Browsing by Subject "Refusal"
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Item Reimagined family ties : redressing memory through photography in the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos(2022-08-12) Fernandez, Maria Emilia, M.A.; Nelson, AdeleThis thesis investigates the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos, three contemporary Brazilian artists who are proposing different ways of looking at the past while also addressing the interlocking forms of oppression at work in the present. Through their collaborations with relatives and ancestors, in which photography plays a crucial role, the artists reflect on the colonial trauma of over three centuries of genocide, slavery and colonization in Brazil. However, I argue that they go beyond that, proposing a way of reimagining frameworks of kinship as a form of redress. By articulating new lines of descent that constitute a (re)membering of those fragmented narratives that remain in the archives, I contend that the artists are addressing present structural, everyday racism while also performing and expanding the possibilities of inhabiting the future. In establishing a relation between their artistic practices, this thesis analyzes the ways they appeal to personal and collective memories brought to the foreground in family photographic records to conceive paths towards repairing, or at least naming, the wounds inflicted by the forms of class, gender and race violence that continue to plague the country. Moreover, this text reveals how their works invite a rearrangement of our perception of time and contribute to a critique of linear temporality, evincing the falseness of any narrative of the past as single, stable and flowing in only one direction. My research is guided by questions such as: How can photography serve as a medium of fabulation and of imagining family ties across time and space? If photographs help constitute a family’s affective archive, how can these intergenerational dialogues become a form of thinking about the future and inventing new lines of filiation? Furthermore, how can these gestures signal the way, if not toward healing, towards an ever-incomplete practice of redress?Item "There is no word for relocation in the Diné language" : everyday forms of refusal to colonialism(s) on Black Mesa(2015-05) Boas, Hallie Sarah; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-There are an estimated twenty to fifty billion tons of high grade, low sulfur coal underlying the Colorado Plateau in a stretch of Arizona desert known as Black Mesa. Since the 1970s, the Navajo (Diné) community of Black Mesa has faced a tremendous battle against particularly insidious types of colonialism that continue to endure into the present day. In 1964, a conglomeration of companies known as Peabody Western Coal Company (now Peabody Energy), first signed a deal with the Navajo Nation and then the Hopi Tribe, granting the company mineral rights to strip mine the high desert plateau of "Black Mesa" seated within the 1882 boundaries of the Navajo and Hopi reservations. In 1974, the Navajo and Hopi Settlement Act made almost a million acres of shared Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona exclusive Hopi territory, called Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL). Black Mesa was crisscrossed and split by barbed wire fencing designating boundaries. The Department of Justice undertook a plan to relocate more than 14,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi. Couched as an effort to resolve what was called the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, the act was actually the result of an ongoing effort to exploit mineral resources in the area. This report is a story of refusal by those who remain. In this report, I will show how the Navajo community now residing on the so-called Hopi Partitioned Lands has employed and called upon place-based relational politics, cultural values, and daily practices of refusal to endure under the harshest conditions of colonial invasions, internal and external changes and resource extraction. My interlocutors shared stories that make stark the brutality of federal Indian policies on Navajo life, and at the same time show resilience and determination in the face of colonialism. Through ethnographic narratives, I highlight the central role of sheep and shepherding as a continued practice of the everyday resistance to the colonial conditions imposed upon them. I bring together theoretical frameworks and literature that reveal how Navajo history traverses and coheres within both settler colonialism and resource colonialism. Lastly, I focus on the role that women, matrilineal kinship and specific female deities play in the continuity of their struggle.