Joy Amidst the Ruins: Gabriel Levine's Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (original) (raw)

I write from Canada. As Levine, similarly situated, observes, these are lands marked by “the dispossessions of colonial modernity” (18) and “the hurt of history” (5), including often-occluded legacies of slavery on Canadian soil and associated contemporary racisms. Although our relationships in Canada, like other settler colonial states, are marked by “white supremacy, genocide and lived oppression” (7), Levine follows anti-racist and Indigenous scholars in arguing that the present, like the past, is not exhausted by these dynamics. Instead, diverse Indigenous and racialized peoples challenge these relationships of domination, as they “retell stories, learn languages, and reclaim everyday life practices, in the service of creative flourishing in the present” (18). In this book, Levine acknowledges persistent racist, colonial injustices and continuing uprisings against them such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and the Standing Rock protests. Yet his focus is neither on structural inequities nor the more spectacular, mediatized challenges to them. Instead, Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings explores everyday, often under-the-radar vernacular expressions of renewed artistic traditions, emphasizing how these playful reinventions of the past may presage emancipatory futures.