Holding It Together: Indigeneity, (Settler-) Postcolonialism, and M. NourbeSe Philip

Abstract

This article considers the conditions for relations between Indigenous and Black diasporic subjects, while also addressing Indigenous and South Asian relations. Concerned with the place of these subject relations within postcolonial and settler colonial paradigms and with their potential for decolonial practice, the article explores Jodi Byrd's and Marie Battiste's critiques of postcolonial and settler-colonial theories and M. NourbeSe Philip's verse-novella Looking for Mr. Livingstone. It also offers a personal anecdote about South Asian settler relations with caretakers of Stl'atl'imx land in British Columbia, Canada. It examines these texts and experiences through the concept of "the hold." "The hold," a spatial and epistemological condition for relations between Indigenous and diasporic subjects, allows one to imagine a sovereign Indigenous space as a practice of cross-racial kinship.