Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Abstract

ABSTRACT:By bracketing whiteness, Avatar: The Last Airbender reorients us to how global colonial modernity produces biopolitical difference as a technology of management to defamiliarize Asian and Indigenous relationalities. Approaching it as a site of alternative contact, I consider Lisa Lowe's intimacies of colonial comparative processes in apposition with insurgent counter-intimacies. This essay traces portrayals of Asian imperialism, colonialism, and Asian diasporic settler colonialism in tandem with comparative Indigeneities and decolonial solidarity. ATLA engages Asianness and Indigeneity together in a mode that is relational but not statically schematic, extending influential work by scholars thinking across Indigenous, Asian, and Asian diasporic studies.