Colonialism’s afterlife: vision and visuality on the Northwest Coast

This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:cultural geographies
Main Author: Braun, Bruce
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publications 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1474474002eu243oa
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1191/1474474002eu243oa
Description
Summary:This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of their representation of relations between indigenous peoples, physical landscapes, state power, and modernity, and in the context of ongoing political struggles over land, resources and the environment between First Nations and the Canadian government. The paper also calls attention to the multiple and fractured nature of postcolonial visualities, to the discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that shape how landscapes are experienced and represented, and, ultimately, to the trace of colonial pasts in the environmental and political imaginaries of a postcolonial present.