the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Faye Ginsburg
Native Intelligence: A Short History of Debates on Indigenous Media
This lecture took place on March 9th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
In the three final decades of the 20th century, and into the 21st, as indigenous people began to gain control over film and video, technologies of representation which had long objectified them, a series of debates emerged around this work that challenged this project. These ranged from early questions as to whether the radical alterity of indigenous cultural life might translate to the screen, to those who thought the very idea of indigenous media was an oxymoron, to more celebratory approaches that imagined this work had displaced other representations. Now, as indigenous people are regularly showing feature films at the Cannes Film Festival, and starting their own national television networks, the debates have moved on. Is the separatism implied by the term “indigenous media” still appropriate in cases of deep collaboration? On the other hand, will exclusively indigenous television initiatives create sequestered media worlds that will become the televisual equivalent to “reservations’? This talk will address this history of debates and the current issues that are shaping contemporary work, with clips of some of the key works shaping this field.
About Faye Ginsburg
Faye Ginsburg is Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU, where she is also the David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology. An award winning author/editor of four books, she is currently completing her 5th entitled Mediating Culture: Indigenous Identity in a Digital Age. She has won multiple book prizes as well as many other honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Macarthur “genius” award, Her work engages with cultural activists across the political spectrum, and always takes into account how people use media in their efforts to transform their social worlds. She has been studying and curating indigenous media work—primarily from Australia but also from other parts of the world—for over 20 years. In addition to her numerous articles, she developed a fellowship program for indigenous media makers at her Center at NYU, and with colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, curated a major international showcase for those venues entitled First Nations, First Features in 2005.
Relevant Links
- Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.
- First Nations, First Features