Prof. Geraldine Pratt (UBC) – Performance, Filipino Migration, Settler Colonialism and Other Futures

"In this talk I explore Tlingipino Bingo, an on-going experimentation with performance as a means of translating and transforming scholarly work to generate more informed and nuanced public debate about migrant labour. Tlingipino Bingo was a collaboration between white settler academics and Filipino and Tlingit artists in Whitehorse Canada, created in a context of rapid Filipino migration and racialised tensions between Filipino migrants and First Nations peoples in Whitehorse. It brought the communities together to participate in an interactive bingo game and to exchange stories of disparate but resonate experiences of colonialism. We document the public event of Tlingipino Bingo to interrogate how deeply settler colonialism burrows into everyday life, including practices of racialised immigrants, the ways that a model minority discourse functions within state multiculturalism, and to imagine other futures beyond settler colonialism, which could possibly include white settlers as allies. We venture that the performance might also help to think strategically about critical responses to contemporary claims of dispossession by white citizens in Canada and elsewhere, as well as their destructive nostalgia for a lost national time of whiteness."