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
Winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship
Published in April of 2011, Engaged Resistance is the first scholarly book to look at the intersection of Indigenous American art, literature, and film. With its comprehensive interdisciplinary scope and its accessible jargon-free writing, Engaged Resistance is one of those rare books that will strike a chord with both mainstream and academic audiences. One one hand, Rader's study is a model of well-researched scholarship, and on the other, it is a lyrical, episodic story of how American Indian artists, filmmakers, and writers, tell their own stories about their own communities in their own voices.
Visually beautiful, poetically adept, and analytically provocative, Engaged Resistance brilliantly sets out a unified field architecture for reading American Indian political aesthetics [and aesthetic politics]. Dean Rader's lively writing, broad range, and cool interpretive moves make him one of the most compelling scholars working in interdisciplinary American Indian studies today. —Phillip Deloria, Professor, Department of History, The Program in American Culture, and The Native American Studies Program, University of Michigan
Visit the Engaged Resistance site at the University of Texas Press
View the Engaged Resistance pages from the 2011 University of Texas Press catalogue
Read the first review in the San Francisco Book Review
Visually beautiful, poetically adept, and analytically provocative, Engaged Resistance brilliantly sets out a unified field architecture for reading American Indian political aesthetics [and aesthetic politics]. Dean Rader's lively writing, broad range, and cool interpretive moves make him one of the most compelling scholars working in interdisciplinary American Indian studies today. —Phillip Deloria, Professor, Department of History, The Program in American Culture, and The Native American Studies Program, University of Michigan
Visit the Engaged Resistance site at the University of Texas Press
View the Engaged Resistance pages from the 2011 University of Texas Press catalogue
Read the first review in the San Francisco Book Review
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
