e n g a g e d r e s i s t a n c e :
american indian art, literature, and film from Alcatraz to the NMAI
Engaged Resistance is a big, brilliant book, full of color film clips, photographs, and art reproductions, as well as excerpts from novels, poetry, and films that both participate in the dominant American culture, and at the same time push against the assimilation and erasure of Indian culture.
--Zara Raab, The San Francisco Review of Books
Dean Rader's Engaged Resistance is a terrifically appealing, accessible, and provocative book. Taking as its premise that "Native-produced texts like poetry, fiction, movies, paintings, and sculpture are fundamental products and processes of American Indian sovereignty," it approaches varieties of Native cultural expression as acts of "aesthetic activism" and puts them in dialogue to animate current critical debates. Careful to distinguish between the "compositional resistance" implicit in a work's materials, form, or genre and the "contextual resistance" explicit in overt statements of defiance, Radar provides—and tests—an effective vocabulary for speaking about the strategies through which contemporary Native authors and visual artists express resistance and tell stories of survival.
--Audrey Goodman, Studies in American Indian Literatures
--Zara Raab, The San Francisco Review of Books
Dean Rader's Engaged Resistance is a terrifically appealing, accessible, and provocative book. Taking as its premise that "Native-produced texts like poetry, fiction, movies, paintings, and sculpture are fundamental products and processes of American Indian sovereignty," it approaches varieties of Native cultural expression as acts of "aesthetic activism" and puts them in dialogue to animate current critical debates. Careful to distinguish between the "compositional resistance" implicit in a work's materials, form, or genre and the "contextual resistance" explicit in overt statements of defiance, Radar provides—and tests—an effective vocabulary for speaking about the strategies through which contemporary Native authors and visual artists express resistance and tell stories of survival.
--Audrey Goodman, Studies in American Indian Literatures
from the spring 2011 catalog, University of Texas Press
