Jutta Weldes’ article “Globalization is Science Fiction” and edited collection To Seek Out New Worlds demonstrated the intertextuality of Cold War era science fiction about interplanetary colonization and the liberal desire for hegemonic stability expressed through the global political conditions of US militarism and the capitalist world order. This paper offers a decolonial feminist reading of the material elements of the Earthseed poetic philosophy written by protagonist Lauren Olamina in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and read by Lauren’s daughter Larkin in Parable of the Talents after “The Pox”, an apocalyptic convergence of global warming, racial capitalism, and the election of an authoritarian President of the United States. I argue that, in the world of Butler’s novels, the matter of earth, trees, and seeds can be read as an intertext with the poetic archive of Lauren’s Earthseed philosophy written in her journals. Butler’s Black feminist intertext disrupts colonial archetypes, political grammars, and imaginaries about apocalyptic scenarios in speculative fiction and the governance of global warming. I discuss climate (in)justice in Butler’s Parables in the context of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt to unsettle claims of Anthropocene exceptionalism through a decolonial feminist reading of elemental matter.

In this paper, I draw on my experiences teaching with the “Introduction” chapter by Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair in Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations. I discuss how the chapter opens up generative conversations on decolonizing IR theories of global capitalism and naming political conditions of settler colonialism. I begin with the experience of reading the chapter in the PhD IR core course at York University during the 2008 – 9 CUPE 3903 graduate student and contract faculty strike and the global financial crisis. Then I talk about the chapter’s themes of representation and agency in the context of my seminar “Popular Cultures and World Politics” during the week on “Satire or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neoliberalism”, reading the chapter alongside Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite. Next I discuss the chapter’s theme of transnational solidarities in my seminar “Climate Change and the Futures of Global Politics” during the week on “Climate Justice and Transnational Activism”, reading the chapter alongside Vincanne Adams et al.’s article “Chronic Disaster Syndrome: Displacement, disaster capitalism and the eviction of the poor from New Orleans” and a chapter from Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s memoire The Right To Be Cold.

Speculative fiction invites readers to think critically about conditions of our everyday lives and the work of stories in making future worlds. Black feminist speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler bequeathed her archive of papers to The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California near her hometown of Pasadena. I draw on my 2018 and 2019 reading of the Butler archive of manuscript drafts, speeches, research files, journals, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera. Reading her archive is not merely a process of retrieving behind the scenes insights on working through story problems but rather reveals Butler’s methods of building a life as an artist within the white male dominated Science-Fiction/Fantasy publishing industry in the United States (see Lynell George 2020). I discuss the museum’s 2019 centenary exhibition NINETEEN NINETEEN that invited critical reviewing of the origins of the Huntington family fortune and brought a global lens to understanding the world in which the institution was founded – the influenza pandemic, workers’ strikes and unionization, the women’s suffrage movement, and foundation of the League of Nations. This exhibition was situated in the broader contemporary global movements of curators transforming the self-mythologizing and exclusive legacies of museum collections.

Conventional International Relations (IR) theories Realism and Liberalism understand power in terms of state military dominance, the rule of law, and stability of capitalist markets. I contribute a transnational feminist analysis to IR of the hierarchical colonial gendered, racialized, economic power dynamics of Canadian and U.S. settler colonialism as well as empowerment through decolonial artwork and popular cultures. Decolonial speculative fiction allows readers to develop imaginative sensibilities and analytically make sense of how colonial modernity defines not only who is a political subject of a sovereign state but who is a human subject with transnational agency to enact change in global contexts. Indigenous storytellers who call attention to the systemic violences of settler colonialism enact Indigenous self-determination through envisioning decolonial futures. My reading of Anishinaabe novelist, poet, and scholar Gerald Vizenor’s speculative fiction book “Treaty Shirts: October 2034 – A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation” focuses on diplomacy, treaty relationships, and constitutional law. My reading contributes to transnational feminist praxis, which emphasizes transforming everyday lived conditions through creative self-expression and cultivating methods of envisioning empowering futures.

My presentation will address the NWSA conference subtheme five: “World-Making and Resistance Imaginaries”. The international system of sovereign states has emerged through the Eurocentric settler colonial imaginary and material political claims to territorial sovereignty in the Americas. Settler colonial claims to exclusive sovereignty attempt to normalize the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from traditional lands and waterways and do not honour settler treaty responsibilities. Settler colonialism is dependent on the relational institutionalization of settler privilege and violence of dispossession, assimilation, and social marginalization experienced and resisted by Indigenous peoples. Analyzing the discourses and material conditions of cultural production provides insights to understanding the powerful role of artwork and popular cultures in subject formation, nationalisms, and collective memory. Decolonial post-apocalyptic science fiction by Indigenous storytellers calls attention to the systemic violences of settler colonialism and enacts Indigenous self-determination through envisioning decolonial futures (Dillon 2012). Afrofuturism transforms how white supremacy and systemic anti-black racism defines who is a human subject with agency in the colonial imagination (Anderson & Jones 2015; Campbell 2013). Octavia E. Butler and Zainab Amadahy’s science fiction novels, and my transnational feminist reading of them, offer an intersectional analysis of the colonial gendered, racialized, economic conditions of global militarism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy (Amadahy 2013; Amadahy 2013; Butler 1993; Butler 1998). I see this work contributing to transnational feminist praxis which emphasizes transforming the everyday lived conditions of patriarchal capitalist colonial modernity through creative self-expression and cultivating methods of envisioning decolonial futures (Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Moya 2012; Spivak 2012).

The global conditions of colonial capitalism have been foundational to the emergence of the international system of sovereign states and the discipline of IR. Historically, postcolonial IR has named the ontological, epistemological, and material violences of colonial capitalism. Yet the ongoing violences of settler colonialism remain systematically undertheorized in both conventional and critical IR. Decolonial contemporary artwork offers transformative potentials to unsettle colonial worldviews and ways of imagining subjectivity, community, and agency in global contexts. Focusing on the role of IR knowledge production in the project of modernity, I draw on transnational feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, postcolonial, and cultural political economy theoretical and methodological contributions to debates on political representation, subject formation, and knowledge production. With a transnational feminist analysis of power, violence, and agency, I engage with decolonial contemporary artwork (the work of artists, curators, art historians, art administrators, and audiences) to analyze IR theories, methods, and pedagogies. With an intersectional analysis of the embodiment of knowledge production, attending to how systemic power dynamics of our everyday lived experiences inform our agency as producers of knowledge in IR and as subjects in world politics, I argue that reading decolonial contemporary artwork in IR can be understood as transnational feminist praxis.

I analyze Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 Venice Biennale performance-based video installation Fountain as an enactment of creative presence at an intersection of international and transnational politics. I discuss how Belmore’s aesthetic method of engaging with water as a visual interface between the artist and viewer, by projecting the film of her performance onto a stream of falling water in the Canadian Pavilion exhibition, offers a productive method of understanding and potentially transforming colonial power relations in world politics. I argue that Belmore’s Fountain in Venice is an expression of Indigenous self-determination by discussing the historical context of the international art world dynamics of the Venice Biennale, Belmore’s decolonial engagement with water as a performing material and medium in Fountain, and how Fountain is situated in relation with contemporary transnational Indigenous land/water reclamations and cultural resurgences. I engage in a transnational feminist analysis of academic knowledge production to argue that contextualizing the undertheorization of settler colonialism in International Relations Realist, Liberal and Critical theories, methods and pedagogies involves examining the relational normalization of Westphalian territorial sovereignty as the universal system of international politics and the erasure of the transnational politics of Indigenous peoples’ self-determination through lands/waters reclamations and cultural resurgences.

Chair: Emily Merson. Participants: Monique Verdin, Clarice Friloux and Brenda Dardar Robichaux. This innovative panel features local community organizers from the Houma Nation who have been challenging the effects of oil and gas exploration in southern Louisiana for decades. The entry of the oil and gas industry is only the latest iteration of layered histories of settler-colonial rule that are now expressed largely through the actions of the extractive sector. The panel explores the struggles of the Houma community to once again recover and rebuild a local Indigenous lifeworld encroached upon by settler society. Through film, discussion and testimonials the three participants will reject on the intersections of the global and the local, the unique contributions of Indigenous women to community sustainability, on-going effects of colonization, the still developing relations between Louisiana’s peoples, the devastating impact of coastal erosion, and the ways in which local struggles against oil and gas development point to alternative understandings of citizenship, community, and possible futures represented by bayou cultures of self-suficiency. The panel will be an opportunity for ISA participants to pause and consider the local context within which the conference unfolds and to begin unravelling the settler colonial geographies that efface local Indigenous presence and claims to self-determination and sovereignty.

Chair: Konstantin Kilibarda. Participants: Wanda Nanibush, Zainab Amadahy, Audrey Huntley, Tannis Nielsen. Launched in November 2012 by four women, #IdleNoMore quickly grew into a national and eventually global movement for Indigenous rights and self-determination. Through round-dances, teach-ins, long-marches, hunger-strikes and road blockades, the movement adopted several tactics to bring Indigenous sovereignty struggles and Canada's colonial and treaty relations with indigenous peoples to the forefront of public debate. Central to the movement’s concerns is a range of issues emerging from the establishment of the Canadian colonial state. #IdleNoMore analyzes the effects of several contradictions of the global political economy on Indigenous communities, contributing to new feminist understandings of environmental protection, human rights, and international heritage, including land and water use, treaty legislation, child-welfare, and cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. These issues are raised within the broader discussion on the impact of colonial administration on Indigenous governance and gender relations and are closely linked to similar discussions occurring throughout the Americas between Indigenous communities, government representatives and international organizations. #IdleNoMore provides an opportunity for rethinking Indigeneity, sovereignty and transnational/global feminisms by reframing identity, social relations, ecology, and cosmology, placing these issues in a hemispheric context, and teasing out tensions and solidarities between various movements and ideological perspectives—locally and globally.

Chair: Robbie Shilliam. Panelists: Anna M. Agathangelou, Hayden King, Sheryl Lightfoot, Scott Morgensen, Meera Sabaratnam, Alina Sajed. This panel engages with possibilities for decolonizing IR knowledge production about settler colonialism and Indigeneity. IR as a discipline and field erases the self-determination struggles of Indigenous peoples in the realm of the “international”, thereby silencing their claims as well as the imaginaries such claims embody. Settler state laws, institutions and every day practices seek to contain Indigenous-settler relationships within the domain of “domestic politics”. Indigenous peoples contest historical and ongoing settler colonial violences and hierarchical power dynamics as relationships of inter-national politics through: reclaiming land; inherent rights to self-determination; maintaining transnational relationships between Indigenous communities; emphasizing how treaty rights/responsibilities are nation to nation relationships with settler states; and contesting settler colonial claims to territorial sovereignty and governance through international institutions such as the United Nations. The panelists discuss how unsettling conventional methods of IR knowledge production is an important part of decolonizing social relationships among settlers and Indigenous peoples. Entry points for discussion include: research methods, writing, pedagogy, curriculum design, accessibility in academic knowledge production (tuition, journal paywalls, conference fees) and universities as contested sites of knowledge production.