In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781786940346)

An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on publication via LUP's website and OAPEN.

Indigenous arts, simultaneously attuned to local voices and global cultural flows, have often been the vanguard in communicating what is at stake in the interactions, contradictions, disjunctions, opportunities, exclusions, injustices and aspirations that globalization entails. Focusing specifically on embodied arts and activism, this interdisciplinary volume offers vital new perspectives on the power and precariousness of indigeneity as a politicized cultural force in our unevenly connected world. Twenty-three distinct voices speak to the growing visibility of indigenous peoples' performance on a global scale over recent decades, drawing specific examples from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, Scandinavia and South Africa.

An ethical touchstone in some arenas and a thorny complication in others, indigeneity is now belatedly recognised as mattering in global debates about natural resources, heritage, governance, belonging and social justice, to name just some of the contentious issues that continue to stall the unfinished business of decolonization. To explore this critical terrain, the essays and images gathered here range in subject from independent film, musical production, endurance art and the performative turn in exhibition and repatriation practices to the appropriation of hip-hop, karaoke and reality TV. Collectively, they urge a fresh look at mechanisms of postcolonial entanglement in the early 21st century as well as the particular rights and insights afforded by indigeneity in that process.


Author: Helen Gilbert
ISBN-10: 1786940345
ISBN-13: 9781786940346
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/01/2023
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback

About the Author

Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London, and visiting Humboldt fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich.

J.D. Phillipson is an independent scholar and theatre artist based in London.

Michelle H. Raheja is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the California Center for Native Nations at the University of California, Riverside.