Front and Back Covers, Volume 35, Number 4. August 2019

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 4Front coverSELF‐EXCLUSIONLocked gates, fences and razor wire symbolize the closed borders and exclusionary nature of ethnonationalism. They also raise questions about what it means to be inside those locked gates. In this issue, Joyce Dalsheim considers the dynamics underlying ethnonationalism in the latest Israeli elections.Back coverINDIGENOUS AMERICA AND ENGLISH HERITAGEThis ink and watercolour image by the English painter John White from the late 16th century depicts dancing Tupinambá Indians, based on an earlier account by a French traveller to Brazil.White's watercolours, like those he composed when he lived among Algonquians in eastern North America, have been celebrated for their elegant naturalism. At the same time, Europeans widely associated the Tupinambá with cannibalism. White's careful lines therefore capture tensions that were inherent in the English imperial gaze, where the fascination with Native American lifeways, adornment and commodities existed alongside underlying assumptions about violent conflict.More often than not, ethnographic curiosity led to appropriation and dispossession. In 17th‐century London, feather headdresses, admired for their lustre, found their way into cabinets of curiosities or into imperial performances like court masques. Torn from their original contexts, such objects were repurposed to endorse an aesthetics of empire that involved both a visibility and erasure of Native American artefacts and peoples.In this issue, Lauren Working considers what English heritage would look like if Native Americans were integrated more fully within it. She explores the opportunities that exist for using history, anthropology and objects to shed light on the complex, often troubling legacies that emerged out of the first moment of empire in England. Acknowledging the entangled nature of Native American and English histories can become a means of conveying multiple but intersecting narratives and perspectives, weaving indigeneity into the story of Englishness and opening up new possibilities for collaboration, museum display and reconciliation.