Open Collections

Abstract

This thesis close reads Larissa Lai’s long poem Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021) and Jin-me Yoon’s videography and photography exhibit About Time (2022) as Asian Canadian cultural productions that critique the settler colonial state through positioning the Asian settler of color and their histories in relation to those of Indigenous peoples. This project is motivated by the overarching question of: What frameworks can open up Asian-Indigenous relations of solidarity and disrupt settler colonial impasses? Contextualizing the term “settler of color,” specifically in relation to Asian settlers, Chen Kuang-Hsing’s concept of “inter-referencing” is joined with frameworks of non-linearity as methodology for opening up possibilities for Asian and Indigenous coalition and orienting towards each other as reference points, rather than centering the West. The first chapter examines Larissa Lai’s inter-referencing of non-linear frameworks through the Taoist I Ching and Stó:lō practices of remembering with direction as a starting point that produces an alternative inventory of empire and further generates potential points for Asian and Indigenous inter-referencing. The second chapter focuses on the imagery of digging across Jin-me Yoon’s works as a framework of “vertical time” that uncovers overlapping histories of empire and shared reference points through place-based methodology, as well as her imagery of mound-building as an honoring of the excavated histories and as a Korean and Coast Salish reference point in itself. Ultimately, this thesis argues that non-linear reorganizations of time can alchemize our different but always interconnected positions and histories into overlapping genealogies of empire and foster Asian-Indigenous practices of inter-referencing that produce alternative epistemologies and methodologies and, in turn, disrupt colonial impasses.