Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art,
and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools.
Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience
in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and
in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the
framework of "aesthetic action," the essays expand the frame of
aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and
question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as
apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential
school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.
This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on
reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory
interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing.
These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to
empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new
relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of
reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new
terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of
reconciliation as a form of resolution.
This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of
reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of
the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed,
and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to
move beyond what many have identified as the TRC's political
limitations.
