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Native American Resistance Through Visual Sovereignty

Paresi, Elizabeth Santina
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Abstract
This thesis aims to understand the extent to which Indigenous-made Cinema actively resists U.S. colonial hegemony. In the past, Native American Resistance has taken on different forms of direct or indirect action depending on the political or historical moment. Native Americans actively and passively resist U.S. colonialism to protect their sovereignty as independent nations. However, when it comes to representing Native Americans in films, the United States primarily takes on a white-centric perspective—dispelling authentic accounts from Indigenous Americans' perspective – intentionally or unintentionally implementing a dominant view which privileges Eurocentric ideology. Based on Nicholas Mirzoeff's theory of counter-visuality, Indigenous-made films, and television series provide a counter-hegemonic narrative to the white-centric portrayal of American Indians in the U.S. society. Extensive research has been conducted on the representation of Native Americans in film. Since hegemony can be further disseminated through visual media, enforcing or reenforcing dominant ideology, the interest of this study is to examine the use of cinematic images and narratives, which construct white-centric narratives, used to irrationalize the identities of Native Americans. According to Michelle Raheja, visual sovereignty is a new way of reimaging and restructuring what autonomy and self-representation means to Native American culture. Through technologies in the film media, Indigenous filmmakers can weaponize the art of cinema to deploy ideas communicating individual and cultural values of the American Indian population. Reasserting sovereignty over their own image and providing a counter-hegemonic view to dismantle colonial and/or imperial status quos.
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Thesis (B.A. in Political Science, Minor in Communications & Creative Writing)--John Cabot University, Spring 2023.
Date
2023
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Keywords
Indians of North America, Government relations, Wars, Territorial expansion
Citation
Paresi, Elizabeth Santina. "Native American Resistance Through Visual Sovereignty". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy.2023.
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