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Abstract What can narratives of suicide tell us about diasporic and Indigenous relationships to the white settler state? This article engages relational critique to examine trans/femme/bisexual South Asian Canadian filmmaker Vivek Shraya's short film I want to kill myself (2017) and queer Cree/Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones's feature film Fire Song (2015). Both films challenge the spectacularity of suicide, effectively situating suicide on a continuum of “slow death.” However, the films also stage distinct relationships between suicide, community, and the state that emerge from diasporic and Native positionalities within a white settler society. Whereas Shraya's diasporic struggle with suicide is alleviated by forging community within settler spaces, Fire Song counters pathologizing depictions of reserve communities by emphasizing resurgent Indigenous practices and their refusal of settler logics.

In this paper, I argue that settler colonialism is a project of desire, and that attention to desire is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between racialized subjects, whose access to political power in settler regimes is tenuous and uneven. Drawing upon psychoanalytically-inflected theories of race, I examine how this desire is articulated, and look to its effects. To do so, I offer a reading of the 2004 South Asian-American film, Indian Cowboy, reflecting on how racialized subjects negotiate and express the desire to access and be included in settler subjectivity.

Abstracts These conversations with independent academics Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Steven Salaita, and Leanne Simpson were inspired by the following questions: How do we make sense of intellectual work that happens [...]

In late 2004, the people of Vancouver were outraged when the public transit authorities at TransLink instituted its third fare increase in five years. The Vancouver Bus Riders Union (BRU) [...]

This article develops a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood's promulgation of the "mythical Indian," I argue that a focus on settlement-rather than on bodies-is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 "blaxploitation Western" Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America's Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity, Thomasine and Bushrod productively illuminates how representations of Indigenous erasure work in often ambiguous and contradictory ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]