Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation (original) (raw)
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Introduction. Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation, 2020
This special issue on “Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty" constitutes a body of creative contributions and academic articles addressing numerous forms of artistic practices of the Pacific Islands, Australia, French Guiana, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Inspired by Indigenous artists and writers whose practices and creativity help reimagine sustainable ways to inhabit the world, this introduction and our special issue interrogate contemporary environmental issues and the legacy of colonisation. They examine how Indigenous artists and writers, and artists working with Indigenous artists and communities, have for decades raised awareness about environmental issues, and encouraged people to regain their agency to struggle against environmental degradation and further destruction of Indigenous people’s societies and health. This introduction contextualises the concepts and Indigenous terms used by artists to express their vision of what a respectful relationship with the environment would be. It also offers readings of the beautiful literary and artistic creative contributions included in this issue. Environmental themes such as waste recycling, health issues, pollutants (mercury, POPs), and agricultural technics are discussed here in light of human and non-¬human life and agency. This issue also features a significant range of calls for action to better protect and restore ecosystems.
CFP: Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation, 2020
This special issue on “Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty" constitutes a body of creative contributions and academic articles addressing numerous forms of artistic practices of the Pacific Islands, Australia, French Guiana, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Inspired by Indigenous artists and writers whose practices and creativity help reimagine sustainable ways to inhabit the world, this introduction and our special issue interrogate contemporary environmental issues and the legacy of colonisation. They examine how Indigenous artists and writers, and artists working with Indigenous artists and communities, have for decades raised awareness about environmental issues, and encouraged people to regain their agency to struggle against environmental degradation and further destruction of Indigenous people’s societies and health. This introduction contextualises the concepts and Indigenous terms used by artists to express their vision of what a respectful relationship with the environment would be. It also offers readings of the beautiful literary and artistic creative contributions included in this issue. Environmental themes such as waste recycling, health issues, pollutants (mercury, POPs), and agricultural technics are discussed here in light of human and non-human life and agency. This issue also features a significant range of calls for action to better protect and restore ecosystems.
eTropic Special Issue on 'Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty', 2020
CALL FOR PAPERS special issue on 'Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty' Submission deadline: 30 July 2019 Analysing creative practices by Indigenous artists, or artists working closely with Indigenous communities, this pluridisciplinary issue aims to determine how Indigenous societies perceive and interact with pollution and toxic substances that affect their environment and territories. The issue examines how conceptions of waste and its recycling enlightens discourses on Indigenous sovereignty, and in turn, explores how the notion of sovereignty – as understood, lived, and defined by Indigenous peoples – informs and influences artistic practices that respond to contemporary environmental challenges. This issue invites contributions addressing all forms of artistic practices in the tropics of the Pacific, Northern Australia, Indian Ocean Islands, tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, or the deep south of America. Contributions on the ways the global North of Europe or America intersects with Indigenous peoples/practices in the tropics are also welcome. Treatment, perception, recycling, and transformation of materials We are interested in the artistic approaches deployed in or around spaces faced with different kinds of pollution and waste. How do artists speak about the journey of waste – for example due to marine currents, rivers or human actions? Is waste perceived as a negative effect of consumerism in society or taken as potentially interesting material that can be valued like any local natural resource? Proposals are invited to highlight the symbolic dimensions of these new materials, and – through the analysis of the negotiations or conflicts that surround their extraction or circulation – to unveil the values given to a territory. Decolonisation and sovereignty as artistic and environmental actions This issue looks at Indigenous concepts used by artists to express their vision of what ‘sustainable development’, or a respectful relationship with the environment, would be. We are particularly interested in contributions that enter into dialogue with, or expand works, conducted by Indigenous academics, researchers, and artists. We also welcome contributions on the responses given by Indigenous artists to situations in which the concerns and actions of environmentalists go against the expression and claims of Indigenous sovereignty. Arts and knowledges of the ocean, sea, rivers, and coastline Authors are invited to analyse how artistic practices that deal with pollution mobilise Indigenous concepts relating to land(scapes), water(scapes), and sea(scapes). Looking at the articulation between the arts, environment, recycling, and sovereignty will also lead us to question the very notion of borders between land and sea commonly used in non-Indigenous contexts. This issue invites contributions addressing all forms of artistic practices articulated through academic or creative works. ABOUT eTropic eTropic disseminates new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. The journal is indexed in Scopus, Ulrich's and DOAJ, it is archived in Pandora and Sherpa/Romeo, and DOIs are used. INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS For submission instructions see: https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/announcement For enquiries or pitching ideas email the special issue editors: Dr Estelle Castro-Koshy, Senior Researcher, James Cook University, Australia estelle.castrokoshy@jcu.edu.au Dr Géraldine Le Roux, Senior Lecturer, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France geraldine.leroux@univ-brest.fr For general enquiries email eTropic: etropic@jcu.edu.au
The Indigenization of Ecological Art
BA Fine Art, 2022
How contemporary artists Amar Kanwar and Hamish Fulton use indigenous practices to critique the human intervention of nature. Study of contemporary ecological art, its roots in western history and how pioneering land artists focused the conversation to indigenous voices as a major part of regaining environmental awareness.
Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and 'New Materialisms' in Contemporary Art
Third Text, 2013
Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour of theorizing the agency and liveliness of matter. The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite dialogue among a wider host of agents, raising the possibility of an ethics that binds humans to the material entities upon which our livelihoods depend. However, any vision of global environmental justice is incomplete without engaging longstanding indigenous philosophies of materiality. The authors devote the first portion of this essay to an analysis of why it has been difficult for the ‘new materialisms’ to incorporate indigenous intellectual traditions into discussions of non-human agency, focusing on contemporary arts discourse. They then turn to a discussion of recent works by Native North American artists Jimmie Durham, Rebecca Belmore, Will Wilson and Jolene Rickard, which incorporate indigenous understandings of material with an acute awareness of the contemporary, global challenges of co-habitation.
Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene
Art Journal, 2017
[Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Movement and No Dakota Access Pipeline to consider tensions and resonances between the work of select Indigenous practitioners and broader developments in art and ecology. Some of the groundwork is laid in a previous article I coauthored with Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” for a special issue of Third Text on contemporary art and the politics of ecology, edited by Demos in 2013, as well as my recently published book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Some of the same artists and insights from that research reappear here.This essay differs in its aim to build a genealogy of ecocritical concerns connecting philosophy and activism during AIM in the 1970s, so-called identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, and creative media in the context of Anthropocene discourses after 2000. Putting “Native struggles for land and life” in dialogue with contemporary ecoaesthetics—or more specifically, considering their intersections in a continuum of First Nations texts and artworks—bears on some of the most pressing problems in both fields. A historically informed engagement with the political status of Native American lands can yield a fuller understanding of the interdependencies among colonialism, capitalism, and ecological devastation. More profoundly, the related arts have played a critical role in transmitting alternative means of organizing human-earth relations through a painful history to address our equally fraught present.
Creative-(ex)tensions: Indigenous eco-poetics as counter-hegemonic discourse.
In this paper I aim to use a phenomenological approach to the Indigenous poetry of Hadaa Sendoo (Mongolia), Humberto Ak’abal (Guatemala), and Walissu Youkan (Taiwan) in order to propose an alternative notion of identity based on the writers’ shared sense of interconnectedness to the environment. In this way, the embodied experiences emerging from the poems can be articulated in a common empowering counter-hegemonic discourse against the ontological and epistemological foundations of global capitalism. Similarly, the paper proposes that the poetry projected in this articulatory, empowering discourse from three bioculturally diverse regions shows paths towards alternative ways of living in the Anthropocene.
This thesis explores the possible ways in which Pacific indigenous art on climate change can be conceptualized in IR. In answering this question, this study also identifies the analytical potential of the so-called Aesthetic Turn in International Relations. In order to do so, this thesis defines two potential ways in which this genre of art can be interpreted. Firstly, the suggestion is made that there is a potential for interpretation of these artworks with concepts borrowed from postcolonial and indigenous theories, such as counterhegemony, decolonization and identity-creation. Secondly, this research identifies that because the artworks address an issue of security, namely climate change, borrowing concepts from securitization theory or the field of Security Studies can be helpful. This thesis analyzes five Pacific indigenous artworks on climate change from various artforms by using the concepts of decolonization, counterhegemony, identity-creation, securitization, environmental security, human security and state sovereignty. This thesis also contributes to the current state of the debate in the Aesthetic Turn in International Relations, by identifying that there is potential for viewing art as part of the realm of politics. This potential lies in exploring non-traditional sectors in security and in working more closely with disciplines that focus on a specific artform or on a specific context.
Indigenous Poetics and Transcultural Ecologies
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2018
This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, antimodern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as “The Dreaming” or “Pachamama” (“World Mother”), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.
This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.