On Anticolonial Homemaking

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores anticolonial maternal politics by turning away from the conventional formulation of the singular enfleshed maternal body and toward the body of the maternal home. It does so through an architectural approach to kinship emerging from a feature-film collaboration, The Nest. A return to the author’s childhood home, the film looks to lost histories and kinship structures embedded in place. Focusing on the Indigenous/Métis, Deaf, Japanese, and South Asian girls and women who lived in the house across 140 years of Canadian history, the film upends national history in service of “brick and mortar kinships,” a counter-historical approach that captures the untold and disregarded radical maternities that characterize domestic space in the settler colony. Framed by the author’s own maternal relations, the essay considers the transtemporal, trans-maternal, and transcultural political bonds that arise through shared space.