occupy within nations. I turn to SKY Lee’s landmark novel Disappearing Moon Café to think beyond the nation-state and about the intimacies of colonial identification. This essay proposes a methodology of inter-referencing as outlined by Kuan-Hsing Chen to approach the relations between diasporic and Indigenous peoples in order to conceive of decolonial projects that can transform how we approach Canada.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• imperialism
• migrant
• Asian
• Indigenous
• Canada
• inter-referencing

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the guest editors Renisa Mawani, Christopher Lee, and Sheila Giffen for including this essay in this special issue, as well as to Andrew Burke, Nadine Attewell, and Phanuel Antwi for feedback on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christine Kim is an Associate Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, diaspora studies and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). She has contributed chapters to essay collections on Asian Canadian literature and theatre and published articles in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Interventions, Mosaic, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Journal of Intercultural Studies. Christine is co-director of SFU's Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Currently, she is working on an SSHRC funded book-length project on representations of North Korea, cultural fantasies, and Cold War legacies.

Notes

1 A similar question about the difference between migration and settler colonialism has been posed by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright as they query the description of ‘settler colonialism [as] the forced movements of enslaved Africans, the movement of unfree indentured Asians, or the subsequent Third World displacements and migrations from across the globe, many of them indigenous people themselves’ (2008–9: 121). I appreciate this nuancing of global movement and their engagement with power, voluntary and involuntary migrations, and colonialism, but differ in terms of how I pursue this insight. Sharma and Wright focus largely on the naturalisation of people to places and critique Indigenous nationalisms in order to construct an argument about the need for a global commons. I make a different argument by focusing on global imperialism and proposing a methodology of decentring Sylvia Wynter’s category of Man or what Walter Mignolo calls the zero point (Mignolo 2011: xvii).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.