Possessions

Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture / Decolonization

£35.00
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The arts of Africa, Oceania and Native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst

The arts of Africa, Oceania and Native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation?

Highly acclaimed on first publication, and now revised and updated, this revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing but never eclipsing Native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, settler artists and designers have drawn upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities, while powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange is a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to uphold the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

For anyone with an interest in the current debates about decolonization, Indigenous culture and the history of art, this is essential reading.
Edition type: New Edition
Extent: 368 pp
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: 181
Publication date: 2022-07-07
Size: 23.4 x 15.3 cm
ISBN: 9780500296592

Press Reviews

One of the most interesting and articulate books written about art made in a non-Western, colonial site … This is not the view of an outsider, but of an insider … marvellous
Svetlana Alpers

A pioneering text in postcolonial art history
Rosalind Polly Blakesley, University of Cambridge

Possessions intelligently and sensitively navigates the relationship between indigenous and settler cultures in Australia and New Zealand
Geoffrey Batchen, University of Oxford

In this re-issue of his ground-breaking book Possessions, Thomas provides what many of us in settler colonies are currently grappling with: the need to assess where we have been in the project of decolonising art and art history, and the need to re-think where we are now
Peter Brunt, Victoria University, Wellington

About the Author

Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006, is author of many books on art, history and empire in the Pacific. Over 2018-19, he co-curated 'Oceania' for the Royal Academy of Arts and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. He was awarded the 2010 Wolfson History Prize for his book Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire.

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