2024/01/02 by María Belén Martín Lucas · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Critical Race Theory in Education #Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/13825577.2024.2420947
openalex publication_date 2024/01/02 · openalex created_date 2024/12/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article examines the creative, political, and affective dialogue between the work of the Nishnaabeg visual artist Rebecca Belmore and the Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson through a close reading of Simpson’s ekphrastic poem “smallpox, anyone,” included in her collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Stories & Songs (2015). Ekphrasis will be considered here a particular mode of poethical (both poetic and ethical) response based on empathic listening that mobilises horizontal empathy – in contrast with the vertical empathy characteristic of colonialism – as a catalyst in the building of relations. This horizontal empathy relies on specific Nishnaabeg notions of relation: between the poet and the visual art that she interacts with; between the poet and the visual artist; between both women and their Anishinaabe nations, the land, and their human and non-human relations. I then define this net of empathic horizontal relations as decolonial love, which is at the heart of Indigenous Radical Resurgence as defined by Simpson. In my analysis, I will be paying attention to Simpson’s critique of vertical empathy from white settlers in the poem and in her theoretical works more broadly.