Creative Presence

Reviews / Votes

Taking artwork to be a powerful force in (un)making world politics, Emily Merson's Creative Presence is a major contribution to our understanding not only of sites and practices of decolonial resistance but also of International Relations and where else we ought to look in theorizing relations between political communities. This important book reveals how failing to inquire beyond disciplinary convention sustains our implication in colonial violence. -- J. Marshall Beier, McMaster University Creative Presence centres contemporary Indigenous arts in relation to ongoing global struggles for justice. Emily Merson's careful reading of decolonial and transnational art works by two of Canada's best-known Indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore and Brian Jungen, lays a groundwork for a transformative and fresh aesthetic method that situates decolonizing Indigenous arts within world politics. For International Relations scholars and others seeking interpretive methods beyond established but universalizing western aesthetic frames, Merson expertly channels an embodiment of practices of Indigenous sovereignty to disrupt settler colonial imaginary. -- Carmen Robertson, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous Visual and Material Cultural, Carleton University Emily Merson's Creative Presence is itself a much needed "creative presence" for a discipline that is only recently waking up to the important political interventions of the visual arts. Conceptually acute, wide ranging in focus, and compellingly argued, her investigation discloses a world of creative work that will lastingly unsettle the one that IR scholars have been inhabiting. -- Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i, Manoa