Journal Articles by Matthew Irwin
Hemisphere: Visual Culture of the Americas, 2020
Steven Paul Judd’s “STOP the DAPL” graphic is not merely a clever appropriation of Benjamin Frank... more Steven Paul Judd’s “STOP the DAPL” graphic is not merely a clever appropriation of Benjamin Franklin’s “JOIN, or Die.” Rather, Judd “indigenizes” both Franklin’s original etching and the later anti-British “radical appropriation” of the image to present the intertribal, intergenerational, inter-ethnic solidarity around #NoDAPL as both analogous and counter to the colonial notion of “union.”
caareviews, 2018
At the independent museum 516 Arts in downtown Albuquerque, an exhibition looks at Puerto Rico af... more At the independent museum 516 Arts in downtown Albuquerque, an exhibition looks at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria through themes of climate change, global weather patterns, colonial essentialism, Caribbean commodification, nationalism, Afro-Caribbean identity, bankruptcy, and local resiliency on the unincorporated US territory. However, the museum itself unintentionally frames the exhibition in a colonial perspective.
InVisible Culture, 2017
For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art i... more For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art installation that reached fifty feet above the desert and two miles across the U.S.-Mexico border. I watched that weekend as they anchored twenty-six helium-filled balloons to the desert floor and let them ascend to create a visual and conceptual link between Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora.
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2016
After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit
(re)appeared in the nationa... more After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit
(re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for
(re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have
addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire
for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also
more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though
this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized
(re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that
mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this
paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a
“landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers
Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and
absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie
working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively
participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land
speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a
renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires
Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization
heralds in its renewed form.
Book Reviews by Matthew Irwin
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2017
A new anthology of scholarship examining the literary production of Junot Diaz makes a case for r... more A new anthology of scholarship examining the literary production of Junot Diaz makes a case for reading the Dominican American author as a “forerunner in creating, articulating, and shaping the decolonial imagination” (8). In Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, the editors track Díaz’s decolonial vision from his childhood in Santo Domingo through his teenage years in New Jersey to an adult life in academia and letters.
Diálogo, 2016
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz condenses much of the latest Native American Studies scholarship i... more Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz condenses much of the latest Native American Studies scholarship in her new volume, An Indigenous Peoples’
History of the United States. Rather than attempt to detail the histories of individual nations, Dunbar-Ortiz frames her project around Jodi Byrd’s critique of the U.S. as a settler-colonial state in which the ongoing dispossession, erasure, and murder of Native Americans sets the
precedent for U.S. militarization and imperialism. Also marking various forms of Indigenous resistance over the last six centuries, Dunbar-Ortiz calls on a coalition of “descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations” to radically transform the nation through Native reparations and restoration of sacred lands.
Public Scholarship by Matthew Irwin
Momus, 2019
A new monograph, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, by the aforementioned P... more A new monograph, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, by the aforementioned Philip Deloria, is often explicitly a tribute to his family, particularly the women who influenced, created, and protected the ad hoc Mary Sully archive. Deloria closely reads the formal and contextual threads of Sully’s work. What emerges is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature recognizing the roles of women in creating an Indigenous futurity rooted in self-representation and self-determination. The cultural work of women like Mary Sully challenges narratives that place Indigenous people outside of, and in opposition to, the modern world.
Hyperallergic, 2019
Follow the link below to my author page for the art blog Hyperallergic.com. Since 2015, I've been... more Follow the link below to my author page for the art blog Hyperallergic.com. Since 2015, I've been writing about Indigenous art, visual culture, and representation in the US Southwest.
Riverwise Magazine (James and Grace Lee Boggs Center), 2018
Dan Gilbert’s deal to build a new deten-
tion center for Wayne County in exchange
for prime real ... more Dan Gilbert’s deal to build a new deten-
tion center for Wayne County in exchange
for prime real estate is not merely his latest attempt to conceal his downtown annexation project under the pall of benevolent progress. Rather, the project, which falls under Gilbert’s Rock Ventures banner, signals a material and rhetorical expansion of racialized redevelop- ment in Detroit. In the words of prison studies literature, the recent land swap articulates a “carceral space” in which public and private agencies surveil, police, criminalize, imprison, penalize, and otherwise exclude people of color in order to protect white property. Not merely white property as taxable enclosures owned exclusively by wealthy white people, but as prior/proper white possession of, and right to control, city spaces.
Riverwise Magazine (James and Grace Lee Boggs Center), 2017
Local activists and pundits have, right- fully, ridiculed Detroit’s new downtown streetcar, the ... more Local activists and pundits have, right- fully, ridiculed Detroit’s new downtown streetcar, the QLINE, also known as the M-1 Rail. It covers only three miles of prime real estate (only 5 percent of the city), stands apart from a larger rapid transit plan, serves sports fans and tourists, and relies on outdated technology that has proven unreliable in other cities. Less prevalent in local debate is what lies beneath the QLINE—namely, the intention
to develop Detroit as a Third Coast Silicon valley by Detroit’s very own white savior, Dan Gilbert. The Quicken Loans founder and real estate mogul used the QLINE to install fiberoptic cable to his newly renovated downtown properties, offering connection speeds around 100 times faster than standard lines (on par with Google Fiber).
Briarpatch
The power in Octavia’s Brood is not in imagining alternative worlds, but in realizing alternative... more The power in Octavia’s Brood is not in imagining alternative worlds, but in realizing alternative thinking, reconstituting resistance and self-determination as ways of being now, rather than as strategies for a later utopia.
Conference Presentations by Matthew Irwin
In September 2016, the Native-owned apparel company The NTVS released a new graphic to support th... more In September 2016, the Native-owned apparel company The NTVS released a new graphic to support the Standing Rock Lakota resistance to the North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Designed by Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd, the black-and-white image depicts an arrow slicing a snake into four sections, each representing a state the pipeline crosses, with the words, “STOP the DAPL.” Judd appropriated the image from a 1754 political engraving by Benjamin Franklin, which featured a snake severed into eight segments, representing British colonies in America, with the phrase “JOIN, or DIE.”
Papers by Matthew Irwin
InVisible Culture
For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art i... more For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art installation that reached fifty feet above the desert and two miles across the U.S.-Mexico border. I watched that weekend as they anchored twenty-six heliumfilled balloons to the desert floor and let them ascend to create a visual and conceptual link between Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora (fig. 2). Each yellow, ten-foot diameter balloon had been inscribed with four sets of concentric circles-red, blue, black, and gray, with a black center-to form two pair of "scare eyes" (fig. 3). 1. Bird-X brand uses the registered trademark "Scare-Eye," while "scary eye" and "scare eyes" show up as common usage on Amazon.com. ↩
Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, 2020
Bridging the Multimodal Gap, 2019
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2016
After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the nationa... more After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as "urban frontier" open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have begun to address the ways in which this frontier rhetoric underscores a settler colonial discourse of erasure for the purpose of land acquisition and (re)development. The post-industrial landscape assumes a veil of wildness and abandon that arouses settler colonial desire for land through a narrative of white return that relies not just on a notion black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it has remained tied to a binary of black/white relations. It has ignored, therefore, white possession as a process that mythologizes and absorbs Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch's 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a "landscape of monstrosity" that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence. Where the film centers on a white vampire elite and suggests a "zombie" white working class, the Detroit landscape recovers African Americans through their invisibility (as ghosts) and Native Americans through savage or regressed nature (as werewolves). More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film's central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit's lost civilization heralds in its renewed form. Their arrival presages the growing tourist presence in Detroit, and Eve's promise that the dark, dangerous city will "rise again" presents it as a sublime world of possibility, while their departure at the end of the film marks the turn from destination to development.
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Journal Articles by Matthew Irwin
(re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for
(re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have
addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire
for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also
more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though
this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized
(re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that
mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this
paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a
“landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers
Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and
absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie
working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively
participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land
speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a
renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires
Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization
heralds in its renewed form.
Book Reviews by Matthew Irwin
History of the United States. Rather than attempt to detail the histories of individual nations, Dunbar-Ortiz frames her project around Jodi Byrd’s critique of the U.S. as a settler-colonial state in which the ongoing dispossession, erasure, and murder of Native Americans sets the
precedent for U.S. militarization and imperialism. Also marking various forms of Indigenous resistance over the last six centuries, Dunbar-Ortiz calls on a coalition of “descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations” to radically transform the nation through Native reparations and restoration of sacred lands.
Public Scholarship by Matthew Irwin
tion center for Wayne County in exchange
for prime real estate is not merely his latest attempt to conceal his downtown annexation project under the pall of benevolent progress. Rather, the project, which falls under Gilbert’s Rock Ventures banner, signals a material and rhetorical expansion of racialized redevelop- ment in Detroit. In the words of prison studies literature, the recent land swap articulates a “carceral space” in which public and private agencies surveil, police, criminalize, imprison, penalize, and otherwise exclude people of color in order to protect white property. Not merely white property as taxable enclosures owned exclusively by wealthy white people, but as prior/proper white possession of, and right to control, city spaces.
to develop Detroit as a Third Coast Silicon valley by Detroit’s very own white savior, Dan Gilbert. The Quicken Loans founder and real estate mogul used the QLINE to install fiberoptic cable to his newly renovated downtown properties, offering connection speeds around 100 times faster than standard lines (on par with Google Fiber).
Conference Presentations by Matthew Irwin
Papers by Matthew Irwin
(re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for
(re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have
addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire
for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also
more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though
this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized
(re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that
mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this
paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a
“landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers
Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and
absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie
working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively
participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land
speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a
renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires
Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization
heralds in its renewed form.
History of the United States. Rather than attempt to detail the histories of individual nations, Dunbar-Ortiz frames her project around Jodi Byrd’s critique of the U.S. as a settler-colonial state in which the ongoing dispossession, erasure, and murder of Native Americans sets the
precedent for U.S. militarization and imperialism. Also marking various forms of Indigenous resistance over the last six centuries, Dunbar-Ortiz calls on a coalition of “descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations” to radically transform the nation through Native reparations and restoration of sacred lands.
tion center for Wayne County in exchange
for prime real estate is not merely his latest attempt to conceal his downtown annexation project under the pall of benevolent progress. Rather, the project, which falls under Gilbert’s Rock Ventures banner, signals a material and rhetorical expansion of racialized redevelop- ment in Detroit. In the words of prison studies literature, the recent land swap articulates a “carceral space” in which public and private agencies surveil, police, criminalize, imprison, penalize, and otherwise exclude people of color in order to protect white property. Not merely white property as taxable enclosures owned exclusively by wealthy white people, but as prior/proper white possession of, and right to control, city spaces.
to develop Detroit as a Third Coast Silicon valley by Detroit’s very own white savior, Dan Gilbert. The Quicken Loans founder and real estate mogul used the QLINE to install fiberoptic cable to his newly renovated downtown properties, offering connection speeds around 100 times faster than standard lines (on par with Google Fiber).