Curb Your Indianthusiasm: Recent Works at the Intersections of German Studies and Indigenous Studies

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    Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals.
    By A. Dana Weber. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. 424 pages
    + 25 b/w images, 1 map. $89.95 hardcover.
    Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses.
    Edited by Hartmut Lutz, Florentine Strzelczyk, and Renae Watchman. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 262 pages. $29.99 paperback, $20.99 eBook.

    On a warm night in Berlin, now many years ago, my wanderings took me toward the Brandenburg Gate. There, on the well-illuminated plaza, I saw a crowd gathered around a curious spectacle. As I approached and joined the circle of onlookers, I saw a group of musical performers wearing the external markings of Plains Indians—leather outfits, feather headdresses, with a large dreamcatcher on a stand beside them. What made the spectacle curious, at least to me, was in the music, the distinctive panpipes and notched flutes marking the music as Quechua, from the Indigenous language and culture family of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. I recognized this distinct musical style from performances at the Nebraska State Fair that I regularly visited as a child. It was a moment of “creative subversion” (Perry 384–86), with Indigenous South American performers engaged in a kind of ethnic drag, using an image of the Native American popularized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to make contemporary Indigenous music legible to a lay German audience that would otherwise likely not recognize it as such. I thought frequently of this moment—with its tension between performance and cliché, recognition and misrecognition—while reading A. Dana Weber’s Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (2019), a study of Karl May theater festivals and Wild West performance cultures in Germany, alongside Hartmut Lutz, Florentine Strzelczyk, and Renae Watchman’s edited volume Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses (2020).
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)669-683
    JournalMonatshefte
    Volume113
    Issue number4
    Publication statusPublished - 2021

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