This short introduction provides a brief overview of the special issue, by addressing the main historiographical and theoretical concerns that unite the individual contributions and by placing the essays in comparative, inter-American and interdisciplinary perspective. What do comparative analyses tell us about patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the visual arts? More specifically, what do these analyses tell us about the role of ethnic agency and audience, and the complex relationship between artistic practice and the “mainstream,” the local and the global?

Between 1821 and 1842, Charles Bird King painted a series of portraits of Native American diplomats for Thomas L. McKenney, founding Superintendent of Indian Affairs. These pictures were hung in a gallery in McKenney's office in the War Department in Washington, DC, and were later copied by lithographers for inclusion in McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1836–44). Significantly, the production and circulation of these portraits straddles a period of tremendous change in the diplomatic interactions between the United States and Native tribes. This essay analyzes a selection of these images for their complex messages about the sovereignty of Indian people and their appropriate interactions with European American culture. Paying particular attention to pictures of leaders of southern nations, including the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, I discuss the sitters' strategies of self-fashioning within the context of long-standing cultural exchange in the region. In addition, I offer a reading of the meaning of the Indian gallery as a whole that challenges the conventional wisdom that it is an archive produced exclusively to impose US control on the subjects included, arguing instead for the inclusion of portrait-making within this history of interaction.

During the early 1900s, Anglo-Americans in search of an indigenous modernism found inspiration in the Hispano and Native American arts of New Mexico. The elevation of Spanish colonial-style art through associations such as the Anglo-led Spanish Colonial Arts Society (SCAS, 1925) placed Hispano aesthetic production within the realm of tradition, as the product of geographic and cultural isolation rather than innovation. The revival of the SCAS in 1952 and Spanish Market in 1965 helped perpetuate the view of Hispanos either as “traditional” artists who replicate an “authentic” Spanish colonial style, or as “outsider” artists who defy categorization. Thus the Spanish colonial paradigm has endorsed a purist vision of Hispano art and identity that obscures the intercultural encounters shaping contemporary Hispano visual culture. This essay investigates a series of contemporary Hispano artists who challenge the Spanish colonial paradigm as it developed under Anglo patronage, principally through the realm of spiritually based artwork. I explore the satirical art of contemporary santero Luis Tapia; the colonial, baroque, indigenous and pop culture iconographies of painter Ray Martín Abeyta; and the “mixed-tech media” of Marion Martínez's circuit-board retablos. These artists blend Spanish colonial art with pre-Columbian mythology and pop culture, tradition with technology, and local with global imaginaries. In doing so, they present more empowering and expansive visions of Hispano art and identity – as declarations of cultural ownership and adaptation and as oppositional mestizo formations tied historically to wider Latino, Latin American and transnational worlds.

Since the early 1980s, the Hopi filmmaker and photographer Victor Masayesva Jr. has played an influential role in Native American multimedia production in the United States. This article examines Masayesva's film Paatuwaqatsi: Water, Land and Life (2007), which documents a 1,650-mile run made by Hopis from their home villages in Northern Arizona to Mexico City in early 2006. The run marked the closure of the Mohave Generating Station in southern Nevada and the Black Mesa coal mine which fuelled the power plant. It also celebrated the shutting down of the controversial coal slurry pipeline between the plant and mine that required for its operation the pumping of 1.2 billion gallons of pristine water annually from the Navajo Aquifer, which lies under the homelands of the Hopi and Navajo nations. The article explains how Hopis' affective relationship with place is put into action through the acts of running, prayer and personal sacrifice. It reviews Masayesva’s filmmaking career to date and considers his core idea of the indigenous aesthetic, a set of principles that has guided the practical decisions and artistic choices he has made in the course of over thirty years' working as an independent media producer. After a close analysis of selected scenes in Paatuwaqatsi, the article concludes by noting, first, how the film negotiates internal divisions within Hopi society over development and environmental issues and, second, how it engages the impact of continuing drought and ongoing climate change on the American Southwest.

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.

Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America.

This article is informed by recent work by the author unearthing the histories of Native American Indian Freemasons from the Revolutionary era to the present. Given that performed ritual has always been key to Masonic practice, it was initially supposed that Indian performance within Masonry could be explained using the same performative analytical lens that has recently been applied to various other aspects of the American and American Indian past. However, this research reveals that the performance paradigm has important limitations when applied in colonial or postcolonial contexts and that these have a particular significance when we evaluate the Native American fraternal experience of Freemasonry. This article explores the specifics of recent “performative” analyses and argues that whilst performance offers potentially revealing and enabling new means of comprehending Indian and non-Indian interaction, it also carries with it risks against which we must remain vigilant. It argues that the performance paradigm is useful only to the extent to which it can differentiate between positive cultural interaction and negative cultural appropriation. It concludes by suggesting that it is only when we conceive of culture as being essentially imaginative that performance as an analytical paradigm fully functions.

This article explores the ways that Rick Bragg memorializes poor white men's labor across his memoir trilogy, examining the tensions that arise as he attempts to bring poor whites into the center of the southern community. I consider the neo-Agrarian strains within his work, as well as Bragg's responses to the globalization of the region. The work addresses the absences within the South's memorial landscape, and questions the extent to which Bragg's work addresses those gaps.

Amateur talent shows were among the most popular programs on mid-1930s network radio, but for African Americans they had an importance that went beyond entertainment. These shows attracted considerable attention in the black press and from black audiences because they held out the promise of escape from the constraints of Jim Crow into a colour-blind national public sphere. This article explores the participation of African American performers on the most popular of the radio amateur shows, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour. It focusses particularly on two black classical performers on the Amateur Hour – singers Otis Holley and La Julia Rhea – contrasting their success on the radio show with the obstacles they encountered in the segregated world outside the studio. Radio did stimulate hope about the possibility of a race-free sound world, a new sense that such a thing could be possible. That the first generation to test the idea – gifted performers such as Holley and Rhea – often failed to translate radio success into mainstream acceptance, should not lead us to neglect the increase in hope that the early mass media provoked among African Americans.

Along with Appleton and Rand McNally, George A. Crofutt helped to establish and popularize the genre of the general traveller's guidebook in the United States. From 1869 to 1884, Crofutt would sell millions of his guides to the American West, which he distinguished from the competition by including copious illustrations. Although the guidebooks claim to arrange and order the West for easy, and almost passive, consumption – to “tell you what is worth seeing” – this article argues that there are two different yet also complimentary modes of representation operating in these popular works. While the images express a “panoramic” mode of vision, evoking the mythology of the endless frontier and a divinely inspired manifest destiny, the text exemplifies a “telegraphic” language based on instantaneity, fragmentation, and velocity – the thrilling, and disorienting, compression of time and space made possible by the railroad and the telegraph. Crofutt's railroad guidebooks mark a double transition: a historical shift in the concept of the West as a limitless, undefined frontier to a region of commerce and culture, and a corresponding aesthetic shift from a mode of representation based upon mythic expansiveness to one that mimics discrete aspects of modernity.

Critical responses to (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) Sherman Alexie's stories of the Spokane Indian reservation and its (semi-)fictional inhabitants in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993, herein TLR) tend to polarize over the problem of the collection's cultural authenticity. The majority of these criticisms fall into one of two categories: those who condemn the author's prose for trafficking moribund Indian stereotypes, and those who defend his commitment to realistic portrayals of a struggling reservation community. In either case, it is the perceived capacity of the stories to develop a particular sense of indigenous community that typically functions as the measure of their cultural authenticity. One story from TLR that has received none of this critical attention is “Distances,” a contemporary, dystopian realization of Wovoka's late nineteenth-century Ghost Dance prophecy that shares none of the characters, settings or events common to the other stories. This apparent withdrawal from the collection's featured community and “reservation realist” aesthetic affords Alexie the critical distance to examine the exclusionary principles that underlay the formation of American Indian communities, and the value of these principles for the individual members. A close reading of “Distances” reveals Alexie's representations of contemporary Ghost Dances to be crucial interjections into the debates surrounding American Indian literary nationalism, as his writing seeks to dramatize the problems of a separatist agenda for urban Indian communities.