Abdollah Zahiri, PhD
Indigenizing Hollywood: A Contrapuntal Reading of the TV Series “1923”
Contrapuntally, this paper attempts to situate 1923, a Paramount+ TV series in a historical Indigenous context shared by Canada and the United States, both settler colonial states. A prequel to Yellowstone that was the highest-rated TV series in 2021, 1923, is a tantalizing TV series that reimagines a pastoral America in Montana in the years following WW1. Montana is the site of the clash between modernization and tradition. Along with his former productions like Yellowstone and Wind River, Taylor Sheridan, the producer textualizes an indigenization of Hollywood Western which is the subtext in 1923. This generic intervention decolonizes Hollywood Western. It brings to the fore the stark, precarious lives lived by the Indigenous communities that have straddled Canada and the United States. Ironically, the communities that have been the authentic inhabitants in North America before 1492, have been diasporized within their own land. This notion of indigenization finds expression in land acknowledgment that echoes throughout 1923. Hence this series is bent on an effort to spatially reterritorialize the ‘deterritorialized’ confederated tribes of Broken Rock in Montana that epitomize the plight of the entire Indigenous communities across North America. They became strangers in their own homeland.
1923 also seriously engages with the brutalities that Indigenous children endured in the residential schools both in Canada and the United States, both colonial settler states that unsettled the Indigenous. This notion of trauma ripples through generations. Hence, 1923 strives to do poetic justice through this indigenization which has been long overdue.
Smita Misra, PhD
Asian Gratitude: Counter-discourses in Netflix's "The Chair"
This presentation examines the concept of immigrant gratitude in the community-building practices of Asian/American characters in contemporary media.
While scholars have explored the ways in which gratitude is an affective expectation that the empire places upon migrants, we want to consider how gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness and appreciation that migrants have for their communities and for the subaltern. By examining gratitude as both an expectation and a willfulness, we shift the perspective from gratitude dictated by empire to gratitude shaped by the migrant. Our goal in making this shift allows us to understand how gratitude holds meaning for migrants and their communities, not just how gratitude serves the interests of empire. Through an examination of “The Chair” (2021), we argue that gratitude is a complex and resistive immigrant discourse that unsettles liberal empire’s conceptions of care and belonging. Sandra Oh’s character in The Chair navigates a turbulent university landscape as the first woman of colour chair of an English department.
This paper develops three core themes on how gratitude helps build community with the subaltern. First, gratitude involves expectations of “paving the way for others.” Second, gratitude emerges as emotional and physical reliance on others. Third, as a counterpart to gratitude, ingratitude is embedded in the process of learning gratitude. Being situated as not gracious by one’s community is as important to being gracious, as immigrants understand, negotiate, and engage with the community to which they belong. While empire’s gift/debt of freedom encourages transactional notions of relationship and relating, gratitude helps create the boundaries between community and empire, between belonging with and among a subaltern and against the subaltern. These three themes establish immigrant gratitude as a counter-affect to capitalist expectations about empire’s gift/debt of freedom.
Abdollah Zahiri, PhD
Abdollah Zahiri teaches at Seneca College. He has published articles on V.S. Naipaul, Frantz Fanon, and diasporic cinema. He is working on a book project on Sikh communities in West Asia. He has translated postcolonial articles into Farsi. His published works include “Frantz Fanon in Iran: Darling of the Right and Left in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Interventions; the translation “An Elegy for the Tree”, in the Michigan Quarterly; “Submerged Idealism in V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds: An Ambivalent Evolution?” in the South Asian Review; and “The Enigma of Arrival: Inverse Authorship, Textualizing Reterritorialization,” in the South Asian Review.
Smita Misra, PhD
Smita Misra is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Misra’s primary area of interest is medical advocacy and activism. Her recent work focuses on the organizational strategies and professional tactics used by medical expert witnesses who testify in refugee proceedings. Her multi-layered analysis delves into bureaucratic processes that produce refugee trauma, providing insights into how medical professionals of different experiences, genders, and races use unique strategies to engage with tropes of refugee victimhood. Challenging the assumption that scientific objectivity and political advocacy are mutually exclusive, Dr. Misra is currently working on a manuscript that maps out the barriers and possibilities for science-based advocacy under a culture of suspicion. Her second area of research is migrant resistance. Contributing to burgeoning conversations on sousveillance, Dr. Misra is developing a theory that describes how migrants use silent observation and tracking to “speak back” against the dehumanizing conditions that they face. Dr. Misra has designed and taught courses in Science Communication; Gender and Communication; Performance Studies; Public Speaking; and Culture and Resistance. In 2022, she will be teaching Science Communication and Public Speaking. She has peer-reviewed publications in Management Communication Quarterly and Frontiers in Communication. She has also written for public audiences in Truth Out.
