Resistance as Negotiation

Resistance as Negotiation
Author: Uday Chandra
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503639150

"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India. Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as "tribal" in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how "tribal" subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its "tribal" margins.

Media Primitivism

Media Primitivism
Author: Delinda Collier
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-09-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1478012315

In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

The Neo-primitivist Turn

The Neo-primitivist Turn
Author: Victor Li
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0802091113

In recent years the concept of 'the primitive' has been the subject of strong criticism; it has been examined, unpacked, and shown to signify little more than a construction or projection necessary for establishing the modernity of the West. The term 'primitive' continues, however, to appear in contemporary critical and cultural discourse, begging the question: Why does primitivism keep reappearing even after it has been uncovered as a modern myth? In The Neo-primitivist Turn, Victor Li argues that this contentious term was never completely banished and that it has in fact reappeared under new theoretical guises. An idealized conception of 'the primitive,' he contends, has come to function as the ultimate sign of alterity. Li focuses on the works of theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jürgen Habermas in order to demonstrate that primitivism continues to be a powerful presence even in those works normally regarded as critical of the concept. Providing close readings of the ways in which the premodern or primitive is strategically deployed in contemporary critical writings, Li's interdisciplinary study is a timely and forceful intervention into current debates on the politics and ethics of otherness, the problems of cultural relativism, and the vicissitudes of modernity.

From Greenwich Village to Taos

From Greenwich Village to Taos
Author: Flannery Burke
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700622365

They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and "primitive" peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between "authentic" places and those who called them home. In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective, Flannery Burke shows how these cultural mavens drew on modernist concepts of primitivism to construct their personal visions and cultural agendas. In each chapter she presents a place as it took shape for a different individual within Dodge's orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artists-as well as a narrative of what happened in the real place of New Mexico when visitors decided it was where they belonged. Expanding the picture of early American modernism beyond New York's dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to find-and that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos. Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodge's salon attracted artists of varying ethnicities and the ways that patronage was perceived-by African American writers seeking publication, Anglos seeking "authentic" material, Native American artists seeking patronage, or Nuevomexicanos simply seeking respect. She considers the notion of "competitive primitivism," especially regarding Carl Van Vechten, and offers nuanced analyses of divisions within northern New Mexico's arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf. Burke's book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodge's visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern world-and that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.

Literary Primitivism

Literary Primitivism
Author: Ben Etherington
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-12-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503604098

This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the "civilized" to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the "West" projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western "others." Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship. Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a "primitive" condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.

Primitivism and Identity in Latin America

Primitivism and Identity in Latin America
Author: Erik Camayd-Freixas
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816547270

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity. Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry. This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them. CONTENTS Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz’s Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguín Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina / José Eduardo González Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar’s "Axolotl" as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future’s Memory; Native Peoples’ Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in César Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick

Art in Theory

Art in Theory
Author: Paul Wood
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1168
Release: 2020-12-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1119591414

A ground-breaking new anthology in the Art in Theory series, offering an examination of the changing relationships between the West and the wider world in the field of art and material culture Art in Theory: The West in the World is a ground-breaking anthology that comprehensively examines the relationship of Western art to the art and material culture of the wider world. Editors Paul Wood and Leon Wainwright have included over 350 texts, some of which appear in English for the first time. The anthologized texts are presented in eight chronological parts, which are then subdivided into key themes appropriate to each historical era. The majority of the texts are representations of changing ideas about the cultures of the world by European artists and intellectuals, but increasingly, as the modern period develops, and especially as colonialism is challenged, a variety of dissenting voices begin to claim their space, and a counter narrative to western hegemony develops. Over half the book is devoted to 20th and 21st century materials, though the book’s unique selling point is the way it relates the modern globalization of art to much longer cultural histories. As well as the anthologized material, Art in Theory: The West in the World contains: A general introduction discussing the scope of the collection Introductory essays to each of the eight parts, outlining the main themes in their historical contexts Individual introductions to each text, explaining how they relate to the wider theoretical and political currents of their time Intended for a wide audience, the book is essential reading for students on courses in art and art history. It will also be useful to specialists in the field of art history and readers with a general interest in the culture and politics of the modern world.

Race, Rage, and Resistance

Race, Rage, and Resistance
Author: David M. Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429561024

This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society’s modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures. Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism’s impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology. This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.