Possessions

Possessions

by Nicholas Thomas
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 01/09/2022

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The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation?


This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

ISBN:
9780500778012
9780500778012
Category:
History of art / art & design styles
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
01-09-2022
Language:
English
Publisher:
Thames and Hudson Ltd
Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Thomas has been Director of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 2006. He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific.

His books include Entangled Objects (1991), Oceanic Art (1995), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and Islanders: The Pacific In The Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.

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