Decolonizing Settler Worlds

On Worldmaking: Settler Worlds, and Other Worlds

Worldmaking anchors each chapter of Settler Attachments. I move back and forth between two senses of worldmaking.6 There is worldmaking in the sense of imaginary worlds that are brought to life in creative sites such as visual art, performance, film, or literature. But there is also worldmaking in the sense of living and breathing worlds in the flesh that is part and parcel of our everyday lives, or the alternate worldmaking that takes place in, for instance, queer or Indigenous spaces. Imaginary worlds can be sites of experimentation, production, and reproduction; they are also always already intimately intertwined with those living and breathing worlds. As Lisa Duggan observes in dialogue with José Muñoz, queer worldmaking is an integral part of left queer politics: “Engaged anti-normative left politics is powered by the pleasures of bitterness, cynicism and pain, as well as by ecstasy, empathy and solidarity. But it gestures always necessarily through hope to the concrete utopias forged in our experimental intimacies and social forms.”7 The experimentation and “making” is key here. Worlds do not simply exist; they require imagining and crafting. They require work. They can be unmade and remade anew.

Settler Attachments places queer worldmaking in conversation with Indigenous decolonization, acknowledging the tensions inherent therein. As Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s work suggests, decolonization requires critical imaginative dreamwork “without the boundaries of linear time,” which necessarily bridges past and present relations in order to generate new ways of knowing.8 As Million and others show us, Native communities already hold much of the knowledge and wisdom necessary for crafting other worlds, particularly given that, as Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk) writes, “Native people have actually survived apocalypses/the end of the world before.”9 Consider, for instance, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson’s sensuous description of Indigenous (Nishnaabeg) relations to land that have been suppressed by settler epistemologies:

Within Nishnaabeg thought, the opposite of dispossession is not possession, it is deep, reciprocal, consensual attachment. Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to land through connection—generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship. The reverse process of dispossession within Indigenous thought then is Nishnaabeg intelligence, Nishnaabewin. The opposite of dispossession within Indigenous thought is grounded normativity.10

Although Simpson poses dispossession in opposition to attachment here, we could equally say that dispossession of Indigenous lands and bodies is enabled and driven by different kinds of attachment: by attachment to settler norms, logics, and desires.

The ancestral knowledge Simpson evokes furnishes a powerful rebuke to settler attachment, as do contemporary modes of critical Indigenous relational dreaming. As writers and scholars Billy-Ray Belcourt (Cree) and Jas Morgan (Cree, Salteaux, Métis heritage) point out, queer/two-spirit/trans Indigenous young people are generating alternate modes of being, relating, and connecting based on their lived experience.11 Morgan thus states that queer ethics are for them “a relational way of being that I learned in the street by being, doing, enacting, creating and resisting in the world in real time alongside my scrappy queer youth kin”; and that further, much of the queer Indigenous relationality they encounter has developed over social media, in “online communities in which queer Indigenous youth are disseminating lived values in quippy GIFs, memes and infographics.”12 Queer Indigenous relationalities, moreover, Belcourt and Morgan suggest, place pressure on concepts for political agitation, including sovereignty, a concept that this book cites on multiple occasions. “Sovereignty,” notes Belcourt, “which is a charismatic concept in Indigenous studies, cannot be the ideational house for those of us who are queer and/or trans Indigenous and two-spirit. . . . [W]e participate in relational practices that agitate the body or the nation as inviolable containers for political life. Anything can become a site of severance, even the concepts to which we are most devoted.”13

Multimedia Diné artist Demian DinéYahzi′’s four-and-a-half-minute short Indigenous Luv, developed for the 2015 anthology film Hanky Code, speaks to the queer Indigenous relationality that Belcourt and Morgan cite.14 Organized by Periwinkle Cinema, a San Francisco queer and trans film collective, Hanky Code invited queer/trans artists to reflect on the hanky code (a system of communicating sexual preferences through a colored handkerchief in the back pocket, developed by gay men in the United States in the 1970s), culminating in twenty-five short films. While other participating artists took up a specific handkerchief color, DinéYahzi′ turns the code on its head. As he provocatively states in the video, “There is no hanky code/for Indigenous queers/cruising on the rez/or in colonized cities,” gesturing to the colonial limits of the code. If, for non-Native queers, the hanky code has provided a means of communicating that circumvents the heteronormative regulation of public sex, it has not been capacious enough to communicate the specific kinds of desires that colonization has generated—for sex that’s wrought free from its racial and colonial entanglements.

Set to the soundtrack of indie band Helium’s 1995 melancholic track “Honeycomb,” the video has a 1990s DIY punk zine aesthetic (Figure 2). There is no dialogue. Running text in a Courier font against graph-paper-like background is interspersed with embedded video images of the landscape and of DinéYahzi′, some close-up and fragmented, others long shots. Some of the video images themselves mimic Helium’s shots in the music video for “Honeycomb”—particularly those shot outside in a forested area (Figure 3). The music and images are slow, ephemeral, and melancholic, while the running text explicitly calls out the intersections of sex, gender, and colonization, placing them in historical context: “the myth of John Smith / getting it up the ass / with a third gendered cock.” The juxtaposition of the text, which is angry and in-your-face (both in content and in its zine-like form), against the slow softness of the music and images suggests the uneven affects that emerge from the structural and historical conditions DinéYahzi′ references. Dwelling in such raw feelings, and citing such a broad range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural signifiers, the video gestures to a queer Indigenous mode of being that does not neatly map onto discourses of nationhood and sovereignty.

Acknowledging (without resolving) these tensions and debates concerning sovereignty, Settler Attachments centers a decolonizing framework (one that draws from Indigenous models), in order to attend to irresolvable differences and tensions between Asian diasporic and Indigenous imaginaries—including ways of conceiving of racial/colonial injury and trauma, and addressing that injury and trauma—considering how such a centering might simultaneously shift imagined diasporic futures and possibilities. How are Asian diasporic imaginaries undone and remade when interpreted and conceived in relation to Indigenous bodies and lands? Settler Attachments is thus a project of “decolonizing worldmaking” in the sense that it both offers a critique of Asian diasporic worldmaking and presents forms of Asian diasporic worldmaking that labor toward decolonizing. “Decolonizing” is here a verb, an active process. Decolonizing worldmaking is not the end point of political imagination, but the starting point for developing and strengthening Asian-Indigenous relations; for imagining beyond settler colonialism.

The neoliberal multicultural settler city of Toronto—from the Mohawk word Tkaronto, for “where there are trees in water”—emerges as a paradigmatic site here. It is no coincidence that the early seeds for this book were planted in Toronto, the traditional territories of multiple nations who have served as its caretakers, including the Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Huron Wendat; the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation are the current treaty holder.15 Broadly speaking, Indigenous politics have both historically and in the present been more publicly visible and prominent in Canada than in the United States. Conversations around settler-Indigenous relations and solidarities have arguably had more time and space to percolate here than they might have in the United States. Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is the fourth largest and most racially diverse city in North America—around 55 percent are BIPOC—and has a substantial Indigenous population; it is a home and gathering place for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, and across the world.

Toronto is also a settler city, part of the post-1492 “New World Order” of the Americas, to cite Sylvia Wynter, that inaugurated new modes of being, thinking, and sensing that were profoundly anti-Black and anti-Indigenous.16 It is the financial center of Canada, a hub of immense wealth accumulated through centuries-long histories of resource extraction and labor exploitation. It is correspondingly also a hub for those seeking uneven forms of refuge from the violence of global capitalism and empire: Indigenous peoples migrating from the structural impoverishment of reserves, Indigenous and non-Indigenous migrants from the Global South. Although this book is not “about” Toronto, Toronto is a rich site from which to think through questions of relation and solidarity. The city’s specific histories of encounter have rendered it a chaotic space of entanglement, one that has generated not only multifarious forms of violence but also multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, including critical conversations and imaginaries around Asian diasporic–Indigenous worldmaking. Here, Canada’s Indian Act collides with Canadian policies of immigration, multiculturalism, and national security, generating forms of erasure, racialization, xenophobia, and exclusion, as well as limited forms of inclusion, while simultaneously giving rise to forms of refusal, resistance, and solidarity against the violence of this political infrastructure. The city’s wealth and resources create conditions of violence and inequity—and, simultaneously, spaces and opportunities for artistic and cultural production. This combination of social, political, and economic circumstances has contributed to the development of a range of depictions of diasporic–Indigenous relationality. Put another way, for artists, activists, and scholars located in Toronto, there is a convergence across the politics of diaspora and Indigeneity that is very much in-your-face, difficult to ignore. Thus, while the starting points of the book (in chapter 1) are the United States and United Kingdom, its subsequent points center on Toronto: chapters 2, 3, and 4 all examine the direct and indirect ways Asian diasporic artists and filmmakers have confronted questions of settler colonialism and Indigeneity.

Film has long held an especial place as a site for imagining new worlds. The relative verisimilitude of the medium—in contrast to other art forms—provides the occasion to reflect, imagine, and dwell in possibility. As Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt assert, “Cinema is always involved in worldmaking.”17 This includes settler worldmaking: the figure of Hollywood cowboy, for instance, is a paradigmatic emblem of settler worldmaking, one that appears at various moments across this book, evoking settler dreams, desires, and fantasies. Film and media are also instruments for antiracist and decolonial interventions, like the one Deer makes in Beans, and like the ones made by the artists and filmmakers featured in this book. However, these interventions are not necessarily equivalent, uniform, or commensurable with one another.

Placing this world-making potential of film in relation to queer worldmaking, as Schoonover and Galt do in Queer Cinema in the World, is both a fraught and exciting project. The ephemerality of “queer of color” coalitional work, which I return to in chapter 4, holds particular promise as a site for living, breathing, and imagining alternate worlds. It exemplifies queer cultural worldmaking in the sense discussed by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their essay “Sex in Public,” but one that is infused with a reckoning with the colonial and racial underpinnings of heteronormativity.18 The lengthy, awkward acronym “(QT)BIPOC”—a grassroots Toronto innovation that modifies the term “(queer and trans) people of color” to acknowledge the particularities of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism without letting go of its relational/coalitional impulse—speaks to the necessity of attempting to love, live, and work with one another through conflict and tension.19 The modified frame of QTBIPOC also embodies my approach to critique in this book, which is both paranoid and reparative.20 It comes from a place of seeing critique and reflection as indispensable tools for repairing the havoc that racial and colonial violence wreak. As Grace Hong points out, “our long and sustained commitment to a coalitional and relational analytic and practice, a tradition that is newly critical and urgent in our time,” is a distinctive feature of Asian American organizing and scholarship.21 This type of reading is, moreover, indebted to a rich tradition of Black feminist thought—extending back to the foundational work of Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective—that engages the generative potential of difference and tension.22 Bernice Johnson Reagon’s 1981 remarks, directed to the women’s movement at the time, are particularly apt: “You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.”23 As Jennifer Nash argues, the sharp critiques of power that these foundational works issue have centered a politics of love and loving.24 “Love” here connotes not only generosity and care but also the willingness to be vulnerable, to hold to account, and to work toward mutual spaces of healing. Settler Attachments leans into the diasporic–Indigenous impasse. I attend to fraught spaces of tension and difficulty from an ethic of love and care, not to tear down possibilities for relation and coalition, but to open such possibilities.

Why Settler Attachments? On Asian Diasporas and Settler Colonialism

Asian diasporas occupy a seemingly contradictory, paradoxical position in settler societies, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, and South Africa. Broadly, settler colonialism names the longue durée of colonization in nation-states such as these, where the ongoing colonial violence that Indigenous peoples are subjected to is effaced and displaced onto the rubrics of neoliberal multiculturalism that presume to benevolently incorporate Native groups (rather than nations).25 Although postcolonial theorists have clearly demonstrated how colonization’s afterlives have persisted even following the mid- to late twentieth-century struggles for national independence across Asia and Africa, they have not tended to account for these settler-colonial cases, which have followed a different political trajectory. At the same time, settler colonialism only exists in relation to other forms of colonization and imperialism. As Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, among others, writes in her critique of the concept of settler colonialism: “I am wanting to hold onto harsher terms like ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ proper to describe the current relationship of the United States to American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians, and the indigenous peoples of its occupied territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean. . . . It is important and necessary to secure indigenous self-determination and decolonization to hold onto the ‘empire’ in our understanding, describing, and strategizing ways of empowerment and revolution.”26 I read Barker’s refusal of settler colonialism and the “settledness” it implies as a form of resistance to its “logic of elimination.”27 Likewise, across the world, and in settler-colonial contexts, what Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kānaka Maoli) refers to as “enduring Indigeneity” powerfully refuses and pushes back against settler colonialism’s attempts at Native erasure.28 Forms of Indigenous resurgence and survivance, from land blockades, articulations of nationhood and sovereignty, to what Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has named “grounded normativity”—“the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman other over time”—exemplify some of the myriad ways that Indigeneity endures.29

In contrast to white settlers, we might presume that Asian diasporic communities ought to know better, and perhaps sometimes do know better, but continue to be drawn in by the lure and attraction of settler colonialism’s promises. How do we theorize the place of Asian diasporas in relation to their new homelands, particularly when those new homelands, to paraphrase Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Malinda Smith, are in a stolen place?30 This is the central problematic animating this book. I intentionally use the descriptor of Asian diasporic rather than “Asian American,” “Asian Canadian,” or “Asian North American” in order to gesture toward the longer histories and trajectories of migration that lead particular communities to a particular place, which do not always evenly map onto status and belonging within nation-states. Such a use of the term diasporic is indebted to the Black British cultural studies scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Troubling the innocence or neutrality of the nation-state, Hall’s and Gilroy’s respective works have broadly emphasized the production of race and racialization through the nation-state by theorizing the transnational formation of race, diaspora, and Blackness.31

Bringing Hall’s and Gilroy’s insights in conversation with Indigenous studies, I choose to use diasporic in order to foreground the relationships to nation, land, and migration that distinguish Indigenous and diasporic communities, even as race remains integral to the study. I use the term diasporic not in the technical sense of dispersed populations, but, following Lily Cho, in the sense of a subjective condition engendered by the aftermath of both national independence struggles across much of the Third World and the creation of a global system of nation-states following World War II.32 The use of the term diasporic, in other words, signals attention to transnational processes of colonization, slavery, imperialism, and globalization that have created a fraught and messy landscape of relationalities.

“Asian,” meanwhile, is a loose and broad signifier encompassing a vast range of histories, migration patterns, and experiences of settlement, to say nothing of other forms of stratification. I frame the book specifically in terms of Asian diaspora in order to mark its distinctions from the histories that frame Latinx and Black diasporic experiences. With that said, the examples in this book draw primarily from post-1960s waves of Asian migration. Immigration and refugee policies in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other Western states shifted in this period to respond to labor shortages; not coincidentally, the turbulence of the Cold War and of the newly formed nation-states that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization across Asia and Africa compelled multiple forms of migration, both voluntary and involuntary. Migration in this period allowed for more permanent settlement of Asian diasporic populations—in contrast to the severe restrictions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance—and gave rise to new modes of state management of racial and ethnic difference. These changes also gave Asian migrants access to different relationships to—and subject positions within—settler-colonial states.

Even more specifically, this book homes in on post-1990s diasporic cultural politics, much of which has been inflected by the legacies of the 1990 Mohawk resistance at Kanehsatake and Kahnawake that Tracey Deer also takes up in Beans. That moment—particularly in Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver—inspired increased consciousness around questions of Indigenous land and sovereignty. The post-1990s context of Kanehsatake/Kahnawake appears again and again across this book as a watershed moment, not only for Indigenous, but for diasporic cultural politics, although with vastly divergent stakes. The Mohawk resistance contextualizes, for example, the South Asian diasporic focus of chapters 2, 3, and part of 4. South Asian diasporic artists figure prominently in Settler Attachments because the Oka Crisis coincided with the early years of Desh Pardesh, a queer South Asian diasporic arts organization that took the lead in cultivating space for conversations on fostering support and solidarity with First Nations peoples. Desh’s primary project was an annual arts festival that convened in Toronto from 1989 to 2001. As Sharon Fernandez notes in her retrospective essay on the festival, “Desh Pardesh was prescient in creating the conditions for the integration of diasporic subjectivities through its active encouragement of pertinent cultural participation in Canada.”33 The forms this “cultural participation” took were often counterhegemonic, including a rejection of model minority respectability and a refusal of the forms of liberal, multicultural relationality that the settler state produces. Many of the artists featured in Settler Attachments—including Shani Mootoo, Vivek Shraya, Ali Kazimi, and V. T. Nayani—emerge from the spaces of possibility opened up by Desh.

In the early 1990s, Desh was explicitly interested in forging connections with Indigenous struggles for sovereignty. In her opening address to the 1991 festival, scholar activist Punam Khosla stated, “[Desh Pardesh] is moving away from romantic notions of nostalgia towards a forum . . . from which we can extend genuine solidarity to . . . people of colour communities around us who also know in their bodies the experience of racism and, in North America in particular, the First Nations Peoples.”34 Fernandez notes that Desh worked with a number of Native organizations in the 1990s, including the Native Canadian Center, Native Women in the Arts, De-Be-Jeh-Mu-Jig, Stoney Point First Nations, and the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts. Desh members also joined Native communities in 1995 protests against the police shooting of Dudley George (Chippewa) at Ipperwash Provincial Park in southwestern Ontario.35 This reflected the organization’s mission statement, which included as its fourth principle to work “in concert with other communities, artists, and activists of colour with compatible objectives to make links between South Asian, First Nations and people of color cultures and communities.”

More broadly, the post-1990s moment can be situated within extant work on Asian diasporic literature, film, visual art, historical archives, and contemporary activism, which has illuminated not only moments of Asian-Indigenous collaboration and connection but also Asian diasporic complicity with colonial violence.36 In Hawai‘i for instance, Asians have assumed positions of political power that enable them to enact settler forms of governance; at the same time, groups of what Candace Fujikane terms Asian “settler allies” have been supporting Indigenous-led movements to oppose the construction of a thirty-meter telescope at the Mauna Kea volcano, a sacred site.37 Indeed, unlike white settlers, whose sociocultural dominance makes clear their investments in sustaining colonial power arrangements, Asian diasporas’ relationship to settler colonialism is far more contingent, entangled as it is with multiple histories and legacies of colonization, and mediated by factors such as class, caste, and immigration status. The notion of “settler common sense,” for example, developed by Mark Rifkin to characterize the aesthetic strategies of white American writers in the nineteenth century who took Indigenous erasure and displacement for granted, does not adequately explain the dynamics underlying Asian diasporic artists’ deployments of similar aesthetics and representational politics.38

Attachment elucidates the ambivalent, uneven relationships of collaboration and complicity Asian diasporic people hold with settler colonialism. It gestures to the shared histories and trajectories of colonization across Asian diasporic and Indigenous communities that also lead to Asian migration to settler North America—to the potential for relationships of mutual support and solidarity that becomes occluded by desires for and investments in the settler-colonial project. Indeed, while there is a plethora of critique, particularly from queer and feminist scholars and activists, of communities of color and their propensity to engage in modes of oppression and domination ranging from cultural nationalism to sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, and classism, we have a great deal to learn about the “lateral” or “horizontal” relations of violence that structure and animate encounters between Asian diasporas and Indigenous peoples.39 Yet knowing better is not quite the problem here: knowing in and of itself does not necessarily generate better relations. As Manu Karuka, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein point out, although it is “colonial unknowing” that “endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and colonization, occluding the mutable historicity of colonial structures and attributing finality to events of conquest and dispossession,” its opposite—knowing—is not, in fact, antidote.40 Although research and activism enable me to know better when it comes to Indigeneity and Indigenous politics, this has not been enough to undo my attachments to settler colonialism. I remain attached to, and embedded within, settler landscapes—I am embedded in settler colonialism not out of choice, but through structure.

Shifting away from (un)knowing toward feeling, emotion, and affect, attachment attends to the deep-seated longings and investments for the settler colonial, signaled through desires for “New World” promises of wealth, freedom, and independence. This book’s focus on the diasporic condition, which illuminates subjective experience and affect—as opposed to other terms, such as settler, arrivant, or alien, which emphasize positionality within a political-economic landscape—enables its exploration of attachment. Settler attachments are not necessarily tied to the exercise of violence, but cannot be separated from them, as Hagar Kotef points out in her theorization of Israeli settler subjects’ “violent attachments”: “when one longs for and belongs to this [settler] landscape, one does not take pleasure in the direct pain inflicted on others (the cruelty model), yet this pain cannot be fully separated from the spaces of belonging that construct the sense of self.”41 Such longings and desires. moreover, may coexist alongside active expressions of solidarity and struggle with Indigenous resurgence. More precisely, attachment is what Kadji Amin calls a “diagnostic” that attunes us to “the affective and imaginary processes of identification, attraction, and belonging that structure and bind any given relation.”42 Attachment disrupts the fiction that harnessing goodwill and studious awareness alone might undo the violence of settler colonialism. Instead, it invites us to shift our perceptions of how we understand forms of art, critique, and activism allied or in solidarity with decolonization: not as inherently good in and of themselves, but as examples of the ongoing labor and experimentation required to work toward decolonization.

The questions taken up in Settler Attachments emerge from conversations happening across a number of interlinked fields of study. This includes conversations in Native and Indigenous studies emphasizing land, sovereignty, and Indigenous resurgence; Black studies’ calls to consider the foundational and constitutive role of anti-Blackness in shaping modernity; Asian American studies’ emphases on entangled histories, relationality, and complicity; and, more broadly, the movement toward critical race and ethnic studies approaches that resist the siloization and institutionalization of ethnic studies within the neoliberal university by emphasizing long histories of race, slavery, empire, and colonization.43

Among the earliest of these is the 2000 special issue of Amerasia Journal edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, entitled “Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i” and later expanded into the 2008 edited collection Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i.44 Placing Asian American studies in conversation with Indigenous (and specifically Kānaka Maoli) studies, both the special issue and book took up Native Hawaiian feminist Haunani-Kay Trask’s assertion—from her keynote address to the 1997 Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. conference—that Asians, not just whites, benefited from settler colonization of Hawai‘i.45 Her essay, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” also published in that special issue, asked various Asian communities—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino—to consider the stakes of framing themselves as “locals” whose laboring histories entitled them to claim Hawai‘i as their own.46 Trask was in particular pointing to a stark division between Native Hawaiians and Asian diasporic communities, the non-Native majority who, though once marginal in status, now hold positions of economic and political power. More broadly, though, Trask, Fujikane, Okamura, and their fellow contributors centered Native Hawaiians in their analysis and theorized all others—regardless of history, social position, or class status—in relation, as “settler.” Settler, in this instance, was a way to name oneself in respectful relation to Indigeneity.

Trask’s question of people of color as settlers came to the fore in Canadian antiracism scholarship a few years later, in the 2005 essay “Decolonizing Antiracism,” by South Asian antiracist feminist scholar Enakshi Dua and Indigenous studies scholar Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaq ancestry).47 Dua and Lawrence argued that postcolonial and antiracist scholarship and activism (from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada) unwittingly reiterated colonial discourses of Native peoples as dead or dying when grounded in the assumption that formal colonization was over; or, when critiques of the nation-state failed to recognize Indigenous nationhood as a distinct formation; or, when demands for equity within the nation-state failed to see the nation-state as a colonial state. Lawrence and Dua’s argument, along with those of Trask, Fujikane, Okamura, and others, was a contentious one that has provoked a wide range of debate, revision, and critique.48 Among these has been the question of how to name non-Native others within these configurations of power, whether that be a modification of settler (settler of color, refugee settler, or minor settler), alien, or arrivant.

While there are significant distinctions between each of these terms, all are rooted in the basic premise—one that I share—that settler colonialism matters, and that we cannot understand processes of racialization except in some relation to it. Conceptually, scholars are engaging these terms to pose similar kinds of questions. As Dean Itsuji Saranillio reminds us, arguments over the taxonomies of terms such as settler or arrivant easily devolve into a “moral hierarchy of competing identities that can elide the very structure of settler colonialism, which remains the same regardless of what term one uses.”49 Moreover, as Malissa Phung points out, “Whatever the term, whatever the conceptual approach, whatever adjective used to describe these various overlapping, ‘co-constitutive’ genealogies of precarious resettlement and forced migration . . . non-Indigenous resettlement remains predicated on the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.”50 My use of the term diasporic is not based on a moral or ethical claim. The central difference distinguishing the term diasporic from others is its primary emphasis on subjective experience, rather than on political or economic positionality. For example, settler of color (Trask; Lawrence and Dua), refugee settler (Gandhi), and minor settler (Huang) all gesture to one’s position within a settler-colonial polity; arrivant (Byrd) signals a status within settler colonialism that is distinguished by mode of migration; and alien (Day) gestures to one’s position within settler capitalism.51 I foreground the diasporic condition in order to emphasize the forms of structural attachments and impasses that this generates.

My use of diasporic also takes its cue from the artists featured in this book, all of whom centrally engaged with their diasporic subjectivity. While some are more explicitly engaged with questions of Indigenous solidarity and relationality (Kazimi in chapter 3, Nayani in chapter 4, and Yoon in the Coda), the starting point for all of these individuals are the experiences and affects that arise from feeling unrooted, out of place, and marginalized. At the same time, my use of diasporic is not a call to replace other terms; rather, it is contingent and strategic. At different moments, other terms may be politically and ethically useful—for example, I use the term settler in the classroom when engaging both white and nonwhite students who have not thought of their access to forms of settler privilege. “Diasporic” does not as readily call forth such conversations.

Put another way, this book is indebted to the early provocations of authors such as Trask, Lawrence, and Dua—and the vexed conversations they have generated—not because of the terms of identification they proposed, but what they have generated: a now rich, nuanced body of thought examining the interconnections between forms of structural violence including anti-Blackness, colonialism, xenophobia, and war/militarism.52 Chickasaw theorist Jodi Byrd’s 2011 book, The Transit of Empire, provides the critical language through which to tease many of these interconnections. Bringing critical Indigenous studies to bear on postcolonial critique, Byrd argues that colonization produces a cacophony of competing and entangled representations and claims to land, identity, and politics.53 For Byrd, these entanglements emerge through the context of empire, in which Indigeneity serves as a site of transit through which colonial ideologies and imperatives are transmitted from one imperial venture to another. Attentive to this colonial messiness, Byrd proposes Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s term arrivant to describe the liminal position of non-Native, nonwhite subjects in settler colonies (for example, immigrants, refugees, descendants of the transatlantic slave trade)—those who have become implicated in settler-colonial dynamics, and who themselves have been affected by transnational circuits of empire. Drawing attention to these transits of empire, cacophony creates analytic space for understanding the complicity of racialized, non-Native populations in settler colonialism in terms of entangled colonialisms, rather than the interrelations of oppressed groups. The concept of arrivant necessarily works through this entanglement; more than an identity category, Byrd clarifies in a 2019 essay that arrivant “name[s] a process and make[s] messy the presumed circuits of white supremacist nationalism underlying certain strands of settler-colonial studies that relegate Indigenous peoples to elimination, refugees to settlers, and descendants of slaves to settler adjacents.”54 Byrd is responding in 2019 (at least partially) to the provocations of Black studies scholars, including Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and in particular Tiffany Lethabo King (whose work locates critical resonances across Black and Native studies), who, holding onto slavery’s foundational and constitutive role in shaping Modernity vis-à-vis anti-Blackness, critique the omissions and occlusions of settler-colonial studies.55 Byrd’s framework of cacophony is one that takes seriously the “intimacies of four continents” created by processes of slavery, conquest, and empire, which, as Lisa Lowe describes, have placed discrepant bodies, objects, spaces, and times in relation to one another.56 Whereas Fujikane and Okamura, Lawrence and Dua, and others make an argument for placing Native peoples and relationships to land at the center of discussions of racialization, Byrd suggests that it is the longue durée of colonization, slavery, conquest, and empire that must be placed at the center of studies of race and Indigeneity.57

These approaches are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but amplify two different aims: asking after ethics and relationality, and clarifying the structural generation of racial and colonial difference and tension. Settler Attachments joins recent monographs on Asian diasporas, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism—driven by some combination of both these imperatives—that attempt to think capaciously about relationality while offering nuanced theorizations of race, labor, migration, colonization, and Indigeneity. This has included centering processes of racial settler capitalism (Day’s Alien Capital), thinking beyond the frame of the nation-state to transnational refugee settlements (Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s Archipelago of Resettlement), de-exceptionalizing U.S. settler colonialism within a global imperial frame (Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks), developing hemispheric approaches (Quynh Nhu Le’s Unsettled Solidarities), examining the crisscrossed transits of Asian and Indigeneity that emerge through entangled colonialisms (Hu Pegues’s Space-Time Colonialism), deploying oceanic frameworks (Erin Suzuki’s Ocean Passages); and considering the intersections of settler colonialism and dominant caste formation in Indian diasporas (Nishant Upadhyay).58 Grounded in Asian American studies’ impulse toward relational critique, these works offer nuanced theorizations of race, labor, migration, colonization, and Indigeneity that move beyond the framework of the nation-state. Settler Attachments shares with these works an ethical impulse to think about Indigenous land and sovereignty while attending to the uneven, contradictory, and messy enmeshment of Asian diasporas within settler-colonial state dynamics generated by global colonialism and imperialism. It differs from these books in two ways: first, in its specific focus on film studies, and second, in its reframing of questions of solidarity and relationality in terms of the underlying psychic and affective dimensions of Asian diasporic investments in settler colonialism.

Some Notes on Method: The Racial and Colonial Emergence of Film

Settler-colonial imaginaries figure prominently in diasporic cultural production. Yet scholars have only recently begun the work of reframing diasporic existence in relation to Indigenous land: the diasporic condition has most often been theorized and imagined in terms of migration from old to new homelands, or problems of identity and belonging. For example, while Black, postcolonial, and feminist cultural critics such as Homi Bhabha, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha have examined diasporic filmmakers’ responses to conditions of racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and cisheteropatriarchy in terms of the politics of visuality, analytical frameworks such as mimicry and the oppositional gaze are complicated when one poses questions about the layered enmeshment of marginalized groups and peoples in relation to one another.59 Studies of diasporic film, which have been concerned with how the diasporic experience informs filmmaking production, reception, and distribution, have not tended to prioritize diasporic relationships to Indigeneity or settler colonization, largely because these have not been prioritized by diasporic communities themselves. Thus, for example, in his classic study An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Hamid Naficy is primarily concerned with the ways in which filmmakers from the Global South mediate their relationships with migration and exile through filmmaking. For Naficy, the common thread tying together these filmmakers is “liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry.”60

The claim I am making about diasporic film is more properly a claim about film broadly as a central site where settler culture coheres and proliferates. This requires a capacious understanding of film and its relationship to race, racism, and colonization, one that stretches far past questions of representation. Rather, I follow Curtis Marez’s impulse in University Babylon to understand film as an object and instrument of structural power.61 If, as Kara Keeling astutely notes, the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century coincided with what Du Bois termed “the problem of the color line,” it also coincided with American westward expansion and its corresponding policies of Indigenous genocide, cultural and physical.62 Thus both a racialized visual regime and a colonial sense of land—of vanishing Indians, empty wilderness, and the harsh frontier—underpin cinematic foundations of representation. As the late historian Cedric Robinson has observed, “with a reach and immediacy not obtained by previous apparatuses (museums, theaters, fairs, the press, etc.), motion pictures insinuated themselves into public life” at the precise moment that a white American national identity was being consolidated.63 To put it another way, the history of film is deeply entangled with histories of racism and colonization.

The very first forays into filmmaking capitalized on the fetishization of Indigenous bodies and were directly connected to violent settler expansion. Early cinema was firmly embedded in late-nineteenth century cultural milieu that fetishized and exploited colonial and racial difference. The invention of film was happening at the same time that scientists were drawing on an emergent archive from erstwhile colonies across the world to classify humanity into races distinguished by sexed and gendered characteristics. It is not surprising, then, that film was not only informed by this context of racial science but also deployed as an instrument of asserting and performing racial-colonial dominance.

Film historian Tom Gunning characterizes early cinema as a “cinema of attraction”: cinema primarily oriented around exhibition.64 Yet, he also argues, this tendency for exhibition did not disappear with the emergence of narrative cinema. In these early years, Gunning suggests, cinema was exciting to the public, not as a medium of storytelling, but as a novel and amusing technology. Filmmakers such as Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter, and the Lumière Brothers were in the business not of entertaining but of scientific invention. Their films oscillated between depictions of the mundane and everyday—for example, Louis Lumiere’s forty-six-second silent short La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière a Lyon (1895) depicts workers leaving a factory—and the spectacular.65 On the spectrum of the spectacular were short captures of dancers, boxing, and fighting matches. Colonial-racial difference here was one item on the laundry list of spectacular forms of entertainment. Many of Edison Studios’ shorts fall in the latter category: Princess Ali (William Heise, 1895) and Fatima’s Coochee Dance (James White and William Heise, 1896) are short films of Egyptian belly dancers; Watermelon Eating Contest (William Heise and James White, 1896), Chinese Laundry Scene (William K. Dickson and William Heise, 1894), and A Morning Bath (James White and William Heise, 1896) draw on the tradition of minstrelsy to exploit public fascination with racial stereotypes. While the individual films corresponded to distinct histories of colonization and racialization, they also emerged in a collective context of scientific racism, Euro-American colonial empire, and the consolidation of transnational whiteness.

Among Edison Studios’ offerings were Sioux Ghost Dance and Buffalo Dance (William K. Dickson and William Heise, both 1894), featuring Lakota Sioux dancers. Just a few years earlier, in 1890, American soldiers massacred three hundred Lakota people at Wounded Knee because of the perceived threat of an Indigenous resistance movement that mobilized this very dance to hail ancestors’ help. The film’s dancers—survivors of the massacre creatively navigating their new lives as performers—were participants in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, now a ready source of content for Edison’s films. Buffalo Bill, aka Bill Cody, was a former Pony Express rider whose exploits journalists initially recorded in newspapers, and who had gained fame as a dime novel hero. Cody capitalized on this fame when he developed his traveling Wild West Show. Much of the intrigue of the show came from the fact that the “performers” in the show were real-life figures familiar to many, including Lakota Chief Sitting Bull. Cody’s Wild West Show indulged audiences’ pleasure by blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Edison saw in Cody’s show the perfect site for his experiments with film: “real” scenes of spectacle ostensibly available for capture. By engaging such colonial scenes of difference as the first subjects of new cinematic technologies, Edison’s experiments established their prowess as film technologies extended colonial imperatives of capture, control, and domestication. In combining verisimilitude with the spectacular, early film was instrumental to the process of crafting settler worlds, enabling audiences to understand themselves as settlers in relation to the colonized.

As repositories or archives of the world in which we live, films are archives of the settler world, but not in a straightforward way. The Asian diasporic films I examine in this book constitute sites of contestation and negotiation through which their directors, writers, and/or producers grapple in often uneven and contradictory ways with cinematic histories, aesthetics, and representations, while also reckoning with personal, familial, and community histories and legacies.

Approaching Film through Critical Ethnic Studies

Film’s history has been hugely wedded to the histories of racism and colonialism. It is therefore surprising (or, perhaps it is not surprising at all) that while there is a robust body of work on gender, cinema, and media and a well-established canon of feminist film theory—held together by academic journals such as Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, and Feminist Media Studies—there is no comparable “canon” of critical race or ethnic film studies. Institutionally, race is marginal within film and media studies, if measured by indicators such as academic journals, course offerings in curricula, and full-time faculty positions.66 Despite this, the work of scholars such as Keeling, Michael Gillespie, Michelle Raheja (Seneca descent), Joanna Hearne, Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche), Denise Khor, Jigna Desai, Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam, among many others, pushes film and media studies to think deeply about histories of race and colonization, particularly as they probe the absences and silences constituting film and media archives, representations, and aesthetics.67

Settler Attachments joins these scholars in drawing attention to absence: specifically, that of relationality and entanglement. As Lowe argues, the division of knowledge within the modern academy obscures and submerges historical connections between forms of racial, imperial, and colonial violence across the world, such that they appear discrete. Correspondingly, she says, “we know little about [the] intimacies of four continents.”68 Although Lowe focuses specifically on history, the afterlife of these obscured connections persists in the contemporary moment, informing the production, circulation, and reception of film and media. This includes scholarly reception of film and media, where conversations around race and ethnicity in film have followed the broader divisions of ethnic studies. Early race and film scholarship, which focused on the representation of racialized groups, did the painstaking and necessary work of addressing negative stereotypes and the inaccuracy of images of racialized people found on film. The work was—and remains—segmented by racial formation; thus, there are studies on representations of Black people in cinema; Chicanx/Latinx communities; Arabs/Muslims; Native Americans/Indigenous peoples; and Asians.69 Beginning in the 1980s, some scholars turned more broadly to the question of race writ large, but the question of relationality was not a central concern. Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s essay “Colonialism, Racism and Representation,” published in a special “race” issue of Screen in 1983, for example, critiqued the preoccupation with realism inflecting much film studies analyses of race at the time, and the foci of many of these analyses on singular dimensions of film, such as social portrayal, plot, and character.70 They instead proposed analyzing racism and colonialism in film in terms of the cinematic dimensions of representation, including genre, spectatorship, composition, sound, editing, and framing. Toward the late 1980s and early 1990s, a greater number of scholars took up the inquiry on method initiated by Stam and Spence. Influenced, in part, by the increased presence of minority filmmakers in both mainstream and independent spaces, film studies theorists began to look beyond the question of positive and negative representations. They turned, instead, to the broader issue of centering race in film analysis.71 This work linked together conversations on how to theorize race—for example, as biological truth or social construction—to the medium of film. These authors contextualized issues of representation and minority production in terms of debates on topics such as identity, essentialism, and authenticity. Thus, in a second special “race” issue of Screen from 1988, Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer’s essay “De Margin and De Centre” argued that race should be central to all studies of film, rather than relegated to analyses of nonwhite subjects in film. In this same journal issue, Richard Dyer’s essay “White” exposed the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of representations of whiteness on film.72 Dyer’s essay importantly suggested that a race analysis might expose the social construction of whiteness in film. Similarly, Daniel Bernardi, in his three consecutive edited collections on race, film, and whiteness, took a cue from Dyer in considering how American cinema constructed whiteness as normative, in relation to racial Otherness.73 Later works on race and film have taken up these methodological concerns in a number of ways. Some have framed filmic representations of race in terms of material and discursive conditions through which they are shaped; some have theorized about spectatorship; others have offered critical perspectives on minority filmmaking practices, taking into account conversations on diaspora, transnationality, and identity.74 As a whole, the scholarship on race and film has contributed to a critical understanding of how cinema informs social construction of race. Cinema and media do not merely reflect “real” social identities, but actively constitute them.75 Film and media can, therefore, reveal much about how to theorize race.

For the most part, however, film and media criticism has remained fragmented according to distinct histories of race, constrained by the siloed nature of its archives (film and media objects, along with their cultures, industries, and infrastructures). This is unsurprising given that patterns of film production and spectatorship have largely corresponded those same distinct histories; there are relatively few examples of film or media that are attentive to entangled relations, unless through the rubrics of multiculturalism and post-raciality. The Fast & Furious film franchise (2001–2023), Marvel Studio’s The Eternals (2021), and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) all feature multiracial casts, but these are not films that explicitly center cross-racial or cross-colonial encounter in the way that Frozen River (2008) or Mississippi Masala (1991) do.76

Even accounting for such examples, it remains the case that because critics interpret film and media primarily based on what is there rather than what is absent, archival absences constrain possibilities for what we can say. How do we see histories and connections that are not there? Are they simply not there, are they invisible, or are they submerged? How might we interpret Asian diasporic filmmakers’ efforts to document Indigenous issues and struggles, such as Rucha Chitnis’s short film In the Land of My Ancestors (2018), about Ohlone elder Ann Marie Sayers’s reclamation of ancestral land in the San Francisco Bay Area; or Sanjay Rawal’s Gather (2020)—produced by a team that included Jason Momoa (Kānaka Maoli) and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole)—about Indigenous food sovereignty movements? How might we identify and interpret traces or remains of connections, such as in the collaborative film and television work of Sandra Osawa (Makah) and Yasu Osawa, who met through the 1969 LA Rebellion film movement?77 Importantly, how might a pivot to foregrounding structural violence, rather than representations of bodies, reorient the ways we interpret film?

To investigate these questions, Settler Attachments draws from relational methods of criticism—also referred to as critical ethnic studies—that scholars across Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Chicanx/Latinx studies have been developing to consider the entangled relationships emerging from the overlaps and disjunctures between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and contemporary globalization.78 As an epistemological formation, critical ethnic studies emerged in the early 2010s in response to the limitations of U.S. ethnic studies models that had become incorporated into the academy; UC Riverside’s Ethnic Studies Department hosted the inaugural critical ethnic studies conference in 2011, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association was established in 2013.79 While it was the radical politics of antiracism, decolonization, and anti-imperial solidarity of late-1960s student movements at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and elsewhere that resulted in ethnic studies programs in Black/African American, Asian American, Chicanx/Latinx, and Native American studies, the academic institutions housing these programs have had no investment in cultivating this critical ethos. Correspondingly, institutional requirements ensnare ethnic studies scholarship to create fields of study that are legible within traditional, disciplinary modes of scholarship, and which meet neoliberal demands of productivity.

Critical ethnic studies frames have challenged ethnic studies to work beyond siloed fields of study organized on the basis of racial formations in order to interrogate the interrelated logics of forms of structural violence: racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, xenophobia, war/militarism, heteropatriarchy. As Danika Medak-Saltzman and Antonio Tiongson Jr. suggest, critical ethnic studies might approach these connections through a focus on their entanglements—rather than comparison or analogy—across histories, epistemologies, aesthetics, narratives, social structures, arrangements, movements, and/or policies.80 In this respect, Settler Attachments contributes to conversations animated by theorists such as the aforementioned Byrd, King, and Day, whose works illuminate the tensions and convergences between Indigenous, postcolonial, Black, and Asian North American studies.

Placing critical ethnic studies in conversation with film and media studies might take a number of shapes and forms; Settler Attachments offers one particular take.81 First, I am particularly invested in thinking about film in terms of structural violence, rather than primarily in terms of stereotype and representation, opening up the possibility of considering film’s agentic role in producing and sustaining structural violence. While stereotype and representation are very much part of the conversation of this book, they are not the end point. Second, relational critique is central to this book. To that end, much of my analysis is oriented around absence and erasure: How do we track these in film? How do we think about entanglement and connection in the face of absence and erasure? More specifically, how are absence and erasure generated affectively and aesthetically in film? How do we work through these absences and erasures? My contention is that cultural criticism and film/media making alike provide opportunities to imagine different worlds—and to make sense of the ones in which we currently live. More broadly, Settler Attachments places pressure on implicit assumptions about what film studies is supposed to look like—and offers an alternate model for what it could look like: how might film studies learn from inter-, post- and transdisciplinary modes of inquiry? What happens when we let go of film or media as the central objects of concern, and instead prioritize the politically urgent questions they open up? Here, Settler Attachments shares similarities, but also significantly departs from the path-making work of Shohat and Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism and Frank B. Wilderson III’s Red, White & Black, both of which also attend to questions of relation and lateral violence.

Published in 1994, Shohat and Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism pre-dates critical ethnic studies but introduces a comparative, transnational framework for analyzing polycentric media representations of race in their analysis. Though their focus is broadly on popular media and not exclusively film, film nonetheless figures prominently in the book. Taking seriously the context of film’s emergence under late-nineteenth-century conditions of racism and colonization into the 1990s, Shohat and Stam produce dense, rigorous media analysis that carefully attends to historical context and structure. In advancing a relational analysis of film and media, for instance, they pointed to the potential for racialized minorities to become complicit in racial violence, noting that “oppressed people can perpetuate the hegemonic system by scapegoating one another ‘sideways,’ in a manner ultimately benefiting those at the top of the hierarchy.”82 Yet, even as Shohat and Stam open up an exciting method for relational analysis, their work suggests that race is a uniform category of oppression. The lateral violence they speak of—which benefits “those at the top of the hierarchy”—implies that racial oppression is mediated primarily through other forms of difference (class or gender, for example), rather than the distinct and uneven circulation of structural violence generated through slavery, racialization, and colonization that disproportionately impacts Black and Native peoples.

Frank B. Wilderson III’s study of what he calls the “structural antagonisms” of U.S. society in film in Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms attends to this uneven relationality.83 Red, White & Black provides the theoretical and methodological scaffolding for attending to race in film studies differently. While Wilderson’s ideas have widely circulated within Black studies and adjacent fields, the book has not generally been received as a work of film studies. Critical theorist Nick Mitchell in fact describes it as “a book of political theory presented as a contribution to film studies”; and Red, White & Black has received relatively little attention in film and media studies, despite Wilderson’s training in film studies and use of film studies methods.84 Yet, as a work of film studies, Wilderson invites readers to meditate on what film does: how film reveals the structural antagonisms—as opposed to social conflicts—of U.S. society. While he addresses representation, it is not his overarching concern; he investigates cinema’s relationship to reality, not for the purposes of determining its authenticity, but in order to think about what film is doing: how it is negotiating representation in a context of racial violence. Wilderson introduces a triangulated set of structural antagonisms through which to interpret U.S. racial dynamics—and by extension, cinema. According to Wilderson, slavery, Native genocide, and white settler supremacy form the triangulated coordinates of U.S. antagonisms—the positions of the Slave, the Savage, and the Settler/Master, to use his phrasing—and “cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design)” make visible “the grammar of Black and Red suffering,” even in instances where the film’s narrative attempts to present that suffering through a more humanist mode (i.e., one that presumes that there is a conflict causing the suffering that can be resolved).85 Wilderson thus opens up space for film studies to consider the role of film in the production of ontologies. Considering race in film beyond the question of historically constituted stereotypes, he turns instead to the question of ontology and structural antagonism: to the question of how white being (more specifically, U.S. white settler being) is contingent on the nonbeing of Blackness (as well as Indigeneity). Thus instead of examining how particular films engage and respond to histories of racial representation, Wilderson asks how the fundamental problematic of structural antagonism plays out in film. Rather than orienting his film study to the question of “How are Black people/Blackness represented in film?,” Wilderson asks: “How do the structural antagonisms of U.S. society play out on film? How does anti-Blackness mediate all representations of Blackness?” While the former is an important question (one that we need not stop asking), the latter questions open up space to think beyond the question of the cinematic representation of bodies and identities, to the representation of structural violence.

Because Wilderson interprets the grammar of Black and Red suffering through film, his reading is necessarily totalizing. The cinematic strategies he presents to us—lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design—invite viewers’ senses into the unthought. There is no easy way to imagine an outside to that, no alternate plots or endings: filmmakers use these strategies to create a world for their audiences. Wilderson accepts this; Red, White & Black, along with his subsequent works, suggests that Black non-ontology is an inevitable facet of our contemporary moment, and he is adamant that we never lose sight of this. It is perhaps because of this that Wilderson refuses to see Native sovereignty and nationhood as anything but complicit in anti-Black violence. Although Wilderson’s model of structural antagonisms includes Native genocide—the position of the Savage—as one triangulated point, and although he argues that the denigration and suffering caused by genocide and chattel slavery profoundly link Black and Native communities, he argues that Native sovereignty is conditional on humanity, which is constituted through anti-Blackness, and thus inherently anti-Black.

In The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, Kara Keeling to an extent also accepts the totalizing force of anti-Blackness, but her historicization of Blackness vis-à-vis Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the cinematic simultaneously describes and deconstructs anti-Blackness in more specific and concrete ways than Wilderson’s rendering. Deleuze’s theorization of the relationship between film and reality, Keeling suggests, opens up a more dynamic way of understanding the place of film within sociocultural relations. As she explains, quoting Deleuze: “Film becomes, on its invention, ‘the organ, for perfecting’ a ‘new reality.’”86 Film, from this perspective, is the machinery that enables our sense of reality to develop. Cinema does not merely represent reality, but mediates and infects it: reality and screen bleed into one another. Beyond questions of representation, spectatorship, or consumption, the cinematic gestures to the process through which cinema becomes the medium through which viewers see and read everyday life and perception; through which film has “train[ed] the human sensorium to accommodate the demands of modern life.”87 This mediation process hinges on the activation of viewers’ “cinematic perception,” which relies on a sensory-motor schema that was initially cultivated through moving-image media, but is no longer limited to it.88 In Keeling’s estimation, cinema so profoundly mediates ways of seeing and knowing that our sense of reality exists only in relation to the infrastructure that film provides for seeing and interpreting the world; hence, the cinematic is synonymous with “twentieth [and now, twenty-first]-century reality.”

Keeling engages this more capacious understanding of film in order to think about its role in anti-Black violence. Because of its central role in mediating reality, she argues that cinema has fortified hegemonic constructions of Blackness. Nonetheless—and here she draws on Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of counterhegemonic common sense that proliferates in spite of more hegemonic common sense—these constructions of Blackness are nonetheless vulnerable to interruption and rupture, particularly by the marginalized, haunting figure of the Black femme. Keeling’s Black femme is more than just disruptive, though: she exposes the possibility of other worlds and modes of being. For example, in her analysis of F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996), Keeling presents a nuanced interpretation of the femme character of Ursula, a supporting character with no lines whose primary role is as the “eye candy” girlfriend of Cleo (played by Queen Latifah). While Ursula is undoubtedly an erotic object consolidating hegemonic common sense in the film, Keeling suggests, her enigmatic presence in the film also exceeds legibility; her whereabouts and actions outside of the film’s frame are opaque and unknown.89 Her illegibility and incoherence thus “might force hegemonic common sense to make space and time for something new.”90 The Black femme, in other words, is doing important radical world-making work.

Settler Attachments draws inspiration from Keeling’s method—of listening and attending to what remains possible even under the extenuating circumstances of totalizing violence. However, whereas Keeling’s project finds in the Black femme a force that disrupts anti-Blackness, Settler Attachments seeks to decenter white (settler-)colonial cultures through a systematic pivoting and reorientation of Asian diasporic culture toward Indigenous land, bodies, and (hi)stories. As Rita Wong has asked, “What happens if we position Indigenous people’s struggles instead of normalized whiteness as the reference point through which we come to articulate our subjectivities? How would such a move radically transform our perceptions of the land on which we live?”91 Revisiting my 1990 cowboy cosplay after watching Deer’s Beans, for example, prompted me to reflect on my subject formation in relation not only to white settler cultures but also to Indigenous peoples and lands. My interpretations of Asian diasporic film are likewise attuned to the decolonial possibilities that open up when we center Indigenous presence, on- and off-screen. This includes excavating forms of Indigenous presence that are muted, obscured, or minimized. For instance, chapter 1’s discussion of Asian diasporic cowboys examines the melancholic affects surrounding representations of Asian cowboys and poses questions about the loss of Asian-Indigenous relationality that such representations occlude.

Yet, a better politics of representation and aesthetics alone is not enough; decolonization is a long-haul process. I take up this question in the second half of the book, where I approach decolonial engagement as an ongoing process or practice. Thus, in chapters 3 and 4, my analysis of films by Ali Kazimi, V. T. Nayani, and Catherine Hernandez does not present these as perfect models to be replicated in service of decolonization. Rather, by situating the representational and aesthetic politics of these works in terms of their meta-contexts of development and production, I emphasize the ways in which these filmmakers labor and work toward the longer-term project of decolonization—one that we have not yet reached, but that is on the horizon.

Chapter Overview

This book is not a survey of Asian diasporic film. Its intervention is a methodological one that illuminates the potential of a critical ethnic studies film method. Thus, I have carefully selected filmic objects that register a range of competing and contradictory representations, aesthetics, and affects constituting Asian diasporic experiences. The book begins by fleshing out the dynamics of settler attachment and the structural impasse these create (chapters 1 and 2), before exploring the generative possibilities of radical friendship and relational survivance under such conditions (chapters 3 and 4).

Chapter 1, “Melancholic Attachments: Asian Diasporic Cowboys,” takes as its starting point the numerous examples of Asian North American visual art, film, and literature engaged with the figure of the cowboy in which Native people are conspicuously absent. I read this pattern of erasure not as moral failure, but as evidence of a melancholic attachment to settler colonialism that simultaneously registers impossible longings for recognition and legitimacy, and the often-unacknowledged loss of Asian-Indigenous relationality. I illuminate my argument with close readings of two films: Wild West (1993)—about a doomed-to-fail South Asian country band in London—and Cowgirl (1996), a comedic-dramatic short about a Korean American woman obsessed with all things western. The chapter proposes a critical viewing practice that sees these films not just as archives of Asian diasporic struggles with identity and inclusion, but also as archives of Indigenous erasure emanating from melancholic reactions to white settler colonialism. This viewing practice reveals the latent potential that is already present within the films. The two films take up the cowboy from distinct locations with respect to gender, nation, and geography, and depict distinct attachments to the cowboy: Cowgirl’s conclusion is mournful, whereas Wild West’s is melancholic. My discussion, however, emphasizes their dual registers in relation to one another: the explicit intention to archive struggles with identity and exclusion, against the unwitting archival of Indigenous erasure.

The second chapter, “Brown Queer and Trans Bodies at the Impasse of Diaspora and Indigeneity,” turns to the work of South Asian diasporic artists Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya, whose attachments to settler-colonial landscapes and aesthetics persist in spite of their political commitments to Indigenous solidarity. Both Mootoo’s and Shraya’s work emerges from queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities in Toronto; both have been embedded in conversations concerning Indigenous sovereignty. I thus look at works by Shraya and Mootoo that take up the question of land: Mootoo’s didactically oriented early 1990s experimental films A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman in the Woods, which critique white settler-colonial tropes of land and wilderness by inserting queer Brown bodies into them; and Shraya’s 2021 photo essay “Legends of the Trans,” which pays disidentificatory homage to Tristan Ludlow, Brad Pitt’s character from the 1994 film Legends of the Fall. I consider Mootoo and Shraya alongside one another in order to emphasize their different strategies—one that deploys Brown queer bodies to disrupt and interrupt violent constructions of nation and land (Mootoo), the other that imbues a Brown trans body with care and joy in order to critique embodied violence (Shraya)—and to draw attention to the ways these artists register the de facto separation of body and land. This experiential disentanglement is one source of diasporic/Indigenous tension. The broader implications of this argument are that ideological transformation—long the approach of social movements and activism—cannot undo diasporic attachments to settler colonialism.

The second half of the book, which is oriented around decolonization and futurity, may appear in some ways to be in tension with the first, insofar as the framework of settler attachments might seem to be a totalizing one. However, my intention across the book is to hold onto difference, tension, and incommensurability alongside hope, possibility, and futurity. If chapters 1 and 2 theorize totalizing violence in terms of attachment and impasse, chapters 3 and 4 turn to radical friendship and relational survivance as they reflect on the kinds of futures generated from spaces of difference, tension, and incommensurability. I turn to the distinct imaginative possibilities that three artists offer: South Asian diasporic filmmaker Ali Kazimi, who engages in intentional dialogue with Iroquois (Onondaga) photographer Jeffrey Thomas, and queer/trans Asian diasporic artists Catherine Hernandez and V. T. Nayani, who engage Indigeneity through queer of color political sensibilities. Chapter 3, “Friendship, Refusal, and Alternate Archives of Diaspora,” focuses on Kazimi’s collaborative experimental documentary with Thomas, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (1997). Although a close analysis of the film is central to the chapter, it is more broadly organized through a relational lens that examines Kazimi’s work alongside two sets of relations. The first is his decades-long friendship with Thomas, which is central both to the film’s narratives and to its aesthetic and representational politics, and which gestures to the radical potential of friendship. The second is the contexts of Indigenous resurgence—grounded in Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson’s theorization of refusal—and South Asian diasporic activism, which condition the emergence of that friendship, and of Kazimi and Thomas’s work. This is not a teleological reading, but one that thinks about one particular artist as embedded within a wider web, one that is regenerative. As I show, Kazimi and Thomas’s friendship is not isolated or exceptional, but one that can be mapped onto a constellation of other relations and movements, in Toronto, across Canada, and across North America.

Chapter 4, “Experiments in Relation: Queer Indigenous and Asian Diasporic Survivance in the Settler-Capitalist City,” is about the experimentative decolonial work of V. T. Nayani’s This Place (2022), and Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough (2021), two of the few feature-length dramatic films that not only place Indigenous and Asian diasporic communities together in a singular cinematic frame, but do so with a queer of color sensibility. This Place features two young women—Malai, a Tamil college student who lives with her brother and is coming to terms with the impending death of her estranged alcoholic father; and Kawenniiohstha, a Kahnawake Mohawk student and budding writer searching for her birth father, an Iranian man. Scarborough, the film adaptation of Hernandez’s 2017 novel of the same name, tells the intertwined story of three children (Filipino, Mi’kmaq, and white) growing up in the Galloway neighborhood of Scarborough, Toronto’s primarily working-class and immigrant of color east-end suburb. The chapter analyzes the “imperfect experiments” of these films in terms of queer of color ephemerality: in terms of the assemblage of intangible, felt experiences, affects, and identifications that generate powerful connections and relations for their Asian diasporic and Indigenous protagonists and that enable what I term—riffing off Gerald Vizenor—their “relational survivance” in the neoliberal multicultural settler city. The films’ emphasis on felt experiences and affects suggest that queer of color ephemerality, while not a solution to the structural impasse between diaspora and Indigeneity, is nonetheless a resource for generating connections, relations, and solidarities.

As a whole, Settler Attachments has three complementary goals. The first, a methodological one, is to invite film and media scholars to consider how we might orient film methods to think about the absences generated by racism and colonization, particularly concerning cross-racial or cross-colonial intimacies. The second is to confront head-on what appear to be difficult and irresolvable tensions between the aesthetic and representational strategies of Asian diasporic artists to address racialized and gendered violence on the one hand, and Native sovereignty on the other. The final, more speculative, goal is to ask what is possible under these conditions. What models, even imperfect ones, do Asian diasporic artists offer that can help us work through this quagmire? How do we understand and make sense of their work?

Settler Attachments is, in other words, about the problem of worldmaking. How does the ongoing violence of racism and colonization inform and constrain our ability to craft worlds? How do we grapple with the violence and injury that our world-making practices generate? What other kinds of worlds are possible? Underlying my cowboy cosplay in 1990 was a claim and desire for inclusion in a settler world, a desire that was not simply undone by reading in Indigenous studies—by, in other words, knowing better. That desire lingers. The artists presented in this book offer a window into the dynamic of attachment, and of the processes of laboring toward the decolonization that is somewhere on the horizon.