Sensing Sovereignty: Theorizing Indigenous & Minoritarian Aesthetics

This graduate seminar explores the rich textures of Indigenous aesthetics by drawing on the fields of Native feminisms, performance studies, queer of color critique, and Indigenous theory. Students will consider Indigenous peoples’ engagement with aesthetics as integral to the persistence of Indigenous paradigms. We will ask: How are aesthetics a critical site of both colonization and decolonial refusal? How can we collectively explore the relational capacities and overtones imbued within Indigenous and minoritarian aesthetics? How do activists, artists, writers, etc. employ aesthetics as the conduit to building anticolonial solidarities across diverse contexts? We will explore the sensory paradigms framing aesthetics asking how these register within the body and the environment to build, sustain, and live in otherwise worlds. Simultaneously, students will explore the way Indigenous and minoritarian uses of media challenge settler colonial and carceral regimes of white supremacist power.