Indigenous Subject Research Articles

Between nature and culture: exploring space for indigenous agency in the Convention on Biological Diversity

The goals of nature conservation have changed over the last decades, but setting aside areas for nature protection is still a major part of environmental efforts globally. Protected areas often include traditional lands of indigenous peoples, and although indigenous rights have been strengthened through international treaties, conflicts over land entitlement are still common. I analyse indigenous peoples' role in nature conservation, focusing on the discursive construction of indigenous subject position in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and using post-colonial theory to situate the discussion in its historical and political context, discussing what subject positions are made available to indigenous people, and what political agency they can be assumed to entail. The analysis shows that limits to indigenous space for agency are embedded in the Convention on Biological Diversity discourse – the analysed texts present a narrow recognition of indigenous people's role in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity, with a heavy focus on indigenous subjects as holders of traditional knowledge, and a clear influence from colonial notions and post-colonial power relations.

Beyond the mask: image-making, resistance and photography in Chiapas

Over the last two decades an established photographic archive has emerged documenting the insurgency uprisings in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. This article examines some of the problematics of representation that have been brought to light through the case of the EZLN and the indigenous chiapaneco subject in photography. It questions the notion of authorship and autonomy within the image-making process and acknowledges changes in direction in terms of representation and the re-appropriation of the image. The growing rejection of the camera on behalf of the indigenous subject brings to the forefront the questioning of the role of photographic archaeology and the use of the image as testimony. This article examines the ideological conjectures of image-making in the context of Chiapas whilst observing examples of visual responses to the mass-produced visual outputs made during the height of conflict.

Indigenous Subject Access: Nga Upoko Tukutuku

Indigenous Subject Access: Nga Upoko Tukutuku

Zelig in the Jungle: Neozapatismo and the Construction of the International Indigenous Subject

This article argues that as an inclusive social movement, the National Liberation Zapatista Army (EZLN), opens diverse critical challenges to unilateral interpretations of globalization—via the construction of communicative action undertaken by international alternative social networks. There is a subversive potentiality in the very concept of globalization as possibility: on the one hand, globalization should be appropriated as rejecting absolute truths of what it is supposed to mean to be globalized; on the other hand, it should provide spaces for the communicative action of subaltern counterpublics in which different human groups interact, discuss diverse topics and create social networks. Likewise, the article argues that the subject is the main agent of liberation, wherein no identity determinant dominates another—class, race, sex, ethnic group, gender—but the subject is the quintessential vanguard—as a plural collectivity—of social struggles forging a potential solidarity against diverse forms of domination. Therefore, if the Neozapatista experience has a lesson, it is precisely its initiative to transform the international indigenous subject—as well as other oppressed identities—into a catalyst for claims of unity in difference.

‘An Essential Ghost’: Indigeneity Within the Legal Archive

The various dimensions associated with the incorporation of the Indigenous subject in the legal archive of the Australian community are analyzed. The different views on the topic that are expressed by Derrida in her writings are also being talked about.

The Andes imagined: indigenismo, society, and modernity

In The Andes Imagined, Jorge Coronado not only examines but also recasts the indigenismo movement of the early 1900s. Coronado departs from the common critical conception of indigenismo as rooted in novels and short stories, and instead analyzes an expansive range of work in poetry, essays, letters, newspaper writing, and photography. He uses this evidence to show how the movement's artists and intellectuals mobilize the figure of the Indian to address larger questions about becoming modern, and he focuses on the contradictions at the heart of indigenismo as a cultural, social, and political movement. By breaking down these different perspectives, Coronado reveals an underlying current in which intellectuals and artists frequently deployed their indigenous subject in order to imagine new forms of political inclusion. He suggests that these deployments rendered particular variants of modernity and make indigenismo's representational practices a privileged site for the examination of the region's cultural negotiation of modernization. His analysis reveals a paradox whereby the un-modern indio becomes the symbol for the modern itself. The Andes Imagined offers an original and broadly based engagement with indigenismo and its intellectual contributions, both in relation to early twentieth-century Andean thought and to larger questions of theorizing modernity.

Guatemala's Genocide Determination and the Spatial Politics of Justice

This paper focuses on the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification's (CEH) determination that state violence in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 constituted acts of genocide. The construction of the CEH's argument is analysed, together with its implications for political dynamics within post-war Guatemala. The potential new ‘geographies of justice’ that flow from the CEH's genocide argument are explored in terms of new venues and avenues for prosecution of Guatemalan genocide cases. It is shown how the CEH made nuanced connections between territory, political practice, ethnic identity and violence, and it is argued that these connections were key to its genocide argument. Finally, the relationship is interrogated between the CEH's genocide determination and the figure of the ‘neutral Maya’ as the post-war representation of an indigenous subject inhabiting a space untainted by the stain of a (failed) revolutionary past.

Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature K. E. Fleming Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. By Mary Roberts. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Mary Roberts’ Intimate Outsiders takes up a well-worn theme – the Romantic-era western orientalist fascination with the harem – and breathes new life into it, turning it from a static study of hegemonic, unidirectional “representation” into a lively account of the interaction between the (largely female) elite western visitors to the harem and the oriental elite women who occupied the harems of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. The academic interest in Western images of the harem by now has of course almost as venerable tradition as the Western preoccupation with the harem did in the first place. So were Roberts’ work to focus on this alone, it would not, elegantly written though it be, emerge as a standout from the pack. What makes Roberts’ book striking is the other side of the coin, its parallel interest in and analysis of “the ways Ottoman elites, particularly Ottoman women, engaged with…Western visitors to their cities in order to fashion their representations” (4). What Roberts is interested in is not so much what Western visitors thought of the harem (though we do get some of that) as how the harem itself served as a zone of encounter between Women – western and Oriental – that allowed for an unusually high level of cross-cultural interaction and even exchange. Roberts’ work is concerned with the “high nineteenth century,” the eighty years from the rule of Abdulmecit (1839–61) to that of Abdulhamit II (1876–1909), during which the Ottoman Empire underwent unprecedented social, political, and economic change and reform. Even as the Empire came under increasing Western influence – and became increasingly beholden to it from an economic standpoint – the core foci of Western colonial activity were elsewhere, to the east and to the south, and Ottoman reform (the so-called Tanzimat) was undertaken by the Ottoman state itself, not at the urging or imposition of the West. The fact that the Ottomans were not formally colonized, Roberts argues, allowed for “a significant difference in attitude to Western culture among the indigenous elites” from that of elites in, say, India or Algeria – where the trappings of Western modernity were imposed upon the indigenous subject peoples. For the Ottomans, Roberts argues, and particularly for female elites, this “difference in attitude” took the form of an easy interest in the sartorial markers of western modernity. So it is that her account reveals not just the usual story of orientalist westerners “turning Turk,” but of oriental women themselves, as it were, “dressing west.” Indeed, some of the visitors Roberts profiles come to the harem armed with valises filled with western clothes with which to ingratiate themselves with the Oriental women they have come to visit. Robert’s narrative is fluidly written, and makes its argument clearly and well. Intimate Outsiders has the winning effect of all exposes of things that ought to be taken for granted, but that actually have never been given much systematic consideration or thought (Said’s Orientalism being itself a case in point). In Roberts’ case, the thing which ought to be taken for granted (but hasn’t, or at least, not sufficiently) is the simple surmise that just as Westerners were fascinated by the “exotic” life and ladies that were to be found within the walls of the oriental harem, so too must the harem’s own inhabitants have been fascinated by the Westerners who came to observe them. And fascinated they were: as Roberts shows through a series of carefully-wrought case studies, a whole cast of Western women, those who’d managed to gain insider access to the harem, arrived there only to find themselves just as much observed as observer, and no less an object of curious scrutiny than the women they’d come to visit. Particularly strong, if brief, is Roberts’ fourth chapter, “Being Seen,” on the reaction given to many Western female visitors to the harem, who were compelled by the curious harem denizens to reveal their peculiar undergarments, corsets, and stays...

Colonialism's goblins: Language, gender, and the Southeast Asian novel in English at a time of nationalism

Models describing the use of the English language in postcolonial literary texts are often progressivist, moving from imitation of colonial models to a return to indigenous subject matter, and finally to a fluent appropriation of English within new national and – increasingly – transnational contexts. This paper argues a contrary position: that earlier texts written in English may be as, if not more, sophisticated than later ones if read within a national context. Examining three novels from Southeast Asian countries where English has a contested presence within a multilingual environment, F. Sionil José's My Brother, My Executioner (The Philippines, 1973), Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid (Malaysia, 1976), Goh Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long (Singapore, 1972), it observes how a language inextricably linked to struggles over class, modernity, and culture enables exploration of specific contradictions in national projects. Rather than being seen as markers on a road to representational mastery, such novels are better viewed as sophisticated meditations on how the national might be imagined, and the occlusions of such imaginings.

No Place like Home

No Place like Home

Book Review: Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York and London: Routledge, 2004, 258 pp., £56.40 hbk.)

Book Review: Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York and London: Routledge, 2004, 258 pp., £56.40 hbk.)

Representing Indigenous Stories in the Cinema: Between Collaboration and Appropriation

[Abstract]: Not only has there been a large increase during the last decade in the amount of Australian films that tell Indigenous stories, but there has also been a significant diversification of both the kinds of stories that are being told and the ways in which they are being told. Where films like Walkabout and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in the 1970s clearly came from a white perspective on Indigeneity, in recent years Indigenous filmmakers have become more visible with films like Radiance, One Night the Moon and Beneath Clouds. In addition, white filmmakers increasingly choose the road of collaboration when it comes to Indigenous subject matter, as can be seen in films like Rabbit Proof Fence and The Tracker. This type of collaboration is most pronounced in the recent Rolf de Heer film Ten Canoes. This paper will discuss Ten Canoes in relation to two main concepts, both coined by Aileen Moreton-Robinson: the idea of Australia as a postcolonising nation (rather than a postcolonial nation) and the idea of incommensurability between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. In the process, it will explore the limits to collaboration and where collaboration becomes appropriation, and the implications of these processes for Australia as a postcolonising nation.

Autobiografia e sujeito histórico indígena: considerações preliminares

A autobiografia, gênero central na bibliografia escrita por ou sobre indígenas nos Estados Unidos, está ausente na bibliografia equivalente no Brasil. Este trabalho questiona as razões desse contraste, resumindo análises sobre a peculiaridade cultural do gênero autobiográfico - profundamente vinculado à formação do indivíduo ocidental -, sobre sua possível tradução ameríndia e sobre as formas pelas quais o sujeito histórico indígena tem sido construído no Brasil.

Critical Injuries: collaborative Indigenous life writing and the ethics of criticism

The publication of collaborative Indigenous life writing places both the text and its production under public scrutiny. The same is true for the criticism of life writing. For each, publication has consequences. Taking as its starting point the recent critical concern for harm occasioned in life writing, this article argues that in the reading of collaborative Indigenous life writing, injury may eventuate from critical commentary itself. The critical work of G Thomas Couser and his concern for vulnerable subjects, whose life narratives reach published form through the efforts or with the assistance of another, has its parallel in the critical attention given to collaboratively produced Indigenous life writing in Australia and Canada. In some cases, however, such analysis is generated without consultation with the Indigenous producers of collaborative texts. Criticism directing its arguments toward the conditions of editorial constraint by which the Indigenous subject is enclosed or silenced has the ironic and surely unintended consequence of removing the Indigenous participants of collaboration from the field of critical engagement. With particular regard to the collaborative texts Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs and Stolen Life: the journey of a Cree woman, this article argues that literary criticism can benefit from the practice of consultation with the Indigenous subjects whose representations it comments upon.

After the Rigoberta Menchu Controversy: Lessons Learned About the Nature of Subalternity and the Specifics of the Indigenous Subject

After the Rigoberta Menchu Controversy: Lessons Learned About the Nature of Subalternity and the Specifics of the Indigenous Subject

Topographical Poetry in the Early National Period

TN THEIR EFFORTS to create a truly national literature, American l poets of the late eighteenth century looked to external nature as offering the best promise for an indigenous poetry that, while original, conformed to accepted modes and styles current in English descriptive poetry. The resulting verse displayed an incongruity between convention and experience that led to its subsequent disregard as belles-lettres. Of all the kinds of English nature poetry imitated, the topographical genre-by definition requiring indigenous subject matter-most aptly reveals how Americans tried to achieve originality as they understood the term. In Dr. Samuel Johnson's words, local poetry had as its object the description of some particular landscape. American poets, like their English counterparts, generally found their models in the tradition established by Denham's Cooper's Hill (I642), Pope's Windsor-Forest (I713), and John Dyer's Grongar Hill (I762). As tradition demanded, Americans surveyed prospects from their favorite hill, flattered the owners of picturesque estates, memorialized towns and regions, recounted their travels, and advertised the beauties of rivers and waterfalls.' Because American topographical poetry was so consistently imitative of English models and trends, generalizations on the back-to-nature movement in English poetry usually apply equally well to American poetry. But the fact that American poets attempted, even while failing, to create a national literature requires a closer look first at the effect of the American physical environment on the treatment of nature within the established tradition and second at the most frequently recurring themes arising from this tradition.

A Letter from Paul Rotha

In your Spring issue, Miss Irene Nicholson in her piece Mexican Films kindly makes two references to my visit to Mexico in 1952, both of which need amplification if my motives are to be fully understood. First, I was not only just impressed by Salvador Toscano Barragan's film Memorias de un Mexicano when his daughter courteously screened it for me; I subsequently brought its existence to the attention of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in New York, the National Film Library in London, and the Cinematheque Fran(aise in Paris, in the hope that one or all of these archives would buy a print for preservation. I was also instrumental in having Miss Nicholson's article about this remarkable film published in the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound (Vol. 23, No. I, July, 1953). Second, my interest in Mexico for film production went a little deeper than being interested in the possibility of foreign companies, English or American, shooting their films 'on location' in the generous spaces of Mexico, to quote Miss Nicholson. The project in which I tried to seek Mexican support was as follows: As film history unrolls, various countries emerge at certain times and for certain reasons for their special contribution to the cinema of the decade. The Germans in the early twenties, the Russians in the middle twenties, the French in the late twenties and mid-thirties, the British during the last war, the Italians in the immediate postwar years, more recently the Japanese, and Hollywood on more than one occasion. Why not the Mexicans? They have a well-equipped industry, excellent technicians and actors, and a country so photogenic that it's hardly real! But, no outstanding directors-except Bufiuel who is Spanish-and what writers there may be are given little encouragement. Production is prosperous with a foreign market in the United States, Latin America, and presumably Spain. But, there are no outstanding pictures to set the movie world afire! So, Mexico needs urgently to train young directors. Who shall train them? The world picture of cinema just then (and indeed now) showed that several of the most gifted directors in Europe were either not working or were making films in which they had little real interest. Why not have the Mexicans invite two or three of these directors each to make a film in Mexico on an indigenous subject (in English, Spanish, and possibly French) with a stipulation that each of them undertakes to train personally a young Mexican assistant during production. In this way, over three or four years, a group of really internationally important films would be made carrying Mexican prestige round the world; and, at the same time, a group of young Mexicans would be trained in the technique of direction by world masters. On my return to Europe, I had occasion to explain this project to De Sica, Max Ophuls, and Jacques Becker. All three enthusiastically agreed to consider the scheme if it materialized. Alas! I never heard any more from the Mexicans to whom I proposed the project! It is still, I suggest, a good idea. 14 July, 1956 PAUL ROTHA E 1o8J