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The Aesthetics of Decolonial Worlding: Contemporary Art and Activism Across Turtle Island

Abstract

The recent surge in global environmental justice movements has been accompanied and often leveraged by a resurgence of movements for Indigenous peoples’ justice. As these interconnected and mutually reinforcing movements have grown in parallel, they have also become more visible through dynamic “movement cultures” – cultural expressions that are born of the aforementioned movements. These cultural demonstrations of the struggles for environmental and Indigenous peoples’ justice stretch far beyond neatly printed posters and photographs, extending into mass collective walks, radical re-workings of cartography, the reclamation of names and places previously snatched up by colonialism, and aesthetic objects that resist co-optation through their continued connections to peoples, territories, and everyday life. Through the analysis of a variety of media – from grassroots drone video, to political printmaking and performative protest – this project puts forward the notion of decolonial worlding as an umbrella term to describe the myriad acts of creative resistance that emerge in generative opposition to colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism. These acts are united in their diversely expressed commitment to an actual postcolonial future.

Drawing upon the methods of visual culture studies, with a commitment to decolonial and feminist approaches, The Aesthetics of Decolonial Worlding unites diverse decolonial projects through rigorous examination of what these activists and artists are resisting, as well as the futures they envision. The projects and actions explored seek to crack open and undermine past frames of hegemonic perception by inserting visions of subjectivity, nationhood, and sovereignty that are not necessarily new, but have been forcibly oppressed through colonial regimes of representation, state oppression, and biopolitical control. While some of these decolonial interventions may seem limited to the spheres of ephemeral protest actions or temporary art exhibitions, they also begin to simultaneously build and remember other worlds. They articulate an alternative visual narrative that seeks to overturn histories of colonialism and reveal counter-visualities of creative decolonial resistance. This project ultimately shows that these visual manifestations of environmental justice and self-determination comprise a collective aesthetics of decolonial worlding, and that turning our attention toward such actions may lead to a more just material reality across Turtle Island.

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