Malissa Phung
Malissa Phung is a second-generation settler descendant of Sino-Vietnamese refugees who have resettled on the territories of the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakado, and Tongva peoples. She is honoured and privileged to have lived and worked as an uninvited guest on the territories of the Huron-Wendat, Mississauga, Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe and Algonquin peoples. Her research focuses on Asian-Indigenous relations, Asian diasporic culture, decolonial advocacy, and anti-racism in an intersectional framework. Having recently completed her PhD Dissertation—Reaching Gold Mountain: Diasporic Labour Narratives in Chinese Canadian Literature Film—at McMaster University, she currently teaches English and Communication at Trent University and Sheridan College.
Supervisors: Dr. Donald Goellnicht, Dr. Daniel Coleman, and Dr. Nadine Attewell
Supervisors: Dr. Donald Goellnicht, Dr. Daniel Coleman, and Dr. Nadine Attewell
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (8)
Uploads
Papers by Malissa Phung
Furthermore, some refugees are themselves Indigenous, while some occupied positions of neo-colonial power within their home countries, which implicates them in the continued dispossession of presently existing Indigenous people. As such, “refugee” and “Indigenous” are not always mutually exclusive; in some instances those referred to as “refugee” are at the same time undergoing a process of forced de-indigenization or have, themselves, been the drivers of de-indigenization. When the complexities of refugeeism and Indigeneity are transported to settler colonies, where the distinction between colonized/colonizer and Indigenous/non-Indigenous is palpable and where colonization continues unabated, refugees are caught by a purported binary of Indigenous/settler.
In the context of Canada, Indigeneity is more readily understood as a terminological placeholder for hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations whose stories of creation and histories of existence tie them, inseparably, to the land they live on. Also referred to as First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, or as “Aboriginal people” in accordance with the Canadian Constitution’s s.35 “Aboriginal rights” section, Indigenous people entangled with settler colonialism have a long history of displacement and dispossession precipitated by parallel processes of global capitalism, empire, and war. Under assimilatory legislation commissioned as a part of a wider genocidal project, Indigenous people were targeted by the Canadian nation-state for eradication and through their survival continue to contend with a racist, anti-Indigenous country that is, for the most part, still committed to a vision of de-indigenizing Indigenous people.
So while refugeeism and Indigeneity may substantially intersect on a number of levels, they are rarely addressed in relation to one another in either refugee or Indigenous studies (Coleman et al.). In this chapter, the scholars, hailing from Métis and Sino-Vietnamese refugee backgrounds, will address this gap by juxtaposing their families’ migration narratives and discussing the practice of genealogical disclosure as an accountability and relation-building tool. Already a common praxis amongst Indigenous, feminist, and racialized scholars, the practice of genealogical disclosure functions as a strategy of decolonial and anti-racist resistance for the authors that ethically situates their knowledge production and political investments as scholars, pedagogues, and community allies. Ultimately, they claim that the practice of genealogical disclosure, grounded in Indigenous kinship principles, performs an ethical and pedagogical role as it lays bare the refugee and Indigenous person’s responsibilities to each other, to their communities, and to the land and its sentient and non-sentient inhabitants.
anti-racist memorial project also problematically reinvests in the model minority myth, indigenizes the figure of the Chinese labourer, and upholds a settler colonial relationship to the land.
Talks by Malissa Phung
This paper joins these historiographical initiatives to further document and render visible Chinese-Indigenous relations on the Canadian prairies (less known and documented than those on the west coast) as depicted in Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed. That the Chinese family in Halfbreed shelter Campbell when she becomes a homeless teenaged mother, employ her as a waitress when Canadian legislation prohibited white and Indigenous women from working in Chinese businesses, and eventually adopt her to be part of their family attests to the ways in which racist and colonial structures have actually enabled Sino-Indigenous relations to thrive, relations that should be remembered to counteract the normative teleology of the Gold Mountain archive.
Since Cox only examines the writings of Euro-American settlers, I examine how a red reading can be applied to the literature of Chinese settlers. Drawing on critical race and anti-colonial studies scholarship, I carefully position the role of settlers of colour within this colonial narrative framework and argue that red readings can be applied to texts such as Denise Chong's memoir of Chinese Canadian settlement that hardly feature the representation of Indigeneity. Such approaches work to dismantle and decolonize settler colonial storytelling and reading traditions that perpetuate or naturalize Native absence and disappearance. While settler narratives of labour and work ethic can constitute settler origin narratives of belonging, I demonstrate that such narratives can be framed in a critical race and anti-colonial reading framework that works to restore and foster good relations between all settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Central to this practice of genealogical disclosure are concepts and categories of Indigenous nationhood and settler of colour complicity deemed contentious by scholarly and activist advocates for open borders: intersecting concepts and categories that we claim have the capacity to complicate and nuance understandings of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationalities. We contend that distinguishing and maintaining the sovereignty of the Indigenous from the migrant, knowing full well that all migrants have once been indigenous elsewhere, more fully acknowledges the historical legacies of our multiple genealogies and contributes to a stronger foundation for building mutual relations and alliances between Indigenous communities and diasporic communities of colour.
In this paper, I discuss an anti-colonial approach to reading historical and literary treatments of Chinese exclusion in Canada. I argue that literary scholars must attend to the narrative strategies and tropes around labour that run the risk of erasing an Indigenous presence in order to assert a settler presence in Canada's national imaginary. It is my understanding that historical and fictional narratives of the Chinese diasporic labourer involve more than a historical re-telling of the marginalized experience of early Chinese settlers; they inevitably launch a social justice argument for how early Chinese labourers should have belonged to the nation and what settler benefits and privileges they were entitled to on account of their nation building contributions. Rather than approaching Chinese exclusion as a hegemonic majority-minority racial conflict, I will discuss an anti-colonial reading methodology that draws on intersectional analysis, Asian diaspora studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous critical theory. I ask, how does one go about reading Chinese exclusion alongside Indigenous displacement and dispossession in Canada? What does it mean to assert Chinese presence in the shadow of Indigenous land and autochthony claims? And how do such assertions affect the building of cross-cultural alliances and political solidarities between diasporas and Indigenous nations and communities?
My presentation will entail an examination of both the Mohegan Sun’s Chinese language website and the photographs I took of the Asian themed décor of the Sunrise Square, the Mohegan Sun’s Asian gaming marketplace. The Asian models displayed on the Chinese version of the website and the provision of Asian employees, an Asian design aesthetic, authentic Chinese cuisine options, and Asian language signs can be read as a capitalist venture to corner a niche market, a simple supply and demand exchange. But within this capitalist framework, I ask whether the racially segregating effects of ethnic marketing may also create mutually beneficial relations. Is it possible to read this cultural and economic trade as a “racial project” given the ways in which Asian migrant and Indigenous histories of exploitation, exclusion, and territorial displacement are intimately linked in settler colonial societies like the US?
In this paper, I discuss an anti-colonial approach to reading the history of Chinese exclusion in Canada. I argue that a text such as Karen Cho's documentary In the Shadow of Gold Mountain runs the risk of erasing an Indigenous presence in order to assert a Chinese presence in Canada's national imaginary. Such texts involve more than a historical re-telling of early Chinese settlement; they inevitably launch a social justice argument for how the early Chinese labourers should have belonged to the nation and what settler benefits and privileges they were entitled to on account of their nation building contributions. Rather than approaching Chinese exclusion as a hegemonic majority-minority racial conflict, I present a reading methodology that draws on intersectional analysis, Asian diaspora studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous critical theory. Curiously, what would it mean to read Chinese exclusion alongside Indigenous displacement and dispossession in Canada? What does it mean to assert Chinese presence in the shadow of Indigenous claims to autochthony?
concept of reconciliation through a lens of artistic practice.
This paper explores the colonial implications behind the invocation of gold as a diasporic origin myth for the Chinese diaspora in North America. Gold Mountain, a symbol of hope and prosperity for the Chinese diaspora, disavows the colonial land histories on the West Coast and the Georgia Gold Rush, the first American gold rush that lead to the devastating eviction of Cherokee people from their homeland in Dahlonega, the Cherokee word for yellow rock. Using Judy Fong Bates’ short story, “Eat Bitter” as a case study, this paper outlines a “red reading” approach to Asian diasporic writing that foregrounds Indigenous concerns and epistemologies even when the presence of Indigenous people appears to be marginal or entirely absent. While Asian Canadian and American scholars have only recently begun to address historical and cultural accounts of Indigenous-Asian relations, this paper expands on these studies to address the construction and signification of Native absence in the historical and cultural representation of Asian diasporic origins on Indigenous territory.
The current Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools, as well as broader state-sponsored projects of redress, mark a significant “crossroads” in Canadian history. However, the demand for, or hope of, closure, which is a recurring trope in state and institutional discourses of reconciliation and redress, including Prime Minister Harper’s apology seem to elide the ongoing complicity of, and benefits accrued to, non-Aboriginal peoples. This panel will foster a discussion on the varying and uneven way in which non-Aboriginal people continue to benefit within the Canadian state, as a colonial project, and specifically through state-sponsored projects of reconciliation. Further, it will explore what it would mean for non-Aboriginal Canadians to participate more fully in these process.
This panel brings together five scholars who are engaging with this critical problem from diverse points of interest.
Furthermore, some refugees are themselves Indigenous, while some occupied positions of neo-colonial power within their home countries, which implicates them in the continued dispossession of presently existing Indigenous people. As such, “refugee” and “Indigenous” are not always mutually exclusive; in some instances those referred to as “refugee” are at the same time undergoing a process of forced de-indigenization or have, themselves, been the drivers of de-indigenization. When the complexities of refugeeism and Indigeneity are transported to settler colonies, where the distinction between colonized/colonizer and Indigenous/non-Indigenous is palpable and where colonization continues unabated, refugees are caught by a purported binary of Indigenous/settler.
In the context of Canada, Indigeneity is more readily understood as a terminological placeholder for hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations whose stories of creation and histories of existence tie them, inseparably, to the land they live on. Also referred to as First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, or as “Aboriginal people” in accordance with the Canadian Constitution’s s.35 “Aboriginal rights” section, Indigenous people entangled with settler colonialism have a long history of displacement and dispossession precipitated by parallel processes of global capitalism, empire, and war. Under assimilatory legislation commissioned as a part of a wider genocidal project, Indigenous people were targeted by the Canadian nation-state for eradication and through their survival continue to contend with a racist, anti-Indigenous country that is, for the most part, still committed to a vision of de-indigenizing Indigenous people.
So while refugeeism and Indigeneity may substantially intersect on a number of levels, they are rarely addressed in relation to one another in either refugee or Indigenous studies (Coleman et al.). In this chapter, the scholars, hailing from Métis and Sino-Vietnamese refugee backgrounds, will address this gap by juxtaposing their families’ migration narratives and discussing the practice of genealogical disclosure as an accountability and relation-building tool. Already a common praxis amongst Indigenous, feminist, and racialized scholars, the practice of genealogical disclosure functions as a strategy of decolonial and anti-racist resistance for the authors that ethically situates their knowledge production and political investments as scholars, pedagogues, and community allies. Ultimately, they claim that the practice of genealogical disclosure, grounded in Indigenous kinship principles, performs an ethical and pedagogical role as it lays bare the refugee and Indigenous person’s responsibilities to each other, to their communities, and to the land and its sentient and non-sentient inhabitants.
anti-racist memorial project also problematically reinvests in the model minority myth, indigenizes the figure of the Chinese labourer, and upholds a settler colonial relationship to the land.
This paper joins these historiographical initiatives to further document and render visible Chinese-Indigenous relations on the Canadian prairies (less known and documented than those on the west coast) as depicted in Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed. That the Chinese family in Halfbreed shelter Campbell when she becomes a homeless teenaged mother, employ her as a waitress when Canadian legislation prohibited white and Indigenous women from working in Chinese businesses, and eventually adopt her to be part of their family attests to the ways in which racist and colonial structures have actually enabled Sino-Indigenous relations to thrive, relations that should be remembered to counteract the normative teleology of the Gold Mountain archive.
Since Cox only examines the writings of Euro-American settlers, I examine how a red reading can be applied to the literature of Chinese settlers. Drawing on critical race and anti-colonial studies scholarship, I carefully position the role of settlers of colour within this colonial narrative framework and argue that red readings can be applied to texts such as Denise Chong's memoir of Chinese Canadian settlement that hardly feature the representation of Indigeneity. Such approaches work to dismantle and decolonize settler colonial storytelling and reading traditions that perpetuate or naturalize Native absence and disappearance. While settler narratives of labour and work ethic can constitute settler origin narratives of belonging, I demonstrate that such narratives can be framed in a critical race and anti-colonial reading framework that works to restore and foster good relations between all settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Central to this practice of genealogical disclosure are concepts and categories of Indigenous nationhood and settler of colour complicity deemed contentious by scholarly and activist advocates for open borders: intersecting concepts and categories that we claim have the capacity to complicate and nuance understandings of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationalities. We contend that distinguishing and maintaining the sovereignty of the Indigenous from the migrant, knowing full well that all migrants have once been indigenous elsewhere, more fully acknowledges the historical legacies of our multiple genealogies and contributes to a stronger foundation for building mutual relations and alliances between Indigenous communities and diasporic communities of colour.
In this paper, I discuss an anti-colonial approach to reading historical and literary treatments of Chinese exclusion in Canada. I argue that literary scholars must attend to the narrative strategies and tropes around labour that run the risk of erasing an Indigenous presence in order to assert a settler presence in Canada's national imaginary. It is my understanding that historical and fictional narratives of the Chinese diasporic labourer involve more than a historical re-telling of the marginalized experience of early Chinese settlers; they inevitably launch a social justice argument for how early Chinese labourers should have belonged to the nation and what settler benefits and privileges they were entitled to on account of their nation building contributions. Rather than approaching Chinese exclusion as a hegemonic majority-minority racial conflict, I will discuss an anti-colonial reading methodology that draws on intersectional analysis, Asian diaspora studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous critical theory. I ask, how does one go about reading Chinese exclusion alongside Indigenous displacement and dispossession in Canada? What does it mean to assert Chinese presence in the shadow of Indigenous land and autochthony claims? And how do such assertions affect the building of cross-cultural alliances and political solidarities between diasporas and Indigenous nations and communities?
My presentation will entail an examination of both the Mohegan Sun’s Chinese language website and the photographs I took of the Asian themed décor of the Sunrise Square, the Mohegan Sun’s Asian gaming marketplace. The Asian models displayed on the Chinese version of the website and the provision of Asian employees, an Asian design aesthetic, authentic Chinese cuisine options, and Asian language signs can be read as a capitalist venture to corner a niche market, a simple supply and demand exchange. But within this capitalist framework, I ask whether the racially segregating effects of ethnic marketing may also create mutually beneficial relations. Is it possible to read this cultural and economic trade as a “racial project” given the ways in which Asian migrant and Indigenous histories of exploitation, exclusion, and territorial displacement are intimately linked in settler colonial societies like the US?
In this paper, I discuss an anti-colonial approach to reading the history of Chinese exclusion in Canada. I argue that a text such as Karen Cho's documentary In the Shadow of Gold Mountain runs the risk of erasing an Indigenous presence in order to assert a Chinese presence in Canada's national imaginary. Such texts involve more than a historical re-telling of early Chinese settlement; they inevitably launch a social justice argument for how the early Chinese labourers should have belonged to the nation and what settler benefits and privileges they were entitled to on account of their nation building contributions. Rather than approaching Chinese exclusion as a hegemonic majority-minority racial conflict, I present a reading methodology that draws on intersectional analysis, Asian diaspora studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous critical theory. Curiously, what would it mean to read Chinese exclusion alongside Indigenous displacement and dispossession in Canada? What does it mean to assert Chinese presence in the shadow of Indigenous claims to autochthony?
concept of reconciliation through a lens of artistic practice.
This paper explores the colonial implications behind the invocation of gold as a diasporic origin myth for the Chinese diaspora in North America. Gold Mountain, a symbol of hope and prosperity for the Chinese diaspora, disavows the colonial land histories on the West Coast and the Georgia Gold Rush, the first American gold rush that lead to the devastating eviction of Cherokee people from their homeland in Dahlonega, the Cherokee word for yellow rock. Using Judy Fong Bates’ short story, “Eat Bitter” as a case study, this paper outlines a “red reading” approach to Asian diasporic writing that foregrounds Indigenous concerns and epistemologies even when the presence of Indigenous people appears to be marginal or entirely absent. While Asian Canadian and American scholars have only recently begun to address historical and cultural accounts of Indigenous-Asian relations, this paper expands on these studies to address the construction and signification of Native absence in the historical and cultural representation of Asian diasporic origins on Indigenous territory.
The current Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools, as well as broader state-sponsored projects of redress, mark a significant “crossroads” in Canadian history. However, the demand for, or hope of, closure, which is a recurring trope in state and institutional discourses of reconciliation and redress, including Prime Minister Harper’s apology seem to elide the ongoing complicity of, and benefits accrued to, non-Aboriginal peoples. This panel will foster a discussion on the varying and uneven way in which non-Aboriginal people continue to benefit within the Canadian state, as a colonial project, and specifically through state-sponsored projects of reconciliation. Further, it will explore what it would mean for non-Aboriginal Canadians to participate more fully in these process.
This panel brings together five scholars who are engaging with this critical problem from diverse points of interest.
While I agree that people of colour participate in and benefit from the on-going displacement of Indigenous peoples, I question whether simple parallels can be drawn between settlers of colour and earlier colonial French and British settler-invaders. In this paper, I will build on Lawrence and Dua’s critical intervention in order to think through the ways in which the entry of Chinese settlers in Canada has put them in colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples. I will review nineteenth century archival documents and historical literature on Chinese labour and immigration debates through a settler colonial framework in order to propose that Chinese settlers have played a multiply ‘invasive’ role in Canadian culture. It is my contention that diasporic Chinese labourers have circulated since the nineteenth century as both a racial and moral threat to the national fabric and as foreign labourers appropriating economic resources ‘rightfully’ belonging to working class white settlers, when these resources more rightfully belong to Indigenous peoples. This paper is drawn from my dissertation project, which will contribute to recent scholarship on settlers of colour in the fields of Asian Canadian and Asian American diaspora studies, particularly in the case of Japanese settlers constituting the hegemonic class in Hawai’i.
While I agree that people of colour participate in the on-going displacement of Indigenous peoples, I question whether simple parallels can be drawn between settlers of colour and earlier colonial French and British settler-invaders. In this paper, I will build on Lawrence and Dua’s crucial intervention in order to think through the ways in which the entry of Chinese settlers in Canada has put them in colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples. By drawing on the work of settler colonial theorists such as Diana Brydon, Alan Lawson, and Sunera Thobani, I will put forth a more nuanced conceptualization of settlers of colour. Rather than positioning Chinese immigrants and their descendants monolithically as settler-invaders, I will discuss the ways in which Chinese settlers have been figured historically as an ‘invasive’ threat to both white settlers and Indigenous peoples. I will conclude by questioning whether the term settler can be recuperated by settlers of colour as a politicized expression of solidarity with Indigenous peoples in the same manner that the Maori term ‘pakeha’ has been taken up by the descendents of British settlers and other white migrants in New Zealand.
That Maracle’s intertextual poem precedes “Yin Chin,” a short story about an Indigenous woman haunted by her and her community’s racist attitudes towards old ‘Chinamen,’ begs a closer comparative analysis of the two works than has been offered to date. In this paper, I will look at Lee’s critical appropriation of Indigenous characters and will explore the ways in which these texts speak to each other and how they imagine Indigenous and Asian Canadian affiliations. Since much work in settler colonial studies has focused mainly on the white settler-invader figure, I will be exploring the problematic settler status of Asian immigrants as settler-invaders even as they are simultaneously discriminated against and treated as subalterns in Canada. I will reflect on what this complex colonial relationship might mean for building solidarities between Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians, especially in British Columbia, an unceded territory which situates these narratives and has come to be increasingly populated by Asian ‘settlers’ and their descendents.
The political investments driving this project show a deep commitment to anti-racist and decolonial advocacy. By examining how Chinese cultural workers in Canada have tried to do justice to the Head Tax generation’s experiences of racial exclusion and intersectional oppressions in fiction, non-fiction, graphic non-fiction, and documentaries, it asks whether there are ways to ethically assert an excluded and marginalized Chinese presence in the context of the settler colonial state. By doing justice to the exclusion of Chinese settlers in the national imaginary, do Chinese cultural workers as a result perform an injustice to the originary presence of Indigenous peoples? This thesis re-examines the anti-racist imperative that frames Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion in Canada: by exploring whether social justice projects by racially marginalized communities can simultaneously re-assert an excluded racialized presence and honour their treaty rights and responsibilities, it works to apprehend the colonial positionality of the Chinese diaspora within the Canadian settler state.