In the Balance

In the Balance In the Balance Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization Edited by Helen Gilbert, J.D. Phillipson and Michelle H. Raheja Liverpool University Press First published 2017 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2017 Liverpool University Press The right of Helen Gilbert, J.D. Phillipson and Michelle H. Raheja to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78694-034-6 paperback https://doi.org/10.3828/9781786940803 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk Contents Contents Introduction Helen Gilbert 1 1. Inside the Machine: Indigeneity, Subversion and the Academy Michael Greyeyes 25 2. Beyond the ‘Nação mestiça’: Post-Racial Performance, Native Sovereignty and Political Community in Contemporary Brazil Tracy Devine Guzmán 45 3. Assimilating Globalization, Performing Indigeneity: Richard Loring’s African Footprint Arifani Moyo 65 4. Repatriation, Rights and the Political Lives of the Dead Margaret Werry 83 5. Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia Kester Dyer 105 6. Beyond the Burden in Redfern Now: Global Collaborations, Local Stories and ‘Televisual Sovereignty’ Faye Ginsburg 123 • v • In the Balance 7. Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef Rosanna Raymond 143 8. Following the Path of the Serpent: Indigenous Film Festivals in Abya Yala Amalia Córdova 163 9. Performed Pasts from Noongar History: Coolbaroo Dances and Noongaroke Nights Anna Haebich 183 10. ‘Feelin’ Reserved’: Global Indigenous Hip-Hop and the Settler Colonial State Michelle H. Raheja 201 11. Sámi Musical Performance, Media and the Politics of Globalization: The Case of Sápmi Sessions Thomas R. Hilder 221 12. On the Ground: Making Indigenous Performance in a Globalizing World Dione Joseph, Jill Carter, Alberto Guevara, Tia Reihana- Morunga, Liza-Mare Syron and Jesse Wente 239 13. Ethical Tribunals: Maya Incursions into Symbolic Social Justice Morna Macleod 255 14. Endurance/Enduring Performance: Nadia Myre, La Marche Amun and the Indian Act’s Tumultuous Geographies Julie Burelle 273 15. Earthworks as Indigenous Performance Chadwick Allen 291 16 Out of the Exhibition: Installation, Activation, Invigilation Helen Gilbert and J.D. Phillipson Glossary of Māori Terms 309 • vi • Introduction: Indigenous Performance and Global Imaginaries Helen Gilbert Introduction: Indigenous Performance and Global Imaginaries [O]ne positive force that encourages an emancipatory politics of globalization is the role of the imagination in social life. Arjun Appadurai (2000: 6) Arjun Appadurai’s assertion, made nearly two decades ago, that globalization might be creatively yoked to ‘an emancipatory politics’ that would benefit grassroots communities now seems ripe for reassessment when vast structural asymmetries in the global distribution of resources, capital and power have rarely been more evident – or more destabilizing. Wherever we stand in the world, it is not too difficult to see (or at least sense) what Judith Butler (2009) calls the ‘precarity’ of those disenfran- chised by war, irregular migration, poverty, discrimination and other socially fragmenting forces. Combined with natural disasters and anthro- pogenic changes to climates and environments, these social ills make the humanist ideals of global peace and prosperity seem ever more elusive. How much of the current world disorder can be attributed to globalization is likely to remain a fiercely debated issue, but there is little doubt that the relentless penetration of ‘culture’ by capital on a global scale has had deleterious effects on some communities, often deepening ‘precisely those channels between rich and poor cut by European imperialism’ (Dale and Gilbert 2007, xiv). The violent incursion by multinational mining, forestry and hydro-power conglomerates into indigenous territories and lifeways in many parts of the world is but one of the more visible signs of capitalism’s rapaciousness, a trait often glossed over in discourses that champion global alignments of disparate economic and political systems. • 1 • In the Balance In this context, the late twentieth-century cultural theorists who put faith in globalization as a common good1 may now find few reasons to celebrate its effects. Clearly, as manifest in recent times, the much-vaunted global flow of culture’s constitutive elements – information, values, technology, images, artefacts and, not least, people – has been, at best, a flawed and profoundly partial engine of progress for social and political democrati- zation. Yet, in its culturalist forms at least, globalization seems to have retained the capacity to inspire a cautious and sometimes compelling optimism, even (and perhaps especially) in fields of study focused on those who have least access to a just share of the world’s resources. Peter Phipps, among others, stakes out an enabling space for minority perspectives amid the opportunities for social reimagining that modern transnational interchange ideally affords: As globalization in all its forms grows in intensity, not only at the level of transnational institutions of justice but also global communications, travel, and trade, so do opportunities for the insertion of marginalized cultures into an emergent ‘global imaginary’: the deeply routinized ways we think about ourselves and our world from an increasingly global perspective. (2009, 32) What is evident in Phipps’s embrace of a ‘global imaginary’, as in my epigraph’s stress on the imagination, is a focus on people, first and foremost, as social, relational and creative beings. This approach tempers conceptions of globalization as primarily an economic phenomenon involving accelerated flows of capital, labour and commodities across vast expanses of the world. Whereas economic studies have revealed how globalization harnesses apparently less-developed societies to capitalist markets in a new post-colonial architecture of core–periphery relations requiring the management of social divisions (see Hoogvelt 2001), cultural analysis has taken up the challenge of exposing and critiqueing those divisions, to discern how they are, or at least could be, dissolved, bridged, transcended, circumvented or otherwise lessened.2 This manifestly political project has gained traction, ironically, from other developments integral to the global networking of production, trade and finance, especially the broad (though by no means universal) dissemination of digital communi- cation technologies and the rapid rise of the Internet and social media as public platforms with unprecedented visibility and reach. Such potent new tools for engaging in, and with, human creativity have shifted the grounds on which vested interests in different forms of culture play out, fostering the emergence of myriad trans-border social, political, intellectual and • 2 • Introduction: Indigenous Performance and Global Imaginaries artistic alliances in the interests of the marginalized. The simultaneous rise in international advocacy groups and supranational governance bodies concerned not only with human rights but also social and environ- mental justice has likewise heightened awareness of the inequities and exclusions that globalization entails. With the widening and deepening of global connectivity and, crucially, increased public consciousness of that fact, has come the tantalizing prospect that disempowerment and injustice could be effectively mitigated, or at least forcefully exposed, in the cultural realm. That possibility has been particularly attractive to indigenous cultures, the key focus of this book, as they navigate ongoing legacies of colonization amid the promises and threats of our (apparently) new world order. Cultural action offers more than simply the symbolic redress of material or ideological forms of oppression – or a momentary diversion from their effects. Bart Moore-Gilbert has observed that globalization reinforces the need for ‘close analysis of contemporary cultural and textual artefacts’ because struggles for and against hegemony are increasingly pursued ‘at the level of representations’. In this respect, he argues, ‘vast transnational information and entertainment industries and ever more sophisticated communications technologies [are] mediating relations of power quite as effectively as trade agreements, diplomatic alliances or military adventurism’ (1998, 64). We need only to consider social media trending – or the ways in which populist politicians have dismissed critical or inconvenient press reports as ‘fake news’ – to see how readily global flows of information affect, and sometimes skew, what Anna Tsing calls ‘the awkward relationship between representation and its object’ (2000, 329). The deterritorialization of social and cultural life, said to be a hallmark of globality, further complicates the ways in which images, discourses, material objects and indeed people come to represent different things to those who encounter them, whether in real or imaginative realms. While some critics have worried that ‘localities’ are losing

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