Miss Chief and the Art of Decolonial Tease

Abstract

This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, as well as the postindian approach to translation. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on the notion of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve he proposes. The discussion concludes by positing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a decolonial era of the future, supplanting the urban flâneur of modernity.