Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 230
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-78552-320-5 • Hardback • September 2020 • $140.00 • (£108.00)
978-1-78552-321-2 • Paperback • September 2020 • $48.00 • (£37.00)
978-1-78552-322-9 • eBook • September 2020 • $45.50 • (£35.00)
Emily Merson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina (2019 – 2020).
Chapter 1. Introduction: Settler Colonial Claims to Sovereignty and Decolonial Contemporary Artwork
Chapter 2. Creative Presence: Tracing the Coloniality of Global Power and Decolonial World Politics Through the Materials, Media Forms and Place-Making of Contemporary Artwork
Chapter 3. Unsettling International Relations: Decolonizing International Relations Theories of Global Power and Settler Colonial Claims to Exclusive Sovereignty
Chapter 4. Decolonizing Settler Colonial Art Institutions: Brian Jungen’s Visual Exhibition Methods of Prototypes for New Understanding
Chapter 5. Materializing Indigenous Self-Determination: Brian Jungen’s Materials and Sculptural Methods in Prototypes for New Understanding
Chapter 6. The Scenario of Naming Power: Remembering Traumas of Canadian Settler Colonialism in Rebecca Belmore’s filmed performance installation The Named and the Unnamed
Chapter 7. International Art World and Transnational Artwork: Creative Presence in Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain at the Venice Biennale
Chapter 8. Conclusion: Contemporary Artwork and Decolonial Futures of World Politics
Works Cited
Index
Taking artwork to be a powerful force in (un)making world politics, Emily Merson’s Creative Presence is a major contribution to our understanding not only of sites and practices of decolonial resistance but also of International Relations and where else we ought to look in theorizing relations between political communities. This important book reveals how failing to inquire beyond disciplinary convention sustains our implication in colonial violence.
— J. Marshall Beier, McMaster University
Creative Presence centres contemporary Indigenous arts in relation to ongoing global struggles for justice. Emily Merson’s careful reading of decolonial and transnational art works by two of Canada’s best-known Indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore and Brian Jungen, lays a groundwork for a transformative and fresh aesthetic method that situates decolonizing Indigenous arts within world politics. For International Relations scholars and others seeking interpretive methods beyond established but universalizing western aesthetic frames, Merson expertly channels an embodiment of practices of Indigenous sovereignty to disrupt settler colonial imaginary.
— Carmen Robertson, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous Visual and Material Cultural, Carleton University
Emily Merson’s Creative Presence is itself a much needed “creative presence” for a discipline that is only recently waking up to the important political interventions of the visual arts. Conceptually acute, wide ranging in focus, and compellingly argued, her investigation discloses a world of creative work that will lastingly unsettle the one that IR scholars have been inhabiting.
— Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i, Manoa