On Anticolonial Homemaking

This talk explores anticolonial maternal politics by turning away from the conventional formulation of the singular enfleshed maternal body and toward the body of the maternal home. It does so through an architectural approach to kinship emerging from a feature-film collaboration, The Nest. A return to the writer’s childhood home, the film looks to lost histories and kinship structures embedded in place. Focusing on the Indigenous/Métis, Deaf, Japanese, and South Asian girls and women who lived in the house across 140 years of Canadian history, the film upends the colonial story in service of “brick and mortar kinships,” a counter-historical approach that captures the untold and disregarded radical maternities that characterize domestic space in the settler colony. Framed by the writer’s own maternal relations, the talk considers the transtemporal, trans-maternal, and transcultural political bonds that arise through shared space.

Julietta Singh (University of Richmond) is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across decolonial studies, the ecological humanities, queer studies, and experimental feminisms. Singh is the author of three books: Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism & Decolonial Entanglements, No Archive Will Restore You, and most recently, The Breaks, in which Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. It has recently been hailed as a best nonfiction book of the year by entities such as the New York Public Library, Book Riot, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. She is currently at work on At Home in Another World, an experimental feature film collaboration (with Chase Joynt), currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada. Singh is associate professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, University of Richmond.

Sponsors:

• Effron Center for the Study of America
• Humanities Council
• Land, Language, and Art, a Humanities Council Global Initiative