This dissertation demonstrates how diasporic practice experiments with cultural forms of communities of African and Asian descent for decolonizing purposes, or radically transforms systemically oppressive politics on nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Through case studies of two transnational dance companies known as the Los Angeles-based REALITY and Minneapolis-based Ananya Dance Theatre and their respective choreographers David Roussève and Ananya Chatterjea, I discuss how choreographies are grounded in exploration of communities living outside boundaries of racial, ethnic, and national origin and an enduring engagement in dance forms and traditions for the purposes of crafting stories about challenges faced by communities of African and Asian descent. Since the late 1980s, Roussève/REALITY has experimented with identities of the African diaspora through utilizing contact improvisation, jazz, Euro-American modern dance, West African-based movement, and Hip-Hop to emphasize experience in terms of gay black men's losses to AIDS and black women's stories of sexual violence. Representing these black cultural forms and histories alongside the Asian diaspora, Roussève and REALITY connect experimentations in black cultural forms with Asian performance practices in contemporary Indian and Indonesian dance. Since the mid-1990s, Chatterjea has experimented with South Asian identity by engaging with the Indian dance forms of Odissi dance, Chhau martial arts, and yoga to connect the environmental, gender-based violence experienced by South Asian women to persons of Asian and African descent. Also representing stories in cross-cultural formation, Chatterjea and Ananya Dance Theatre align experimentations with Indian dance forms with an African American theatrical jazz aesthetic. To examine racial formations across African and Asian cultures, I utilize a methodology of: dance and film analysis; life history interviews; observations of dance rehearsals, live performances, and films; dance critiques; and autoethnography of my connections as a researcher with the artistic works under scrutiny. This research contributes to gender and sexuality, diaspora, dance, and performance studies.

This study addresses the relationship between intergenerational trauma of ongoing United States and Canadian colonialism as it impacts Native American and Aboriginal First Nations Peoples and ways global football contributes practices of intergenerational healing. I argue that Indigenous soccer operates as a mechanism of decolonization and re-membering for Indigenous Peoples who inherit colonial traumas. Indigenous soccer directly challenges hegemonic sports culture as typically marked by Indian mascotry and Native invisibility. While cultural historians have shown how American sports are used as colonial technologies of assimilation, violent gendering, labor and militarism, the story of Indigenous soccer has not been studied. As a Lummi footballer, I utilize Native voices from Coast Salish Tribes of Washington State and British Columbia, Mohawk and Cree First Nations Canada, Southwest tribes from New Mexico Pueblos and Navajo Nation, and Kiowa Territories in Oklahoma to illustrate Indigenous soccer identities and schelangen, or way of life in Lummi. As soccer in North America challenges hegemonic ideologies of nationalism, instrumental Indigenous footballers are demanding visibility, like the late Canadian Hall of Fame First Nations Aboriginal footballer Snuneymuxw Harry Xulsimalt Manson and U.S. World Cup participant Kiowa Native Chris Bau Daigh Wondolowski. Using the theoretical framework of Tulalip scholar Stephanie Fryberg's “theory of invisibility,” I tell and analyze Indigenous soccer stories as evidence that Indigenous visibility, in soccer or otherwise, provides intergenerational healing. I begin to fill the gap in the sports culture and U.S.-Canada colonialism discourse, with the goal of making Indigenous soccer locally accessible as an instrument of decolonial healing for generations of Indigenous North American Peoples.