Jérémie Voirol (UoM/Geneva Graduate Institute): "Indigenous elegance in the city: Producing contemporary indigeneity through YouTube music videos in Otavalo, Ecuador"
| Dates: | 10 January 2023 |
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| Times: | All day |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Jérémie Voirol |
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Part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.
This event will take place in Samuel Alexander Building A202. However, it can be followed online via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstract: In this presentation, I examine the image of indigeneity spread through music videos made by indigenous producers from Otavalo, in the Ecuadorian Andes, for mainly a local indigenous audience. In order to do this, I look at the motivations of the producers and musicians and at the constitution of a specific aesthetics in the music videos through an analysis of the settings, the characters portrayed and their actions.Investigating this form of expression, which constitutes a widely consumed cultural product in the Otavalo region, allows me to shed light on local understandings of indigeneity by common indigenous people. I show that these understandings challenge national and international narratives and imaginings of indigeneity (e.g. indigenismo, ‘Andean arcadia’), which often rest on rural/urban and tradition/modernity dichotomies (indigenous people being associated with the first of the two terms). While scholarship on media and indigeneity tends to be permeated by these oppositions, Otavalo music videos do not quite fit, as they unsettle the boundaries between these opposite terms (through intense engagement with urbanity, widespread use of technology, etc.). Consequently, I argue that the aesthetics of these music videos constitute a claim by the indigenous Otavalo people to contemporaneity and their membership in global society.
Speaker
Jérémie Voirol
Role: Postdoctoral researcher
Organisation: Global Migration Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A202
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
