engleski

“Postindian Warrior is in the House: Voicing Survivance in Contemporary Native American Art.”

This paper discusses the strategies of subversion in the work of contemporary American Indian conceptual artist James Luna. Employing auto-ethnographic parody through the media of photography and installation, Luna voices an alternative to the dominant imagination that for centuries has defined American Indians through the categories of invisibility and exclusion. His installation The End of the Frail (1990-91) exposes and disturbs that imagination, drawing attention to the fundamental tie between historical configurations of Native American identity and Otherness and the colonial politics of representation. In Half-Indian/ Half-Mexican (1991), a triptych photograph of his face split into two ethnic halves, Luna again mobilizes photographic stereotypes and stages a cross-cultural encounter, inscribing his own body as borderlands, cleft and crisscrossed by competing discourses of the self. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha's definition of hybridity, Gerald Vizenor's concepts of survivance and the postindian, Gloria Anzaldúa's borderlands theory and Louis Owens's concept of the frontier, the paper points at the decolonizing potential of Luna's attempted self-stereotyping and border-crossing. It also touches upon some recent political practices, such as Arizona immigration legislation SB 1070 and the militarization of the border on the Tohono O'odham territory, to examine their resonances upon contemporary perceptions and representations of Native American identity and their ongoing state of oppression and marginalization.

James Luna, Native American, self-stereotyping, subversion, survivance, postindian, decolonization

nije evidentirano