Unsettling Settler Colonial Feelings: Contemporary Indigenous Art Practice and Pedagogical Implications Toward Indigenous Futurity

• In Event: Art, Jazz, and Love: Curricular Aesthetics and Poet(h)ics

Abstract

This theoretical paper discusses an avenue of disrupting settler colonial feelings through an encounter with contemporary art. Specifically, it explores how contemporary Indigenous artists’ practices can serve as a pedagogical site for challenging and reconditioning settler colonial habits of feeling and sensing. Based on the concept of settler common sense (Rifkin, 2013) and the visceral, as a logic of decolonization (Khanna, 2020), it highlights the affective dimension of settler colonialism and how the encounters with art enables us to feel, sense, think, and ultimately access and engage with decolonial critiques. It also conceptualizes possible pedagogical implications based on transformative feelings evoked by contemporary Indigenous art practices and Indigenous aesthetics.

Authors

• Injeong Yoon-Ramirez, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

• Benjamin Ramirez, The University of Arizona