Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973 will examine how artists revitalized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy in the unlikely shape of US-sponsored Cold War tours. The book will foreground the creative translation of Indigenous political ecologies across two decades and four continents, into a system of international relations that was otherwise premised upon their externalization and exploitation. Earth Diplomacy will respond to contemporary debates about planetary ecological crises, revealing that frameworks of “earth jurisprudence” and “sustainable diplomacies” were anticipated and circulated by a diverse array of Indigenous modernisms during a formative period in the global spread of capitalism.
Jessica Horton’s research and teaching emphasize the centrality of Native North American art to a global story of modernity, focusing on the transnational and transcultural movement of people, objects, and ideas. She works across modern, contemporary, American, and Indigenous subfields within art history and draws upon a wide range of interdisciplinary theories and methods. She holds a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester and teaches in the University of Delaware’s Department of Art History. Her first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (Duke University Press, 2017), examines the impact of Indigenous spatial struggles on artists working internationally since the 1970s and was published with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.