The Art of Protest Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: Singing Civil Rights: The Freedom Song Tradition argues that music played a crucial role in virtually every dimension of the African American Civil Rights movement. It traces the rise and varied use of the "freedom songs," as activists transformed deep-seeded Black religious and secular musical traditions into a major resource for the struggle against racial injustice.
Chapter 2: Dramatic Resistance: Theatrical Politics from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter focuses on the Black Power phase of the African American liberation struggle, demonstrating that the Black Panther Party can be seen as engaging in a deadly serious form of political drama on the national and world stage. The chapter, like most, challenges easy distinctions between culture and politics, in this case between literary dramas and the "theater" of politics. The last section of the chapter carries the argument up to the Black Lives Matter movement and its use of dramatic videos.
Chapter 3: The Poetical Is the Political: Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women’s Rights looks at the emergence and development of a new radical wave of women's movements beginning in the mid-1960s. Here I focus on the role of poetry as one site of feminist consciousness-raising action, and as a resource in the formation of a variety of contested feminist identities rooted in differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality, as they have evolved up to the present.
Chapter 4: Revolutionary Walls: Chicano/a/x Murals, Chicano/a/x Movements treats the Mexican Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the ways in which the thousands of murals produced in and around the Brown Power movimiento embody and reflect the political and cultural changes the movement generates in its efforts to bring justice and respect to U.S. communities of Mexican descent.
Chapter 5: Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian Movement focuses on the group that called itself the American Indian Movement (AIM), one of the key organizations in the wider Native American Red Power Movement. This chapter examines the ways in which the movement's story has been told through the widely circulated, if inevitably somewhat distorting, medium of the Hollywood film.
Chapter 6: “We Are [Not] the World”: Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of Rock Music takes a look at the role played by pop and rock music in movements of the mid 1980s, especially the student-based anti-apartheid movement. Student movements, from the 1930s to the 1960s to the 1980s and into the present have used popular culture as an organizing tool. In focusing on one of these waves of student activism, I try to show the power, as well as the limits, of using pop culture as a force in the promotion of social movements.
Chapter 7: ACTing UP against AIDS: The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis analyzes the brilliant use of graphic arts (posters, T-shirts, banners, stickers, etc.) by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the movement group at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS. I focus on how the group mobilized both the gay community and other affected populations through a direct action campaign illustrating how homophobia, racism, sexism, and class prejudice had created a deadly "epidemic of signification" that stalled progress in saving lives.
Chapter 8: Novels of Environmental Justice: Toxic Colonialism and the Nature of Culture addresses the relationship between academia and social movements by describing an emerging trend in the academic literary and cultural study that I call "environmental justice eco-criticism." Using Native author Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead as an exemplary text, I suggest how the novel helped give birth to a new phase of the environmental justice movement. I show how the environmental justice movement has documented how environmental dangers have fallen unevenly upon poor whites and people of color, and demonstrates how the linked field of ecocriticism is expanding beyond its concern with wilderness appreciation to treat these complex issues.
Chapter 9: Puppetry against Puppet Regimes: The “Battle of Seattle” and the Global Justice Movement focuses on the broad, coalitional movement against corporate globalization. Here I analyze the ways in which the new medium of the Internet helped foster a global culture of resistance to the poverty, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses brought about by forms of globalization which attend only to the rights of corporations and nation-states, rather than workers. I examine the use of festive politics, including the use of giant puppets to further creative demonstrations of alternatives..
Chapter 10: #Occupy All the Arts: Challenging Wall Street and Economic Inequality Worldwide moves away from the focus on a single art form to look at how the #Occupy Wall Street movement drew upon a whole panoply of traditional forms as well as newer ones like augmented reality art and projection art to draw attention to the increasing income equality in the world in the current era.
Conclusion: The Cultural Study of Social Movements offers a survey of social movement theories, and synthesizes some key elements of a cultural approach to analyzing the impact of protest. The chapter raises more systematic questions about various relations between culture(s) and movements that are discussed and exemplified in the ten case studies that make up the core of the book. Those seeking a more explicit framework of analysis through which to think culture-movement relations may wish to read this final chapter first.