Resurgent Futures: Contemporary Indigenous Performance in the Americas (TPS-0223)

Fall 2024 · TPS 0223 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

“Indigenous people do not exist.” This sentiment was uttered in the opening remarks of a 2015 workshop with Spiderwoman Theatre, the longest running all women’s Native theatre group in the settler nation of the United States. The theatre group’s triad was right: they are Rappahanock and Guna. Their ancestors experienced the long legacy of colonization under both Spanish and British settlers, and through this process (one example of a Foucauldian subjection) they were produced as “Indigenous.” And yet this term is actively multi-faceted; it works to congeal global peoples who have experienced dispossession through land, language, and culture and simultaneously erase specificity. While these histories of colonization throughout the Americas— particularly through the regimes of French, British, Portuguese, and Spanish forces—are important and part of contemporary Indigenous livelihoods, so too are the numerous forms of Indigenous resurgence and continued presence-ing through Indigenous epistemes. For this reason, we will discuss both the specific practices and histories of Anishinaabe, Tahltan, Pueblo, Cree, Zapotec and Wampanoag artists (among other Native nations) interwoven with settler colonial histories of coercion and violence. This course will explore contemporary performance, sculpture, dance and visual media produced by Indigenous artists throughout the Americas. The readings herein are not comprehensive but rather thematic, gathering around four themes: Embodied Story, Grounded Relationality, Queer/Feminist/Decolonial Present and Resurgent Futures.

Course codes: TPS-0223, TPS 0223, TPS0223, TPS-223, TPS 223, TPS223

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