(IND7) Towards Decolonial Solidarity from the Perspective of Asian Diasporas

Asian diasporas constitute almost 20 percent of the Canadian population. It is the largest, fastest growing, and diverse visible minority group in Canada. The history of Asian immigration to Canada is intertwined with the complicated colonial history of both the countries of origin and Canada as a settler colony. This session seeks to showcase research by Asian diaspora researchers who explore possibilities of decolonial solidarity through their work, and aims to encourage dialogues between Asian diasporas, and Indigenous and other racialized communities. Tags: Canadian Sociology, Migration and Immigration, Social Movements

Organizers: Xiaobei Chen, Carleton University, Jiyoung Lee-An, Thompson Rivers University; Chair: Xiaobei Chen, Carleton University

Presentations

Angela May, McMaster University

"They're beautiful and they're white": Cherry Blossoms, Nikkei Aesthetics, and Settler Colonial Memory in Paueru Gai

In so-called Vancouver, just south of the Burrard Inlet, is the neighbourhood once deemed “Canada’s poorest postal code” but better known today as the Downtown Eastside; along the northernmost stretch of the Downtown Eastside is Paueru Gai (“Powell Street/Town”), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians; and at the centre of Paueru Gai, in Oppenheimer Park, is a commemoration of cherry trees: the Legacy Sakura. Planted in 1977 by the issei (first generation members of the Japanese diaspora) who had returned to Paueru Gai beginning in the 1950s, after the state’s attempted banishment of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia’s west coast (i.e., in the 1940s), the Legacy Sakura have been widely celebrated in the Japanese Canadian community and beyond for their beauty and commemorative value. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which these cherry trees may nevertheless be wrapped up in historic and ongoing efforts to ‘clean up’ (read: gentrify) the Downtown Eastside. In this paper, I explore how the Legacy Sakura risk affirming (rather than upending) the logics of beauty, whiteness, and indeed cleanliness which not only led in the first place to the forced removal of Japanese Canadians, but which have, in recent decades, been mobilized against the low-income (and disproportionately Indigenous) Downtown Eastside community. As a mixed gosei (fifth generation) Japanese Canadian, I call for a renewed commitment to the Legacy Sakura, one that digs deeper for the spirit of justice with which these trees were planted, toward a practice of accountability to not just our neighbours in the Downtown Eastside, but to disenfranchised, racialized, poor, and Indigenous people across settler colonial Canada. I begin by contextualizing the 1977 planting of the Legacy Sakura within two concurrent events: the renovation of Oppenheimer Park and the Japanese Canadian Centennial celebrations (which marked 100 years of Japanese Canadian settlement in so-called Canada). By doing so, I investigate how even as the Legacy Sakura remain important expressions of Japanese Canadian history and grassroots organizing, these cherry trees are threaded through with the logics and practices of settler colonialism. I then turn to local news media to reveal how these logics and practices surfaced in everyday public discourse throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Analyzing how these cherry trees were portrayed by journalists, city officials, and even Japanese Canadians, I emphasize how the Legacy Sakura (and, to some extent, Japanese Canadians themselves) were cast as fundamentally distinct from—even as they remained a part of—the wider Downtown Eastside. Drawing on the work of feminist sociologist Sunera Thobani, I consider how such exceptional interpellations of the Legacy Sakura helped to constitute a sense of the Japanese Canadian subjectivity, one that configured Japanese Canadians as more proximal to whiteness than our neighbours in the Downtown Eastside. In the second half of this paper, I consider how the Legacy Sakura advance what I call nikkei  (Japanese diaspora) aesthetics and why that matters in the context of the present-day Downtown Eastside. First, using the image of the sakura (cherry blossom) as an example, I theorize nikkei aesthetics. A set of visual and cultural sensibilities shaped by the postwar period in both Japan (e.g., kawaii [cuteness] culture) and North America (e.g., multiculturalism in Canada), I explain how nikkei aesthetics are ultimately expressed, consumed, and articulated across the Asia-Pacific by nikkei people (such as Japanese Canadians), often in order to recuperate a sense of identity in response to wartime violence. Then, drawing on anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s examination of the cherry blossom and reading the Legacy Sakura as one example of nikkei aesthetics, I suggest that these cherry trees are not merely innocent expressions of Japanese Canadian collective memory, but complicated instances of Japanese Canadian inheritance, dating back to Imperial Japan’s Meiji Era (1868-1912). Ultimately, in this paper, I investigate the durability of the past and its impacts on the present. Through the example of the Japanese Canadian community in the Downtown Eastside and the Legacy Sakura, I reveal not just the limits of rote identity politics and dominant collective memory, but the possibilities for decolonial solidarities in the present.

Urvashi Soni-Sinha, University of Windsor

Challenging Eurocentrism: Synergies, Disjuncture and Solidarities in South Asian Feminisms

The paper engages with the meanings, solidarities, and disjuncture of South Asian feminist diasporic identities in a globalized world. While recognizing the complexities of South Asian identities and the many feminisms it entails, I explore the potential for coalition building across the diaspora of South Asian feminism, through receptive dialogic approaches. As Spivak reminds us of strategic use of essentialism that is different from universalism in her interview with Grosz (1990), I engage with the idea of "South Asian feminist diasporic identity" as a strategy to deconstruct the spaces of Western feminism we inhabit. I explore the possibilities of building decolonial synergies while recognizing the disjuncture in our histories, politics and the unique intersectionalities and positionalities. What do these synergies look like and how do we engage in critiquing the Eurocentric feminist scholarship within a framework of solidarity and shared values? How will the synergies and coalitions across diasporic South Asian feminisms help "to begin the process of re-membering and of spinning new, gynocentric and biophilic realities" (Daly, 1990)? The South Asian Feminisms: The Road Travelled and the Road Ahead This paper explores the ideas of South Asian feminist diasporic identity and synergies to disrupt the centrality of Western feminist institutional discourses and the spaces of Western feminism we inhabit. Mohanty (2003) uses a decolonial framework to critique the Western feminist scholarship within a framework of solidarity and shared values and has called for a "shared frame of difference" that is "based on a vision of equality" (502). Yuval-Davis (2015, 98) calls for "transversal epistemology" rooted on self reflexivity while "understanding the situated gazes" as a basis of political solidarity. How does the emergence of a South Asian feminist diasporic identity help in fostering a vision of equality with Western feminism? What are the disjuncture and complexities of South Asian feminist diasporic identities in a globalized world? Gupta (2006, 10) in her detailed analysis of seven South Asian organizations in the US comments on the ways in which these organizations "negotiate the coming together of immigrants who are defined as originating from a geographic region and sharing a common culture". She writes "The process of identity formation requires straddling wars, religious dis-harmony, and national and regional antagonisms rooted in a history of colonization, partition, and independence struggles". The question of common decolonial identity of South Asian culture as a bond to foster coalition across South Asian diaspora raises questions around authenticity of culture as we recognize culture as a social construct, and its changing dynamic nature. Given the wide variations across regions within South Asia, and within different countries, as well as the variation in individual positionalities and differences in language, religions, class, and caste would mean heterogenous experience of culture for different people. Moreover, women of colour being seen as representative of their "culture" has gendered connotations. Lee (2011, 259) when recognizing the social construction of cultures by the colonizers and colonized applauds the "perceived epistemic incongruity" and the lack of correspondence between the image and the embodiment of women of colour as a challenge to colonialism. South Asian feminist coalition built around common cultural identities thus raises several questions around heterogenous, dynamic cultures and the problematic claims around gendered cultural identities. Rather a decolonial South Asian feminist coalition imaginary disrupts the very claim to a common gendered cultural identity for not only are cultures diverse, dynamic, and heterogenous, but the link of women to culture and building of feminist coalition around culture needs unpacking. The paper will explore the following questions: What are the diverse and common intersectional positionalities of South Asian women in Canada? What are the common grounds for decolonial coalition for South Asian feminism? What are the issues with using culture as ground for coalition building? What would be some concrete steps to strengthening a decolonial South Asian feminist coalition in Canada?