(Re)Staging Sovereignty through Connectivity: The Decolonial Aesthetics of the O’odham Anti Border Collective on Facebook
Keywords:
Indigenous sovereignty, anti-border activism, social media, decolonization, artivismAbstract
This article analyzes the decolonizing strategies of the O’odham Anti Border Collective’s Facebook page. It argues that decolonial filmic and narrative aesthetics are used in portrayals of activism by members of the O’odham Nation who protest the planned construction of an international border wall between the US and Mexico. With documentary aesthetics, the O’odham Anti Border Collective enacts sovereignty. Therefore, the self-presentation of this movement is an example of contemporary land-based artivism that aims for global solidarity. To normalize decolonial resistance against territorial as well as jurisdictional dispossession, the Indigenous artivists especially mobilize the bodies of female anti border activists, who are shown and heard physically protesting, giving critical speeches in public locations, or being arrested. As this article argues, while the online presence of the O’odham Anti Border Collective visualizes both sovereignty and containment, it shows how an allegorical voice of the borderlands is constructed through the activism of O’odham women.
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