This essay analyzes the history of a San Francisco Bay Area cultural institution over a period of more than four decades, and, applying to it the concept of "cultural long-distance nationalism," it attempts to tease apart the complexity of cultural practice in diaspora. The organization in question is the Chinese Folk Dance Association (CFDA), founded in 1959, a pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) troupe of amateur dancers and musicians playing Chinese instruments. As someone who was peripherally involved with the group in the mid-1970s and early 1980s and was a friend or acquaintance of a few members of the group, I became curious about the changes in its activities, its performance programs, its roles in the Bay Area community, and its self-perceived relationship to the homeland over time. I have examined the CFDA’s performance programs, photographs, and press coverage since the 1970s (earlier archival material was not available to me), as well as interviewed three of its key figures and spoken on several occasions with one of the three, the long-time executive director of the group and a friend from graduate school. What I have found is that the changes undergone by the group reveal the multiplicity of factors that go into the staging of Chineseness in diaspora and the challenges inherent in such a process. The challenges are especially acute given how rapidly the nation-state to which a specific cultural presentation is tied—the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—has itself been undergoing rapid and radical transformations.

In Place/Of Solidarity argues the exigence of developing Asian Canadian critical praxes that align and move in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignties and radical resurgence movements. In the dissertation, I analyze a body of literary texts by contemporary Indigenous and Asian North American writers whose works contain instances of reciprocal representation. I argue that actions proceeding from and grounded in praxes of acknowledgement and reciprocity constitute openings to solidarity. By enacting Asian Canadian studies explicitly with decolonial solidarities in the foreground, I argue that Asian Canadian studies may not only work in ethical alignment with Indigenous knowledges and methodologies, but may also enliven and reconstitute the solidarities upon which Asian Canadian studies is premised.

Bringing Asian Canadian studies into dialogue with scholarly work from Indigenous studies and recent research on Asian settler colonialism within a transnational Asian (North) American context, this dissertation considers reciprocal representations across a number of literary works by Indigenous and Asian Canadian women. Analyzing key texts by SKY Lee, Lee Maracle, Marie Clements, and others, and writing self-reflexively into the analysis through Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby,” I theorize forms of relational critical praxis based on acknowledgement and reciprocity. The project takes up key urges read in the undercurrents of Asian Canadian studies to argue that even as the field grapples to enunciate its own coalitional position from which to initiate solidarity, it needs concurrently to deterritorialize and resituate Asian Canadian agency on new grounds.

The goal of this project is to posit a praxical framework for enacting Asian Canadian creative solidarity that: first, moves in alignment with Indigenous resurgence and sovereignty movements grounded in place; second, is animated by a love-based ethic for research, writing, and activism that hails from legacies of intersectional, Women of Colour, and Indigenous feminisms; and finally, shifts from analyzing Asian Canadian settler-colonialism to illuminating practices of and directions for Asian Canadian unsettling and solidarity.

Over the past three decades, more than 300 Vietnamese American authors have produced at least 550 novels, 200 collections of short stories and poetry in addition to over 100 volumes of informal reflective and formal commentary essays in their native language. Nonetheless, a majority of this literature remains in utter obscurity, both within and beyond the borders of Vietnamese America. My dissertation focuses on the body of work of the feminist writer Lê Thị Huệ whose expansive breadth and constantly evolving aesthetics render her an appropriate representative and a singular phenomenon among her contemporaries in the Vietnamese diaspora. I propose the double concept exilic homelessness and situated nomadism as the theoretical framework to read Lê's body of work and as a means through which to understand Lê's ethics and aesthetics. I demonstrate that, if multiple historical displacements underlie Lê's experience as a refugee, woman, and writer, exilic homelessness and situated nomadism reveal the vicissitudes of Lê's subjectivity as an exile, feminist, and Asian American cyborg and cultural producer. Combining the ethico-critical force of poststructuralist theories (including nomadology, cyborg theory, and ecriture feminine) and politico-aesthetic strength of critical theories (including women-of-color feminism and critical denationalization), I demonstrate how Lê's work offers a meaningful opportunity to re-imagine Asian American subjectivity and politics of resistance in the contemporary diasporic moment. Ultimately I reveal how reading Lê's work requires a critical paradigm that incorporates both indigenizing and diasporic modes of Asian American subjectivity and that, not only is such paradigm theoretically and politically productive, it is also desirable.