Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transnational Imaginaries, Media Aesthetics, and Social Thought

Against the long historical backdrop of 1492, Columbus, and the Conquest, Robert Stam's wide-ranging study traces a trajectory from the representation of indigenous peoples by others to self-representation by indigenous peoples, often as a form of resistance and rebellion to colonialist or neoliberal capitalism, across an eclectic range of forms of media, arts, and social philosophy. Spanning national and transnational media in countries including the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy, Stam orchestrates a dialogue between the western mediated gaze on the 'Indian' and the indigenous gaze itself, especially as incarnated in the burgeoning movement of “indigenous media,” that is, the use of audio-visual-digital media for the social and cultural purposes of indigenous peoples themselves. Drawing on examples from cinema, literature, music, video, painting and stand-up comedy, Stam shows how indigenous artists, intellectuals and activists are responding to the multiple crises - climatological, economic, political, racial, and cultural - confronting the world. Significant attention is paid to the role of arts-based activism in supporting the struggle of indigenous artistic activism, of the Yanomami people specifically, to save the Amazon forest and the planet.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction The Terms of Debate A 1492 Project: Conquest and Discovery The Protocols of Anti-Indigenism The Sacred Land Native Arts and Aesthetics Indigenous Media Chapter One: From France Antartique To Shamanic Critique: The Tupinization Of Social Thought France Antartique and Tupi Theory Filming France Antartique Montaigne and Tupi Theory From France Antartique to the Carib Revolution From the French Philosophes to the American Revolution The French Missions, Lévi-Strauss, and the Indian Pierre Clastres, the Anarchist Indigene, and the Wari The Franco-Brazilian Dialogue and the Politics of The Falling Sky Chapter Two: The Indigenous “Cunhã:” The Metamorphosis of a Gendered Trope The Tupinization of Manhattan The “Cunhã” as Filmmaker The Cunhã as Myth: Paraguaçu Caramuru: The Invention of Brazil The Filmic and Televisual Cunhã The Cunhã Degraded The Cunhã as Warrior The Cunhã as Forest Princess The Cunhã as Hyper-Woman The Ecological Cunhã The “Cunhã” as Activist/Artist Myths of Extinction: The Return of the Vanished Indigene Chapter Three: The Transnational “Indian” Land and the Frontier Western Going Native Europe’s “White Indians” The Indian Hobbyists Transmedial Indigeneity The Strategic Uses of Humor Painterly Tricksterism Indigeneity and Music First Peoples, First Features Indigenization of Horror Chapter Four: Cross-National Comparabilities: The Indigenization Of Brazilian Media Centennial Commemorations and First Contact Films Variations on a Westward Theme Proto-Indigenist Cinema in Brazil Indigenous Media in Brazil Video nas Aldeias The Archival Turn Corumbiara: on the Trail of Massacres The Guaraní and Contrapuntal Narration The Martyrdom of the Guaraní-Kaiowá The Transmediatic Indigene of Popular Culture Chapter Five: Triumphs and the Travails of the Yanomami Juan Downey and “The Laughing Alligator” Crossed Filmic Gazes The Poetics of The Falling Sky The Cinematic Imaginary of the Yanomami Cinematizing Shamanism: Xapiri The Last Forest Conclusion: The Theoretical Indigene: Becoming Indian, And The Elsewhere Of Capitalism Colonial Ambivalence and the Transnational Gaze Transformational Becomings From Republican Constitutions to the Carib Revolution The Theoretical Indigene Indigeneity and the Postcolonial Left Before and After the Nation-State Postcolonialism and the Nurture of Nature The Fear of a Red Academe: Indigenous Decoloniality The Power of Shamanic Critique Capitalism vs. the Planet The Transnational Trope of Indigenous Happiness Coda Index

About the Author :
Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University, USA. He has authored, co-authored, and edited nineteen books on film and cultural theory, national cinemas, politics and aesthetics, and comparative race and postcolonial studies. His books include: Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985,1995); Brazilian Cinema (1982);Subversive Pleasures:(1989); Tropical Multiculturalism (1997); Film Theory: An Introduction (2000); Literature through Film (2005); Francois Truffaut and Friends (2006); Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (2015); and World Literature, Transnational Cinema,and Global Media: Towards a Transartistic Commons (2019) He is co-author, with Ella Shohat, of Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) Flagging Patriotism; (2006); and Race in Translation: (2012); He has taught in France, Tunisia, Brazil, Germany, and Abu Dhabi. His work has been translated into more than 15 languages.

Review :
With this book, Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transnational Imaginaries, Media Aesthetics, and Social Thought, the always brilliant scholar Bob Stam has given us another tour de force. In this new work he tracks how -- over 500 years -- the possibilities of contemporary Indigenous media emerged in the Americas, with special attention to Brazil. He traces the colonial circumstances and European imaginaries that produced “the Protocols of Anti-Indigenism,” morphed into the “transnational Indian”, and landed in the rich dialogue emerging from contemporary Indigenous media. Witty, erudite, and politically engaged, this book is essential reading for those who hope to decolonize cinema studies and locate Indigenous media making in a rich historical context. Building on research in media studies, anthropology, and social philosophy, this timely book offers an in depth account of the recent indigenous turn in global scholarship, politics, and culture. Particularly impressive is Stam’s ability to relationalize processes and events from diverse historical epochs and geographical regions. Eclectic and breathtaking in its scope, transnational and trans-medial, this book puts on full display Stam’s unique capacity to think across myriad sources and cultural forms in an insightful, sophisticated, and generous way. The book should be an important contribution not only to scholars across but also to cultural producers, activists, and even nonspecialized readers interested in the past and future of indigenous people. Through a "trans-methodology" that crosses disciplines and boundaries of historical periods and countries, Stam shows us how indigenous peoples have constructed a global and intercontinental response to colonialism over the centuries. As a result, the modern world's history emerges as an "intertextual mise-en-abyme", in which indigenous progressive social thought, political practices and arts interpose the colonial imaginary.