{"id":36,"date":"2020-02-29T22:14:49","date_gmt":"2020-03-01T05:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/?p=36"},"modified":"2020-03-09T21:30:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T04:30:35","slug":"assignment-3-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/2020\/02\/29\/assignment-3-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Assignment 3.2 – Hidden Perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to answer question 6 regarding Lee Maracle’s essay. In the beginning of the essay, Maracle details the difficulties Indigenous communities in have had in coalescing their literary tradition and the intentional hurdles which where created by settlers to exert physical and cultural control over Canada. In effect, the Eurocentric control over the literary canon and all academic fields which legitimize literary criticism serves to maintain authority, and reenforce a specific narrative which places white perspectives at the apex of development and understanding. I found a similar parallel in Maracle’s discussion of how the white settler-colonial domination of critical institutions has prevented de-colonized Indigenous critical frameworks relating to their literary and informative traditions from being able to consolidate and discuss Indigenous works, therefore preventing them from being legitimized, in field of art history. For a long time, it was a ‘truth’ of the art history canon that abstract art was ‘invented’ by Vassily Kandinsky. However, a Swedish woman artist named Hilma Af Klimt<\/a> had been creating abstract art years before he had. But her work never gained prominence, and because of her gender, her artwork, while seen by artist such as Kandinsky, was marginalized and was not elevated into the canon of art history until recently, when discourse surrounding her role has begun to permeate academic and cultural institutions.<\/p>\n

Its worth pointing out that my example exists within the context of Western art history, and the marginalization Klimt experiences is only on the level of gender. Additionally an argument could be made that abstraction in art was created outside the boundaries established by the Western academic canon<\/a>, as abstract artists borrowed “formal properties” of African art in their own work. African works, as with other forms of non-western are less credited for their influence in the development of abstraction, thus marginalizing their works. However, by applying the argument which Maracle puts forth, African arts should not need to be validated or understood in the context of European art criticism in order to be studied or have merit.<\/p>\n

Maracle then proceeds to detail how literary criticism in Salish culture works, as an ever evolving discipline which spreads beyond storytelling and into to fields in the natural and social sciences. It also creates “requires that the myth-makers engage in discourse with the intellectuals of the nation whom they recognize as understanding the context we inherit” (Maracle 90). In comparison to the Western culture which dominates our current discourse, where story is often separate from discourses and sciences, all of these things are combined in the Salish storytelling tradition. In effect the Salish tradition works more like the entirety of academia, then one specific institution like literary criticism.<\/p>\n

However, the colonial destruction of nature, a key aspect of Salish storytelling and the removal of the Salish people from their land, as well as stripping them of the ability pass down their oral informative practices, have prevented the Salish narrative practices from proliferating. Ironically, even though Frye barely mentions Indigenous storytelling in his detail of Canadian literary history, and the strong absence of a “Canadian Literary Culture” seems ironic as Canadians have robbed their Indigenous peoples of their abilities to pass down their already existing mythos. Canadians seem unable to define themselves through their literary practices, but peoples like that of the Salish Nation are able to define themselves culturally despite having their practices actively suppressed by the same institutions which bemoan a lack of a specific Canadian culture and identity.<\/p>\n

Dyrschka, Halina, director.\u00a0Beyond the Visible – Hilma Af Klint<\/i>. Ambrosia Film, 2019.<\/p>\n

Frye, Northrop.\u00a0The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination.<\/i>\u00a02011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.<\/p>\n

Maracle, Lee. \u201cToward a National Literature: A Body of Writing.\u201d\u00a0Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures by Paul Warren Depasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma Larocque (z-lib.org)<\/a>, Broadview, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n

Dr. Peri Klemm, “The Reception of African Art in the West,” in Smarthistory, December 20, 2016,\u00a0 https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/the-reception-of-african-art-in-the-west\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to answer question 6 regarding Lee Maracle’s essay. In the beginning of the essay, Maracle details the difficulties Indigenous communities in have had in coalescing their literary tradition and the intentional hurdles which where created by settlers to exert physical and cultural control over Canada. In effect, the Eurocentric control […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69985,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69985"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}