Optic/Haptic/Abject: Revisioning Indigenous Media in Victor Masayesva, Jr and Leslie Marmon Silko

作者 

Karen Jacobs

Department of English, Hellems 101, UCB 226, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-226, USAkaren.jacobs@colorado.edu

資料來源

 doi: 10.1177/1470412904048565  

Journal of Visual Culture December 2004 vol. 3 no. 3 291-316

摘要

This article uses Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr’s 1992 film, Imagining Indians, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, as test cases through which tore-evaluate a central debate in visual anthropology about the meanings and values of indigenous visual media, and as complex representations which force us to move beyond that debate’s endorsements and critiques. Through their shared embrace of anti-visualist modes, both Masayesva and Silko develop alternative strategies of visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relations – strategies which seek to reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity and tactility. They not only redraw the territory of subject– object relations informed by the gaze, but more foundationally may be said to rewrite the ‘scription’ through which social rules are inscribed upon the body, and to redesignate what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘rules of recognition’ that regulate colonial encounters. 

關鍵字

• abjection
• indigenous media
• Leslie Marmon Silko
• photography
• Victor Masayesva
• visuality