Thursday, 14 November 2024
6:00pm CST
2024 AMS President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture
Red Lacquer Ballroom

This 2024 President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture will by delivered by distinguished scholar Philip J. Deloria.

Event Description

The 2017 film Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World advanced arguments for Native American presence in multiple genres of American music and for previously underacknowledged Native influences on those genres. Now, seven years later—and in the wake of increased Native visibility in music, literature, art, and screen culture—how might we reevaluate arguments for Indigenous presence, agency, and influence? Can we historicize such arguments over a longer span of time? Might we develop new critical perspectives on what the Anishinaabe theorist Gerald Vizenor has called survivance, that canny mix of survival, resistance, courage, and ironic wit that characterizes so much Native American cultural production?

In this lecture, Deloria explores the meaning and impact of Rumble and suggests frames for understanding and interpreting both the film and the wider field of Native American cultural contributions.

Philip J. Deloria is Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, and author of Playing Indian (1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. A former music performance major and middle school band director, he writes the occasional piece of music criticism focused on guitars and country-western music.