"Indian" of Four Continents: Reading for Horizontal Relations of Violence, Complicity, and the Making of White Settler Colonialism
THE "INDIAN" OF FOUR CONTINENTS: READING FOR HORIZONTAL RELATIONS OF VIOLENCE, COMPLICITY, AND THE MAKING OF WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM by Shaista Patel A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Shaista Patel, 2018 The "Indian" of Four Continents: Reading for Horizontal Relations of Violence, Complicity, and the Making of White Settler Colonialism Shaista Patel Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto 2018 Abstract This research study asks: How do we theorize the place of non-Black people of colour vis-à- vis Indigenous peoples and Black people in North America? Paying attention to transnational power relations, and colonial entanglements of differential racialization, I particularly inquire into the place of South Asian diaspora in North America. This study draws upon critical Indigenous, Black, anti-caste, and transnational feminist theories to argue for the urgent need to place analyses of white settler colonialism here in conversation with other entangled histories, presented through discrepant spatialities and temporalities, in order to examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, caste, and relations of labor. My “unlikely archive” (Lowe, 2015) of complicity consists of a wide array of legal, representational and cultural artifacts. Drawing upon Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading of texts, and Lisa Lowe’s methodology of paying attention to past conditional temporality, this study travels from analyzing lingering coloniality in a series of photographs titled An Indian from India by a contemporary South Asian artist to Bengal of 19th century where I study Neel Darpan, an anti-colonial protest play.
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