Abstract: This paper documents an intermodel arts-based inquiry through engaging in expressive arts therapy. The author responded to reflexive questions: Who am I as a Hong Kong Chinese Canadianin the indigenous-colonial context of the 21st century? How can I carry my own decolonizationthrough the arts? Carried out in Hong Kong and Ontario, Canada, this inquiry […]

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Abstract: ‘The garden’ as both a conceptual framework and a material locality acts as a lush site of cultural analysis that helps investigate multiple phenomena, including climate change, colonialism, capitalism, and social transformation. This thesis analyzes these multiple interlocking systems of oppression through using ‘the garden’ as both a lens to help reveal these power structures, […]

Abstract: Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. Our […]

Excerpt: At the conclusion of his 1932 cross-country travelogue, American Jitters, the critic Edmund Wilson reaches the end of the continental United States to gaze upon the sugar magnate John Speckles’s iconic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Wilson describes the hotel as “white as a wedding cake” and, in a nod to the imperial “Great […]

Excerpt: In March 2020, New York City became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, as the virus spread exponentially through the densely populated city. But, almost unnoticed by national media, the virus was spreading at an even faster rate in an unlikely community at the other end of the spectrum of […]

Description: The master narrative of American history depicts the triumph of “civilization” over “savagery,” with Angloamerican settlers braving the wilderness to assert their “right” to establish a state over which they would exert complete control. It is a story of constant and inevitable progress, of racial and gendered hierarchies, and of the transformation of land […]

Excerpt: As a global epoch and as a critical-theoretical center of gravity, the Anthropocene is big, amorphous, and daunting, not only because of its scale but also because of its trajectory. Its scale is massive, comprehending the entire human history of intervening in and imposing on geologic and ecological processes. Somewhat like the inception of […]

Description: Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef […]

Abstract: Drawing on insights from recent ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of bureaucracy by scholars such as Akhil Gupta and Ann-Laura Stoler, this dissertation turns the ethnohistorical lens back upon the colonial state to offer a ground-level view of how statecraft functioned on a day-to-day basis within the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs between approximately 1897 […]