Toward Postcolonial Practice and Theology of Radical Hospitality in Canadian Diasporic Contexts: Transformative Relocation in Asian Migrant Women's Perspective

Abstract

The life condition of Asian migrant women in Canada is marginal, discriminatory, and subordinate, since Canadian white colonialism and its interlocking oppressive structures locate these women as perpetual strangers in a social, cultural and gendered hierarchy of the dominant host society. However, their lived experience of being dislocated, their critical diasporic perspectives on colonial power, and their eagerness for justice and fullness of life can become creative epistemological, moral, and theological resources for fostering an alternative and transformative life-vision. This thesis explores how, by embracing their migrant hybridity, multiplicity, and in-between-ness, Asian migrant women play a creative agential role in devising resistant strategies against white colonialism, and in building respectful, border-crossing, and interdependent relationships with different others. Decolonial and collaborative solidarity-making with Indigenous women offers an exemplary expression of Asian migrant women’s embodied and hybrid agenthood and their moral capacity to bring out a hopeful future. Working against the entangled white settler colonial structures of gender-based violence, racism, patriarchal imperialism, and cultural genocide, both groups of women weave a potentially alternative model of life that offers the co-benefits of liberation, mutual dependency, and interrelatedness. Asian migrant women’s performances of creating border-crossing hospitable circles of life with vulnerable others through relationality, mutuality, and solidarity, become a significant enactment of a radical vision of Christian hospitality. This thesis explores how Asian migrant women embody can God’s hospitality in their migrant contexts, by weaving interactive, inclusive, and open-ending community with strangers across difference and barriers, so that all can find true welcome, empowerment, and wholeness. Through their imaginative practices, the essential nature of ecclesia is actualized temporally and spatially, in which marginal and vulnerable bodies can experience God’s redemptive power, restoration, and liberation in the conflicted and fragmented time and place of migration.