|
Difference & Desire |
|
Week 2 - April 13, 2001
Subverting Stereotypes Desire is desire for the
absolutely other. Besides the hunger one satisfies, the thirst one
quenches, and the senses one allays, metaphysics desires the other
beyond satisfactions . . . A desire without satisfaction which,
precisely, understands [entend] the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority
of the other. - Emmanuel Levinas[1] The Original: The First Image [Hegel and Teleology]
They go about naked; they have no sense of property; the men have relations with all women; they feed on each other; they do not have a government; and they live for 150 years. Before the Beginning Races
monstrueuses de l'Orient
C. von Megenberg. Puch der Natur. Augsbourg, 1478
The Native as America
Michel
de Certeau, in The Writing of
History, writes: An inaugural scene: after a moment of stupor . . . the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history. . . . Jan Van der Straet’s staging of the disembarkment surely depicts Vespucci’s surprise as he faces this world, the first to grasp clearly that she is a nuova terra not yet existing on maps—an unknown body destined to bear the name . . . of its inventor. But what is really initiated here is a colonization of the body by the discourse of power. (xxv) [palimpsest] Ernst Renan explains in “What is a Nation?”: “Forgetting, I would even go as far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation . . .” (11) Seventeenth
Century Dutch in Brazil Animals,
Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau:
The Golden Body of the
Native
The Native in the Museum
Contemporary Native Art
Timothy Brennan defines imperialist nationalisms as those “project[s] of unity [formed] on the basis of conquest and economic expediency” while anti-imperialist nationalisms are those that take on “the task of reclaiming community from within boundaries defined by the very power whose presence denied community.”[2] James Luna (Luiseño/Diegueño)
Jimmie Durham (sometimes a Cherokee) “I am not an American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn allegiance to India. I am not a Native ‘American’, nor do I feel that America has any right to either name me or un-name me. I have previously stated that I should be considered mixed-blood: that is, I claim to be a male but in fact only one of my parents was male.”
Richard Ray Whitman (Euchee/Creek)
Juane Quick-to-See Smith (Salish and Kootenai)
Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora)
“Native people have distinct epistemological, cosmological and ideological constructs of reality, identified in total as a world view. Any attempt at understanding the visual expression of Native people must be located within a framework familiar with their specific cultural construct or world view. Yet, within the field of art history there is no recognition that specifically calls for an Indigenous intellectual framework to critique the work of contemporary Native American artists.” Doris Sommer, re: Menchú’s secrets: ". . . it may be useful to notice that the refusal is performative; it constructs metaleptically the apparent cause of the refusal: our craving to know. . . whether she is withholding her secrets because we are so different and would understand them only imperfectly; or whether we should not know them for ethical reasons, because our knowledge would lead to power over her community. . . It is the degree of our foreignness, our cultural difference that would make her secrets incomprehensible to the outsider." Bodies that Matter: Performing the Self
[1] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity,
trans. A. Linghis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979) 34. [2] Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation
and Narration, 58.
|