Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.
political aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed up’); this concept, which originally referred to racial mixture in a pejorative way, has recently been appropriated by Mapuche living in urban contexts and constantly negotiating between different identities and senses of belonging, and, often coming from mixed families, claiming their own mestizaje or miscegenation as something creative, heterogeneous, yet still entirely indigenous, as will be discussed further in this introduction. What we refer
restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. (Benjamin 1996: 234) The political-aesthetic task for Benjamin consisted not in showing how the past of the Arcades influenced the present, nor how the present shed its light on the past, but to reveal in the ruins of the Arcades a historical ‘truth’ whose ‘afterlives’ were capable of producing an ‘awakening’ into what Benjamin called the ‘now of recognisability’. Crucial for Benjamin’s way of conceptualising history, this Jetztzeit, which in a ‘lightning flash’ produced by a moment of ‘danger’ created a ‘new
Penguin Modern European Poets series, which introduced into the English language the works of such authors as Zbigniew Herbert from Poland, Miroslav Holub from Czechoslovakia, Janosz Pilinszky from Hungary or Vasko Popa from Serbia. The influence these poets exerted was political, aesthetic and ethical. Their voices were enabling because they embodied an art that faced up to fundamental political and moral questions. For poets 9780719075636_4_007.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 129 Scattered and diverse 129 from Britain and Ireland these writers from the other Europe