Re/presenting the European at the University of Auckland October 9th 2019

In October 2019, Dr. Gerald McMaster participated in a workshop at the University of Auckland, New Zealand dedicated to deconstructing the conventionally accepted European gaze by focusing on works within various Indigenous Cultures. The project, Disentangling the European Gaze, expands upon Gerald McMaster’s previous research symposium titled “The Entangled Gaze”. McMaster’s symposium on that subject examined the ways North American Indigenous peoples and Europeans have represented each other in historical and contemporary art to explore postcolonial histories through Indigenous voices. The Disentangling the European Gaze workshop aimed to build on the pertinent issues that were brought up as part of McMaster’s symposium.

The collaborative aspect of the project enabled a dialogical approach to the interplay of (post)colonial European and Indigenous representations, reflecting the ambiguous and hybrid relationship of such representation. While some researchers in the team have previously focused on European representations of indigenous peoples, others have been more focused on the ways in which Indigenous peoples have “gazed back”, resisted, and subverted (post)colonial attempts to determine them from the outside as objects of scrutiny. These diverse but complementary perspectives incorporate German representations of indigenous Americans, French representations of Māori and Mā’ohi, the revitalization of Indigenous languages, and Euro-American/Indigenous relationships, and other research interests.