Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums ed. by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo (review)

Reviewed by: Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums ed. by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo Mark Minch-de Leon (bio) Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo University of Arizona Press, 2022 GENOCIDE CREATES a problem for visuality. The problem is in both the effacement of violence through normalization and the demand to render it visible in a colonial visual field. This issue is amplified by the conditions of invisibility that settler states create for Indigenous Peoples. Recently, this overdeter-mined invisibilization has begun to dissipate, thanks largely to the work of Indigenous activists but also to changing attitudes toward the recognition of genocide, raising the need to attend to the politics of visibility anew. Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo's coedited book, Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums, does just this by engaging the issue of genocide's visibility in the context of Indigenous art. The twelve chapters and ten authors, from an Indigenous viewpoint, engage the question of how genocide registers in the material practices of Indigenous artists, archives and their formations and uses, and museums and exhibitionary narratives with attention to the impact on communities. A vast literature exists on the problem that genocide creates for visuality, in relation to truth and reconciliation, the destruction of records, the value of testimony of survivors, of thresholds of violence and the means through which violence is made visible or invisible, and of the ethics of reproducing and/or reprising the violence. Much of this work hinges on the question of proof, which has led many scholars to be critical of human rights frameworks for the damage that reliance on the archival dimensions of documentation can have on communities, communal memory, and forms of healing when those processes of recognition and validation are controlled by the same state and epistemological formations that initially produced the violence. The turn to art and its powers of visualization is an important intervention, moving as it does from the realm of documentary to forms of collective memorialization and the material, aesthetic, and epistemic consequences of violence on the visual field. Unburdened by the logic of the archive, Indigenous artists are able to explore more deeply the impact violence continues to have on communities and their forms of memory and creative and End Page 164 collective energies outside the bounds of state-centered recognition of violence and the aftermath of sociologically defined trauma and harm. In their introduction, Chavez and Mithlo write, "In an era characterized by fragmented knowing, decontextualized sound bites, and instant access, how do we know with certainty the difference between truth and distortion when contemplating past atrocities? . . . Our analysis contends that it is in the open registers of artistic practice and reinterpretation of archival holdings that facts previously considered 'unknowable' can be clearly documented" (4). I'm intrigued by the irreverent conflation of art and fact, but I wonder about the implications of reading art as the space of truth-making. Is there a risk of replacing the creative imagination with the impetus to document organized around an archival conception of truth? Chavez and Mithlo address this issue by acknowledging the inherent bias of archival sources and the need to attend to cultural specificity, authorial voice, and positionality in assessing historical claims, but does this approach risk being included as "active interventions in the colonial historic record"? One of the ways that Chavez and Mithlo address this issue is by focusing on the figure of the witness (5). Indigenous artists are often confronted with a public desire for the performance of authenticity and tradition. An associated impulse is the demand for Indigenous people to perform their trauma. In the context of the politics of truth and reconciliation, for instance, Dian Million locates a state-centered biopolitical force in the demand/desire to testify that raises important questions about the effect of interpreting Indigenous art as a form of witnessing. In other words, we should be cautious about which forms of legitimation we adopt in order to contest the forces of invisibilization and the destruction of agency in the ongoing genocidal structures of settler...