Aesthetics of Repair

""Challenging what art is and does, Aesthetics of Repair brings together a compelling series of studies of Northwest Coast art as relation, transaction, and mobilizing agency across an expanding contemporary field. Against reductive reconciliatory promises and vacuities, this book positions the work of art as material care, obligation, and justice, yoked to unsettled histories in the making by artists and activists today.""--Jennifer L. Biddle, Director of emLAB (the Ethnographic Media Lab), Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales ""With theoretical insight and nuance, Eugenia Kisin traces out the world-repairing capacities of the aesthetics and materialities of Northwest Coast art within the historically shifting entanglements of settler-state violence, the brutal extraction of cultural and natural resources, the art market and anthropology's influence, neoliberal heritage regimes, and the Canadian TRC following the exposure of the residential schools. This book demonstrates with immense sensitivity how close attunement to the efficacies and transformative powers of objects and the ways these may embody, animate, and re-enchant Indigenous histories and sovereignties means recognizing injury and loss while avoiding the romanticism of redemptive and conciliatory narratives.""--Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute