Name pronunciation: Pruh–kah-sh
Statement of positionality: I am a first-generation Tamizhan-Canadian arrivant1 from Malaysia born and raised in Dish With One Spoon territory, the traditional territory of Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee [Tkaronto/”Toronto”] who currently lives and works on unceded Lands stolen from Kanienkehá:ka Nation and the Anishinaabe [Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/”Montréal”].
Bio: Bio: Prakash Krishnan (he/him) is an artist-researcher and cultural worker exploring questions around accessibility, contemporary art, and education. He is the Public Programs and Education Coordinator at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. From 2019-2024, Prakash worked closely with members of AIM as the lab’s coordinator. He holds an MA in Media Studies and a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies, both from Concordia University. He has published widely on feminist archives, contemporary art, and 2SLBGTQ+ organizing in the form of reviews, interviews, zines, and essays in addition to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. His writing appears in PUBLIC, Plot(s) Journal of Design Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materiality (ed. Traganou), and Cigale among others.
1 Anti-colonial Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd expands on Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s conception of the arrivant to describe those who outside a strict Indigenous/settler binary. In the introduction of their book, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Byrd utilizes the term arrogant to “signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe” (p. xix).
I use the term here to describe my social position as a person who has become twice diasporic due largely to Anglo-imperial interventions within South and Southeast Asia. I offer this justification of my presence on these Lands not as what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) call “settler moves to innocence”, but rather to invoke the complex relationships to territory that I and many in the diaspora experience when trying to build a new life in a (differently) but still hostile world. Nevertheless, I am endlessly thankful for the various First Nations and Indigenous peoples who have, since time immemorial, maintained sacred relationships with the Lands and Waters on which I have been able to make a life here in so-called Canada.
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne.” Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1-40.