Diaspora Walks: Small Lessons in Unlearning

Abstract

This essay is a thought experiment that explores walking’s potential in enacting recognition of Indigenous and territorial lands with the hope of rendering pedagogies of citizenship anew. More precisely, I ask whether walking can offer everyday lessons in unlearning Canada’s settler colonial frameworks of citizenship. This essay, attempting to respond to the question, also hopes to add to conversations in diaspora studies and the ways diaspora performance studies can learn from Indigenous recognition and care of territorial lands as relations and Indigenous methodological interventions to unsettle colonialism. Using a feminist and critical Muslim studies positionality, I bring together research in performance studies, walking methodologies, and politics of diasporic subjects in order to explore how walking as an everyday and citational form might offer diaspora subjects affective ways to home in on a relational politics.