Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture

by Nicholas Thomas

Tribal art has been one of the greatest inspirations for twentieth-century Western artists. Picasso, Matisse, Ernst, and Brancusi responded in unforgettable ways to masks, sculpture, and other forms of indigenous African, Oceanic, and American art. The politics of this relationship have long been a matter of is it a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book looks at the distinctive situation of the settler society--countries in which large numbers of Europeans have displaced, outnumbered, but never entirely eclipsed native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, settler artists and designers have drawn on tribal motifs and styles, while powerful indigenous art traditions have been used to assert the presence of native peoples and their claim to sovereignty. Cultural exchange proves to be a two-way process, and an unpredictable much contemporary indigenous art draws on modern Western art, while affirming ancestral values and rejecting the European appropriation of tribal cultures.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Thomas is one of the most insightful explorers of the cultures and condition of colonialism I have encountered, and in this anthropological art history of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand he successfully unpacks the contradictions that are cultures of colonialism in settler colonies. Much of the analysis of colonialism and its cultures is based in a view of a deep physical distance between coloniser and colonised – the colonised were away in the colonies, the colonisers in the metropolitan core – but as Thomas notes settlement colonies (Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and to a lesser extent South Africa – not in his list – Canada and the USA in the Anglo-world, but also much of central and south America, as well as places like Siberia) disrupts this cosy view of colonialism. In settler colonies, the colonisers and the colonised are in each other backyards (or at least live next door to each other), and colonisers have real trouble marking a distinct cultural existence. As Thomas notes, colonial culture is always 'native and/or national' – and I'd add that the use of 'native' by the colonisers to self-define is one of the great under-explored concepts/discourses in colonial history.

By definition, the 'and/or' element of colonisers' cultures is unstable – colonial cultures are sometimes both, sometimes one of the dyad, so he can argue that colonisers relations with indigenous cultures can be defined as a 'strangely fundamental union of adoption and antipathy' and a concurrent 'celebration and denigration' (p 213). I really like Thomas's work – he helps give me theoretical tools to make more sense of the paradox that is colonial nationalism, and the contradictory discourses of late colonial life and practice, and what's more he writes so well. Top notch book with ideas I can use, develop, and invoke.