National and Global Decolonial Practices: Asian and Indigenous Inter-referencing

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article puts local debates about settler colonialism and racialised migrants into dialogue with decoloniality with the hope of forging new critical approaches and making new political projects possible. I appeal to a global context in order to move beyond the impasse that has arisen on the national plane between settler colonialism studies which divides us into the homogenising categories of Indigenous and settler, and migrant studies which relies on a more nuanced understanding of both the transnational trajectories of migrants as well as the racialised spaces they occupy within nations. I turn to SKY Lee’s landmark novel Disappearing Moon Café to think beyond the nation-state and about the intimacies of colonial identification. This essay proposes a methodology of inter-referencing as outlined by Kuan-Hsing Chen to approach the relations between diasporic and Indigenous peoples in order to conceive of decolonial projects that can transform how we approach Canada.