Christine Kim

Monique Truong’s southern gothic novel Bitter in the Mouth and Catherine Hernandez’s migrant novel The Story of Us are Southeast Asian narratives that reimagine narratives about the Vietnamese refugee and the Filipina domestic worker. They not only detail the common struggles that the Southeast Asian subject experiences but also examine the overlooked moments and temporalities of rest, intimacy, and agency nestled in Southeast Asian life. Within these novels, the affective force of indifference disrupts the conventions of gratitude and subservience expected from Southeast Asians in the US and Canada. In Truong’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the refugee to feel refuge marvelously beyond the assimilationist logics set by the nation-state. In Hernandez’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the Filipina domestic worker to endure the confines of work as a full-time live-in caretaker and ekes out more expansive imaginings of the domestic. My thesis turns to indifference, as both a state of being and style, to examine what inexpressiveness affords the Southeast Asian subject. Through indifference, I conceive of a different notion of carework that is situated in tending to the self, relations, and well-being of the Southeast Asian. Chapter One analyzes Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth for how the Vietnamese refugee’s indifference ruptures the linear and neat temporality of refuge. Through its unexpectedly indifferent narrator Linda, Truong rethinks what it means for the refugee to experience refuge, the received temporality of the “good life” and the obligations that come with it, indifferently. Chapter Two examines how indifference emerges within the Filipina migrant domestic worker’s experience of work time in Hernandez’s The Story of Us. MG’s indifference to the temporality of work time emerges as a practice to survive work, as opposed to life as a whole, and limns the excesses of selfhood and relationalities within the domestic that fall outside of the transactional exchange of labor and capital. My conclusion leaves the reader with a notion of home that is built by the affective blocks of memory and kin, a home whose warmth and love can be felt again and again within oneself.

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This thesis close reads Larissa Lai’s long poem Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021) and Jin-me Yoon’s videography and photography exhibit About Time (2022) as Asian Canadian cultural productions that critique the settler colonial state through positioning the Asian settler of color and their histories in relation to those of Indigenous peoples. This project is motivated by the overarching question of: What frameworks can open up Asian-Indigenous relations of solidarity and disrupt settler colonial impasses? Contextualizing the term “settler of color,” specifically in relation to Asian settlers, Chen Kuang-Hsing’s concept of “inter-referencing” is joined with frameworks of non-linearity as methodology for opening up possibilities for Asian and Indigenous coalition and orienting towards each other as reference points, rather than centering the West. The first chapter examines Larissa Lai’s inter-referencing of non-linear frameworks through the Taoist I Ching and Stó:lō practices of remembering with direction as a starting point that produces an alternative inventory of empire and further generates potential points for Asian and Indigenous inter-referencing. The second chapter focuses on the imagery of digging across Jin-me Yoon’s works as a framework of “vertical time” that uncovers overlapping histories of empire and shared reference points through place-based methodology, as well as her imagery of mound-building as an honoring of the excavated histories and as a Korean and Coast Salish reference point in itself. Ultimately, this thesis argues that non-linear reorganizations of time can alchemize our different but always interconnected positions and histories into overlapping genealogies of empire and foster Asian-Indigenous practices of inter-referencing that produce alternative epistemologies and methodologies and, in turn, disrupt colonial impasses.

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This thesis attends to questions of redress and justice that arise from the ways American militarism in the transpacific endures in the body-mind as disability and debility. Focusing on the Cold War in Asia, including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacy of the War in Vietnam, and the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime following the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, my research intervenes in liberal humanist juridical redress culture’s pathologization of disability as an index of harm and expresses its critical limits in accounting for the long temporality and nebulous scope of debilitative violence. Mobilizing the theoretical apparatuses of critical disability studies, redress studies, critical refugee studies, and scholarship on the Cold War in Asia, I theorize a transpacific aesthetic of redress, a cripistemology of redress that develops from aesthetic forms that work to produce alternative fields of sensibility surrounding disability and debilitative violence, making perceivable the complex transpacific entanglements of survival, beauty, and harm in the afterlives of U.S. imperialism. To articulate this epistemology of redress, I close read contemporary transnational literature that engages with histories of U.S. militarism in the transpacific. I consider how the formal qualities of these texts, particularly fragmentation and non-linear narrative, orient us towards frameworks of redress that emerge from recognizing U.S. imperialism’s debilitative violence as a condition of possibility for disability, while still resisting the reduction of disability to a redressable harm. Chapter One examines the quantification of violence in Kim Thúy’s novel Em, exploring critical ambivalences that express the entanglement of beauty and debilitation within the conflict’s chemical legacy. Chapter Two reads Marie Clements’s play Burning Vision for the slow violences of uranium that highlight the temporal limits of contemporary redress frameworks, turning to debilitation to theorize modes of contending with this unredressability. Chapter Three analyzes the rhythms of debilitative time held within Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter to conceptualize a theory of fugitive redress that unsettles state-based justice paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that a transpacific aesthetic of redress enables more capacious understandings of interconnection, disability, and debilitation that offers a radical reimagining of redress culture.

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This thesis examines how contemporary literature in Canada is imagining cross-cultural, decolonial, and abolitionist futures beyond the multicultural horizons of the settler state. It focuses on three contemporary literary texts published in Canada—Marie Clements’ Burning Vision; Sonnet L’Abbé’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare; and Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough—to disrupt the grammars and logics that structure the national narratives, histories, and ideologies that cast Canada as an inclusive nation no longer tied to the violences and exclusions integral to its foundation. By drawing on the work of postcolonial and critical race studies scholars Jodi Byrd and Lisa Lowe, who read horizontally across archives, peoples, places, and temporalities to map the uneven and cacophonous effects of empire, this thesis argues that Burning Vision, Sonnet’s Shakespeare, and Scarborough not only contest national histories but also trace how differently racialized and marginalized peoples have become entangled in each others’ lives. While the introduction provides a brief overview of the contradictions that underpin the multicultural settler state and outlines how reading or thinking horizontally accounts for the varied ways in which empire has entangled people together across space and time, the body chapters examine how each literary text stages those entanglements in ways that give rise to alternative forms of cross-cultural relationality, kinship, and care. Chapter 2 examines how Marie Clements’ Burning Vision explores the hemispheric implications of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan and imaginatively stories the victims of the bombs together across the past, present, and future. Chapter 3 analyzes how Sonnet L’Abbé’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare disrupts Canada’s national narratives and reworks Shakespeare’s poems to construct a cacophonous textual terrain that interrogates questions related to history, complicity, responsibility, and care. Finally, chapter 4 considers how Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough intervenes in common portrayals of the titular inner-city suburb and explores the space of the post/colonial city both as a site inextricably tied to the legacies of empire and as an affective space capable of generating a sense of cross-cultural care and communality. Taken together, these texts produce openings into elsewheres beyond the multicultural logics of the nation-state and beyond the cacophonous intimacies of the here-and-now.

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This thesis examines nonprofit documentary films produced within the African continent featuring African populations. Contemporary humanitarian documentary productions by Western constituents frequently commit acts of ideological violence against the African communities they purport to assist through neocolonial tropes and extractive visual aesthetics. Decolonial storytelling strategies are imperative for ethical and holistic narratives to begin revitalizing Western epistemologies about the African context. Drawing on critical humanitarian studies – which critiques the imbrication of humanitarian work with Western national political agendas – I argue that the contemporary nonprofit narrative model draws inspiration from a neocolonial humanitarian history built on inequitable power imbalances between Western imperial powers and their former colonies. African scholars Achille Mbembe and Ngūgī Wa Thiong’o provide theoretical and pragmatic strategies for repositioning African voices in positions of agency, and these strategies will provide an avenue through which nonprofit films can be assessed. Then, by looking to nonprofit films produced by both Western filmmakers and African filmmakers, this research evaluates the requirements necessary to move the nonprofit documentary sector from a neocolonial present into a decolonial future. Considering elements such as language and authorship, I conclude my analysis by discussing how encouraging locally-led cultural production will not only work to actively decolonize the current Western impression of African nations, but also to curb any future utilization of the same tired neocolonial tropes by rising global powers.

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