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El-Mikati, Marianne

University of British Columbia

This thesis sits at the intersection of a migrant’s right to refuge and Indigenous rights to land back, to explore models of solidarity for collective liberation. I consider the experiences of Levantine refugees and forced migrants (L-RFM) to examine how they navigate shifting understandings of home and belonging in diaspora, noting the ways in which they are called upon by the Canadian state to preserve settler-colonialism. I first employ critical discourse analysis to three Canadian newcomer guides, paying particular attention to themes of national identity and history, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, in order to better understand how L-RFM become oriented towards settler-colonial futurity. In this section, I am particularly interested in analyzing how the nation-state presents itself as a settler-colonial nation, and what its expectations are of racialized migrants. I then apply an intersectional feminist methodology to analyze my interviews with three Levantine women, to reveal how they characterize their relationship to Canada as a multicultural settler-colonial host nation. I also critically investigate Canadian multiculturalism and reconciliation as similar yet distinct politics of recognition projects, and assess to what extent they succeed in serving racialized migrants and Indigenous peoples respectively. Importantly, this research also considers ways in which L-RFM can build solidarities with Indigenous peoples and orient towards decolonial belonging. Here, I present several different models of reciprocal solidarity, and further engage with the interviews to reflect on the potentialities of orienting towards Indigenous resurgence and decolonization.

Text

2024-08-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89060

Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/