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Reading (Re)conciliation in White Settler and Chinese Canadian Narratives: From Liberal towards Transformative Approaches

This article explores how four settler narratives situate themselves differently within the reconciliation discourse in response to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In my reading of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds (2016) and Jennifer Manuel’s The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016) alongside Doretta Lau’s “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” (2014) and Amy Fung’s Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (2019), I show how these narratives express different degrees of critical reflection on the settler colonial state and differ in their acknowledgement of Indigenous resurgence. I adopt David B. MacDonald’s distinction between “liberal reconciliation,” which is based on a “shared vison of a harmonious future,” and “transformative reconciliation,” which “is about fundamentally problematizing the settler state as a colonial creation, a vector of cultural genocide, and one that continues inexorably to suppress Indigenous collective aspirations for self-determination and sovereignty” as a critical framework.