Description
"Indians Playing Indian?" approaches contemporary indigenous art in North America as a diverse yet coherent body of work confronting a common set of political and cultural circumstances, amounting to what one might call the predicament of indigenous self-representation. This predicament stems from the long legacy of European and settler American depictions of indigenous peoples and has been heightened by the emergence of contemporary multiculturalism and its appetite for performances of cultural difference. In a series of case studies, ranging from The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. to Inuit cinema, digital photographic art, literary fiction, and multi-media art, it describes the many distinctive ways in which North American indigenous artists negotiate this representational quandary. By focusing on figures, texts, and sites, which directly address the dangers of commodification and co-optation inherent in the present-day politics of recognition, "Indians Playing Indian?" offers an account of the contemporary indigenous art that is acutely attuned to its complex and often contradictory ideological investments and effects.
