Rebalancing the Cold War: Diné Sandpainting and Earth Diplomacy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy
We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time – in 1941-2 and in 2009 - the government staged an extensive exhibition in the US. Each time the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted – against governmental intentions and policies at the time - the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands for sovereignty. In doing so art challenged not just legal and political norms, but an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Rancière called the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, thinkable and unthinkable and thus of what can and cannot be debated in politics.
Curatorial Studies, 2017
*For a special issue on “The Art of Cultural Diplomacy.” From 1964 to 1966, the United States Information Agency toured an exhibition of modern artworks titled Contemporary American Indian Paintings to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Israel. Among other exhibitions of Native American art sent abroad during the Cold War, the paintings were intended to counter Soviet critiques of US colonization with a message of benevolent modernization, while deflecting international attention away from Indigenous decolonization struggles. This article positions the tour between federal Indian termination policy and Cold War propaganda, considering how Contemporary American Indian Paintings quietly slipped Native American diplomatic concerns into a global arena shaped by imperialism.
Seeing the National Museum of the American Indian Anew as a Diplomatic Assemblage
American Art, 2022
*American Art has unfortunately requested removal of the pdf of this essay, so please email me if you don't have free institutional access.* This essay offers a reading of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as a diplomatic assemblage, centered on the exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (2014–25). I elaborate on the political geographer Jason Dittmer’s theory of the diplomatic assemblage, which holds that material circulations shape international relations through a surplus emotional charge that can shift political cognition. Throughout Nation to Nation, Indigenous diplomatic arts such as wampum advance geopolitical frameworks premised on kinship and reciprocity with all aspects of a living cosmos. I argue that these arts activate a latent potential for the museum to function as a diplomatic agent in Native nations’ ongoing negotiations with the United States, despite centuries of betrayal. I also consider how the diplomatic assemblage can inform a broader interpretive ethics in the field of Native North American art.
BOOK PROPOSAL | "DIPLOMACY BY DESIGN — REINVENTING U.S. SCENOGRAPHY"
PROJECT SUMMARY ASSETS — ¾ of the book has already been written and/or transcribed CHALLENGES — To find funds and resources; To cut through my bullshit writing to achieve " Less is more " TRUE GOAL — To complete a series of engaging travel narratives (as opposed to an academic book). To seek financial subsidy and peer-review support from U.S. universities and colleges, Warhol Foundation, USITT, visual-art foundations and angels in funding. INTRODUCTION/ABSTRACT Imagine, as you leaf through this sundry collage of words and images, an impressionistic composite. Picture a young artisan at once technically proficient and intuitively creative. This storyteller must be so visually oriented as to have a strong flair for the theatrical, a detective who uncovers the clues that reveal the inner life of a play's characters and the exterior environment in which they live. Imagine an inventor of made-up worlds so transparently constructed as to look and feel deeply real or symbolic or poetic or abstract — a communicator of clear ideas who somehow enhances the points of view of other dreamers involved in a project. If you can piece together all these facets, you will begin to discern a portrait of the stage designer as thinker.
“Unfinished Business” of U.S. Diplomacy & the Cultural Cold War
ISRG Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2024
American intervention abroad took on varied forms of creative representation during the Cold War. In the period from the 1950s through to the fall of the Soviet Union, a host of new and inventive platforms emerged promoting free expression in things like exhibitions, world fairs, literary works, and radio broadcasting. These are some of the focal points historians have studied in detail. They were wielded by the United States government as a tactic to shape the hearts and minds of international spectators. This historiographical essay addresses the set of arguments that historians have posited explaining how various elements of popular culture were employed as a psychological weapon. Furthermore, this paper argues that examples of psychological warfare in Europe like radio broadcasting and film in Asia created distinct interregional networks where the U.S. proliferated its Americanization agenda through corporate military partnerships. In many ways, historians of the Cultural Cold War make a case for these regional networks being the backbone of intelligence efforts in the U.S. and highlight how consumerism was intertwined with new archetypes of both business culture and military fanaticism. “Cultural Transfer” is a term that Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht defines along a spectrum of meanings, mostly as a way of depicting the diplomatic, cultural transmission of U.S. policy and products. Other historians like Christina Klein and Sangjoon Lee provide specific examples of American consumerism and modernity being deployed in art and technology throughout Asia. This overlap is underemphasized.
Museum History Journal, 2024
‘The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of the People’s Republic of China’ was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in December 1974. It was the first exhibition of Chinese archaeological relics organised by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the United States. This occasion marked a significant moment in Sino-American relations and cultural exchange during the Cold War. This paper explores the intricacies of the planning, organisation, and curation of the exhibition, highlighting the strategic use of cultural diplomacy by China to promote its state ideology on an international scale. This paper argues that the exhibition had far-reaching implications for US–China relationship at the time. On one hand, it represented a significant step towards cultural engagement and rapprochement between the two nations. On the other hand, it served to disrupt the relationship further by exposing ideological differences and triggering contentions. Thus, the exhibition’s impact on US–China relations was complex and multifaceted, reflecting the delicate act of cultural diplomacy in the context of Cold War politics.