"Unsettling Solidarities" examines Asian North American and Indigenous solidarities, alliances, and interactions imagined in the contemporary literatures of these two communities, tracing how these moments of literary contact reveal the vexed dynamics of race and resistance after the mid-twentieth century. Emerging out of anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of the 1950-70s, narratives by Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Leslie Marmon Silko grapple with the limits of identity-based cultural politics, articulating in its their place different collectivities and ethical relations that can account for the increasing stratifications of power within and across racial identities.

The dissertation tracks the aesthetically diverse ways these writers imagine their own and each other's communities within their revised cultural politics, and argues that the ambivalent depictions register these communities' differential yet mutually constitutive histories and critical visions for social justice. Recent scholarship in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies has posited a comparative framework---within and between communities of difference---for apprehending the shifting localities, agents, and processes of settler colonial distributions of life and (vulnerabilities to) death. Such analytics have become urgent within the context of (neo)liberal multiculturalism and its selective recognition of cultural difference as the condition of possibility for new global economic restructuring for inequities.

Asian/Indigenous convergences, in particular, bring to the fore how civil rights frameworks can elide Indigenous experiences, perpetuating discursive erasures of settler colonial conditions. The dissertation's project foregrounds these tensions, attending to their biopolitical and affective dimensions, as they are revealed, negotiated, and metonymically reproduced within the narratives. By investigating the intersecting affective economies of Asian/Indigenous interaction, imagined at various geopolitical sites (such as Hawai`i, the U.S./Mexico Border, Canada, and Brazil), this study connects intimate and localized specificities of racial formations to broader networks of settler national configurations.