Decolonizing Across Borders

In an essay included in Angela Naimou’s recent Cambridge Critical Concepts volume Diaspora and Literary Studies, I trace the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, towards engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. The essay develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, I argue, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and non-human others, including the land itself. Originally published July 2023.