Wanton and sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly: Gerald Vizenor’s cosmoprimitivist visions of France

Abstract

The Anishinaabe novelist and postmodern cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor has a long-standing interest in France and French culture, which has come to the fore in his most recent work. This article examines the implications for his larger project, as revealed through the encounter between his Native American characters and a France depicted as an origin point of high modernist culture. By re-appropriating tropes and concepts from thinkers and artists such as Albert Camus, Marc Chagall and Edmond Jabés, in a narrative dominated by the figure of an Anishinaabe artist clearly modelled on George Morrison, Vizenor clearly attempts a revaluation of the category of the primitive so vital to modernist experimentation, reformulating it as “cosmoprimivitism”. In doing so, however, he also intervenes in contemporary debates around the exhibition of “arts premiers” in the Musée du Quai Branly, with results that problematically complicate any assessment of his attempt to unify the categories of the indigenous and the postmodern.

Keywords:

• France
• Anishinaabe
• Gerald Vizenor
• Branly
• primitivism
• Musée du Quai Branly

Notes

1. Even when creating a poem, set in the German city of Freiburg, Ortiz decides to depict only Indigenous American speakers (Ortiz 2002, 40). For discussion of all the poets mentioned, see Mackay (2012).

2. Anishinaabe is the main autonym for Anishinaabemowin-speaking cultures: Ojibwe refers to the largest group of peoples within this language set. The older signifier “Chippewa” is considered an imposed name and is used with less frequency among Anishinaabeg peoples.

3. Although Vizenor spent relatively little time on the reservation while he was growing up, White Earth is his ancestral and clan home. He has recently reaffirmed his roots there by becoming the Principal Writer for the new tribal constitution. See Blaeser (2013, 237–257).

4. “Vizenor coined the term postindian precisely to elude ‘the white man’s Indian’, that morass of colonial and Western identity questions and projections, mapped by Robert Berkhofer, Roy Harvey Pearce, and others. [ … ] The lowercase indian resists Columbus’s originary misrepresentation in los indios” (Moore 2014, 302–303).

5. “Meme” is the Anishinaabemowin word for woodpecker. It has no connection with either Richard Dawkins’s concept of evolutionary culture nor its populist redefinition as a way of describing the sharing of Internet cat videos.

6. The ledger artists were prisoners of war from various Plains Indian nations, held by colonial authorities at Fort Marion in Florida in the 1870s, who created art using blank ledger books and paints provided by their jailers. Contemporary Natives continue to work in the style of ledger artists; for a listing of the most prominent such artists, see Fauntleroy (2011).

7. Both are real people with whom Vizenor has long-standing acquaintance: Cayol provides the cover of Shrouds.

8. I will follow English practice here in capitalizing the initial letter of each significant word in the museum’s name: the French practice (followed by some sources which I will cite) is to use lower case.