Complex Relationalities, Encounters, and Solidarities in Settler Colonial Contexts
Description
This seminar seeks to critically unpack the complex and often fraught relationalities of, but also the generative expressions and praxis of solidarities between, peoples – Indigenous, Black, and/or racialized settlers or “arrivants” (Byrd, 2011) – who are differently situated in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and histories within settler colonial contexts. Or, as Manu Karuka, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein (2017) put it, our commitment is to the study of “interconnections, frictions, and difficult conversations” among different fields of study and subject positionalities in settler colonial contexts beyond simple binaries, in the space of what Byrd (2011) calls “the cacophonous.” Karuka, Pegues, and Goldstein, paraphrasing Gayatri Spivak, describe “colonial unknowing” as a form of “sanctioned ignorance” that sustains colonial domination and “strives to preclude relational modes of analysis and ways of knowing otherwise” (1042). Instead, they foreground “relations of study” that situate “settler colonial formations within the broader global entanglements of empire(s) and racialization” (1043), and they expound upon “the violence of defining places to the exclusion of Black collective life . . . [or] of embodied Black presence and Black modes of relationship to the practice of decolonization” (1045) – or what Philippe Néméh-Nombré (2024) has more recently theorized as the “curious assemblages” (27) of Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization. With Glissant, he describes these as relations without “waterproof frontiers” between “elements whose determination changes from and within the relation” (56), and with each pole coexisting as “non-reducible . . . singularities within transformative encounters” (61). From an Asian diasporic perspective, Beenash Jafri (2025) draws on queer theory – particularly José Muñoz’s notion of queer worldmaking as “concrete utopia” – to highlight “diasporic complicity with settler colonialism not in the interest of tearing down, but in the interest of building up, of worldmaking” (4), a project she describes as “decolonizing worldmaking” (7). This seminar thus seeks contributions to these scholarly conversations through analyses of textual practices – from literature, film, visual and performance arts to new media – that generatively engage these sometimes fraught but always complex relationalities and their potential worldmaking solidarities. We aim to address questions such as: How might we imagine solidarities that do not collapse difference but instead hold it in tension? What does it mean to commit to relational modes of study that remain accountable to histories of violence and dispossession? Can worldmaking be decolonizing without reproducing complicity? And what possibilities emerge when we dwell in the cacophonous rather than seek to resolve it?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. He has had critical work published in Settler Colonial Studies, Theory & Event, AlterNative, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His debut book, CREELAND, was released in 2021. His most recent book, Teeth, was published in 2024. Dallas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.
Speaker Bio
Shaun Stevenson is a settler scholar and faculty member in the University Studies program at Northern Lakes College, where he teaches Indigenous Studies and English. He is also an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. He previously worked as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Treaties and Aboriginal Government sector for the government of Canada. His research focuses on Indigenous land and water rights, law and policy, and settler/Indigenous relations.
Speaker Bio
Aliza Theis is a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Her research considers transatlantic nineteenth-century narratives of history and coloniality. Aliza received a Master’s in Education and taught high school for seven years. She has presented papers at the National Council of Teachers of English and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In 2025, she was the recipient of the Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Center for Mark Twain Studies.
Speaker Bio
Leah Kuragano is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in settler colonial critique, critical race studies, and 20th century U.S. cultural history. Her current book project examines historical processes of settler knowledge-making about Hawaiʻi within U.S. popular culture. She is also writing a collection of place-based personal essays that narrate lessons on race, gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism learned while living in Japan, Hong Kong, the United States, and Canada.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women's studies at UC Davis.
Speaker Bio
Philippe Néméh-Nombré is an assistant professor at the School of Social Innovation at Saint Paul University. His research focuses on Black political thought, cultures, poetics, and ecologies, on the possibilities for relationships between Black, Indigenous, and racialized liberation perspectives, and on critical methodologies. He is the author of Seize temps noirs pour apprendre à dire kuei (2022) and Improviser le reste : études noires, risques poétiques, relationalité décoloniale (2024).
Speaker Bio
Andrew Jones (Ph.D., Penn State) is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Ursinus College. His research focuses on representations of trauma in the cinemas and literatures of the French-speaking world. His work has recently appeared in French Forum and Memory Studies, with a monograph (French and Francophone Cinema as Testimony: Narrating for-the-Other after Mass Trauma) slated to appear in May 2026 with Liverpool University Press.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Brennan McCracken is a PhD candidate in the department of English at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Québec, where he also works as a coordinator for the Critical Anthropocene Research Group at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. His research considers relations between ecology and settler colonialism in the contemporary novel.
Speaker Bio
Kester Dyer is a settler scholar and Associate Professor at Carleton University. His research and teaching focus on Québécois and Indigenous film and media, genre theory, decoloniality, and ecocinema. Dyer’s current book project titled Otherworldly Incursions: The Supernatural in Québec Cinema is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and explores Québec's struggle to delineate relationships between historically dominant and more marginalized groups through cinema.
Speaker Bio
Bruno Cornellier is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg. His recent articles appeared in Screen, Discourse, Nouvelles Vues, Studies in Canadian Literature and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. He is currently completing a book manuscript on race, whiteness, and colonialism in contemporary Quebec cinema (under contract with McGill-Queen's University Press).
Speaker Bio
Tavleen Purewal is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick, located on Wolastoqiyik. Her current work examines literary relations between Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous communities in Canada. Her research appears in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, ARIEL, Canada and Beyond, and in the books Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka and Call and Response-Ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation