Performance against perfunctory: Sheetala Bhat, ‘Indigenous performances of love beyond settler recognition in Vigil and the unnatural and accidental women’, Australasian Drama Studies, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Performance against perfunctory: Sheetala Bhat, ‘Indigenous performances of love beyond settler recognition in Vigil and the unnatural and accidental women’, Australasian Drama Studies, 2024

23Dec24

Abstract: There has been a marked rise in the discourse of recognition in global state politics in the last four decades. In many ways, recognition has ‘become a key word of our time’. Indigenous scholars on Turtle Island note that the Canadian state has a history of using recognition as a strategy to appear to be ‘just’ and ‘humane’, while relinquishing commitments to upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard argues that, owing to the persistence of Indigenous-led movements, there has been an ‘unprecedented degree of recognition for Aboriginal “cultural” rights within the legal and political framework of the Canadian state’. However, this state recognition attempts to accommodate identity-based claims within settler state sovereignty and therefore continues to ‘reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’. This article examines how Indigenous women artists resist colonial state recognition through performance.

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