Experiments in Relation

Queer of Color Worldmaking: Refuge and Risk

Although queer of color is not a formation that is exclusive to Asian diasporic and Indigenous relationalities, I explore it in this chapter as one of the de facto frames through which Asian diasporic and Indigenous peoples and experiences are brought together in relation. More specifically, as ephemeral assemblage, queer of color might be understood as a starting point for generating political projects, coalitions, bonds, or alliances on the basis of shared experiences informed by contexts of white supremacy and heteronormativity. These bonds are not automatic or natural, but require work. This Bridge Called My Back is exemplary of such a project. Although Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa articulated This Bridge as “women of color feminism” rather than as a “queer of color” project, an analysis of sexuality and critique of heteronormativity was woven into the intersectional feminism they advanced.12

In chapter 2, I discussed the limitations of queer of color critique with respect to understanding the necessity and urgency of calls for Indigenous decolonization in terms of nationhood and sovereignty. Those observations still stand; this chapter’s discussion of queer of color ephemerality does not cancel out such criticisms. What this chapter does highlight are the contradictions between theory and practice. Whereas queer of color critique emerges from lived and embodied experiences, the critique as it has been ossified does not capture the full breadth of experiences that may come under its sign; nor does it capture work happening on the ground and in real time. Just as queer or feminist critique writ large have tended to centralize, normalize, and universalize white subjects, Indigeneity has been marginalized and often occluded within queer of color theory and politics. Still, the question remains: Might queer of color ephemerality offer different directions for thinking through relationality and connection? What might these cinematic experiments tell us? What is being worked through or labored toward in the moment that might yield other kinds of futures and possibilities?

This chapter thus pays attention to the imperfect relational work that is taking place under the sign queer of color in spite of its tensions and limitations, in spite of the impasse. Works such as Scarborough and This Place do not eliminate the impasse but raise questions about what it means to work through it. What possibilities and futures emerge in the face of the seeming impossibility of the impasse? How do Nayani and Hernandez attempt to address the impasse, and what can we learn from their imperfect experiments?

This Place and Scarborough are not isolated in their attempts to engage queer of color imaginaries as sites of expansive and capacious possibility. Like Kazimi’s Shooting Indians, This Place and Scarborough developed in the context of activist cultures in Toronto and beyond, where there has been increased attention directed toward something I would characterize as relational survivance. In recent years, queer of color activists there have generated the modified acronym QTBIPOC—queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color—to emphasize the fraught and uneven relations across those marginalized by white supremacy. This Place and Scarborough emerge out of the thick of such debates, discussions, and conversations concerning how to attend to unevenness and difference while holding onto possibilities for coalition, alliance, and relation. The modification QTBIPOC reflects a broader conversation across antiracist and decolonizing social movements, not exclusive to queer social movements, in which “people of color” has been modified to the disaggregated “Black, Indigenous, and people of color.” It is a direct response to academic-activist conversations about the gaps and failures of antiracist coalitions.13 Political and artistic projects organized through this frame often (though not always) emphasize the foundational significance of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism to racism and white supremacy. In these instances, the rubric of QTBIPOC calls forth seen and unseen connections across queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color as a resource for imagining possibilities for abolitionist and decolonizing futures, despite the nonequivalence and unevenness of these identity formations.14

The Toronto-based community mapping project Marvellous Grounds, for example, unearths QTBIPOC stories about the city. The collaborative project intervenes in dominant multiculturalist and homonationalist renderings of the city that make invisible the ways that QTBIPOC people walk, live, and make community in Toronto. A short introductory video by filmmaker Min Sook Lee, commissioned by the project, captures its ethos. Dancers from the ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company—a queer of color dance troupe—perform a choreographed piece in various spots of Church Street, Toronto’s Gay Village. It is winter, and they are dressed in toques, gloves, and heavy coats. We see them exhale puffs of cold air. Still, they dance beautifully, taking up space against the odds of weather and the dictates of space (white, middle-class, cis, gay masculinity dominates Church Street). In ILL NANA’s words, “For this short film, we purposely took up space and danced in several locations in the Gay Village, a space where our bodies, art, and presence are often underrepresented and excluded from, and where we face violence.”15 A music track by the local indie electronic band LAL plays in the background as voiceovers by queer Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx artists reflect on their relationships to the city. The coalitional frame not only emphasizes the interconnectivity of struggle, and of emancipation, but also telegraphs a future where queer of color bodies can unabashedly take up space.

The filmmaker, poet, and visual artist Jess X. Snow, who “creates genre-defying inter-generational stories from a queer Asian immigrant lens,” likewise takes up the critical potentiality of QTBIPOC. As of 2022, they are enrolled in the New York University Tisch School of the Arts MFA program, and have a long list of accolades and an oeuvre that spans feature and short-length films, a children’s book, and published poetry. Much of this work confronts questions of coalition and relation, often explicitly foregrounding the framework of QTBIPOC, as in their public mural project in New York City’s Chinatown, Between You & Me, which Snow organized as a fall 2021 student artist-in-residence at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute.16 Snow describes the mural:

Behind this Chinatown mural is a portal to a future. There is a place on the other side where, without the state, without prisons, we keep each other safe. Untouchable by white supremacy, uncontainable by nations and binaries. Our elders always make it home. The land is returned to Indigenous hands. And our children grow up knowing that one community’s safety cannot come at the cost of another’s.17

Snow conceived of the mural alongside community collaborators in response to a rising tide of anti-Asian violence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than isolate the experience of Asian communities, Snow relationally framed the mural in terms of a critique of neoliberal conceptions of safety that depend too heavily on the police and criminal legal system. The mural foregrounds decolonial and abolitionist futures made possible by centering community care, respect, and mutual aid, and emphasizes the inextricability of Asian diasporic futures from those of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. A community conversation reflecting on the mural-making process accordingly brought together speakers from these communities, many of whom had participated in the mural in some way, and all of whom were Snow’s friends and comrades.

Many of Snow’s other works take up similar themes, including their narrative shorts Roots that Reach Toward the Sky (in postproduction) and Motherland (2019) and experimental documentary Afterearth (2018). Afterearth, for example, illuminates the connections across the narratives of four Asian and Indigenous women who reflect on the impending effects of rising sea levels on their homelands from their respective locations in Hawai‘i, the Philippines, China, and the United States. By filming these women on their homelands as they sing songs and recite poetry that shares the land-based knowledge they have cultivated, Afterearth generates a sense of collectivity. That is, the critiques and affects concerning climate change these women share are not merely four disparate ones, but deeply intertwined.

Projects such as these focus on the futures that queer of color relationalities make possible: futures where land is decolonized, and violence is abolished. In the work of Snow and Marvellous Grounds, QTBIPOC signals a kind of safety—a refuge from white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and cisheteronormativity of both public and counterpublic spaces. Safety is both enticing and elusive. As Christina Hanhardt explains, safety has been an important term for LGBTQ activism: “At many colleges and universities the mere words safe space on a sticker on a door may signal that those inside are sympathetic to LGBT students without naming those very identities. And then there is safe sex: some public health advocates like to clarify the point that no sex is without risk and thus prefer the term safer sex.”18

Whereas conservative politics frame safety in normative terms that position the police and legal system as its arbiters, abolitionist organizing has attempted to reframe safety in terms of notions of “bottom-up” justice that consider who is most vulnerable to violence in order to create justice for all. As Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade point out, “Building a trans and queer abolitionist movement means building power among people facing multiple systems of oppression in order to imagine a world beyond mass devastation, violence, and inequity that occurs within and between communities.”19 Safety in this sense may be aspirational. An authentic safety for all may be the end goal of abolition. Yet, as Hanhardt further points out, safety becomes even more complicated when positioned against risk.20 For conservatives, a certain measure of financial risk taking and speculation generates wealth and (de facto) safety; for queers, a certain measure of risk (in terms of pushing back against normative expectations) generates (de facto) safer futures in which multifarious forms of love, pleasure, and justice might proliferate.

Although the intention of QTBIPOC is to address uneven and disparate forms of structural violence, it is an imperfect representational strategy that does not fully resolve the incommensurabilities it names. It is not unequivocally “safe.” Nayani’s and Hernandez’s QTBIPOC imaginaries likewise address Indigenous erasure even as they do not resolve the disjunctures between diaspora and Indigeneity. This chapter also does not resolve this tension. However, I position these tensions as part of a longue durée of future-making conversations yet to be had. Assuming, as I have argued across this book, that diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, then their unraveling is also a long-term project that will require a great deal of work, both imaginative and theoretical, as well as material and practical.

Nayani and Hernandez engage queer of color as a frame of speculation and utopian potential in their films, one in which Indigenous lives and experiences are central. In both films, the lines between the real and the fictional are blurry, provoking reflection on what could be. Their experiments remain messy, chaotic, and incomplete. However, they redirect us toward other ways of understanding the connections across diaspora and Indigeneity: toward imagining safer spaces of unknowing and not-knowing, of risk and possibility. They compel us to consider the forms of relational survivance that are already afoot in the settler city, and the decolonial possibilities these open up.

This Place: Didactics and Felt Connections

This Place started as an experiment. “The original idea,” says Nayani, “was two friends: one is Indigenous and one is Tamil. They meet. What conversations do they have?” In the film, two young women—Malai, who is Tamil, and Kawenniiohstha, who is Mohawk with Iranian ancestry—meet by chance in downtown Toronto. Malai is a college student gifted in math who is struggling to find direction in her life: her mother has passed away and she lives with her older brother, who also works to support them both; her father, whom she is estranged from, is dying of cancer. The film suggests that he turned to alcohol to manage the stress of war and migration, which has both strained his relationship with his children and wreaked havoc on his body. Kawenniiohstha is a student and writer who has just moved to the city from the Kahnawake reservation, in large part because she wishes to find her biological father, an Iranian man.

Malai and Kawenniiohstha find solace in one another as they navigate their respective familial challenges. They briefly separate when Kawenniiohstha returns to Kahnawake to confront her mother, where she learns that her mother chose her love for Kahnawake over her love for Kawenniiohstha’s biological father Behrooz, because they appeared irreconcilable. Kawenniiohstha then makes the choice to return to Toronto and Malai, who is now grieving the loss of her father.

This Place emphasizes the histories and forms of trauma that are knotted together in the collision between Malai and Kawenniiohstha. Beyond registering a critique of racial settler capitalism, however, This Place intentionally attempts to make Indigeneity central to its exploration of global war, displacement, and trauma. Nayani notes that “yes, [Tamil refugees] escaped and found some semblance of safety. . . . We found some semblance of safety on land that’s been stolen, where violence is still committed against the communities that this land belongs to.” The film raises the question: How does one make Indigeneity central to diasporic film?

This Place signals its political commitments most explicitly through its opening title card, an extended land acknowledgment that not only notes the writing and production locations of the film but also invites viewers “to reflect on the land that you are on, who the traditional keepers of the land are, what the treaty relationship is, or if it’s unceded territory” (Figure 21). As the plot shifts locations, title cards announce their Kanien‘kéha (Mohawk) place names alongside English ones: Tiohtià:ke (Montreal); Aterón:to (Toronto); Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory. While now commonplace at public events, including film festivals, it is rare to find a land acknowledgment within a film, whether by Indigenous or non-Indigenous filmmakers.

The practice of land acknowledgment itself began on the west coast of Canada, much of which remains unceded territory, or land which was never officially transferred to settler ownership through treaties (as it was on the east coast). There, a land acknowledgment at the start of a community or government meeting served as a reminder to non-Native peoples of the uncomfortable reality that this meeting was taking place through Indigenous land dispossession. More recently, particularly in the wake of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Indigenous recognition and reconciliation have become institutional buzzwords in Canada.21 Across the continent, on both east and west coasts, Indigenous land acknowledgments have become more widespread, incorporated into corporate, university, and government websites and meetings, with this practice now spilling over into the United States.

Critics debate the function and efficacy of land acknowledgment, however. As Métis writer Chelsea Vowel points out, “When territorial acknowledgments first began, they were fairly powerful statements of presence, somewhat shocking, perhaps even unwelcome in settler spaces. They provoked discomfort and centered Indigenous priority on these lands.”22 However, their effects have become more uneven in recent years: while they sometimes continue to provoke settler discomfort and compel a confrontation with Indigenous presence, they also often function as tokenistic or reconciliatory gestures.23

In This Place, the land acknowledgment title card serves as a citation of the wider practice of land acknowledgment; it also invites viewers into community with those who understand and reflect on Indigenous land and presence. Its existence in the film does not escape debates around land acknowledgments. However, because this is a film rather than a public event, it serves not just as a declaration, but also as a framing device. In fiction film, text is often superimposed onto moving image in order to establish setting—along the lines of “City, Year”—which This Place also does when it tells us that the film setting is now “Aterón:to (Toronto), 2011,” for example (Figure 22). The addition of the land acknowledgment title card invites us to read those setting announcements not just matter-of-factly, but in terms of Indigenous place and colonial histories. It also provides some context for understanding the bilingual (Mohawk and English) naming of place. Most viewers will watch the film knowing that it is about a relationship between a Mohawk and Tamil woman; the land acknowledgment immediately suggests that the film’s events are not just about interracial intimacy but also about taking seriously questions of land, settlement, and colonization.

The film’s activist orientation makes sense given that its filmmaker, V. T. Nayani, was initially trained as a journalist at Toronto Metropolitan University and has had a longstanding interest in thinking about “lateral” forms of violence.24 Her first foray into filmmaking (and major work prior to This Place) was Shadeism: Digging Deeper (2015), a documentary feature that investigates light-skinned privilege and discrimination against dark-skinned peoples in communities of color. She has also written and directed a number of music videos and short films engaged with race, gender, and sexuality in collaboration with other BIPOC artists. Nayani began developing the film following a provocation by family friend Darshika Selvasivam during the worldwide protests against the Tamil Genocide in 2009.25 According to UN reports, the Sri Lankan government killed 40,000–70,000 Tamils during the 2009 Mullivaikkal massacre, in the last stages of the Sri Lankan civil war.26 The Tamil diasporic mobilization in 2009 also prompted the community to reflect more deeply on the question of Indigenous sovereignty, particularly following an invitation for conversation by Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) activists. Tamil activists and Six Nations members issued a joint solidarity statement following that meeting.27 In the vein of such mutual solidarity and conversation, Nayani’s friend asked: “What does it mean to protest on Indigenous land for land elsewhere that’s been denied to us or is stolen?”28

Toronto: This Place of Collision and Chaos

This Place: the film’s title names its rootedness and groundedness in Toronto, its referent. But it is also a play on the word “displace” that recalls the multiple forms of movement and displacement that come into contact in Toronto. As film cowriter Golshan Abdmoulaie notes, the relationship between Malai and Kawenniiohstha is “just a normal relationship in the city of Toronto: people colliding into each other with really complex histories that we all have, whether we’re refugees or we come from the impacts of colonization. It was just about how all those things collide.” Nayani adds that “Toronto is this place where things just collide. You meet randomly somewhere, you have a moment, you build a lifelong friendship, you build a love story. . . . We wanted to capture that.” The generative collision that both Abdmoulaie and Nayani observe in Toronto bears echoes of the generativity of chaos that Choctaw writer Leanne Howe discusses in her short story “The Chaos of Angels”—specifically, the Choctaw cosmological concept of haksuba, “chaos.” Haksuba occurs, she explains, “When the Upper and Lower Worlds of the Southeastern Indians collide in the Between World,” resulting in “a reaction in This World.”29 Extending haksuba to the contemporary moment, she suggests that haksuba likewise “occurs when Indians and non-Indians bang their heads together in search of cross-cultural understanding.”30 Howe interprets haksuba as generative, though also traumatic and violent, emerging as it does from histories of slavery and conquest: in the short story, Howe meditates on the chaotic frictions between French colonizers, enslaved Black people, and Choctaw peoples that formulate what the character of the grandmother in the story refers to as the “cross-cultural afterlife.” Leaning into haksuba’s generativity, Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) suggests, “When the boundaries between worlds break down and the distinctive characteristics of each world begin to collapse upon and bleed into the others, possibilities for rejuvenation and destruction emerge to transform this world radically. The goal is to find balance.”31 Howe’s and Byrd’s writings suggest that collision and encounter initiate processes of working through the mess of destruction, and making anew.

This Place dives deep into the raw potential of chaos and cacophony. It articulates—without naming it as such—a queer of color political formation that emerges at the nexus of that chaos. It also reflects the afterlife of various forms of violence—from colonization, to war, to migration, to displacement—that form the underbelly of the film’s events. These collisions are apparent in the opening scene. On an airplane en route to Montreal in 1989, a dark-skinned Brown man rushes to the airplane bathroom in a panic and attempts to destroy his Sri Lankan passport, before finally shoving it in the trash receptacle. He returns to his seat and takes a swig of alcohol. A few rows ahead, two lighter-skinned Brown men chat with one another. “When will we arrive?” one asks the other. At the airport, the darker-skinned man declares himself a refugee while the lighter-skinned men take the opportunity to rush past security, unnoticed. We shortly learn that these are the fathers of the film’s protagonists and lovers, Malai and Kawenniiohstha. This scene of migration and arrival suggests that their lives are already entangled in one another in deeply intimate ways, both through structure and through serendipity.

This Place’s World

The world of This Place emerges out of the chaotic collision of global itineraries of war and racial capitalism. Malai and Kawenniiohstha’s first encounter takes place at a laundromat, a space of historical significance for Asian—specifically Chinese—migrants in North America. Following the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese men who remained on the continent were barred from taking up most professions, and were relegated to feminized labor in restaurants and laundromats.32 In the film and in the contemporary moment, the laundromat is not a place of labor but a site of encounter that gestures to the shared class status of the two women and the realities of rental housing in a downtown metropolis. Their meeting at the laundromat in 2011—born of their respective familial histories of displacement and migration—is also continuous with the early twentieth-century histories of migrant collision in the North American west that historian Nayan Shah has detailed, where transient, precarious, and vulnerable Black, Brown, and Indigenous people were brought into intimate relation as a result of uneven and contradictory policies of migration, economic development, and nation building.33 In 2011 the characters similarly come together in the neoliberal multicultural city for a range of reasons: Indigenous land dispossession and displacement across many years leads Kawenniiohstha to leave her reserve community to follow career goals; Sri Lanka’s civil war and Tamil genocide lead Malai’s family to seek refuge in Toronto.

These global itineraries that collide in Toronto are inseparable from the film’s romantic plot. Although the romance between Malai and Kawenniiohstha is at the film’s core, it does not follow the conventions of romantic film; there is never a real obstacle to their union, though it is briefly interrupted as Kawenniiohstha struggles with her parents. Rather, the relationship serves as a node of the broader familial networks that each woman hails from: the two women are drawn to each other as they navigate grief, tension, and reconciliation with their families of origin. Their parental conflicts—inseparable from global political events—are as central to the plot as their romance. The film thus draws the audience’s attention toward the entanglement of romantic and nonromantic forms of love and intimacy.

Kawenniiohstha’s character development, for example, gains momentum after a tender love scene between her and Malai. It is after this scene that Kawenniiohstha gathers the courage to seek out her father, Behrooz. As Behrooz sees her, memories of his last encounter with Kawenniiohstha’s mother Wari flood his mind, an encounter that is likewise framed by war and colonization. The first thing we see in this flashback is a TV screen of an image seared into the minds of those who remember: residents of the Quebec town of Chateaugay burning a Mohawk effigy during the 1990 siege at Kahnesatake (Figure 23). Wari is tearfully packing up her belongings as Behrooz enters the room and tries to convince her not to head back to her home. As the news footage plays in the background, he says to her, “I don’t understand. I left everything because of war.” Wari replies: “Some wars you run from. You had to run from yours. You don’t need to understand. . . . I have to be with my community. Everything in my body is calling me home to Kahnawake. I mean just look what’s happening.” Behrooz turns his head to look at the TV screen, which now shows two soldiers armed with rifles in front of a battle tank. Wari continues: “If I don’t go now, I will regret it. It’s like I’m being called home.” Later, when Kawenniiohstha confronts Wari about her refusal to disclose the truth about Behrooz, Wari confesses that her love for her community ultimately exceeded her love for Behrooz:

I loved your father. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. But then 90 happened and the community needed us.34 I couldn’t bring him back with me. I chose us. I chose our culture. And as much as it killed me, my love for being Kanien‘kehà:ka overrode my love for Behrooz. And I don’t regret loving him. And I don’t regret having you. But I do regret having you with Behrooz. . . . I’m already mixed. I’ve had to defend our position in this community because of my blood quantum, so I needed you to be Kanien‘kehà:ka. So I came to terms with letting him go. And I rooted you to this place.

For Wari, the bond with Behrooz was not enough to undo the structural impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity that led her back to Kahnawake. Recognizing the cost of that decision, Kawenniiohstha makes a different choice: she returns to Malai so that they can confront their respective struggles together.

The question of whether their relationship will endure or succumb to the impasse like Behrooz and Wari’s is an open one. Here it is the felt connection between Malai and Kawenniiohstha that suggests futures beyond, yet unknown: futures that cannot be captured by the didactic dialogue that makes explicit links between overlapping histories, forms of violence, and displacement. That felt connection is depicted by the actors through their shy smiles, awkward glances, intense gazes, and raw chemistry; it is also captured by the cinematography—specifically, the use of rich, warm, and lush purple, brown, and yellow hues—and by the film’s dream-like orchestral soundtrack. The affective charge between them exceeds the histories of structural violence they allude to in their conversations with one another, and with their family members, speculatively gesturing to the possibility of other worlds: What possible kinds of intimacies and new kin formations are opened up (Figure 24)?

Malai and Kawenniiohstha’s initial encounter at the laundromat, for example, is a quiet scene that consists primarily of furtive looks of recognition and appreciation. We are introduced to Kawenniiohstha through a medium shot, as she sits amid the warm hues of dimly lit laundry, writing in a journal. She looks up and the camera shifts to a medium close-up of Malai, who has just walked in the door and looks directly at Kawenniiohstha. As the scene continues, the background music shifts to a racier tune; Kawenniiohstha continues to glance with interest at Malai, who is now facing the washing machine before exiting the laundromat. She has left behind her journal, which Malai later notices and begins to peruse. The missing journal then becomes the basis for their next encounter and eventual romance. In later scenes, the affective charge between the two intensifies. At a dance party, slow nondiegetic music and close-ups zero in on the growing connection between Malai and Kawenniiohstha. The uninhibited intimacy portrayed here evokes what feminist philosopher María Lugones has described as the love that is generated by “world-traveling”—travel not in the physical sense, but in the sense of dwelling in the perceptual and affective orbits of others.

Speaking to the necessity of loving relations for feminist coalition building, Lugones suggests that forging connections across difference requires fully inhabiting the joy and pleasures of others’ worlds. Central to world-traveling, she argues, is a sense of playfulness, or “an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.”35 The joy that Malai and Kawenniiohstha exude in these scenes conveys the love that emanates from them as they easily inhabit one another’s worlds. A dinner date scene includes some of that raw tenderness and intimacy alongside a conversation about their identities and community histories. The difference between the sensuous, felt connection between the two women and their cerebral discussion of misrecognition, Mohawk citizenship, Tamil genocide, and migration is stark. Though the two are not antithetical to one another, this juxtaposition suggests that relationality might be cultivated not only through better or precise analytics but also through small moments of felt connection.

The closing scene of This Place, which returns to the laundromat, reemphasizes these felt connections. There are no words in this scene. We see a medium close-up of Kawenniiohstha folding her laundry; she glances over to her left, and smiles lovingly. The camera reveals Malai, also folding laundry. Kawenniiohstha turns to Malai, and together they fold a bright yellow fabric; as they do so, they gaze at one another, happy and relaxed (Figure 25). They exit the laundromat together and make their way back home through an alleyway. Kawenniiohstha reaches for Malai’s hand, and they walk off into the distance as the credits roll. Unlike the rest of the film, this scene is brightly lit, signaling toward optimistic futures.

The film’s happy ending is arguably in tension with its plot, which points to the overdetermining role of structural violence in the characters’ lives. However, reading the film as a site of experimentation, the happy ending that does not “make sense” might gesture to relational survivance that persists in the neoliberal multicultural settler city in the face of conditions of egregious violence. More aptly, the film’s happy ending is a metaphor for the film’s production process, which, like Kazimi’s Shooting Indians, was collaborative. Nayani cowrote the script with Mohawk actress/director Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs (who also plays the lead role of Kawenniiohstha) and Iranian diasporic writer Golshan Abdmoulaie. For Nayani, these collaborative efforts constitute a world-making project; for that reason, one of the opening intertitles reads “a v.t. nayani world,” rather than “a v.t. nayani film.”36 As she states in an interview:

I look at my work in storytelling and filmmaking and television as world-building. Everyone is part of that world that we’re building. I have a vision that they’re bringing to life and so it felt true and honest for me to call it “a v.t. nayani world,” because that’s what I hope to do. I always hope to reimagine and create new worlds through narrative work, a world that’s influenced and impacted by everyone I collaborate with.37

The collaborative nature of the film is reflected in its plot and character development. Each writer mined their own experiences and family histories of colonization, war, and displacement: the genocidal Sinhalese war against Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Iran–Iraq War and Iran’s authoritarian theocracy, Canadian settler colonialism and settler military siege at Kahnawake and Kahnesatake in 1990.

While the writers initially imagined Malai and Kawenniiohstha to be friends rather than lovers, this changed as the story developed, mirroring developments in the writers’ lives. Says Abdmoulaie: “At the time when we discussed the two characters’ relationship, Devery was falling in love and coming into her queerness. So was I. And I was like, I think they should fall in love. I don’t know about them staying together because I’m a little jaded.”38 If Malai and Kawenniiohstha’s union as plot point is not as fully developed as to be convincing, as avatars for the film’s collaborators, their coming together conveys the relational survivance that is a reality of life in the settler city of Toronto. More than this, though, what is most striking about This Place is the contrast between the seemingly totalizing conditions of structural violence it repeatedly emphasizes and the affective bonds between the two women that are not easily explained. Affect, then, exceeds containment by plot here. Troubling the limitations of critique and analysis, the film gestures to the radical possibilities of affects and feelings, and their place within decolonial worldmaking.

Relational Survivance In-Place: Scarborough

The Toronto of Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough is not the same as the Toronto of This Place. Whereas This Place emphasizes the chaotic entanglement of migration and displacement bringing people together in Toronto writ large, Scarborough homes in on the lives and experiences of those in Toronto’s east end. This is a working-class suburb, a place where people are portrayed as—and may often feel they are—entrapped or stuck in place due to circumstance. While many of the same forms of structural violence shape the lives of Scarborough’s characters, it is their everyday struggles in place that inform its narrative.

However, by centering the perspectives of children in both form and plot, the film also depicts Scarborough as a place of joy, wonder, and possibility. The film focuses on three children: Bing, who is Filipino, is a genderqueer child who lives with his single mother, an esthetician who has fled from her abusive husband; Sylvie, who is Native (Mi’kmaq), lives with her mom, chronically injured father, and autistic brother in a shelter; Laura, who is white, has been abandoned by her mother and lives with an abusive father, a former skinhead and white supremacist. Bing, Sylvie, and Laura are brought into community through the school’s before-school literacy program run by a hijabi Muslim social worker, Hina, who forms close bonds with the children and their families while confronting the racist and classist condescension of her supervisor Jane, a white woman (Figure 26).

Scarborough emerges from the shared context of Toronto QTBIPOC organizing and visioning that Hernandez, like Nayani, is embedded in. The queer Filipinx diasporic writer states that she is of “Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian descent and married into the Navajo nation.”39 Apart from her career as a novelist, Hernandez worked as a caregiver, running a home daycare in Scarborough; she has also spent many years writing, directing, and performing in theatre. In that capacity, she was the founder and artistic director of the Sulong Theatre Collective, dedicated to showcasing work by and about women of color.

Hernandez’s personal and professional background manifests in the queer of color sensibility framing Scarborough. The film is not conventionally “queer”: it does not center queer sex or romance, and although one of the protagonists (Bing) is queer, this is not the film’s central plot line. However, the film’s formal and narrative attention to the nonlinearity of children’s navigation of the world queerly interrupts what Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormative” impulses that direct one toward property ownership and the nuclear family.40 Much of the novel and the film narrate their story from the children’s perspectives, occasionally shifting to adults. In the film, the camera’s point-of-view mirrors the children’s gaze, accentuated by the use of a handheld camera. In the first few scenes of the film, we are introduced to Bing, Laura, and then finally Sylvie, each of whom is slowly processing the harried panic and stress of their parent. We see partial shots of adults, often from below, often from the neck down; we hear adults speaking in frenzied tones as the children watch and listen. Hernandez’s selection of Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson as the film’s directors—both of whom come from documentary backgrounds—and casting of nonprofessional child actors enhances the sense of the film’s realism and authenticity.41

This realism is not just essential to the verisimilitude the film establishes; it also invites the audiences to queerly inhabit the world as experienced by children. When asked what makes Scarborough a queer film, Hernandez replied, “Overall, ‘queer’ is more a verb to me. You ‘queer’ something because you’re trying to imagine something better, right? It’s not only about body parts, it’s not only about orientation. I really feel queerness is just as much about imagining things and making it happen.”42 Hernandez’s explanation echoes Sara Ahmed’s framing of queerness in terms of phenomenological orientation, as she suggests that compulsory heterosexuality is made normative by directing subjects toward particular objects: “Subjects are required to tend toward some objects and not others as a condition of familial as well as social love. For the boy, to follow the family line, he ‘must’ orient himself toward women as loved objects. For the girl, to follow the family line, she ‘must’ take men as loved objects.”43 Rather than following the normative paths that children’s lives take, Scarborough asks us to follow the “sideways” paths of children.44

Because it moves alongside its child protagonists, Scarborough’s plot does not follow a conventional path. Rather than building up to a singular climax, the story leads to multiple climactic moments and continually brings the audience back to the interconnectivity that stitches the characters together. Laura’s death in an apartment fire, for example, takes place well before the film’s conclusion. Though it is a spectacular death, it is not presented as spectacle in the film, though it is foreshadowed in the previous scene during Christmas mass. We share the shock of Bing and his mother as they hear sirens and see the burning building from a distance, but unlike the characters, we do not witness the incident up close. The film shifts quite quickly to the aftermath of the fire, as we see the other characters grieve, mourn, and process the loss. The decision to position Laura’s death at this particular point in the film’s timeline—neither very early on, nor at the conclusion—suggests that while the tragic effects of structural poverty and domestic violence are within the purview of its characters, there are also dynamic forms of community support and love that hold them together and enable them to move on with their lives.

Scarborough’s queering, then, is about presenting an alternate assemblage of kinship and intimacy, something it models both in plot and form. Against the hegemony of patrilineal connection, it portrays the intimacy of lives brought together through the structural precarity of Scarborough’s working-class residents. The friendship between Sylvie and Bing—which emerges organically out of their life circumstances and particularly through Sylvie’s ability to connect with people—is the film’s centerpiece. Their friendship brings together their mothers and allows Sylvie and Bing to form a connection with Laura.

The joy and chemistry between Bing and Sylvie is captured across multiple scenes, but particularly in an extended scene at Edna’s nail salon. The bleak difficulties presented in earlier scenes melt away as the children roleplay as doctors in the back room of the salon, race across the floor on swivel chairs, lounge on massage seats, watch neighborhood artist Victor as he sketches, play tic-tac-toe with nail polish bottles, and finally, as evening approaches, sneak out to the back parking lot to chat with Starr, who works at a nearby spa. In one memorable moment, a medium-long shot captures them with their heads bobbing and mouths agape as they enjoy the vibrations of the massage chair. The gentle music composition of this scene, in which piano and xylophone are audible, heightens the sense of childlike wonder and pleasure permeating the scene. Like many of the film’s scenes, it feels raw, organic, and unscripted; Hernandez describes Nakhai and Williamson’s approach as “setting up environments, letting the actors just be who they are and staying ready to capture the right moments” (Figure 27).45

That Scarborough’s reassemblage of kin and intimacy is anchored in a specific place is not incidental. The film significantly intervenes in dominant depictions of Scarborough, which Torontonians often refer to as “Scarlem,” “Scartown,” or “Scarberia,” usually portrayed in the mainstream as dangerous, crime ridden, and impoverished, in large part due to the high concentration of social housing dispersed across the suburb. Services, resources, and capital are oriented not toward Scarborough, but instead toward downtown Toronto and wealthier suburbs. It is perceived as a space of degeneracy, danger, and immorality, and occasionally as a fetishized space of difference. In contrast to the more glamorous and glitzy high-rises of downtown Toronto, Scarborough is not perceived as a destination, even as recent patterns of gentrification have shifted some focus there, particularly its unique and eclectic range of cuisines.46

Scarborough’s fictional rendering of its protagonists’ lives, and the interconnected webs of relations that bind them together, queers and remaps these dominant spatial narratives about racism, violence, and overlapping layers of oppression. In one scene, for instance, Marie is rushing to take her chronically injured husband to the hospital, with Sylvie and Johnny in tow. To Marie’s protests, Sylvie pauses at the nail salon when she sees Bing. Sylvie is relieved when Edna, who is working a shift, offers to look after Sylvie and Bing. This scene reorients the audience to the geography of Scarborough as navigated by its residents, one that generates intimacies between them. Marie, Sylvie, and Johnny pass by the nail salon because it sits between their home (the shelter) and the bus stop. Notably, the inadequate transit infrastructure of Scarborough is the subject of much public debate in Toronto. It is a large and sprawling suburb where many rely on a patchwork of buses, light rapid transit, and limited subway access; the lack of density has meant that subway construction is especially costly. The film conveys the intolerable sprawl of Scarborough: as the single camera follows Marie running from the shelter to the bus stop, the audience gets a sense of the everyday challenge of getting from place to place. Yet, even as inadequate transit creates difficulty for the characters of Scarborough, they navigate its challenges through informal mutual aid networks that emerge incidentally and organically out of that same geography.

More than just a depiction of a specific place, however, Scarborough provides a paradigm for imagining urban queer diasporic and Indigenous relationalities outside of frames such as Canadian multiculturalism or U.S. assimilation. It engages, in other words, in a kind of speculative practice for what might be possible. Ruha Benjamin notes that under current conditions of crisis, “novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world—alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed.”47 Although Benjamin is thinking more in the realm of science fiction here, there is a utopian promise to Scarborough that I interpret as speculative, as that which could be. The film queerly reimagines racial difference on terms that exceed the frameworks of both multiculturalism or assimilation. In Canada, the framework of multiculturalism—both as official state policy and as informal cultural discourse—frames racial and ethnic difference in relation to whiteness. Multicultural ideology accommodates or “tolerates” difference in primarily “cultural” terms, where culture is understood through superficial markers such as clothing, food, and music.48 In the United States, where there is no official policy of multiculturalism, assimilation or absorption into the American national imaginary is the expectation and norm, as marked by the proliferation of “hyphenated” identities. The management of racial difference (Blackness, Indigeneity, Latinidad, Asianness) takes place at the intersections of multiple forms of racial and colonial histories that often come into tension with one another. Grassroots forms of multiculturalism or multiracialism from below challenge not only the logics of assimilation but also relation vis-à-vis competition for status, recognition, or resources.49 Likewise, in contrast to hegemonic forms of multiculturalism, Scarborough invites us to see the interconnection of everyday lives that are brought together due to structural circumstances. Casting choices reinforce this: Toronto-based queer Blackfoot actor Cherish Violet Blood—familiar to many in Scarborough’s local queer of color audiences—plays Marie, Sylvie’s mother, linking together the imagined relational utopia of the film with one that is lived and experienced on-the-ground in Toronto.50

Despite this emphasis on interconnection, there is an unevenness to the film’s representations that raises questions about the film’s limits. Sylvie and her mother are never announced as Native or Mi’kmaq, a representational choice that powerfully emphasizes affect and ephemerality even as it folds Indigeneity into the multiracial body politic of Scarborough.51 The quiet presence of Indigeneity in the film is risky in this sense, particularly as it is Bing who is the most well-developed character. Of the three children, his arc is also the most triumphant. Laura’s ends in death; Sylvie finds some peace with her home situation, but her growth is not charted as clearly as Bing’s, nor do we witness her inner world as clearly. She is the caretaker and storyteller of the trio, the one who looks out for Bing and Laura and defends them against bullies. At the end of the film, Bing is headed off to a school for gifted children, his friendship with Sylvie still strong, and Marie has made progress in learning to communicate with Sylvie’s brother Johnny.

At the same time, Sylvie’s character, while not as well fleshed out, upends expectations of Native representation.52 Most notably, of the trio, Sylvie is the most mobile and engaged with space. We see Laura, for example, most often in closed spaces, usually her apartment or the school. Bing is likewise most often featured in confined spaces, such as school, the nail salon, or his apartment. By contrast, the film frequently shows Sylvie, her mother, and her brother walking back and forth from the shelter, to school, and to appointments. Long shots position Sylvie and her family within Scarborough’s urban landscape. Scarborough’s depiction of Indigenous bodies in the city counters tired stereotypes relegating Native people to the reservation, to rural spaces, or to “wilderness”; they also contrast depictions of houseless urban Native people that deploy tropes of deviance, decay, or degeneracy. Instead, we see Sylvie confidently and unabashedly take up space as she stops to talk with various community members: Victor, a young Black artist who is often outside painting street art, or Christy and Cindy, two white women who live at the shelter.

A scene depicting a mourning ceremony for Laura in which the literacy program community participates likewise portrays Ojibwe ceremony with depth and richness. In this scene, children and adults gather outside in the snowy cold around a fire as Fay, an elder, leads the group to send prayer to affirm Laura’s life. Those around the circle cry and huddle together as they pass around the tobacco Fay shares with them. Medium shots capture the community circled together, and the smudging and prayer are included in the frame but with no close-up shots. The film presents the mourning ceremony as neither a spectacle nor a foreign ritual, in neither exotic nor fetishizing terms. Instead, the ceremony is shown to be a source of nourishment for all, particularly as it starkly contrasts the next scene, in which Hina confronts the clueless professionalism of her supervisor Jane, who has requested she strategize about “self-care” rather than attend Laura’s funeral.

The depth of feeling palpable in the mourning scene is mirrored by the choice to refrain from announcing or explaining the racial identities of characters but rather to portray them in felt and affective ways. As discussed earlier, this is a risky choice with respect to the film’s portrayals of Indigeneity. But it also emphasizes the lived connections between characters. We know that Bing and his mother (Edna) are Filipino primarily because of language and speech; she frequently uses terms of endearment such as anak (“child” in Tagalog), for example. Hina is a hijab-wearing Muslim woman, and the film treats her identity matter-of-factly: it just is. The only moments where it becomes more “visible” are vis-à-vis overt expressions of racism: when Hina’s supervisor chides her for appearing at a public event with a South Asian political candidate (conflating the foreignness of Hina’s hijab with the candidate’s turban); when Laura asks Hina if she “eats babies,” as her father claims; when Corey refers to her as a “towelhead.” The film’s choice to treat identity as felt or experienced, rather than explicitly named, enables discrete experiences to be stitched together relationally. We see the shared connections across their distinct experiences of trauma, grief, and hardship, as well as joy and pleasure, particularly when they are together at the literacy center enjoying some respite from the stresses of the outside world.

These shared connections are amplified in the penultimate scene that is the film’s climax. At the school talent show, Bing performs Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” with a karaoke machine his mother has purchased from a pawn shop (Figure 28). His voice is not perfect, but raw and authentic. As he sings, he throws off his black blazer to reveal a gold sequined vest underneath. It is a joyful scene of love and communion: Bing fully expresses his queer self, to the thunderous applause of his mother, teachers, and classmates; Hina laughs and beams off-stage. The next scene, at the film’s close, is by contrast a quiet one. A gentle breeze sweeps through the school as we see a stray balloon idle in the shadows of the school hallway; toys strewn across a play area in Hina’s classroom; a picture of the literacy program class next to a yellow paper duck Laura once made using old eviction notices; the children’s artwork, desks, and schoolwork; a large balloon that the film features prominently as a space of wonder, play, and pleasure; a tree outside the window.

In the novel, this last scene represents Laura’s spirit visiting the places special to her, but that point of view is not clear in the film. What is more clearly conveyed in the film adaptation across these two scenes is the ephemerality of the community that is held together both through exuberant queer performance and within a space such as a school literacy program—one that is difficult to capture within official reports or policy documents such as those signaled through the email correspondence between Hina and her supervisor, Jane. This scene, and the film as a whole, suggest that it is these intangible, felt relations and experiences that generate resilience and make futures possible.

Scarborough, in sum, foregrounds the queer of color relationalities that emerge out of place and circumstance. While this includes a nuanced depiction of a Mi’kmaq child and her family, the film’s emphasis on relationality simultaneously decenters them. This Place registers the structural nature of diasporic/Indigenous impasse—and the overlapping histories of colonialism, war, and displacement that generate them—but gestures optimistically to the potential for affective connections to exceed the impasse. Viewing them together, one gets a sense of the rich potential of queer of color ephemerality as resource: in Scarborough, the shared experiences that emerge organically out of place bind together residents of a working-class, multiracial neighborhood; in This Place, affective connections create a powerful bond between two women across overlapping but incommensurate experiences of war, colonization, and displacement. Both films emphasize, moreover, the crucial necessity of the felt and the intangible; particularly the potential of the felt and the intangible to exceed the limits of didactic critique and analytics.

The felt and ephemeral connections and relations depicted in these films say much about place, but not so much about land or sovereignty, but this does not mean they are antithetical to one another. Felt connections are a potential resource for the concrete demands of the Land Back movement. They are there, impossible to ignore, and require a reckoning with. “Decolonization is not a metaphor”—yes, undoubtedly, but how do we make sense of the actions, connections, or relations that do not fit neatly into definitions of decolonization but that may be vital supplements to it?53 Might the child-oriented joy of Sylvie and Bing in Scarborough, or the intangible tenderness of Malai and Kawenniiohstha in This Place, be generative sources for mapping out paths toward decolonization and the reimagination of kinship and intimacy that that entails?

Recent discussions in and across Indigenous and Black studies that have sought to trouble the limitations of sovereignty, both as a concept and as a political project, and that have—sometimes implicitly, sometimes more explicitly—raised questions about the significance of the fleeting and ephemeral, offer some clues. In a dialogue on queer Indigenous ethics with Jas Morgan (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux), for instance, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Cree) pushes back against what he describes as the “charisma” of the concept of sovereignty, opining that “we participate in relational practices that agitate the body or the nation as inviolable containers for political life.”54 He continues: “Queerness . . . makes trouble for the diagnostics that are used to spot resistance or to repair suffering; sex, for example, can be a space in which care is enacted by those who have elsewhere been barred from it. What this means, then, is that those who are Indigenous and differently gendered and/or sexualized will seek and/or perform alternative sites of political action and community-building.”55

By implicitly endorsing queer politics that are illegible through the registers of sovereignty and nation building, Belcourt gestures instead to an otherwise that is in excess of those registers (and, perhaps, akin to rich Indigenous traditions of relationality across human and more-than-human). When he names “alternative sites of political action and community-building,” I read this to include the acts (both small and large) that may appear imperceptible as capital-S Sovereignty: sex, a drag show, a queer party. Although decolonization is undoubtedly “not a metaphor”—it is about the very real, material question of land—neither can we dismiss the feelings and affects that accumulate through such alternative sites and generate momentum for Sovereignty.56

I am struck here by the resonances of Belcourt’s comments with Sandra Harvey’s suggestion to consider registers of sovereignty that reside outside of the realms of politics and governance. Harvey is particularly responding to Afropessimist critiques of Native sovereignty, which suggest that it is embedded in a project of Modernity that is anti-Black at its foundation:

In one sense, orientation or acting is the sort of sovereignty that does not depend on recognition from or against an Other. But it is also about the law-making actions that produce ruptures in the colonial and slave owning symbolic order. I understand Fanon’s reflections on violence in this vein, but I also consider that the way “speaking” (as Kelly [Limes-Taylor] has pointed out) and ceremonies, as Tiffany [King] puts it in The Black Shoals, “carry potential for transformation” (199). Rather than foundational, institutional, or grounded sovereignty (noting that Jared Sexton critiques a certain understanding of sovereignty with land as its basis), this notion of sovereignty is fleeting, emergent, and relational. It is found in Standing Rock, Alcatraz, the Dakota road blocks, and in the defiance of the uprising for Black lives.57

Harvey here repurposes the meaning of “sovereignty” as it has developed vis-à-vis Enlightenment philosophies. In opposition to the sovereignty of the autonomous, free-thinking self that develops as a result of the bifurcation of mind/body, she hails as an alternate mode that is activated through relational encounters found in ceremony, on the land defender road block, on the front lines against police violence. Cree scholar Karyn Recollet’s powerful work on Black and Indigenous relationalities in urban dance performances likewise gets to this potential of bodies in motion as she cites the energy and dynamism that collective performance generates. In “Choreographies of the Fall,” Recollet places Afrofuturist and Indigifuturist scholarship in conversation. In her dynamic interpretations of Indigenous art and performance, Recollet foregrounds the centrality of migration and motion, and pushes back against the perception of Indigeneity as “land locked.”58 It is in the thick of these moments of encounter that new modes of being and relating open up.

What I gather from the collective insights of Belcourt, Recollet, Harvey, King, Morgan, and others is that sovereignty is not a zero-sum game. Decolonization is not a metaphor, but neither is it possible without metaphor—without the capacious dreamwork that artists, writers, and performers have always offered. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) writes: “Recognizing possibilities of other kinds of intimacies—not focused on biological reproduction and making population, but caretaking precious kin that come to us in diverse ways—is an important step to unsettling settler sex and family. So is looking for answers to questions about what intimacies were and are possible beyond the settler impositions we now live with.”59 TallBear’s words are directed to a presumably Indigenous audience and thus materially tie her calls to Indigenous land and histories. But I also hear and wonder about them in the context of the relational survivance taking place in the city through circumstance. The affective bonds, the intangible connections: the reorientations of intimacy depicted in This Place and Scarborough, while not instances of visual sovereignty, capture forms of relational survivance that might nourish and supplement Indigenous-led decolonization.