Friday, October 30th 3:15pm – 5:15pm

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Lisa Taylor, Bishops University
2) Adam Barker, Wilfrid Laurier University
3) Emma Battell Lowman, University of Leicester
4) Karl Hardy, Queen’s University
5) Cameron Greensmith, Queen’s University

Paper #1

Toward a Practice of Settler Decolonization: Unsettling Queer Complicities

This paper attempts to expand upon important and growing discourse around how non-Indigenous peoples can act in solidarity with Indigenous peoples to support their struggles for nationhood and sovereignty. Upon considering the ways Indigenous-settler solidarity requires on-going unlearning and challenging of dominant white settler colonial structures, this paper looks at how white queer service organizations in Toronto continue to invest in rights regimes and naturalize white settler colonial violence. In this analysis of non-Indigenous queer complicities, which makes use of research participants’ narratives, I examine how non-Indigenous queer and trans service providers deflect their responsibility in white settler colonialism. While efforts are made to raise consciousness surrounding the land in which we reside, by naming it as contested, there lacks systemic analysis of the actual institutions the research participants work within as perpetuating and sustaining white settler colonialism (e.g., by barring Indigenous peoples who appear as though they are using substances). This paper considers the extent to which non-Indigenous queer and trans service providers can address and work toward a practice of decolonization within the queer service sector in downtown Toronto. Together, these non-Indigenous queer and trans service providers carry the potential to utilize their own experiences of complicity to shape their relationships with Indigenous peoples in ways that support their struggles for nationhood and sovereignty.

Paper #2

The Spaces of Dangerous Freedom: Disrupting Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism in places like Canada grows out of an ontological expectation of what it means to belong in a place. This is projected forward in time through tropes of progress, and backwards through myths of a shared past. As settler colonial society coalesces around structures, systems and stories (Battell Lowman & Barker 2015), these futurities and mythistories are ‘proven’: the world is transformed to meet settler colonial expectations, ‘confirming’ that it was always already that way. Decolonization must denormalize this settler colonial ontology, disrupt the material functioning of settler colonial extraction and erasure of Indigenous peoples, and assert different ways of being on the land, both against the broad ‘structures of invasion’ and also against individual phenomenological experiences of ‘being settled’. In this paper, we expand on a concept from Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2005): ‘the clearing’ as a space of ‘dangerous freedom.’ We examine how the clearing can be a powerful metaphor for transforming relationships, supporting Indigenous resurgence that is fundamentally varied and variable (Simpson 2011). We follow on work by Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes (2015) on intimate domestic spaces, and Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven (2014) on spaces of social movements and mobilization to reveal possibilities for decolonizing personal relationships while simultaneously building capacity for social change.

Paper #3

Colonial logics in educational memory formations: Disrupting intimate publics in response to residential school testimonial texts

This paper reports on research responding to the invitation to educators made by Canada’s TRC to engage our broader society in the task of publicly witnessing and commemorating the testimonies of First Nations, Inuit and Métis residential school survivors as part of a historic process of revising the terms of national imaginaries, historiographies, and civic bonds. In the case study analyzed here—a B. Ed. undergraduate course on postcolonial and testimonial literature—I examine excerpts from student journal responses to photographic, filmic and literary testimonial texts addressing this history of trauma and survival. My analysis focuses on the figure of the child that shapes the futurist logic (Edelman, 2004) framing educational discourses within social formations of the settler colonial nation. I examine how the figural logics of civilizational fantasies of racial redemption and assimilation structuring my students’ optimistic attachments (Berlant, 2011a) are both disrupted and reinvigorated when my students encounter representations of residential schools focused on the children sent there. My analysis worries about the experience of learning to teach as a dispersed “intimate public” (Berlant, 2011b), a register of experience affectively structured by a colonial logic of futurity made visible in the ambivalent, charged affects clustered around the figure of the Child.

Paper #4

Decolonizing utopia: locating the horizon of Indigeneity in narratives of futurity

This paper attends to the relationship between views the past, how the present is experienced, and what seems desirable or undesirable, possible or impossible in the future. Settler colonialism and white supremacy have relied, in part, upon utopian narratives-stories of desirable social change predicated upon notions of progressive human development and becoming modern. I will draw on the work of Jodi. A Byrd and Grace L. Dillon to discuss their respective notions of “transgenre” interventions and Indigenous Futurisms alongside critiques of the naturalized dehumanization Indigenous peoples and peoples of colour within the traditions of science fiction and fantasy, or speculative fiction (sf). Indigenous and mixed-identifying authors including Zainab Amadahy, Nalo Hopkinson, and Daniel Heath Justice and filmmakers such as Nanobah Becker, Danis Goulet, and Helen Haig-Brown are simultaneously drawing on and unsettling the conventions of SF. I will proceed from an examination of the expressions of desire for Indigeneity found in the contemporary SF narratives of Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Starhawk. My intention is to highlight the promise associated with the ongoing education of social desire, what Justice refers to as our collective ability to “imagine otherwise.”