Knowing Tomorrow 2.0: Native North American Archives of Futurity

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Däwes
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413065738

In Western discourse from J.F. Cooper’s 'noble savages' to J. Cameron’s Avatar, Indigenous American cultures have always been displaced into nostalgic obsolescence and thus deprived of a future in Western culture. In contrast to these codes of outdatedness, Indigenous cultural expressions abound with imaginaries of the future in textual narratives, digital media, visual arts, and public spaces, such as museums or websites. From pre-contact prophecies to contemporary Indigenous video games, writers, artists, and curators such as Gerald Vizenor, Kent Monkman, Elizabeth LaPensée, Skawennati, and Danis Goulet have contributed to a vast, underresearched corpus of Indigenous futurity that defies colonial temporality, empowers alternative modes of knowledge, envisions sustainable societies and thus harbors highly relevant cultural capital for designs of a global future.Relying on previous research from the fields of Native literatures and (science) fiction, this project instigates a systematic exploration of Indigenous North American engagements of temporality and the future in museums and digital environments. Since the meanings of such concepts as "future", "modernity", and "indigeneity" are circulated and generated through the cultural products of narratives, visual media, museum exhibitions, and virtual worlds, Knowing Tomorrow 2.0 will analyze these within the conceptual framework of an Indigenous “archive”—in Jacques Derrida’s sense as “an irreducible experience of the future”—that resists linear concepts of history and provides a larger theoretical matrix for questions of knowledge, cultural difference, political and social identities.With case studies on (1) nation-specific and pan-tribal museums in Washington, D.C., North Carolina, Arizona, and Oklahoma and (2) Indigenous digital media, virtual reality projects, video games, and online presences, Knowing Tomorrow 2.0 is dedicated to the following four complementary research objectives: - to establish a semantics of Indigenous futurity by extrapolating narrative, visual, and virtual patterns in the representational archives of museums and digital platforms- to explore the ways in which futurity and “temporal sovereignty” (Rifkin 2017) resonate with public representations of history- to locate Indigenous representations of time and temporality within a larger matrix of alternative systems of knowledge - to identify the strategies by which these alternative modes of knowledge are communicated within and across cultural and national boundariesThis project’s research is not only thematically about the future, but it also seeks to create interculturally sensitive understandings of time for the future. Knowing Tomorrow 2.0 thus promises to break new ground for current understandings of futurity and temporality across cultural boundaries; it will allow for revisions of hegemonic historiography, expand North American canons, and open new corridors for Indigenous studies and American studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants