Olivia Casagrande

OLIVIA CASAGRANDE, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid research and writing on “Spaces of Interconnection and Saturation. Indigenous Storytelling, World-making and Place.” “Spaces of Interconnection and Saturation” focuses on displaced Indigenous people and their practices of storytelling as creative formulations of emerging subjectivities. With a specific focus on Latin America, the monograph challenges conventional socio-spatial categories that associate Indigeneity with bounded and ancestral (rural) territories, moving beyond an imagery of Indigenous identities in antithesis to modernity, technology and urbanity. In the context of either political exile or migration, the book looks at the ways in which multiple “elsewheres” shape different forms of belonging. Indigenous creative practices of storytelling in displacement — broadly intended as oral, visual, embodied and textual representation — are addressed as essential acts of world-making. Through the analysis of these narratives, artworks, and performances, the book sheds innovative light on how Indigenous engagement with (dis)placement is capable of playing with unforeseen connections and routings, crafting Indigeneity otherwise. Adopting a writing that engages with the “awkwardness” of anthropological authorship, the book is a layered composition informed by multi-modal and collaborative research. In close dialogue with recent anticolonial critiques and elaborating on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative ethnography, and art-based methods, the book puts forwards the potentialities and unruliness of creation for the inter-relational construction of knowledge.