Philip Kreiner's Contact Prints and the Problematics of Colonial Representation

Résumé Fr En

Les revendications des Autochtones quant à la propriété de leurs textes et les théories coloniales relatives à la construction de l'“Autre” ont fait prendre conscience aux auteurs canadiens que la représentation des indigènes relevait d'un véritable vol culturel. C'est ce que met brillamment en évidence Philip Kreiner dans Contact Prints.

Native claims to the ownership of their own stories and colonial theorizing on the construction of the “other” has made white Canadian writers increasingly aware that their use of indigenous material and characters might be mostly cultural theft and programmed misrepresentation. The resultant crisis of representation — the question of how to image the indigene — is brilliantly solved in Philip Kreiner's Contact Prints, which features two white artists working with Native “material” but who, in different ways and with different implications, always get it wrong. In short, Kreiner depicts the processes of white misrepresentation implicit in any rendering of the Native.