Editor's Statement: Depictions of the Dispossessed

This issue grew out of a symposium held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in May 1985, titled "Depictions of the Dispossessed: Image and Self-Image of Euroamerica's Colonized Natives." I organized that symposium because it seemed to me at the time that the work and interests of many UCLA art history faculty and graduate students, like those of more and more scholars outside our university, were converging on the questions of how and why pictures represent those who experience the deprivations and transformations of a major foreign takeover. While the problems concerning representation of native inhabitants of colonized lands had been addressed by various students of literature or history, the number of serious studies of pictorial images of the dispossessed was far fewer. The latter, moreover, had never been synthesized or analyzed as a body.