What happens when a Native or indigenous person turns a video camera on his or her own culture? Are the resulting images different from what a Westernized filmmaker would create, and, if so, in what ways? How does the use of a non-Native art-making medium, specifically video or film, affect the aesthetics of the Native culture? These are some of the questions that underlie this rich study of Native American aesthetics, art, media, and identity. Steven Leuthold opens with a theoretically informed discussion of the core concepts of aesthetics and indigenous culture and then turns to detailed examination of the work of American Indian documentary filmmakers, including George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr. He shows how Native filmmaking incorporates traditional concepts such as the connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature. While these concepts now find expression through Westernized media, they also maintain continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. In this way, Native filmmaking serves to create and preserve a sense of identity for indigenous people.

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

This companion consists of chapters that focus on and bring forward critical theories and productive methodologies for Indigenous art history in North America. This book makes a major and original contribution to the fields of Indigenous visual arts, professional curatorial practice, graduate-level curriculum development, and academic research. The contributors expand, create, establish and define Indigenous theoretical and methodological approaches for the production, discussion, and writing of Indigenous art histories. Bringing together scholars, curators, and artists from across the intersecting fields of Indigenous art history, critical museology, cultural studies, and curatorial practice, the companion promotes the study and dissemination of Indigenous art and stimulates new conversations on such key areas as visual sovereignty and self-determination; resurgence and resilience; land-based, embodied, and nation-specific knowledges; epistemologies and ontologies; curatorial and museological methodologies; language; decolonization and Indigenization; and collaboration, consultation, and mentorship.

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S’eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks. Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking, and aesthetic education to issues in film-theory and problems of the past versus present. As well as discussing indigenous versus foreign in aesthetic practices, this volume covers North and South Indian performance practices and theories, alongside recent and new themes including the Gandhian aesthetics of surrender and self-control and the aesthetics of touch in the light of the politics of untouchability. With such unparalleled and authoritative coverage, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art represents a dynamic map of comparative cross-cultural aesthetics. Bringing together original philosophical research from renowned thinkers, it makes a major contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary aesthetics.

The anthropology of art is currently at a crossroads. Although well versed in the meaning of art in small-scale tribal societies, anthropologists are still wrestling with the question of how to interpret art in a complex, post-colonial environment. Alfred Gell recently confronted this problem in his posthumous book Art and Agency. The central thesis of his study was that art objects could be seen, not as bearers of meaning or aesthetic value, but as forms mediating social action. At a stroke, Gell provocatively dismissed many longstanding but tired questions of definition and issues of aesthetic value. His book proposed a novel perspective on the roles of art in political practice and made fresh links between analyses of style, tradition and society. Offering a new overview of the anthropology of art, this book begins where Gell left off. Presenting wide-ranging critiques of the limits of aesthetic interpretation, the workings of objects in practice, the relations between meaning and efficacy and the politics of postcolonial art, its distinguished contributors both elaborate on and dissent from the controversies of Gells important text. Subjects covered include music and the internet as well as ethnographic traditions and contemporary indigenous art. Geographically its case studies range from India to Oceania to North America and Europe.

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking, and aesthetic education to issues in film-theory and problems of the past versus present. As well as discussing indigenous versus foreign in aesthetic practices, this volume covers North and South Indian performance practices and theories, alongside recent and new themes including the Gandhian aesthetics of surrender and self-control and the aesthetics of touch in the light of the politics of untouchability. With such unparalleled and authoritative coverage, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art represents a dynamic map of comparative cross-cultural aesthetics. Bringing together original philosophical research from renowned thinkers, it makes a major contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary aesthetics.

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today. In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future. This provocative volume challenges readers to critically consider and rethink their assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics while never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the power of story to effect personal and social change. Written with a generalist reader firmly in mind, but addressing issues of interest to specialists in the field, this book welcomes new audiences to Indigenous literary studies while offering more seasoned readers a renewed appreciation for these transformative literary traditions.

This book rethinks the history of colonisation by focusing on the formation of the European aesthetic ideas of indigeneity and blackness in the Caribbean, and how these ideas were deployed as markers of biopolitical governance. Using Foucault’s philosophical archaeology as method, this work argues that the European formation of indigeneity and blackness was based on aesthetically casting Aboriginal and African peoples in the Caribbean as monsters yet with a similar degree of Western civilisation and ‘culture’. By focusing on the aesthetics of the first racial imageries that produced indigeneity and blackness this work takes a radical departure from the current Social Darwinian theorisations of race and racism. It reveals a new connection between the global origins of colonisation and local post-Enlightenment histories.