Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representation in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le (review)

quynh nhu le's Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representation in the Américas is an innovative hemispheric and transnational text that examines the similarities and divergences of Asian and Indigenous narratives across multiple imperial and settler-colonial projects. Through theoretically deft analyses of literature, plays, essays, and government apologies that center on Asian and Indigenous encounters and crossings, Le makes a significant intervention into the fields of global and transnational American Indian / Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, and comparative ethnic studies. Unsettled Solidarities' concentration on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century narratives exposes asymmetries of settler colonialism across the Américas and provides important examples of potential cross-racial solidarities against imperialism, historical erasure, and global capitalism.

Le's use of the term "Américas" instead of "Americas" signals her strategic expansion of geopolitical boundaries to analyze works based in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil. This expansion illuminates distinct yet interconnected processes of colonialization, settlement, and racialization. Through a relational hemispheric focus, Unsettled Solidarities discerns the ways state violence "echoes" through Indigenous peoples' and Asians' different experiences of erasure, removal, and incarceration. Le compellingly argues that settler-colonial hegemonies' "uneven incorporation of Indigenous and non-Native racialized communities' social cultural and political articulations into the imperatives of the settler state … reinscrib[es] the territorial claims and telos of the settler state" (4).

Throughout the book Le asserts that tense—as a grammatical, emotional, and/or temporal state—plays a central role in the texts she integrates. In each chapter, Le moves across the Américas identifying how settler-state hegemonies create different tensions for and between Asian American and Indigenous people. In chapter 1 Le uses Maxine Hong Kingston's rendering of her ancestors in Hawai'i in China Men (1980) and Ronin Brown, a fictional soldier of Okichi and Anishinaabe descent, in Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) to consider obscured histories and the entanglements of imperialism and settler colonialism. Le contends that these "affective ruptures" and entanglements allow for new assemblages of feelings from which to fight against imperialism and toward a global transformation attentive to Indigenous futurities (28).

Le's second chapter centers on cultural productions that remember and attempt to reconcile state violence. The chapter compares the Canadian government's formal 1988 apology to Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War and the House of Commons' 2008 apology to Inuit, Métis, and First Nations peoples for residential schools thirty years later. Le posits that the performative public apologies provide coherence to the settler state's national identity, securing the belief that inequality only occurs in the past and "foreclos[ing] other transformative feelings and collectivities" (61). Le reads these apologies against two works that temporally proceed the apologies, Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (1981) and Marie Clement's play Burning Vision (2002). Le establishes that these texts discuss Asian-Indigenous "cross-community acknowledgements" of grief and melancholia caused by the setter state that were not acknowledged in the state's apologies (74).

The next chapters approach the politics of racial mixing in the Américas. Chapter 3 addresses anticapitalist resistance to global encroachment through Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Le describes how legacies of mestizaje/mestiçagem racial intermixing inform contemporary narratives of decolonization and "cross racial/colonial contacts" (126). Thus, Le argues, Silko and Yamashita reveal the colonial and interracial tensions of the characters and envision possibilities of global alliances against transnational capitalism. In the fourth chapter Le discerningly explores the continuing theme of racial mixing in the Américas through personal narratives. Le considers the ways life stories can "illuminate the biopolitical and sovereign logics and instabilities" of settler states (132). Le examines two personal histories alongside one another, Dorothy Christian's essay "Articulating a Silence" and Gregg Sarris's essay "Mabel McKay: 'Weaving a Dream...