My dissertation considers what kind of decolonial spatial futures we as diasporic American Christians (specifically, Asian American Christians) can and should hope for and work toward. By spatial futures, I refer to how communities can reimagine the spaces, lands, and nations in which they live—and their relationship to the peoples and ecologies in these spaces— in ways that interrupts the logic of violent spatial domination.

This dissertation reads diasporic Asian experiences and theologies alongside Indigenous North American writings, paying particular attention to the differences and solidarities between the two groups in terms of how they narrate their traumas of displacement and their relationship to land. I consider how the Christian eschatological question of “what do we hope for?” can be supplemented by these experiences of spatial marginalization to also ask: “where do we hope to be, and how do we hope to inhabit the spaces we live in?” I argue that for diasporic American Christians, our answers to this question must both honor our theology that emerges from living in the “in-between” space of diaspora and honor Indigenous communities’ ongoing rootedness in their lands and ecologies.

Connecting insights from decolonial theories, eschatology, feminist theology, and records and writings from Asian American and Asian Canadian solidarity movements, this dissertation constructs an eschatology and ethics that that respond to the global reality of overlapping colonial traumas and multiple displacements. The work fills a gap in the existing literature of liberation-oriented Christian systematic theology, where few works (outside of eco-theology) center the question of humanity’s inherent relationship to their living spaces. The dissertation thus contributes to both theoretical understandings of theology and decoloniality, and charts out practical paths for North American Christian communities to live in solidarity with both immigrant and Indigenous populations.