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Introduction: Indigenous Visualities
- Michigan State University Press
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xiii introduction: indigenous Visualities this collection aims to highlight the hybridity of visual communication within contemporary native america, with essays that examine how the visual has become a primary means of mediating identities . With its emphases on native film-, video-, and art-making, the volume’s scope intentionally embraces a visual field perspective in order to examine aspects of the social importance of indigenous visual culture. the work presented here should be understood as part of a larger conversation that aspires to parallel the contemporary moment from a critical perspective; the employed conceptual frameworks and analytical tools that the authors and the artists they study are, of necessity, evolving and responding to changes in social reality. the link between indigenous aesthetic expression and individual and collective identification was boldly explored in steven leuthold’s 1998 monograph Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity, within which the author acknowledged the centrality of aesthetic expression to native communities by underscoring that “an awareness of and willingness to participate in indigenous aesthetic expression increasingly signify belonging and accountability within native communities.”1 as the new millennium approached, leuthold recognized that the traditional concepts of connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature were finding new expression through westernized media, such as native filmmaking, while also maintaining continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. the relationships between various forms of aesthetic production, as well as the concept that individual and collective identities are constituted through systems of knowledge production embodied in visual forms— pictures and images—largely inform the essays presented here. in the course of conceiving this volume and in working with its contributors, i have insisted on visuality—practices of seeing the world and the seeing of other people—as an important mode of understanding and mode of our xiv| Introduction production as social and cultural beings: a lesson i learned from margaret r. miles and s. Brent Plate in their work on an ethical approach to film. i believe engaging visuality in this way is both our intellectual obligation and choice of social commitment. But what do we mean by visuality? at once i might suggest that the word visuality itself is a kind of convergence term, a neologism, and certainly a word associated with visual culture—that political venture nicholas mirzoeff calls “a tactic for those who do not control . . . dominant means of visual production to negotiate the hypervisuality of everyday life in a digitized global culture.”2 in the second edition of The Visual Culture Reader (2002), mirzoeff further describes visuality as “the intersection of power with visual representation.”3 understood in this way, visuality concerns the field of vision as a site of power and social control. elsewhere, mirzoeff traces the etymology of visuality, locating its coinage by the scottish historian thomas carlyle in his lectures On Heroes (1841).4 in demystifying the notion that visuality is a postmodern theoretical term, mirzoeff writes: the centrality of carlyle’s discourse of visualized heroism to anglophone imperial culture was such that any claim to subjectivity had to pass by visuality. Here lies the contradictory source of the resonance of “visuality” as a keyword for visual culture as both a mode of representing imperial culture and a means of resisting it by means of reverse appropriation. reading carlyle in the imperial context leads to a distinction between Visuality 1, which is proper to modernity, and a Visuality 2 that exceeds or precedes the commodification of vision. this tension was played out in the work of carlyle’s admirers Oscar Wilde and W.e.B. du Bois and in the politics surrounding the abolition of slavery. noting this “tension” mirzoeff describes, we can appreciate visuality, then, as both a mode of representation and means of resisting as it pertains to the constructs, discourses, and practices of the colonial and postcolonial. in their provocative Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2002), a collection concerning various modes of visuality in africa, editors Paul s. landau and deborah Kaspin astutely identify that the meaning of any communicative medium, including iconic images, is arguably a product of what stanley Fish calls its “interpretive communities.” landau and Kaspin’s essayists are interested in the history of images and items of visual media originating in colonial contact and beyond. By discussing various modes of visuality in and of africa, they collectively investigate the interplay of visual images with lived personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. in this way, the editors see the...