From the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play ...is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan. John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic category of "primitive art" was invented.
This book is a collection of key legal decisions affecting Indigenous Australians, which have been re-imagined so as to be inclusive of Indigenous people’s stories, historical experience, ...perspectives and worldviews.
In this groundbreaking work, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have collaborated to rewrite 16 key decisions. Spanning from 1889 to 2017, the judgments reflect the trajectory of Indigenous people’s engagements with Australian law. The collection includes decisions that laid the foundation for the wrongful application of terra nullius and the long disavowal of native title. Contributors have also challenged narrow judicial interpretations of native title, which have denied recognition to Indigenous people who suffered the prolonged impacts of dispossession. Exciting new voices have reclaimed Australian law to deliver justice to the Stolen Generations and to families who have experienced institutional and police racism. Contributors have shown how judicial officers can use their power to challenge systemic racism and tell the stories of Indigenous people who have been dehumanised by the criminal justice system.
The new judgments are characterised by intersectional perspectives which draw on postcolonial, critical race and whiteness theories. Several scholars have chosen to operate within the parameters of legal doctrine. Some have imagined new truth-telling forums, highlighting the strength and creative resistance of Indigenous people to oppression and exclusion. Others have rejected the possibility that the legal system, which has been integral to settler-colonialism, can ever deliver meaningful justice to Indigenous people.
In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new ...decolonized society. In this perceptive new book, Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures that have followed in the ten years since Morales’s election. While the Morales government has made many changes that have benefited Bolivia’s majority indigenous population, it has also consolidated power and reinforced extractivist development models. In the process, indigeneity has been transformed from a site of emancipatory politics to a site of liberal nationstate building. By carefully tracing the political origins and practices of decolonization among activists, government administrators, and ordinary citizens, Postero makes an important contribution to our understanding of the meaning and impact of Bolivia’s indigenous state.
Many of N.P. van Wyk Louw’s essays address the role of the intellectual. In the 1930s, Louw struggled to define a place for the intellectual in relation to the Afrikaner volk and its cultural ...movements and political parties. At the end of “Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur” (Cultural Leaders without Culture) (1939), Louw turns to the simile of the cave from book seven of Plato’s Republic. There the cave represents the city and its people, who are trapped in illusion. Plato’s “philosopher” escapes the dark chamber where the prisoners observe only shadows, gains enlightenment, and returns to open the eyes of his fellow inhabitants. Returning is the duty of the philosopher. How did N.P. van Wyk Louw imagine descending back into the “cave,” into the midst of the city, to be among the people of his country? One answer lies in a pair of unpublished fragments dating from the 1940s entitled “In die bus afgeluister” (Overheard on the Bus). In these fragments, Louw eavesdrops, as he takes the bus to and from work, on the conversations of people of Cape Town of various races. We get a slice of city life, and a sense of how Louw tried to embrace that life rather than isolate himself from it. These two urban sketches nevertheless show that the task of enlightening one’s fellow citizens proves more complicated than Louw expects because the intellectual is more deeply implicated in the illusory play of shadows than he imagines.
Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, ...Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could – or should – be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.
This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United ...States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.
Visions of Nature revives the work of late
nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the
environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman
World and in California. Despite ...having little association with one
another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions
of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and
made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in
albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both
the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed
into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about
territory and history. During this key period of settler
revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate
"nature" with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective
that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced
colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the
work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and
repositions it within a new comparative frame.
According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public ...protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve individual subjection or domination insofar as we enjoy an equally shared form of control over those in power. This claim may seem utopian but it is supported by a realistic model of the institutions that might establish such democratic control. Beginning with a fresh articulation of republican ideas, Pettit develops a highly original account of the rationale of democracy, breathing new life into democratic theory.
The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the ...Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.
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