From Sit-ins to #revolutions: Media and the Changing Nature of Protests 9781501336959, 9781501336980, 9781501336973

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From Sit-ins to #revolutions

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From Sit-ins to #revolutions Media and the Changing Nature of Protests Edited by Olivia Guntarik and Victoria Grieve-Williams

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Olivia Guntarik and Victoria Grieve-Williams and Contributors, 2020 Volume Editors’ Part of the Work © Olivia Guntarik and Victoria Grieve-Williams Each chapter © of Contributors Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Paddy Gibson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guntarik, Olivia, editor. | Grieves-Williams, Victoria, editor. Title: From sit-ins to #revolutions : media and the changing nature of protests / edited by Olivia Guntarik and Victoria Grieves-Williams. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028664 (print) | LCCN 2019028665 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501336959 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501336966 (epub) | ISBN 9781501336973 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Social media–Political aspects. | Mass media–Political aspects. | Protest movements. Classification: LCC HM742 .F758 2020 (print) | LCC HM742 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028664 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028665 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3695-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3697-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-3696-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Figures  viii

1 Introduction: ‘Together We Are More’: New Media for Old Tales Victoria Grieve-Williams and Olivia Guntarik  1

PART I  History in Perspective 2 ‘We Have Survived the White Man’s World’: A Critical Review of Aboriginal Australian Activism in Media and Social MediaVictoria Grieve-Williams  19 3 A Historically Shifting Sphere: The Internet as a Basis of a Public Sphere for Social Activism in the United States Wesley R. Bishop  37 4 From the ‘Radical Women’s Press’ to the Digital Age: Subversive Networks of Feminism in the United States Ana Stevenson  51 5 Evolution of Hacktivism: From Origins to Now Marco Romagna  65 6 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista: The Protofeminism and Radical Organizing of Journalist Jovita Idár Annette M. Rodríguez  77

PART II  The Art of Activism 7 ‘Reggae Became the Main Transporter of Our Struggle … and Our Love’: Willie Brim – Cultural Custodian, Bush Doctor and Songman of the Buluwai People of North Queensland Victoria Grieve-Williams  95

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CONTENTS

8 Cockpit Country Dreams: Film, Media and Protest in the Long Journey to Save Jamaica’s Cockpit Country Esther Figueroa  113 9 The Hacktivist Cultural Archive: From Science Fiction to Snowden, Worms to the Women’s March Nicholas M. Kelly  127 10 On Solitude and Solidarity Olivia Guntarik and Verity Trott  141

PART III  Ecologies of Place 11 Facebook, WhatsApp and Selective Outrage: The Impact of Digital Activism on the Intersectional Identities of Antirape Feminist Activists in India Pallavi Guha  159 12 #SocialMediaAffordances: A Consideration of the Impact of Facebook and Twitter on the Green Movement Mina Momeni  173 13 Examining the Alt-right: A Media Analysis of Hate Speech through Bendigo’s Anti-Muslim Protests Grace Taylor  189 14 Connective Crowds: The Organizational Structure of a Feminist Crowd in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc Campaign Verity Trott  203

PART IV  Memory and Materiality 15 Grassroots Feminist Music Activism: Finding a Place in the Archives Catherine Strong  219 16 Postal Mail, Digital Platforms and Exhibitions: Mobilizing Publics to End the Carceral State Jose Luis Benavides, Erica R. Meiners, Sarah Padilla, Therese Quinn and Matthew Yasuoka  231 17 Victims Go Viral: Digitally Dismantling Racist Lynching in the United States Karoline Summerville  247

CONTENTS

18 Responsibility without Sovereignty: Inaugurating a Maternal Contract to Find the Mexican ‘Disappeared’ through Protest and Social Media Elva F. Orozco Mendoza  261 19 On the Concept of Progress Olivia Guntarik  277 Notes on Contributors  293 Index  298

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FIGURES

2.1

Gary Foley during the 1971 South African Springbok rugby team tour protests. Aboriginal activists used the platform to bring attention to the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. Photo credit Koori History Website  21

7.1

Buluwandji young warriors preparing for ceremony being initiated into tribal life. Quartz crystal was used for cutting the skin during initiation. Each scar represents levels of initiation; the more scars, the higher the seniority level. Toby Brim (Tjiauwin), Willie’s great-grandfather, is pictured standing in the back row third from the left. Image courtesy of Willie Brim  96

7.2

Willie Brim outside his Grandad Cecil Brim’s house at Mantaka in Kuranda, 1979. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim  97

7.3

Willie Brim and Irwin Riley performing with Mantaka at the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) celebrations at Kuranda State School, 1983. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim  101

7.4

Willie’s great-grandparents Toby Brim (Tjiauwin) and Annie Brim (together right of centre) with family standing in front of their Bayu (traditional Buluwai shelter) at Mona Mona Seventh Day Adventist Mission, North Queensland. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim  105

FIGURES

7.5

The poster for the national tour of Mantaka and the Warumpi Band 1984. Image courtesy of Willie Brim  108

7.6

Willie Brim (R) with his sons Astro Brim (Middle) and Aden Brim (L) who are part of Zennith (Reggae/ Roots/Hip-hop band) 2010. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim  109

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13.1 Timeline of legal proceedings and community action  194 13.2 Number of articles found using keyword searches of online archives  195 16.1 List of items forbidden in mail sent to Illinois Department of Corrections institutions. This was received by the authors in 2017 in response to a letter sent to an incarcerated individual; names have been redacted  238

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1 Introduction: ‘Together We Are More’: New media for Old Tales Victoria Grieve-Williams and Olivia Guntarik

In 1989 two Australian (NSW) policemen dressed in blackface at a police barbeque to mock two Aboriginal men who had died in custody. They wandered around with nooses on their necks saying, ‘I am Lloyd Boney’ and ‘I am David Dungay.’ Lloyd Boney had been found deceased hanging by a sock in a police cell some ninety-five minutes after his arrest in 1987. His family and the Aboriginal community and their allies believed he was one of many Aboriginal men murdered by police in similar circumstances: For example, John Pat in 1983, Eddie Murray in 1981. David Gundy too – shot dead in his home in 1989 as a result of a bungled raid by the police Special Weapons Operation Squad (SWOS) who were in pursuit of another man – is recognized by the Aboriginal community as a death in police custody. The video evidence of the police blackface mockery was passed on to an ABC reporter and televised in 1993. Later that year, eighteen-year-old Daniel Yock died as a result of police violence in Brisbane, Queensland. The evidence of the protests that followed the deaths of these men is hard to find. In recent decades, instances of Aboriginal protests and talking back to white power abound due to the widespread take-up of social media by Aboriginal people to publicize the race-hate crimes committed against them.

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In 2004, large-scale riots occurred in Redfern and on Palm Island due to the deaths in custody of Thomas Hickey and Mulrunji Doomadgee, respectively. These riots were unprecedented in Australian history and succeeded in showcasing Aboriginal anger and frustration globally through media attention. Police presence in Redfern had been stepped up in what was perceived as coordinated attempts to clear the inner-city suburb of Redfern of Aboriginal people and allow gentrification to occur. Fourteen-year-old Thomas Hickey was riding his bicycle and trailed by police in a pursuit vehicle when he was impaled on top of a high picket fence as a result of being thrown into the air. Mulrunji Doomadgee was singing while walking down a street on Palm Island, taken into custody and beaten so badly that he died as a result of his liver being cleaved in two. In both locations the police intensified the riot instead of acting to calm it; in Redfern they were fighting young Aboriginal men and children. Aboriginal writer Tony Birch published an essay, ‘Who Gives a Fuck about White Society Anymore?’ as a response to the Redfern riot; media commentary was extensive. Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death has been followed by legal challenges in the courts and a documentary, The Tall Man, as well as global media publicity. The extensive use of new media and new powerful Aboriginal voices entering media commentary has arguably seen a paradigm shift in Aboriginal media profile over the past two decades. The deaths mentioned above do not include those that have occurred through white vigilante violence, and these have added another dimension to our understanding of violent Aboriginal deaths. There are several examples. Adopted into a white family in Perth, eighteen-year-old Warren Braedon was murdered by a gang of white youths in 1993 ‘because he was black’. In 2009, Kwementyaye Ryder was kicked to death in the dry Todd River bed in Alice Springs by a group of white youth who had been driving dangerously near sleeping Aboriginal people and shouting racist insults in the early hours of the morning. In 2016, in Kalgoorlie Western Australia, fourteen-year-old Elijah Doughty was fatally wounded when struck by a vehicle that had been pursuing him on a dirt bike at high speed. The circumstances of Elijah’s death and the subsequent court hearings were widely publicized and protests were held in every capital city in an attempt to get justice for Elijah. The Black Arm Band – a group of Aboriginal musicians formed in response to a Prime Minister saying he had no time for the ‘black arm band view of Australian history’, that is, the truth telling of massacres and criminal takeover – composed a poignant song for him that is on YouTube. Aboriginal take-up of contemporary media forms has lifted protest to be broader, deeper and more effective. In 2014, Ms Dhu, a twenty-two-year-old Aboriginal woman, called police because of a violation of a domestic violence order by her partner. Police found she had unpaid parking fines and imprisoned her for four days, deliberately ignoring her complaints of feeling unwell, wrongfully assuming she was withdrawing from drugs. She died as a result of infection caused by cracked ribs she previously suffered at the hands of her partner. In 2015,

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David Dungay died in prison as a result of being forcibly restrained by seriously untrained custodial officers. His inquest was shown a harrowing video of his final moments when he was saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and spitting blood. In 2017, Tanya Day died of traumatic brain injuries after she was arrested for public drunkenness on a train in central Victoria. CCTV footage shows her arriving at a police station for questioning. She repeatedly asked not to be put in custody. At the inquest into her death in 2019, police insist she was treated with dignity and respect. Her family state otherwise. By July 2018, news of the predicament of Aboriginal Australians suffering deaths in custody and from vigilante violence had spread effectively around the world resulting in strong international support. Outside the inquest into David Dungay’s death in Sydney, Hank Newsome, president of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Greater New York, USA, stood in solidarity with David’s family and supporters, his arm around the diminutive body of David’s mother Leetona Dungay. ‘It’s the same story, different soil’, he said in reference to the death of Eric Garner in New York City in 2014. Both men had cried out that they could not breathe when restrained by officers and, their cries ignored, had died.1 These examples demonstrate innovations in social media uses in mobilizing political support. Yet, to be too quick to celebrate social media is to ignore its ugly underbelly. Just a month earlier in June 2018, at the fringe of the city of Melbourne, more than 10,000 people had gathered in a park. On an icy winter’s night in Melbourne they had come together for a silent vigil to commemorate the life of Eurydice Dixon, a twentytwo-year-old woman who was found dead at the park the previous week, raped and murdered by a stranger on her way home from a night out in the city. The vigil was a chance for the public to come together to mourn and demonstrate the community’s desire to end violence against women. Reporters interviewed many women about why they attended these events and why they protested. Among the most heartbreaking responses a mother stated: ‘It happened to my daughter.’ For another woman it was ‘To pay respect’. For another, ‘To pray for change’. For others: ‘We want to make a difference.’ ‘We want violence against women stopped.’ Attendees held signs declaring: We will beat this. Together we are more. This is not an unusual story. Several years earlier a candlelight vigil was held for another murder victim, Jill Meagher, only a few blocks away from this park. At the time, there was also a peace march that drew a large crowd. Bright and cheerful banners fluttered in the wind proclaiming No Violence and Respect Women. On both these occasions political speeches about change were delivered in Parliament as a response to the acts against these women. Media attention was intense and, while the murders were deplorable and tragic, the activism and mourning in their wake powerful, astute observers were quick to point out the differences between coverage of Dixon’s murder and

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violence against other women, particularly women of colour.2 For instance, Chinese woman Qi Yu was killed the same week but her murder ‘slipped by with little attention’.3 The murder of Sudanese woman Natalina Angok in Melbourne in 2019 is a similar case in point. Violence against white women, particularly if they are perceived as young and ‘undeserving’, often generates more media and public attention and outrage. This phenomenon crosses global borders. It is what Cornel West referred to as ‘the problem of the color line’, tied to the practice of a long history of colonialism and white supremacy, reincarnated through the alt-right movement, through recurring acts of xenophobia, discrimination and violence against blacks, Latinos, Asians and other racial, religious, gender and sexual minorities.4 The historical legacy of white supremacy bleeds into contemporary settings perpetuated by discursive constructions that pivot between a white normative figure in duress and a wider public ready to bring redemption to the figure in crisis. We saw this in the constant media references to both Dixon and Meagher in multiple media articles on violence and women. While there is no doubt that both women deserve to be remembered, it is equally important to recognize where the gaps in the nature of the coverage lie and in the racialized textures of the stories on display. There were detailed descriptions and backstories associated with both women. Dixon was portrayed as an up-and-coming comedian with a burgeoning career, a rising star whose young life had been tragically cut short. Meagher was the newly married, independent and intelligent colleague who was at the prime of her life. Media articles describe her last movements in detail, going as far as to provide the text messages she sent to friends to reflect her wit and wisdom. There is an obvious pattern here and it highlights how the media gives voice and a face to victims of crime that is not normally attributed to the same extent for non-white women. Qi Yu, in contrast, was painted as ‘quiet’ and ‘nice’; we do not learn what she did for a living nor much about who she was besides the fact her origin is Asian. For her, there was no public vigil. And yet the facts and figures about the rates of violence against women, Aboriginal people and other minorities reveal a sad truth. These are the statistics: One woman is killed in Australia every week. One in five women has been raped. More than four hundred Aboriginal people have died in custody since 1991.5 Violence, in all its forms, online and off, continues. But this is not a book about statistics or data, big or small. It is not confined to any one region of the world; it is global in its reach. Neither is it a book about protests writ large. This book is about change – in the nature of protests, in the ways in which we organize to resist and the changing repercussive consequences of different forms of protest. Our aim is to gather a range of perspectives on whether the differing ways in which people come together to work for change make a difference.

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Our intention is to reveal the movement, the flows of activity that are often initiated by extraordinary individuals, the vibrancy, proximity and even distance associated with these changes. We have focused on media, communication tools and actions, as well as their associated acts of sharing, networking and influencing practices. This anthology documents and celebrates recent works and thinking, approaching change from historical, personal and political perspectives. The book can be read as offering an opportunity to understand a multifaceted, transnational phenomenon – the coming together of people to instigate change, and the modes and practices of communication that make those solidarities real.

New beginnings … We begin with the premise that connections between older and newer forms of protests are not well understood in that there is an assumption of a disconnect, that historical forms of social and political organization were not as effective as more contemporary forms. We begin with a focus on the people at the margins who have the most to gain but also the most to lose in instances of social unrest. We begin with the claim that while social media protests are an inherent part of contemporary life, their relative efficacy to traditional protests (such as sit-ins, pamphleteering, speaker shoutdowns and obstructions) in the pre-internet age has yet to be fully explored, understood and contextualized. For these reasons, we made a point to resist beginning with the biggest protests originating in the West, namely the United States. Instead, we privileged writings from the Global South and contributors who describe the challenges of communities and individuals who have overcome the lack of information, resources and policies specific to their needs. We centred our attention on those people who have to be more innovative in their drive for change and to advance their message. Within the pages of this collection, readers will only find passing references to Occupy Wall Street and the #MeToo movement. Our starting point for analysis is Aboriginal Australia, a place and a people that tend to go unnoticed in ever-growing discussions on social movements. Yet for us, this genesis represents the textual and contextual horizon of our approach: to position a critique of any theorization of social movements along the borders of difference and across cultural and political content that tends to be reduced, overlooked or stereotyped in popular media. In this light, the significance and applications of visual media during protests cannot be underestimated. These images hold our attention for a reason; they possess the power to convey a larger story, to capture a moment in time, and carry the potential to take us back to an individual or collective

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experience of resistance. They bear the traces and frictions of the encounter between people, places and technologies, between ideas and their historical worldviews, and between those activists and communities sitting at the heart of the struggle. As visual artefacts, they also retain timeless qualities of nostalgia for what has been lost, while communicating a movement’s central purpose or appealing to our collective conscience. The image on the cover of this book expresses a particular history, part of the 2015 National Day of Action to protest the Australian government’s as yet unsuccessful bid (despite continuing threats) to force the people within 150 remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia off their land. During this time, a series of gatherings and events were staged across major regional and urban centres, including Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, organized under the banner of #SOSBlakAustralia. These protests rallied people at key sites to take over major intersections of the city. Paddy Gibson, an activist academic from the University of Technology Sydney, took this photograph during the Sydney protests as the crowds marched towards Central Station, showing how the resistance in Sydney connected to wider national action. This photograph reflects the sense of cultural pride on the day. The man holding the megaphone is Felon Mason, who had a strong leadership role in the demonstration. He used the megaphone to marshal the crowds and to direct the protest chants, which centred on the issue of community closures. Felon also guided the singing and dancing taking place at the intersections, using the megaphone to deliver short impromptu speeches along the way, while urging the people to band together to defend the autonomy of remote communities. He made a point about how the closure of the Aboriginal community in Redfern at the Block predated the push to close remote communities and this needed to be a strong focus of the campaigning in Sydney. By attacking the community in central Sydney over many years, the government had managed to remove a vital hub of black activism that had supported communities across Australia (see Chapter 2). Paddy Gibson shared this image on his Facebook page, and the photograph was re-shared through new social networks, jostling with other images of the crowds on the day. This image of protesters who had stopped traffic as they performed an Aboriginal dance, circulated with other images of protesters holding banners that read, ‘Our Land, Our Life’; the distinctive Aboriginal flag dotting the landscape is iconic to Aboriginal protest in Australia. In selecting this photograph as our cover image, we draw attention to the importance of images in symbolizing significant protest moments and the ways in which visual media can resonate with the people and continue to be viewed, recirculated and re-presented in different forms and new contexts. This is revealing of the ways that an image can convey mood, tone and raw emotion, how the visual elements of time and place can touch us, divide and conflict us simultaneously. Ultimately, what this photograph

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represents is our persistent hunger for consuming history through the image. We need the enduring power of images to reinforce our beliefs, for image and imagination are inextricably linked insofar as certain pictures of history can allow for a kind of collective imagining. The photograph of the young warriors from more than 100 years ago in Grieve-Williams’ chapter on Willie Brim (Figure 7.1 on page 96) is significant because, alongside the more recent photographs in the chapter, it highlights cultural continuity while asserting temporal depth, thus providing a way to understand how the past matters in the present and for the generations to follow. We cannot build a better future without imagining the possibilities of our shared futures. Our opening chapter offers a discussion of Aboriginal activism in Australia as a way to consider these possibilities. GrieveWilliams highlights how Aboriginal people have fought against racial segregation policies both at home and abroad, and raised awareness about stolen Aboriginal children, slavery and stolen wages, the need for citizenship, for land rights, for self-governance and most recently the need for a treaty or treaties, as well as the threatened closure of remote Aboriginal communities through #SOSBlakAustralia. Australia has a black history and we wanted to centralize the ways in which these political claims continue to challenge and resist the colonial legacy and the development of the neoliberal state. Chapters in this collection also privilege non-Western traditions and peoples, incorporating decolonizing alternatives that sit outside of Eurocentric positivist models. To this end, we are inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’ work on the concept of intersectionality, which insists on bringing multiple power relations and identity politics into view. Collins’ theoretical insights allow us to scrutinize how systems of domination mutually cohere along the lines of race, class, gender and nation. Here, we see our common challenges as being greater than our differences; here, we see the greatest challenge being how we express and engage with those common challenges across our differences. Collins offers a valuable perspective that prompts us to question the relations of power that shape our social conditions and the ties that bind us to different forms of oppression. Her acute awareness of the need to create safe spaces of diversity in fostering group autonomy and effective coalitions resonates with our own worldviews on the need to identify points of connection across raced and gendered cultural, political and national boundaries. We applied these considerations to ground our socio-historical approach to viewing political struggles and their multiple dimensions and intersections. This informed our thinking in gathering this collection, which personifies both contemporary and traditional cultural forms of expression, the expression of activism in regions and amongst peoples that are too often silenced and erased in media and scholarly discourses. The diversity of range of activism includes writings on India (Guha), Thailand (Guntarik and Trott), Iran (Momeni), Jamaica

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(Figueroa), Mexico (Rodríguez, Mendoza), Aboriginal Australia (GrieveWilliams), Malaysia (Guntarik) and black America (Summerville). While this range is designed to encourage comparison, we are not interested in entering a debate on the extent and hierarchies of oppression in these various locations. The diversity we bring speaks directly to the multiple roots of the wellspring of activism, demonstrating the ways in which our combined social histories and inequalities are relational. The book is divided into four thematic parts. The first part of this anthology clusters around the theme of history: the five chapters in Part 1 set out to untangle the tensions between public and private communication practices, offering glimpses into how the past shapes our contemporary epoch. The anthology begins with putting history in perspective to demonstrate how activism around class, gender, sexuality, race and social justice issues has been affected by and rooted in time. History can show us that social media and digital tools can permit freedom of information, democracy and more open, public discourse. Yet history also reveals how social media has imposed strong, exceedingly draconian state-level constraints on protest efforts. Viewed through the lens of time, what might these kinds of social media uses tell us about what direct democracy looks like in an age of shareable media messages? Put another way, social media may give us a sense of being more connected, yet whether social media provides more access to knowledge is debatable. Bishop directly responds to this issue by posing a fundamental question about the impact of our seemingly global connectedness: despite how ‘connected’ we are, what is a truly democratic social, civic and public sphere? Moreover, what is the role of traditional forms of media, such as print (newspapers, magazines, journals), and their relationship to existing digital culture? Stevenson distinguishes between traditional ‘print’ forms of communication and new media as seen through the development of the women’s rights movement and contemporary feminism. She engages with the women’s movement as a set of political activities that show long-standing methods and goals feminists applied in the longue durée. Adopting a comparable examination of print culture, Rodríguez presents the tireless journalistic efforts of activist Jovita Idár to fight for civil rights in Texas and for Mexicans/Mexican-Americans. Idár was raised on the frontier of US takeover of Mexican lands, when women had little, if no political, traction, and long before women won the right to vote. Rodriguez discusses how this form of campaign activism provides a model for understanding existing newly created spaces of contemporary racial terror. Similarly, Romagna demonstrates how the evolution of activism can be critically analysed through analysis of historical modes of political participation, tracing the threads of ‘underground’ collectives and through ongoing practices of hacktivism. He thus illustrates how hacktivists, in their demands for freedom of information and free speech, have become more aggressive and effective over time.

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The art and artefacts of activism In compiling this collection, we offer new angles through which to look at the diverse social and media features of protest cultures. The approaches utilized to scrutinize this landscape in this volume give a taste of the myriad variations employed across the globe. We seek to assert that such diverse considerations, while situated along the heuristic of social and cultural difference, are vital at a time that has experienced enormous shifts in relationships to the state, gender roles, racial and ethnic identities and transformations in people’s media and digital literacy levels. In the current world context of immense population growth and urbanization, dwindling resources and increasing challenges for environmental and social sustainability, this critique is evermore significant. It is in this thematic vein that we have curated the mix of contributors in Part II who emphasize the varying tactical and creative uses of communication tools and technologies to promote democracy to ultimately expose anti-democratic practices. Figueroa discusses how the Maroon people of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country have addressed issues of under-representation and how their resilience was tested as a consequence of the bauxite mining industry and rapid urbanization. She reveals the role media, communications techniques and particularly film played in awareness building, lobbying and the work of garnering national and international support to protect land rights. Following a similar, yet unique, cultural trajectory, Grieve-Williams’ contribution on Willie Brim, elder and leader of the Buluwai people in north Queensland, Australia, conveys how reggae music forms emerged as a catalyst to mobilize change, spreading an Aboriginal cultural and political message to the world through a popular form. She reveals how the reach of such messages and narratives can spread through people’s love of music and the lyrics of songs and the stories of the Dreamtime that are shared on YouTube. Activism is viable only when people are convinced that public protest is acceptable and likely to produce a result, making explorations on the language of activism necessary as a way to understand how protesters are inspired. For instance, popular culture has been a significant site of struggle for resistance against dominant cultural ideologies, providing a language for engaging with the culture of the masses. Kelly’s chapter provides an overview of the ways popular culture has been employed in activism in inventive ways, thus connecting cultural texts with hacktivism in his focus on science-fiction films, cyberpunk novels, the archives of early hacker ‘zines, and many other aesthetic and literary forms that have inspired contemporary organizations such as Anonymous. Guntarik and Trott have similarly discussed the significance of popular culture on activism through protest songs, popular literature and social networking sites. In their chapter, they blend literary form and imagination to engage with participatory politics and to understand

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how social media analysis can be investigated through performance, creative practice and metaphor, as well as from a critical geographic distance.

Landscape as text Evgeny Morozov’s 2012 book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom is a wake-up call to those ‘cyber-utopians’ who have fallen sway to the charge that digital technologies are a panacea for social change. This kind of technology worship is dangerous because it can blind us to the ways that social media can both empower and reduce people. The relationship of activist cultural texts and intense, ever-increasing social change is telling of our contemporary media landscape. Hence, we are interested to present this landscape from both the positions of ‘users’ and ‘consumers’ of that media, as well as their ‘producers’, ‘creators’ and audiences. We seek to convey different features and facets of this changing landscape, which is both limiting and retaining unique opportunities for activists alike. Modes through which events and issues are televised and represented around the world effect new cultural forms in local contexts. And yet, we are experiencing a world of extreme media convergence. The media landscape is evolving rapidly with older forms of media being reconfigured in newer forms, highlighting the messiness and sometimes inscrutable nature of our networked and ephemeral media environment. The dark side of this social world is evident in closed forums that are based on invitation-only online networks such as 8Chan, where extremist groups are given license to present divisive views of their social reality with others of like-mind. These representational issues tussle with competing images of third world development and contemporary discourses of Euro-Americanization. How to make sense of this media ecosystem? How do these ‘texts’ speak to the moment? In what ways do they foretell the future? In posing these questions we sought to bring together new ways of seeing this protest milieu through a media lens. We know that popular tools of communication have changed the protest landscape over time. This has often meant that at times people’s range of basic, complex and mixed uses of these tools have both hindered and enhanced the progress of communities, social movements and political agendas. At other times, these tools have contributed significantly to connecting the social and political struggles of the people whose lives they touch while at the same time providing the ideal megaphones through which to vocalize minority groups’ pro-, anti-religious, racist and violent views. We have to wonder what this particular moment of social media–inspired activism reveals about our age. While social media characterizes this late modern world, what is less definitive is the potential that social media carries to drive change relative to its capacity to deliver speed, scale and reach.

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Covering more recent events over the past decade from 2009 to 2019, contributors in Part III throw light on the very question of social media’s possibilities, peculiarities and future insights, and through a focus on specific geographic regions. Specifically, through rape cases in India, Guha discusses how feminist activists advocate for non-violence against women, by bypassing media gatekeepers and engaging directly with key political influencers through forms of citizen journalism and advocacy. Other authors in this section remind us that social media can be used to both bolster and undermine democracy; it can give weight to right-wing, racist and anti-religious ideals in rural regions (Taylor) or be used to promote misogynistic and sexist events on the ground in urban centres (Trott), while simultaneously deployed by autocratic governments to censor and silence oppositional voices across multi-centres of geopolitical uprisings in the Middle East (Momeni). These contributors each engage with social media as sites of narration, influence and collective struggle and through a place-relations focus. Indeed, social media research as a form of archival enquiry – no matter where their locations of analysis – can expose the connections and contradictions between different ways of thinking and relations of power. We can mine this archive of social media to interrogate how political processes create barriers to action inasmuch as we can excavate the archive to call out the intractable dysfunction of the state. And still, no matter how much burrowing we do to assign value and meaning to this archive, we know that it still retains the power to foreclose knowledge and to provide access to other people’s authentic experiences and realities. While the dynamic of screen- and street-level activism makes it harder to examine questions of impact and affect, it is evident that social media can be exploited for both social good and harm. This is why we must caution ascribing social media with a divine status for it is easy to get swept up by the moment and all too quickly embrace social media as transformative and emancipatory, or to see these interactions on social media as a solution to our economic, political and social ills. Research is establishing this as an overly ambitious claim to make, one that is based on wishful thinking rather than evidence of ongoing organized social action.

Powerful reach but not (yet) revolutionary As editors, we have discerned that while social media is a political tool, it does not in and of itself cause revolutionary change. It takes more to produce the deep social political and economic change that the actors in this volume seek, but what is this? We seek to nuance this imperative, hence why this book is intent in exploring the role of the ‘social’ in instigating change.

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This focus on the social dimensions of protest culture invites new questions about the impact and affect of sociality across cultural, racial, gendered and political differences. How are people using their voices, social networks and influence to shape decision-making processes at the personal and political levels, and through their provisional practices? Contributors in Part IV look to the tangible fabric of place, while underscoring the intangible values of memory. The equally ethereal notion of democracy and agency cannot be discussed without also drawing attention to groups who continue to be excluded or written out of history such as women, minority racial and ethnic groups, gender non-conforming, queer, trans and gender diverse people. Strong’s examination of music archives highlights issues of gender under-representation and diversity in the context of how historical accounts of music reflect a gender bias. In so doing, she contests hegemonic masculine forms and dominance by questioning rights to access knowledge, opportunities and resources for emerging female musicians. Such a critique is critical of the democratization of technology and knowledge so far as certain groups are excluded from participating in such democratizing processes. These exclusions adopt a distinctive form among those incarcerated who are deprived of access to communication technologies as Benavides, Meiners, Padilla, Quinn and Yasuoka illustrate in their discussion of the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project. This chapter further probes the contradiction that online activism is promising but also inherently limited. The authors show that while democratizing informationsharing technologies are banned within prisons, they can also be used to bring humanity to an otherwise under-represented and overlooked group of people denied access to the internet in the prison system. In contemporary everyday life, the social takes place across the duality of offline and online spaces. People share stories in these spaces and engage with other people’s stories, compelling many to take action while others remain glued to their screen and connect in different ways or perhaps remain merely consumers. This is part of the risk and the peril of protest cultures referred to as ‘clicktivism’ or ‘slacktivism’, a form of feeble involvement in protests considered dangerous and ineffective, enacted from the perceived safety of the screen. Indeed, whether action takes place on the street or via the screen is open to contention as to the extent to which the individual ‘participates’ in that protest. All these insights leave us with enduring questions about what it means to think and act together, to be involved politically, and the extent to which various forms of protest lead to social and political change.

The changing face of protest The book’s central focus on the concept of social change allows us to come full circle and return to our original topic and the distinctive ways

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people engage with social change, whether institutional, behavioural, environmental, relational, practical or conceptual. Continuing with the theme of memory and materiality, the remaining contributions in this collection cast light on these finer aspects of social change. Summerville describes forms of African American representation through the unchanging dominant narrative of American equality, freedom and justice and how this narrative has worked to obscure black bodies. This narrative has functioned in tandem with changing uses of mobile and handheld devices (e.g. cameras, video recorders, mobile phones) in forms that enable African Americans to portray different versions of themselves and promote wider civil activism. Change is also explored through the role social and digital media play in facilitating new constitutions of activism; how people have employed innovations in technology to tackle global problems. Mendoza’s chapter is a provocative examination of the online activities of mothers in Mexico searching for their missing children who have ‘disappeared’ under government policies that allow impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes. Through a critique of definitions of sovereignty, she acknowledges the crucial role new technologies play in supporting mothers of the missing to form collectives, while posing an important question about protest repertoire, its legacies and lessons. If protest demonstrations do not lead to revolutionary change, how do our struggles contribute to the movement and why fight at all? This question connects directly to our purpose in curating this collection, which is to showcase the complexity of responses to such a query, and which various authors have responded to in different ways. Indeed, the volume closes with Guntarik’s personal reflections on the nature of progress and through the enduring question of how people are inspired to develop a sense of political consciousness in the first place and commit to fighting for a cause. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s theory of progress, she argues that at the heart of any analysis of social change is the need to account for the realities of peoples’ lives, their political experience and history, and the materialities of their social capital, resources and literacies. As Marx ([1859] 1978: 4) cautioned: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’6 This claim interrogates the very nature of change through the social and personal: who are we, how we change, what it takes to engage with difference and, ultimately, how our encounters with difference alter us and shape our experience. This book embodies a socio-historical approach to exploring questions of change and protest agendas, suggesting ways in which new social forms have challenged or played a complicit role in prevailing systems of authority. Herein, we do not wish to draw definitive conclusions nor do we seek to present universal truths. Rather, our objective is to explore the complexities and cultural nuances of diverse peoples’ interactions with social and media forms over space and time. This required us to find a new conceptual language that departs from existing dominant frameworks that privilege the

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now and the about-to-be over the past. Insofar as a more comprehensive understanding of mass mobilizations is necessary, we have not yet found an adequate model to fully articulate how protests have truly made a difference. The inspiration for this book was to present a range of contradictions, in terms of how people are equally more connected to and disconnected from one another through social media than ever before. The connections allow us to see new opportunities and the enduring potential of protest cultures through traditional and digital epochs, while the disconnections highlight the necessity and urgency of being humanly connected, illustrating what it means to unite as a community and for a common goal under extraordinary circumstances. Social media–driven protests can serve as an expression of the times, reflecting the tensions in democratic and undemocratic moments and conditions and individual and collective reactions to personal loss, interpersonal and political violations, and attacks on our freedoms. While these events are shared publicly in old and new media, and across social media, what is less evident is the irrevocable and often irreducible gap between experience and its enunciation – between the personal and political. How to capture change without reducing its very meaning? Change itself cannot be static. In developing this anthology, we sought to address the movement between the individual and the collective and vice versa, in processes of becoming political, active and participatory subjects and what that takes. The collective demonstration of action, listening, speaking out, standing apart and together, sharing a particular experience across the distances, in physical proximity, across digital and real time-spaces, can be either dangerous or empowering, functioning as both mechanisms of oppression and resistance. How we think collectively about these issues is critical despite how diverse our experiences may be, despite our various geographic and social locations. This would not entail envisioning our alliances as isolated, individual or homogenous lived realities. This would entail seeing our alliances as part of something bigger, and would allow us to work towards what Patricia Hill Collins might regard as continuous change, affording a way to move beyond group-specific politics. Continuous change demands that we persist in undoing the social relations of domination in forms that dismantle overlapping cycles of violence. This collection is not a celebration of change but a vehicle for guiding our thinking towards truths that persist within the flux of our encounters with everyday forms of resistance. To this end, the book is unapologetically polemical, expressing how collective and individual experiences alter and are in turn altered by the speed, scale and impact of our changing media technologies. We believe in the energy, truthfulness and tenacity that collectives can engender. We live for the localized spaces of resistance that can sharpen our political will. These moments help us to imagine other possibilities that allow for the erosion of ideologies that construct us as dangerous and impoverished. This momentum matters and drives meaning in

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the message. Movements necessitate strong leaders and the communication of key messages through the power of voice, a form of technology in its own right, in supporting movement leaders to evoke an emotional connection with and response from their followers. As a musician and leader of his community, Willie Brim (Chapter 7) used his voice to share his worldview, to create bonds with people around the world and to bear truths, reflecting the power of political uses of voice through music. Through the work of activist Jovita Idár (Chapter 6), we also see the ways in which voice, body and position are interconnected – used to convey cultural resistance through the performance of the political message in everyday subversive words and actions, to express stories of daily hope and struggle, or to simply force authorities to back off. The body as we know has been exploited as screen, stage, site and canvas for social and political uses, highlighting just how vulnerable we are to images that perpetuate structures of power, privilege and inauthenticity. Dead bodies remind us of the ultimate sacrifice we make for resistance. Dead bodies signal that all bodies are in crisis. Our stance here echoes what Patricia Hill Collins calls ‘interlocking systems’ of oppression that keep bodies in their place. To resist oppression, we must call these images to account in order to curb the recycling of old repressions: ‘Racist and sexist ideologies, if they are disbelieved, lose their impact. Thus, an important feature of the hegemonic domain of power lies in the need to continually refashion images in order to solicit support’ (Collins 2000: 283).7 The shared recognition of this oppression is crucial and urgent, for even as oppositional voices are submerged, silenced or out-voiced in everyday struggles for justice, the influence of media in carrying the message forward gains traction as ‘transmitters of culture’ for the next generation. We leave you with a final message for what this collection represents: If media can make us more risk-prone and violent, it can also counteract the forces that would enslave and brutalize us.

Notes 1 ‘Black Lives Matter Leader Shows Support for David Dungay’s Family’, (2018), NITV News, 16 July. Available online: https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitvnews/article/2018/07/16/black-lives-matter-australia-david-dungay (accessed 15 March 2019). 2 Lin, J. (2018), ‘Eurydice Dixon Absolutely Deserves to Be Remembered. But So Does Qi Yu’, Mamamia, 21 June 2018. Available online: https://www. mamamia.com.au/qi-yu-murder/ (accessed 26 March 2019). 3 Kun, J. (2018), ‘In Response to the Death of Eurydice Dixon’, Wire, July 2018. Available online: https://www.wire.org.au/in-response-to-the-death-ofeuridyce-dixon/ (accessed 26 March 2019). Gbla, K. (2018), ‘Let’s Make Space for the Stories of All Women’, Our Watch, 20 June 2018. Available online:

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https://www.ourwatch.org.au/News-media/Latest-news/Let-s-make-space-forthe-stories-of-all-women?feed=LatestNewsFeed (accessed 26 March 2019). 4 West, C. (2017), Race Matters, 25th Anniversary. Boston: Beacon Press. 5 The Guardian Australia has an online database tracking Aboriginal deaths in custody; see ‘Deaths Inside: Indigenous Australian Deaths in Custody’ https:// www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/28/deaths-insideindigenous-australian-deaths-in-custody (accessed 20 March 2019). 6 Marx, K. ([1859] 1978), ‘Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in R. C. Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, 3–6, New York: W. W. Norton. 7 Collins, P.H. (2000), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, New York and London: Routledge.

PART I

History in Perspective

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2 ‘We Have Survived the White Man’s World’: A Critical Review of Aboriginal Australian Activism in Media and Social Media Victoria Grieve-Williams

Social activism is great for making a big splash and a big wave that follows that splash, but it isn’t always the right people that ride that wave, there isn’t always direction or strategy for the way that wave is going toward an outcome. -Luke Pearson, founder IndigenousX This chapter is concerned with the political activism of Australia’s Aboriginal people who are perhaps the most disregarded of all the Indigenous peoples of the world. They have come to be known as Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Peoples and First Nations. Their own names for themselves are more complex – koori, murri, nungah, nyoongar, yammatjee, yolngu, anangu, for example – since they were not a people organized nationally in the way of colonial states. Originally moving in circumscribed patterns within a wholly settled continent, organized into bands of kin-related groups, their country was annexed by the British and invaded through the south-east in 1788. The spread of colonization was

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relatively slow over the whole of the continent through the introduction of sheep and cattle, mining, timber-getting, fishing and pearling, and the spreading stations, villages and towns. The original brutal colonial aggression was relatively recent; the last recorded massacre of Aboriginal people was in Central Australia in 1928; the last known deaths of colonists as a result of Aboriginal resistance was in the 1930s in the Kimberley region in the north-west of the continent. Populations of Aboriginal people were decimated by massacres in an undeclared colonial war, starvation and disease. This, the last British colony, was brutally and thoroughly taken under the doctrine of terra nullius, an empty land, through unrestrained settler colonial vigilante violence. We know it was not an empty continent of course, but this doctrine gave the colonists the rationale for setting about making it empty of the original inhabitants through unrestrained violent aggression fuelled by racist doctrine. The people they encountered with each wave of colonization across the continent were inscribed as non-human with no right to exist. A major research project is only now uncovering the extent of massacres and recording them online (NITV News 2018; Ryan n.d.). There is no doubt that this was a process of systematic and premeditated genocide. Settler colonials and civil servants alike applied the lessons learnt in the colonization of other Indigenous peoples with force; the ‘bushwhack’, attacking camps of men, women and children before dawn, poisonings, rape, violent restraint and movement of populations off country, were commonplace. The remnant populations were enslaved on sheep and cattle stations, incarcerated on reserves and effectively segregated through material application of racist doctrine. Aboriginal people have eked out a bare life in tightly administered colonial regimes that have varied in practice, though not in intent, between states and territories over a vast continent, over time. However, Aboriginal resilience and resistance are evident in not only armed responses but in the increasing take-up of the written word. Aboriginal people were learning to read from the early years of colonization, and they adopted written texts in various ways, including letter and petition writing, to challenge their oppressors and to protect country and kin (Van Toorn 2006). Now less than 3 per cent of the population, Aboriginal people are recognized as holding the cultural heart of the nation and punch above their weight in the arts, sport and education. However, many people are left in a state of existential torpor and communities suffer high rates of incarceration, child removal and youth suicide. Individuals suffer racism, de facto segregation and racist violence including lynching, in contemporary Australian society. Aboriginal people still labour under the racist trope of the most primitive people on Earth, resistant to modernity.

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While there is growing evidence of the depth and breadth of Aboriginal resistance to colonialism over the whole of the country over time, it was not until the 1970s that this activism exploded onto the media stage both nationally and internationally. A younger generation was influenced by international fights for rights, inspired and led by their elders into a new brand of activism. This became essentially a celebration of survival of the doctrine of terra nullius and a refusal to go away, nor to be grateful for the crumbs from the whiteman’s table.

The historical legacy of Aboriginal activism and media The early 1970s remains widely understood as the high point of Aboriginal activism for human rights and social justice in Australia. This period was marked by brilliant political strategy, both at home and transnationally, that

FIGURE 2.1  Gary Foley during the 1971 South African Springbok rugby team tour protests. Aboriginal activists used the platform to bring attention to the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. Photo credit Koori History Website.

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was developed by Aboriginal people using the principle of connectedness and relatedness as realized in the philosophical foundations to Aboriginal culture. Ravi de Costa has documented the development of extensive national and international networks that were vigorous and thoroughgoing without the benefit of contemporary internet technology at that time (de Costa 2006). In 1972, people from across the continent arrived in the national capital, Canberra, to support the Tent Embassy outside of Australia’s Parliament House. It is testament to Aboriginal capacity to build networks and communications that this became an extremely effective transnational political event. The foundations are to be found in the activities of Aboriginal political organizations and individuals during the earlier part of the century until they reached an explosive force by the late 1960s. The catalyst for the Tent Embassy occurred when the Prime Minister announced there would be no Land Rights but rather a plan to lease back stolen lands to Aboriginal peoples. The very next day a group of urban-based activists from Sydney – including Michael Ghillar Anderson, Billy Craigie, Tony Koorie and Bertie Williams – arrived in the national capital Canberra, by car, with only a beach umbrella and some signs. Aboriginal people from across the country converged on the site of the Tent Embassy to join the protest, signalling the burgeoning of a panAboriginal movement that broached traditional language and geographic divisions as well as colonial state and territory boundaries. The ‘old fellas’ the lawmen of the remote communities of the centre, the west and the topend arrived on the back of cattle trucks with nothing but a blanket for a swag. Aboriginal community leaders and members, women and children also arrived by bus and by car. Aboriginal Australia was hurting and hurting deeply. The Tent Embassy was symbolic of Aboriginal people as outsiders, without the rights of citizens, despite the overwhelming YES vote for ‘citizenship’ at the 1967 Referendum. The original doctrine of terra nullius enshrined in the constitution of the Australian government, formed in 1901, has left unfinished business with Aboriginal people in the absence of a treaty or any form of agreement for the takeover of their lands. Nor had there been any reparations. I have argued elsewhere that we exist in a state of exception to the Australian democratic state, fitting exactly the theoretical homo sacer as described by Agamben (Grieves 2017; 2018). Aboriginal Australia in all of its poverty came to the notice of national and international media. In many locations in Aboriginal Australia people were (and are) reduced to starvation, the bottom line of dispossession and genocide, as they had been over the history of colonization and racism. Tent Embassy activists created an opportunity to protest the genocidal disregard and segregationalist neglect, and the accompanying racist configurations of power and privilege, by successive governments.

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Aboriginal media activism in the Tent Embassy Era The fact that John Newfong (1943–99), a descendant of Ngugi people of the Moreton Bay region in Queensland, became the media strategist for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy meant that it received wide media coverage through newspapers, radio and television. Newfong was already a mainstream print media journalist, having been the first Aboriginal person to complete a cadetship in the mid-1960s. He subsequently worked for major newspapers and journals – The Australian, The Sydney Morning-Herald and The Bulletin in the early 1970s. From February to July 1972 he coordinated the lobby of federal parliamentarians, the press gallery and the diplomatic corps, thereby building the press profile of the embassy nationally and internationally (Foley 2019; Latimore 2018). Images of Aboriginal people being beaten by police were accompanied by reports of the appalling conditions that Aboriginal people lived in across the country – urban, rural and remote. It was through the use of media that the Aboriginal activists sought to reinscribe the dominant colonialist tropes of laziness, backwardness, inferiority and frailty in the face of progress, to that of a proud people who had endured dispossession and segregation through inhuman and arguably illegal treatment. They effectively changed the reputation of Aboriginal people and, in spite of their small numbers, made a huge impact on the shape of Australian society; the public pedagogical power of the historical reputation of Aboriginal people that had been a bastion of their disadvantage was diverted into a lever for social change (see Fine 2012: 6). Activists challenged the unjust social and spatial order not only through overt protest but by highlighting the everyday politics of surviving in the face of white supremacy. In this way the Tent Embassy protest forged new identities for Aboriginal people. What has yet to be fully explored is the degree to which Aboriginal people organized and trained as activists before the Tent Embassy. Every state and territory had Aboriginal organizations that brought people together and gave them experience in political organizing, public speaking and also produced newsletters. Examples of organizations include the One People of Australia League (OPAL) in Queensland; the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA), a New South Wales–based organization from the 1920s; the Aborigines Advancement League (AAL), a Victorianbased organization formed in 1932 and later known as the Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League (VAAL); Australian Aboriginal Fellowship (AAF), formed in New South Wales in the 1950s. Many delegates from these organizations attended meetings of the Federal Council of Aboriginal Affairs formed in 1958, that became the Federal Council of Aboriginal and

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Torres Strait Islander Affairs (FCAATSI) (for histories of these associations see Foley n.d.; de Costa 2006; Lothian 2007). The Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs was set up in Sydney in 1964 and became an important meeting place for locals and anyone who happened to be in town. There was a huge movement of Aboriginal people to the cities in this period to escape the restrictions of reserve life and the associated police harassment and violence. In inner city Sydney alone, the number of Aboriginal residents increased from 4,000 in 1966 to the incredible number of about 35,000 – of people arguably refugees – only two years later (Green 2016). The popularity of ‘the Foundation’, as it was called, is tangible evidence of the mixing of young Aboriginal people and the older generation of activists that was the catalyst for the direct action of the Tent Embassy, first erected by Sydney-based activists. More than this, communication links were set up with Aboriginal people in far-flung areas of the country through the agency of many newsletters and publications in this period. For a people who suffered from poor access to schooling through segregation practices this range of publications is immense. Ravi de Costa has referred to it as ‘an explosion of Indigenous publishing … attesting to the creativity and urge for expression amongst Indigenous communities across Australia’ (de Costa 2006: 106). Bruce McGuinness developed the newspaper Koorier (later the National Koorier and later still Jumbunna) that was published from 1968 to 1971 in Victoria. From 1975 the Black News Service was published out of Melbourne by the Black Resource Centre established by Cheryl Buchanan and Lionel Fogarty. John Newfong was the inaugural editor and principal writer of the magazine Identity that was published for about a decade after 1971. Koori Bina (1975–9), a black Australian news monthly, was set up by Roberta Sykes, Marcia Langton, Naomi Mayers and Sue Chilli of the Black Womens Action Group. It became known as the Aboriginal and Islander Message (AIM), and Roberta coordinated the students at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) to develop journalistic skills to publish this paper.

Transnational connections, music and Black Power This period is marked by urban Aboriginal musicians, dancers and performers emerging into the public life of the cities in what is arguably a phenomenon that has led to the innovative and exciting performing arts developments of today. For example, Aboriginal bands formed and accompanied the meetings and protests, as well as touring nationally, and reflected the mood of the people. The reggae band No Fixed Address was

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developed at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1978. At that time not one member was older than nineteen years. Band member Ricky Harrison, Brabulung of the Kurnai/ Gunai people of Gippsland in Victoria, recalls how all band members grew up in the south-east of Australia with the talk of Black Power and the fight for rights all around them (Harrison 2017). For Aboriginal musicians of the activist period such as No Fixed Address, Wrong Side of the Road and Coloured Stone ‘music was not mere entertainment but ideological weaponry’ as it was for Bob Marley and other black transnational musicians (White 2009: 114). Aboriginal people celebrate our survival above all else, ‘we have survived the whitemans’ world’ because survival has been the operative word for Aboriginal people in a hegemonic, genocidal settler colonial state, founded on the doctrine of terra nullius. This spirit of 1970s Aboriginal Australia, consciously confronting white Australia with historical truths, is reflected in the number ‘We Have Survived’ written by Bart Willoughby (lead vocalist and drums) that has become the unofficial anthem of Aboriginal Australia until this day. The lyrics are as follows: You can’t change the rhythm of my soul You can’t tell me too, what to do, You can’t break my bones by putting me down Or by taking the things that belong to me. (‘cos why) Chorus: We have survived the whiteman’s world And the horror and the torment of it all We have survived the whiteman’s world And you know, you can’t change that. All these years have just passed me by I’ve been hassled by the cops nearly all my life People trying to keep me sublime But I can see what’s going on, in my mind. Members of the band found a sense of identification and belonging in reggae music styles and lyrics. They recognized it as a consciously black music form, that was played against the dominant rock’n’roll music that had been skewed to reinforce the cultural hegemony of whiteness. Willoughby reflected in 2000, ‘Rock’n’roll is all white, its fuckin’ bullshit rhythm … it’s theirs, it can never be ours’ (White 2009: 119). In Chapter 7 the reggae artist of the band Mantaka, Willie Brim, reports how reggae had him relax. For many Aboriginal people, it just spoke to them.

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Willoughby was moved by the beauty of reggae in a place that is so violent – he said, the chaos of life in Jamaica is the same as Australia (White 2009: 119). For Willoughby, Harrison, No Fixed Address and all those who followed their music, it became the vehicle to tell their own stories of police violence, removal from their families as children, separation from homelands and lack of citizenship rights in a segregated society, their survival of the ‘torment and the horror of it all’ – and, in so doing, they told the stories of Aboriginal people around the nation, inspiring a new generation of activists and community leaders (Harrison 2016). Aboriginal activists travelled to many parts of the world for support of their cause, to publicize the state of affairs for Aboriginal people in Australia and to gather ideas for ways forward. Activists were invited to China in 1972 after Gough Whitlam, the leader of the opposition, travelled there in 1971, and a group of activists travelled again in 1974. Gathering ideas was by no means a one-way street, Aboriginal activists also made great contributions in their activities and discussions. For myself, I have witnessed Maori elders from Aotearoa, New Zealand, while speaking in the marae, pay tribute to the Aboriginal activists who travelled to assist them in their campaigns, including the celebrated Bastion Point protest near Auckland. The idea of Aboriginal Black Power was the powerful message to emerge from the late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia. Kathy Lothian explains: Black Power was an attitude that manifested itself in numerous ways through the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was embraced by both pragmatic Indigenous activists committed to reconciliatory approaches and, although they were in a minority, those inclined towards a revolutionary and violent solution. At its heart, however, Black Power represented an overt rejection of the lack of power in Aboriginal lives. For some activists, this meant a drastic reshuffling of Aboriginal organizations where Whites held important decision-making roles. Others saw the adoption of Black Power ideas as a way of focusing on a positive reclamation of Aboriginal identity. For others, the fight against racism and poverty was paramount. (Lothian 2007: 20) There is a widespread assumption that Black Power was borrowed from the Black Panther movement in the United States but it is more correctly described as Aboriginal activists seeking self-determination at home while embracing a transnational decolonization movement, allying themselves with similar black activists worldwide. It is the case that in August 1969, US and Caribbean Black Power advocate Roosevelt Brown visited Australia and other African leaders also visited and began to support Aboriginal aspirations within the United Nations. As a result of Roosevelt Brown’s meeting with activists Bruce McGuinness and Bob Maza, these two men were among the five activists who travelled to the Congress of African People in Atlanta in

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1970. They went by New York City and delivered a petition to the United Nations. Sol Bellear stayed on with the US-based Panthers for some months and this in Gary Foley’s view established a direct connection between the US Black Panthers and the Australian activists (Robinson 1993). And it is the case that Denis Walker and Sam Watson formed a Black Panther Party in Australia in 1972 as a ‘vanguard of all oppressed peoples – Aboriginal Australians being the most oppressed of all’. However, activists were also influenced by the writings of Franz Fanon, and they closely followed the political organization of Indigenous peoples around the world, including the American Indian Movement (AIM) action at Wounded Knee in 1973, as well as making links with the decolonized states in Africa and Asia and the African National Congress (ANC) in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Aboriginal activists recognized apartheid in Queensland under the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Sale of Opium Act, and now we know that the South African government had visited Australia and were influenced by the effectiveness of the Queensland model in disadvantaging blacks and shoring up the power of whiteness (Davidson 2018; Limb 2008). While the idea of Black Power permeated the whole of the Aboriginal activist movement, it was a minority who spoke publicly of meeting violence with violence in the way of the US-based Black Panther Party. As it happened Aboriginal activists separated themselves from white people in their organizations in the quest for self-determination, most notably in the split that occurred in FCAATSI over the period 1967–71. This is arguably an important development that was bound to happen in Aboriginal politics and comes from the realization, documented in the activist Kevin Gilbert’s (1973) book Because a White Man’ll Never Do It. The year 1972 saw not only the Tent Embassy development but a range of developments out of the idea that Aboriginal people needed to express themselves and their life experiences and seek new identities for themselves. Notable is the development of the Black Theatre in Redfern, Sydney, New South Wales, by the agency of Bob Maza, who had visited Amiri Baraka’s National Black Theatre in Harlem in 1970. What has not been fully explored is the impact of historical African and African American connections to Aboriginal Australia, including through kinship. For example, there were eleven African convicts on the First Fleet that arrived from Britain in 1788, almost 200 African convicts were transported to Australia from the Caribbean between 1815 and 1835, and there are several Aboriginal families that have an African ancestor who arrived in Australia in the nineteenth century, before the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901 (Grieves 2015). More than this there has been an ongoing socialization of African Americans and Aboriginal people through the agency of the Second World War when approximately 80,000 African Australian military personnel were stationed in Australia from 1941 to 1945 (Grieves 2014). Then again, African American military personnel visited Australia on Rest

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and Recreation leave during the Vietnam War (1962–75) between 1965 and 1971 and socialized with Aboriginal Australians. The success of the Aboriginal political movement, in its various manifes­ tations, materialized in the development of Federal government responsibility in Aboriginal Affairs (DAA). Through the agency of this fledgling department led by the activist Charles Perkins, Aboriginal organizations were directly funded to provide legal, health, housing and preschooling programs to their communities. This government initiative was ironically in the shape of the Black Panther programs developed in the United States whereby Aboriginal people sought the responsibility to provide these services using the selfdetermination methodology of the Panthers. Historically, these essential services had been unavailable through the state and territory governments that held jurisdiction over providing them to citizens but had generally not made them available to Aboriginal people.

Contemporary social media and media activism: Intelligence, wit and humour as activism There has been a meteoric rise in the visibility and impact of Aboriginal individuals and groups as a result of their engagement on social media – websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook all have a high Aboriginal involvement and visibility, despite the Aboriginal population being less than 3 per cent of the total Australian population. Carlson and Frazer (2006) have established how social media engagement is important for Indigenous identity, practices of ‘community’ building, cultural knowledge and practice online, helpseeking and giving and for the organization of political activity (Carlson & Frazer 2018: 20–1). As a result of this engagement important voices have an impact in print media, on television and radio. For example, Melbourne-based Arrente activist Celeste Liddle started a blog in 2012, Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist, that led to her becoming a media phenomenon in Australia in the following years, with mainstream publications and appearances on television. Celeste initially used her online platform to raise discussions about issues that do not occur in mainstream media. As it happened mainstream media was looking, reading and became inspired by the news potential of her take on contemporary events, and six weeks after her blog began she was published in a mainstream newspaper, a Fairfax subsidiary, Daily Life. Since then she has published in ABC and SBS online, The Guardian and other mainstream media outlets, and she now has a regular column with Eureka Street. Celeste has been very active on Facebook; she says it is a place for Aboriginal people to bridge distances across the country and this has allowed her to connect with extended family members, some of

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whom she has not met before. She says that many Aboriginal movements and activism have been filtered through Facebook. Her blog now has a Facebook page and this has taken over much of the function of the blog. She has used these platforms along with that of the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) for example, leading to broader support and traction for activist events. Celeste cites the Invasion Day Rally in 2018 had five times as many people participate than the year before. Most of those attending are non-Aboriginal allies. Celeste recognizes the impact of Aboriginal voices on contemporary social activism. She says: Aboriginal people have bonded on social media because it gave us a way of navigating around the usual media landscape that was so conservative and so white, and still is so conservative and so white. What has happened as a result of this, through the various networks that individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have with mainstream Australian society, hubs of our activity have been created that others are tapping into because they too are trying to navigate around the restrictions of mainstream media. I refer particularly to the generations whose entire childhood was framed by the Howard years and the cultural wars when media messages were streamlined to the right for such a long time. Many have come to those social media hubs looking for alternatives and information that was denied to ally activists for such a long time. (Liddle 2018) Social media fits with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people culturally because it connects us – locally, regionally and internationally. And it connects us to other like-minded people whether Indigenous or not (see Petray 2010). Indigenous media activist Luke Pearson, Gamilaroi educator, developed IndigenousX in 2012 out of a strong Twitter presence, to a website with regular journalistic pieces, monthly IndigenousX hosts who are also profiled by Guardian Australia. He reflects on the early days of Twitter in Australia when, paradoxically, the media made it a very relevant space by reporting on what emerged on that interface. Luke was very engaged with Twitter at that time, transparent about his motivations; he says he was ‘thinking out loud on Twitter’ and increased his following among Aboriginal people and their allies. IndigenousX came to champion causes on behalf of Aboriginal people with success that increased their following. When The Guardian newspaper came to Australia they saw IndigenousX as a ready-made talent pool for news in Australia that was not covered by the existing media (Pearson 2018). Other journalist activists (and the issues they engage with) include Amy McGuire, a Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist, originally a ground-breaking cadet journalist and editor of the National Indigenous Times newspaper now writing for The Guardian and New Matilda as well

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as having an active Twitter and Facebook profile (Aboriginal children murdered in Bowraville, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, the folly of Recognition, domestic violence); Allan Clarke of ABC News (the suspicious death of Aboriginal teenager Mark Haines); Jack Latimore, a Birrpai guri, is a regular contributor to Guardian Australia and Koori Mail newspapers as well as editor at IndigenousX (critical analysis of government policy in Aboriginal affairs, racism in Australia/hypocrisy of white Australia, treaty negotiations); Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander writer, actor, comedian and playwright, writes a regular column in the Australian Women’s Weekly, she has hosted ABC Radio National’s Awaye Indigenous current affairs program and regularly appears on television in guest slots on the ABC television programs QandA and The Drum (Aboriginal youth suicide, Invasion Day/Australia Day controversy, racism, white Australia and identity); and previously mentioned Celeste Liddle, Arrente feminist, union organizer and freelance writer/columnist who rose to a high public profile through her blog Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist, who now writes regularly for The Guardian and Daily Life and has hosted IndigenousX (stolen wages, black feminism including reproductive rights, critical analysis of government policy in Aboriginal affairs including constitutional recognition, Invasion Day/Australia Day controversy, anti-racist, Aboriginal deaths in custody, stolen generations, the folly of Recognition, Aboriginal history and the culture wars). As well as these there are many more Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander people who are emerging as important voices in the public sphere. In this connection I mention Nathan ‘Mudyi’ Sentence, a Wiradjuri who works as project officer in First Nations programming at the Australian Museum, with a blog the Archival Decolonist, and who is active on Twitter as @saywhatNathan, an anti-racist and decolonizing activist. Aboriginal social and political activism through media is diverse! The Aboriginal journalists and social commentators listed above are an important part of a group of Aboriginal activists including comedians and musicians who are connected through community and kinship links as well as through their support for Aboriginal human rights and social justice. Humour is used as a powerful tool by Aboriginal people who have utilized the natural proclivity to irony and humour within Aboriginal cultural ways of being to highlight issues of importance to Aboriginal people (Branagan 2007). For example, Nakkiah Lui mentioned above is also one of the stars of the ABC Black Comedy program (ABC Black Comedy 2018). Aboriginal people were outraged by a segment on the Channel 7 program on national television Sunrise when it hosted white commentators advocating for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and their adoption into white families. Nakkiah Lui tweeted:

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Yo @sunriseon7 if youre talking about the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, communities & culture, maybe speak to Aboriginal children, families and adults that have been affected. Not White people who have zero knowledge. You are bottom feeding off peoples pain. Nakkiah then appeared in a spoof of the Sunrise program on ABC Black Comedy – a segment in a program called Wake up to Yourself! in which a panel of black Australians discussed whether or not white people are c**ts (Startsat60 2018). In this way Nakkiah broke the boundaries of what Aboriginal people can say about white people with a vengeance. She was reacting to the normal everyday casual racism of white Australians who discuss Aboriginal matters in a patronizing and privileged way as a right, and in the absence of any Aboriginal people as part of this discussion. This is speaking back to white power in no uncertain terms and in a way unprecedented in Australian media. Other comedians include Sean Choolburra, Jamahi Jordan King aka Constantina Bush, Mia Stanford, Kevin Kropinyeri, Steph Tidsell, Stephen Oliver and Mary G. aka Mark Bin Bakar. Mark is a self-confessed campaigner for Aboriginal rights through a cross-dressing comedy act now broadcast to more than 100 radio stations in remote Australia. He is also the Chairman of the Kimberley Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation. Mary G has a huge following in Aboriginal Australia. Mark says: I think the secret of Mary G’s success is her simple humour and motherly presence. She personifies the matriarchal personality; she is the grandmother who tells you off if you’re not pulling your weight. She talks about the issues that affect Aboriginal people, like addiction to drugs and alcohol, which has broken apart so many families. Every week she chips away, and hopefully her message is getting into the psyche of Aboriginal people. I think they see Mary G as a leader and not as a madeup character; to them she is real…. She is what a lot of people need. She brings Aboriginal humor to Aboriginal people and talks about serious issues with wit and comedy. She holds up a mirror to society and helps people to laugh at themselves. This is what we need. She is good medicine. (O’Kane 2008: n.p.) Mark talks about growing up in a family with two parents who were part of the stolen generation, removed from their parents as children, who were never able to speak to their own children of their experiences. They were shamed and silent – Mary G is not; she tells it like it is! (O’Kane 2008). This is truly good medicine when it is accompanied by humour. The example of #SOSBlakAustralia that was developed in 2015 brings into relief the issue of whether social media campaigns can be the foundation of a successful movement. Conceived of and co-ordinated by Sam Cook,

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Nyikina from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, who is a seasoned campaigner familiar with the strengths and limitations of social media and the importance of networks and strategy, it exploded onto the Australian political landscape. The campaign began when the then Premier of Western Australia announced that the remote Aboriginal communities in that state would be closed down. The remote communities in the Northern Territory were already under great stress and threat of becoming unviable through the restrictions imposed by the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) of 2007. The then Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott asserted that the government could not afford to fund the ‘lifestyle choices’ of remotely based Aboriginal people (Grieves 2015a). This was especially dystopian coming from the self-appointed Minister for Indigenous Affairs who was supposed to represent the interests of the people in his portfolio. This remark encapsulated his ignorance and his ideological intent. Aboriginal Australia was outraged and went to the defence of the people of the remote homelands. In seven hours the Facebook page created by Sam Cook had 2000 likes – in three weeks 50,000 likes. In five months #SOSBlakAustralia reached over twenty million people and engaged more than one hundred actions nationally and internationally on 1 May 2015, one of which is represented in the image of the cover of this book. In so doing #SOSBlakAustralia connected regional and remote Aboriginal people to the cities and offshore, going to places like London, Berlin and Los Angeles, where allies were standing alongside Aboriginal people and being descended on by the media. It was an artistic movement, the catalyst for poetry, songs, short film; and there was a strong, public celebration of Aboriginal culture. Since then the momentum has fallen. However, Sam Cook has indicated that the nuts and bolts of this campaign, the connections made with a range of networks and organizations, are all still live and ready to go if the occasion arises (Cook 2018). There is no doubt this campaign was enormously successful on many fronts, including the prevention of the immediate closing of these communities. The question of what will happen and what exactly is happening with these communities remains uncertain. This campaign helped to bring the current Labor government into power on the promise that the communities would not be closed (Cook 2018). However, indications are that the closures are happening by stealth and the government refuses to comment. Aboriginal Australians and their allies may yet have to take to the streets again.

Conclusion Aboriginal campaigns and media commentary continue to be a reaction to racism as expressed in repressive and disadvantaging government policies

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and in mainstream media – as they have been throughout the twentieth century. At this time there are many battles being fought on a range of fronts. As well as those already mentioned, Aboriginal people and their allies are fighting against forced adoption laws in the state of New South Wales that will take the continuing removal of Aboriginal children and separation from their families to a dystopian level that belies any idea of a benign settler colonial state. There is a national action concerning the Federal government’s rejection of the recommendations of the Uluru Statement from the Heart calling for a Makarrata (settlement after a struggle) and an Aboriginal advisory body in the Australian Parliament. Various groups in the states and territories are working on bringing forward treaty negotiations at local and state government levels. There are actions in the Northern Territory and elsewhere to close down the juvenile detention centres, such as the Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre, that witnessed brutal torture of Aboriginal boys that were aired on national television and led to a Royal Commission. There are ongoing actions to arrest the disproportionately large numbers of Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and the anti-prison activist Angela Davis from the University of California, Los Angeles, was hosted at a meeting in Brisbane in November 2018. Aboriginal people across the country are protesting the mining of their country – coal, uranium, iron ore – and plans to dump uranium waste on Aboriginal lands. Just as the activists of the 1960s and 1970s began to demand more from the settler colonial state, reject white privilege and assert the primacy of their relationship with country – and foster a growing consciousness of their position as dispossessed original owners of the continent, deserving of more than welfare – almost fifty years later contemporary activists in all of their diversity are essentially doing the same. The original Black Power activists developed a critical and coherent narrative about the racist administrative regimes that held them in segregated poverty, further dispossessed them of land and tore families apart by removing their children. However, the repressive colonialist regime continues apace in the neoliberal age (Grieves 2017). It was the activists of the landmark Tent Embassy period that created a movement, the anti-racist movement for freedom on our terms, that is, a just and proper settlement to the violent takeover of Aboriginal lands. This is the social movement that is still continuing, reacting to new attacks on Aboriginal people, developing and morphing into diverse ways to secure the same aims. There are no other movements within this, only different battles on many fronts. This movement continues because the aims of the original activists have not yet been fully achieved, and certain gains made in the past have been erased. All of the campaigns developed since the Tent Embassy of 1972 have been a continuation of the ongoing social and political anti-racist and anti-colonial movement for the sovereignty of Aboriginal people in their own lands, that was stepped up to national and transnational prominence at

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that time. However, the diversity of our campaigns, and the media activism that accompanies them, now need once again to develop to another level of organization. It is time for one united front and a concentrated campaign in order to break through the hegemony of settler colonial racism and restore sovereignty. The argument for the development of a new sovereign Republic based on the ethics and values as expounded in Aboriginal philosophy is sound and promises a new beginning for all Australians, free of the taint of criminal takeover of Aboriginal lands. Only a new constitution guarantees the overthrow of the doctrine of terra nullius once and for all (Grieves 2018). It is this development that will deliver human rights and social justice for Aboriginal Australians who now languish in a state of exception to the Australian settler colonial state, and it holds great promise as the way forward for all Australian peoples.

Acknowledgement The following people have made a great contribution to the development of this chapter: Sam Cook, Padraic Gibson, Ricky Harrison, Celeste Liddle and Luke Pearson who kindly shared their experience and ideas with me. The constraints of a chapter prevented me from including all the issues they raised and there is clearly so much more that could be said in this space. Thank you too to the scholars Rachel Evans, Raymond Evans, Regina Ganter, Jennifer Germon, Olivia Guntarik, Maria Elena Indelicato, Alana Lentin, Vek Lewis, Sharlene LeRoy Dyer, Gaynor Macdonald and Omid Tofighian, for support and inspiration. I am indebted to the formidable Aboriginal activists of then and now who give me hope. All my relations.

References ABC (2018), Black Comedy. Available online: https://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/ black-comedy/ (accessed 20 September 2018). Branagan, M. (2007), ‘The Last Laugh: Humour in Community Activism’, Community Development Journal, 42 (4): 470–81. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib. rmit.edu.au/10.1093/cdj/bsm037 Carlson, B. and Frazer, R. (2006), ‘Indigenous Activism and Social Media: A Global Response to #SOSBLAKAUSTRALIA’, in A. McCosker, S. Vivienne and A. Johns (eds), Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture, 115–30, London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield International. Carlson, B. and Frazer, R. (2018), Social Media Mob: Being Indigenous Online, Sydney: Macquarie University. Cook, Sam. (2018), Interview with Victoria Grieve-Williams, 18 June.

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Davidson, S. (2018), ‘Memo from a South African: Peter Dutton Is Entrenching White Privilege’, The Guardian. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2018/apr/10/memo-from-a-south-african-peter-dutton-isentrenching-racist-white-privilege (accessed 15 August 2018). de Costa, R. (2006), A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia, Kensington, NSW: University of NSW Press. Fine, G.A. (2012), Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective memory in Midcentury America, New York: Routledge. Foley, G. (2019a), The Koori History Website. Available online: http://www. kooriweb.org/foley/indexb.html (accessed 21 June 2018). Foley, G. (2019b), The Koori History Website, ‘Heroes in the Struggle for Justice: John Newfong 1943–1999’. Available online: http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/ heroes/biogs/john_newfong.html (accessed 20 June 2018). Foley, G. (2019c), The Koori History Website, ‘Miscellaneous Images from the 1970s’. Available online: http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1970s/ misc/p2.html (accessed 21 November 2018). Gilbert, K. (1973), Because a White Man'll Never Do It, Melbourne: Angus and Robertson. Green, N. (2016), Black and Bloody Beautiful. Honours Thesis. Harvard University, Massachusetts. Grieves, V. (2014), ‘Children Born of War: A Neglected Legacy of Troops among Civilians’, The Conversation, 11 August. Available online: https:// theconversation.com/children-born-of-war-a-neglected-legacy-of-troops-amongcivilians-29845 (accessed 20 June 2018). Grieves, V. (2015), ‘Jamaica Australia Historical Connections and the Black Diaspora in the Australian Pacific Region’, Charles Town 7th Annual International Maroon Conference Magazine. Available online: http://maroons-jamaica.com/ (accessed 20 June 2018). Grieves, V. (2015a), ‘Aboriginal Lifestyles Could Heal the Hole in the Heart of Australia’. Available online: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-lifestylescould-fix-the-hole-in-the-heart-of-australia-38701 (accessed 10 November 2018). Grieves, V. (2017), ‘The Seven Pillars of Aboriginal Exception to the Australian State: Camps, Refugees, Biopolitics and the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER)’, in E. Baehr and B. Schmidt-Haberkamp (eds), ‘And There’ll Be NO Dancing’. Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australians since 2007, 97–109, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Grieves, V. (2018), ‘A New Sovereign Republic: Living History in the Present’, in J. Schultz and S. Phillips (eds), Griffith Review 60: First Things First, Griffith University: Nathan Qld. Harrison, Ricky. (2017), Interview with Victoria Grieve-Williams, 10 February 2017. Latimore, J. (2018), ‘Five Figures in the History of First Nations Media You Should Know About’ IndigenousX, 16 March. Available online: https://indigenousx. com.au/jack-latimore-five-figures-in-the-history-of-first-nations-media-youshould-know-about/#.W8aZH1JRe8V (accessed 30 July 2018). Liddle, Celeste. (2018), Interview with Victoria Grieve-Williams, 18 June. Limb, P. (2008), ‘The Anti-Apartheid Movements in Australia and Aotearoa/ New Zealand’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 3 The

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International Anti-Apartheid Movement, Vol. 3: 907–82, Pretoria: Unisa Press for South Africa Democracy and Education Trust. Lothian, K. (2007), ‘Moving Blackwards: Black Power and the Aboriginal Embassy’, in I. McFarlane and M. Hannah (eds), Transgressions: Critical Australian Indigenous Histories, Canberra ACT.: ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Incorporated: Aboriginal History Monograph 16. NITV News (2018), ‘We Haven’t Been Listening: Indigenous Massacre Map Expands to 250 Sites’, NITV News, 27 July. Available online: https://www.sbs. com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2018/07/27/we-havent-been-listening-indigenousmassacre-map-expands-250-sites (accessed 30 July 2018). O’Kane, D. (2008), ‘In Conversation with Mark Bin Bakar’, First Person: The Guardian. 21 September. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2008/sep/25/australia-radio-comedy (accessed 20 June 2018). Pearson, Luke. (2018), Interview with Victoria Grieve-Williams, 22 June. Petray, T.L. (2010), ‘Support vs. Solidarity: White Involvement in the Aboriginal Movement’, Social Alternatives, 29 (3): 69–72. Robinson, S. (1993), ‘Aboriginal Embassy, 1972’, MA diss., Australian National University, Canberra. Ryan, L. (n.d.), ‘Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1830’, The University of Newcastle. Available online: https://c21ch. newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php (accessed 21 November 2018). Startsat60 (2018), ‘Indigenous ABC Comedy Sketch Mocks White Australians’, startsat60.news, 20 March. Available online: https://startsat60.com/ entertainment/tv-movies/black-comedy-wake-up-to-yourself-clip-indigenousresponse-to-sunrise-segment (accessed 20 September 2018). Van Toorn, P. (2006), Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. White, C. (2009), ‘“Rapper on a Rampage”: Theorising the Political Significance of Aboriginal Australian Hip Hop and Reggae’, Transforming Cultures eJournal, 4 (1): 108–30.

3 A Historically Shifting Sphere: The Internet as a Basis of a Public Sphere for Social Activism in the United States Wesley R. Bishop

Given the explosion of online activity in the past decade, modern communication theorists, sociologists and historians are inevitably drawn to the question, how has the literal manifestation of a ‘body electric’ of tweets, hashtags and blog posts affected social activists’ ability to build campaigns, mobilize bodies in the physical world and enact social change via direct democracy? Despite the new technology, this is not the first time people have wondered how our political and social bodies would operate as a whole. In the work Leaves of Grass, the American poet Walt Whitman argued that the observer of any social reality was automatically and irrevocably connected to all other social beings. Capable of producing a kind of overwhelming parade of emotions, this was more than just a metaphysical argument. It informed the very idea of a social and civic sphere for Whitman. ‘I sing the body electric,’ Whitman wrote, ‘The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,/They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,/And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul’ (Whitman 1857). It is worth asking, however, how ‘connected’ is that body in actuality? Do those connections readily zip about, like an electric current? How much can we gain from assuming such a perspective? Such questions are vital for both

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the historian of social movements, and the modern person living in societies governed by various forms of democracy in the digital age. Asking such questions requires a historic lens which periodizes the democratic social reform movements of the modern period. This chapter addresses these questions by examining the way in which US activists, reformers and intellectuals of the late Gilded Age and early Progressive era reconceptualized both activism and the public sphere and, in doing so, took the first major steps in redefining the role and purpose of activism in the twentieth century. As these movements directly informed many of the iterations of current political movements, it will be demonstrated that although the medium has changed drastically, the same phenomenon is occurring across periods with movements forcing their societies, via direct action campaigns and popular argument, to radically reconsider what are the confines and boundaries of the public sphere, and what exactly is meant when we say we live in a ‘democratic civilization’. More importantly, it also needs to be understood how the project of these reformers was largely one of engaging society via different avenues of the larger public sphere. We might ask what, exactly, is the ‘public sphere’. Most academic discussions concerning the public sphere begin with the work of Jürgen Habermas and his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas did many things in that work, most notably tracing the historical development of liberal bourgeois society. Central to that development, Habermas demonstrated, was the establishment of a liberal democratic public sphere. Yet, Habermas did not merely explain the history of this development, but also provided a series of normative claims, arguing for a particular social and political formulation based on reason and rational debate. As such, the actual content of the debates was secondary to the more important phenomenon that democratic discourse be able to flourish in civil society (Habermas 1962). Yet this idealized concept raises many questions as thinkers like Craig Calhoun, Nancy Frazer and James Van Horn Melton have argued. This is because most idealized conceptions of the public sphere raise questions of who is included, excluded and what is determined to be ‘rational’ speech acts. Several scholars in the fields of critical race theory and modern feminist movements have noted this deficiency in an idealized public sphere that operates on the assumption that speech acts, made by individual actors, leads to society listening, deliberating and then choosing to end some system of oppression. These issues are also seen in how ‘public sphere’ is used as a common phrase. Typically, the term is used widely in popular political analysis to signify everything from political dialogue, popular entertainment and cafés, to the very existence of print culture itself. Yet these designations lead one to believe that the public sphere is largely just a matter of space and communicative delivery. Therefore, parks, cafés, schools and government

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buildings make up the spatial aspect of this public sphere while popular shows, the internet, television and print culture make up its delivery. This is a designation many historians are all too willing to adopt, and, in the process, it permits a host of troubling analysis to become established wisdom. This conceptualizing of the public sphere leads to a common cultural criticism best described as the ‘myth of the declining public sphere’, and like most myths it is little more than a narrative that purports to explain our origins while containing little empirical fact. Furthermore, it creates a false belief among many commentators that social activism that focuses on the social and political concerns of certain people is somehow ‘less activist’ and doomed to failure, since it is ‘less universal’. As the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has demonstrated, situating concerns and demands of social activism within particular social positionalities and identities not only creates better outcomes, but in fact is vital to achieving emancipatory change in society. ‘The problem with identity politics’, Crenshaw explains, ‘is not that it fails to transcend difference … but rather … that it conflates or ignores intra group differences’ (1991: 1242). As will be shown, current elite commentators who claim supposedly overly fragmented modern ‘identity based’ social movements are antithetical to older ‘economic’ based social movements are mistaken, and scapegoating newer forms of digital communication is at best ahistorical. Instead, older movements in labour and the working class came from specific social and economic identities. The problem then is not over fragmentation of the public sphere, but instead our dominant culture’s ability to marginalize certain people and concerns from the mainstream.

The message and the medium Some of the clearest examples of this myth of the declining public sphere can be found in Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death and Cass Sunstein’s 2001 book Republic.com. In both works, Postman and Sunstein largely subscribed to the thinking of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the medium of delivering a message determined the content of the message itself. For Postman, this meant that the corporate and hegemonic nature of television collapsed all civil and political discourse into a giant commercial/entertainment program. This marked a decline in the way the US republic had operated prior, primarily as a print culture. This distinction was important to Postman, as it signified a change in one of the legacies of Western civilization, since it was a series of political societies supposedly founded on Enlightenment ideals of rational debate which influenced public questions. As Postman (1985: 49–51) wrote:

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[Printed words have] a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content … In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It was no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of print culture, first in Europe and then in America. Postman, therefore, argued that the basis of a strong democratic society was contained in the very means of how it communicated ideas. Postman was neither the first nor the last thinker to posit such a claim. Sunstein made similar arguments, but instead of television focused on the supposed fractured nature of the internet. ‘[P]eople should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance,’ Sunstein (2001: 8–9) wrote. ‘Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating.’ Sunstein argued the internet produced an infinite universe of multiple platforms, and therefore betrayed democracy, since both commensurability and new civil interaction would not be produced. From this we can see two seemingly contradictory arguments on the declining democratic public sphere. Whereas Postman feared hegemony and the collapsing of democratic discourse into a standardized portrayal of images, Sunstein feared a hyper-fragmentation of various social actors incapable of learning about the complexity of social reality. Yet, what connects the two is the belief that technological advancements were to blame for the decline in the public sphere, and, more implicitly, the members of civil society watching television and interacting online were directly contributing to democracy’s destruction. These two explanations are well worth understanding because both are merely technologically focused iterations of a larger cultural criticism. This is that the people of a society who engage in the popular media of their time are responsible for the lack of a robust democracy. Therefore, for some critics, the answer to the question of how the internet has affected social activism and democracy is quite clear – the internet as a means of human communication has been a wholly negative development. These arguments are not difficult to find. One can see them when concerns of ‘post truth’ in the digital age are raised. These ‘new’ threats are supposedly delivered by the new technologies of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. This thinking has inspired endless ‘think pieces’ which bemoan the state of democracy now that we are firmly in the age of the internet. ‘I fear … the factionalism that threatens [democracy’s] survival,’ one such piece argues. ‘[This factionalism] will only be exacerbated by the growing political use of technology in those societies. It is a grim irony: The

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electronic empowerment of citizens may dangerously weaken democratic governments’ (Radcliffe 2011: n.p.). These arguments are part of a larger cultural critique that goes back several centuries in the United States. From the early fears in the American colonies over Catholicism, to the upper-class deriding working-class beer halls and music theatres, to the Whigs’ concern of Jacksonian Democrats’ political machines, the US society has witnessed multiple expressions of fear that democratic liberty was at risk of destruction because of a declining public sphere. Granted, the culprit of this declining public sphere shifted over time, from Catholics, to recent immigrants, to people of colour, to lowwage urban workers. It comes as no surprise, then, that those blamed for the decline of the public sphere are those most marginalized by the dominant society in question. That is typical of nearly all hegemonic social systems. Yet, those targets for criticism often include the forms of entertainment the subjects readily enjoy (from music halls in the nineteenth century, to television in the twentieth, to the internet in the twenty-first century). Once it is acknowledged that both the marginalized and their forms of popular communication and entertainment are the targets, one can then see how a very generalized criticism of social movements fits into this fear of the declining public sphere. As agents seeking change of the dominant society, social movements naturally fit into the narrative that the public sphere is at risk.

Self-identification as a basis of action Workers enjoying the fruits of consumer capitalism, recent immigrants entering politics and African American activists shutting down public areas such as lunch counters and highways are all related to the criticism that forms of communication are harming democracy because the assumption is that we are all at risk from a fragmented body politic. But, this begs the question, when has that body ever actually been unified? The answer is simple – never. In fact, a homogenous, solidified public sphere that deals with only what the dominant cultural institutions want, and discusses only the issues they see as prescient, has never existed. If it did exist, such a state would betray the possibility of having an actual democratic society, since it would predetermine what the issues and course of action should be, and effectively shut out the people who are supposed to empower that democratic society. Therefore, modern cultural criticism, which fears losing the public sphere, in fact fears losing a sphere that has never existed except as an ideal. An open and historically developing public sphere requires a forever-fragmented arena of communicative exchange in order to be democratic.

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Here is a nub of the problems social reformers and activists have in influencing democratic societies, online and off. Periodization schemas that posit a recurring democratic promise, failure and decline require a subject to play the perpetual villain. When technology is not blamed this narrative can shift to activists and activist movements as the source of the public sphere’s decline. Perhaps no better example of this myth of a declining public sphere can be found in Richard Sennett’s (1988) work The Fall of Public Man. In it, Sennett argued the modern United States and Western Europe were in a period of rapid decline, due to the rise of what he termed the ‘cultivation of the self’. As Sennett argued, this focus shifted the way in which people developed an identity, no longer using an outwardly focused idea of social relations, but instead an inwardly focused concept of psychological identity. This inward focus inverted social life, creating a populace that saw the public sphere as a place to be affirmed for a sense of worth, instead of a place where common problems were discussed and addressed. Although Sennett never admitted this, he largely employed a crude understanding of Freudian identity to make his argument. In this way, we have the superego (society and the greater good), id (the self and the impulse to find comfort) and the ego (the true public persona which navigates between the other two points). Sennett argued, as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, the ‘id’ of personal self-worth became the centre with the ‘superego’ of the public sphere subsumed to serve its interests. In the process, the ‘ego’ of a robust democracy was destroyed. By contrast, later psychologists such as Abraham Maslow did not view the change in public life as negative, because the end goal of an individual is self-actualization, and the democratic process has a role in this selfactualization. A forever-frontier of sorts, the individual is constantly pushing the boundaries in a process of fulfilment and discovery. The self-actualization process, therefore, ties the self to the rest of society in a meaningful way. No longer mere actors on a stage for society’s benefit, the self-actualization process acknowledges the diversity of the populace, and seeks to make society an open environment where we can collectively realize our potential, while assisting each other in the same process. Out of a multitude of fragmentation arises the possibility of a new mode of social thinking. In other words, a true body electric of politics. This approach to the function of democracy has been difficult for dominant cultures to accept. A nascent example of the conservative pushback is that following the 2016 presidential election in the United States there was no shortage of commentary that blamed the rise of Trump to the current iteration of social justice activism online. Writing in the New York Times Mark Lilla (2016: n.p.) argued: ‘But how should diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is

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a splendid principle of moral pedagogy—but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age.’ Lilla argued there was a crisis for left-based politics. Instead of focusing on issues such as transgender rights, misogyny, racism and xenophobia, politics and social reform efforts should be focused on ‘common’ concerns of the economy that supposedly bound national communities together. ‘We need a post-identity liberalism,’ Lilla (2016: n.p.) argued, ‘and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them.’ Movements like the New Deal, labour and economic exploitation, for Lilla and others, were the prime best candidates. According to this argument, by continuing to focus on the question of civil rights, social activism was in danger of surrendering the public sphere’s larger promise of radical transformation. This argument is related to the criticism that social activists in the digital age are not engaged in true activism because the nature of the internet is to fragment people into self-selecting communities, which does not translate into ‘real world’ action. What emerges then is an argument which deems the activities of modern activists as overly fragmented and unable to engage the more ‘legitimate’ and authentic public. But this argument ignores the very nature of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labour movement, the alleged ideal for social reform. Central to that broad-based movement was precisely the project of taking the private, specific concerns of the working class and making the rest of society engage those concerns as democratic issues. Relying on a mixture of direct action and print culture, these labour reformers and early social activists – including Eugene V. Debs and the left wing of the American Socialist Party, Jane Addams and the early social worker movement, Samuel Gompers and the trade unionist movement, Ida B. Wells and the antilynching movement, and Jacob Riis and the broader concern over urban living conditions – all took previously private concerns of a certain section of the larger society, and forced a reconceptualization of what was the basis of the public sphere. In other words, the economic focus of post–New Deal activism and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was no more ‘natural’ than the concern of transgender people and Muslim refugees in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the robust print culture that existed in the previous turn of the century, where these movements thrived and posited their ideas, was just as fragmented, if not more so, than the digital landscape activists currently inhabit. Understanding this pushes back on the myth of the declining public sphere, and argues that instead of constantly losing a sphere that can never be won, activists are, in fact, constructing a counter hegemonic force in the hopes of reshaping society.

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Historically shifting sphere Turning to a specific example from the Gilded Age and Progressive era, we can see how social reform efforts of the marginalized are often treated as a non-public, and overly partisan, effort. Furthermore, these efforts were often criticized because they disrupted the pre-established ideal of how a democratic public sphere should operate when in fact what is happening is historical change and changes abreast of new technology developments. For example, in 1894 when the American Railway Union (ARU), under the direction of the labour leader Eugene V. Debs, began a massive strike targeting the Pullman Car Company similar issues of public and private, and the use of the public sphere, were criticized and attacked. Growing out of the specific concerns of the workers at Pullman following the Panic of 1893 (a massive economic depression brought on by overbuilding of railroads and the subsequent collapses of banks), the ARU had decided to block any cars from the Pullman Company from using the railways. When the railway companies refused to recognize the strike and continued to allow Pullman cars on the rails, members of the ARU walked off the job, thereby stalling the nation’s railways (Schneirov 1999). As the strike continued, the railroad companies increasingly lobbied the federal government to intervene. As a result, the courts issued an injunction for the ARU to cease and desist any threats or use of force in the interference of interstate commerce. Explicit in its language, the injunction stated that any action taken to continue the strike would be a violation of the court’s ruling. This included giving any speech in support of the strike or writing letters to encourage its continuation. Debs and the ARU refused to comply. On 3 July 1894, 10,000 federal troops and 5,000 US Marshals entered Chicago to begin suppression of the strike. After a short period of fighting in the streets, the federal government crushed the strike using physical violence, arrested the leaders and, in the case of Debs, sentenced him to a short prison sentence. What is particularly fascinating about this entire episode was the justification the Cleveland administration used for the suppression of the strike. Reasoning that the public sphere, such as railways, was open to all, the federal government maintained that any effort to stop traffic and force the private concerns of a handful of workers onto a larger society was nothing short of tyranny. ‘It is violence,’ Richard Olney (1894), Cleveland’s Attorney General, wrote at the time, ‘to deprive the traveling public to the rights created by law and designed for the general welfare’. The justification for breaking the strike was presented as preserving the public good, and not allowing a select group in society to hoist their concerns on the general body politic. This criticism has a long and established context. Whether it be the ARU in 1894, the American and British Suffragists in the early twentieth century,

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or BlackLivesMatter and the Fight for Fifteen in 2016, a similar argument is played out by dominant popular culture and the politically dominant class and many established political leaders that the social movement in question is simultaneously misusing public space while fragmenting the larger democratic public sphere. In fact, just a few months prior to the Pullman Strike, marching unemployed workers had been chased away from Washington DC. Led by the populist political activist Jacob Coxey, these workers had been charged in the press as ‘dangerous vagabonds’, and unaware of how democracy was supposed to operate. As several editorials argued, a democratic government’s concern was not with the private problems of an individual person’s employment. That was a private concern, wholly separate from the liberal bourgeois notion of what was truly ‘public’. Yet the actions of the working class, in both strikes and popular protest, had the effect of changing many popular conceptions of what constituted ‘public’ concerns. Observing the actions of the federal government, the conditions of the Pullman town and the stated goals of the workers, Jane Addams wrote about the event largely focusing on the moral and political failure of Pullman. The labour economist Richard T. Ely also echoed this criticism, saying that companies like Pullman were leading the charge on a dangerous new effort to radically reconceptualize democracy and the public good. ‘The power of Bismarck … is utterly insignificant when compared with the power of the ruling authority of the Pullman … Company … If free American institutions are to be preserved, we want no race of men reared as underlings and with the spirit of menials’ (Ely 1885: 9–10). From these two upper-class reformers, then, we can see an important shift in thinking brought on by the social movements of the working class. Using the tactics of social reform movements, such as taking space, advancing arguments in the media of the day and forcing social responses from other sections of society, the social reform movements of the late nineteenth century produced a new consciousness and in so doing altered what was legitimate consideration for the public sphere. This was not merely the result of a benevolent upper class. Instead, it grew out of the demands and actions of social movements, like labour, which demanded a shift in what historically had been considered the public sphere’s concern. In fact, the leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, argued in 1893 that the demands of labour were not easily or permanently defined. Instead, the movement of workers to influence society would constantly be seeking greater and greater security, recognition and worth in society. Asking the question, ‘What did labor want?’ Gompers (1893: n.p.) answered by saying, ‘We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime … in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.’

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Aside from these social reformers and labour leaders, there was also a robust intellectual debate during this period that articulated this historically shifting sphere of public concern and foregrounded it as the basis of not just social activism, but the larger project of democracy. For example, in the much discussed debate between the Progressive-era intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey about the advisability of entering the First World War, we can see this shift in thinking about what the public sphere constituted and more importantly how it was directly tied to democratic concerns. Much historical work has been focused on the feud between Dewey and Bourne in the last months of Bourne’s life. However, if we step back from deciding whose position was ‘correct’ we can see that contained within the American intellectual debate over whether to participate in the First World War there was a much larger, and far more significant, debate over what the modern public sphere should entail. Essentially, Dewey and other pro-war pragmatists argued the conflict was already underway and that the United States had little choice but to enter it so as to have a seat at the table to help negotiate. Bourne argued US history provided another inherited past where the United States had remained largely neutral and uninvolved in open European conflicts. Such a commitment to neutrality, Bourne reasoned, made the United States exceptional as a Western nation, and permitted it the ability to be the staging ground for a new universal cosmopolitanism that would push the world into a deeper understanding of the full potential of a universal democratic public sphere. Rejecting the idea that a basis for democratic society required a ‘melting pot’ scenario to create homogeneity, Bourne argued for a transnational cosmopolitanism to embrace global diversity and foster a civil society at ease with its fractured and complex nature. Remaining out of the war would help ensure that such a state would be encouraged. Entering the war would almost certainly guarantee the rise of a European-like primitive nationalism, with Anglo identity increasingly serving as the basis of an ‘enlightened’ identity (Bourne 1999). Not all shared this view, however, going so far as to argue for not only involvement in the war but also that the larger project of the democratic public sphere was dead. The thinker and journalist Walter Lippmann had begun his career as an avid social democratic pragmatist but over time he had soured towards many of his previous ideals. Looking at the events of the First World War, Lippmann concluded that people were unable to govern themselves due to a fatal flaw in their cognitive abilities. Lippmann was quick to stress that this issue was not some kind of defect specific to Americans but an inability to rely on public opinion, and the public sphere in general, arose from the basic way the public sphere was constituted. It was impossible, Lippmann argued, for a large enough group of civilians to become proficient in all the fields of knowledge needed to govern. Therefore, public opinion was often nothing more than an expression of ignorance

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and bias, based on specific sectarian and personalized outlooks. The general public as a rational actor and the public sphere as an arena where rationality arose from were, therefore, a phantom (Lippmann 1925). Of course, Lippmann was not wrong that as society diversified over time commensurability increasingly became difficult to maintain. However, the philosopher and education theorist John Dewey raised important questions in response to Lippmann, including: why would this fragmenting of a civil sphere necessarily equate to a failure and decline in democracy? And why was it that direct democracy could not provide the basis of democratic change? Although Dewey had sided with Lippmann in supporting US entry into the war, after the conflict he broke with Lippmann and the other declension authors, arguing that the public sphere was not in fact in a period of decline. The definition of ‘public’, Dewey (1927: 12) argued, rested upon ‘the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action to secure some consequences and avoid others.’ Dewey continued, stating that the definition of public and private was determined by each community in each period. Where there was perceived, shared interest and concern, there was the designation of the public. Where there was perceived, isolated interests and concerns, there was the designation of the private.

Conclusion Such an argument profoundly challenges the common conceptions of the public sphere as merely a communicative space based on civic commensurability. It is not clear that the public sphere arises from a society where social actors force a reconceptualization of what are public concerns and this will change over time. What Dewey provided, and what social activists then and now make possible, is an understanding that posits the public sphere as a historically shifting collection of thoughts, beliefs and customs. There is no established and definite public sphere. Instead, each period determines its size and scope via a series of historical developments. If we combine this understanding with Bourne’s arguments to make a transnational public, a public sphere and a democracy that incorporates multiple diverse identities and outlooks, we see that the outcomes of specific policy questions (be it war, abortion or regulations of corporations) are not the only thing determined by the public sphere. Instead, the public sphere is defined by the social roles, political power and economic standing an actor has in society. Social activists contribute to this project by directly engaging their dominant culture, and forcing a counter-hegemonic consideration of how that society should operate.

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The modern public sphere, therefore, emerges not as a collection of print artefacts, a series of physical spaces or a state in a period of decline. Instead, the public sphere is a historically based set of thoughts that demarcates ‘public’ and ‘private’ concerns, and in which those demarcations are influenced, not by the kind of rational widespread debate championed by Postman and Sunstein, but through popular thought, ideology and social power. Social movements, be they based in pamphlets, newspapers or the internet, have always sought to influence those ideologies, and in so doing hope to secure a new hegemonic formation where new public concerns are generated that change the society. In this way, although the internet undeniably functions differently from previous modes of communication, it is just an extension of centuries of democratic activism. The project of electrifying the body politic, therefore, remains the central project of activists then and now because this is the media of the times. It is there to be utilized as an agent of change in an ongoing democratic state.

References Bourne, R. (1999), War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. C. Resek, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241–99. Dewey, J. ([1927] 1954), The Public and Its Problems, Chicago: The Swallow Press Inc. Ely, R. (1885), ‘Pullman: A Social Study’, Harper’s Weekly, February: 131–7. Gompers, S. (1893), ‘An Address before the International Labor Congress in Chicago: What Does Labor Want?’, 28 August. Habermas, J. ([1962] 1991), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press. Lilla, M. (2016), ‘The End of Identity Liberalism’, The New York Times, 18 November. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/ sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html (accessed 29 March 2019). Lippmann, W. ([1925] 1993), The Phantom Public, Washington, DC: International Organization Series. Olney, R. (1894), The Chicago Herald, 2 July. Postman, N. (1985), Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, New York: Penguin Books. Radcliffe, D. (2011), ‘Can Social Media Undermine Democracy?’, Huffington Post, 18 October. Available online: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/ can-social-media-undermine_b_1011290.html (accessed 29 March 2019). Schneirov, R. (1999), ‘“To the Ragged Edge of Anarchy”: The 1894 Pullman Boycott’, Schneirov, R. et al. (1999), The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Sennett, R. (1988), Fall of Public Man, New York: W. W. Norton. Sunstein, C. (2001), Republic.com, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Whitman, W. ([1867] 2005), Leaves of Grass, New York: Oxford University Press.

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4 From the ‘Radical Women’s Press’ to the Digital Age: Subversive Networks of Feminism in the United States Ana Stevenson

The new media of the digital age has contributed to increasing feminist activity in the twenty-first century and is perceived as an enabling tool for social movements. As media scholar Aristea Fotopoulou (2016: 41) observes: ‘Social and cultural imaginaries of technology and women have long been strong drives for visions and promises of a “networked feminism”.’ Before the internet, however, women’s activism was linked by other emergent communications technologies. As early as the 1850s, what Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae (1991) describe as the ‘radical women’s press’ developed from the emerging women’s rights movement. Historian Amy Erdman Farrell (1998: 3) describes Ms. magazine as a ‘movement’ unto itself during the 1970s. Knowledge of these earlier subversive networks is central for understanding the meaning and impact of feminist networks in the digital age. This chapter examines the print and digital culture produced in different eras at the high points of American women’s movements. It highlights the changing, but also enduring, methods and goals feminists have cultivated. Taking a longue durée approach, this chapter focuses on publications written and produced by a diverse array of activist women between the 1830s and

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the 2010s. A breadth of feminist thought was produced under difficult and sometimes competing funding structures. Print culture has fostered exclusions based upon race, class and sexuality, yet communities of readers have increasingly sought to transcend such forms of marginalization. An enduring characteristic of this feminist print and digital culture has been the impetus to create a sense of community for promoting gender solidarity among women across the United States. This chapter finds important continuities as well as differences between past and present, thus offering historical lessons for intersectional feminist activism in the digital age.

Greatly needed: Beginnings The radical women’s press of the 1850s represented an early subversive feminist network. Early nineteenth-century American culture was initially resistant to the ‘sisterhood of reforms’, especially abolitionism and women’s rights (Walters 1978: xi–xiv). Fashionable magazines and the mainstream press glorified domesticity and femininity. Prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention about women’s rights, some engaged in charity work and benevolence, as well as reforms relating to temperance, moral reform, antislavery, labour and health (Tetrault 2014). Women could submit letters and articles to the ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ press alike, yet this was not necessarily an ‘effective or satisfying’ way to engage in public debate or social transformation (Endres and Lueck 1996: xi–xii). Though only ever reaching a small community of readers (Russo & Kramarae 1991; Endres & Lueck 1996: xiii), the radical women’s press created a space for women to legitimate their efforts and discuss social reform. Well aware of the importance of the press to spread reform ideals, early nineteenth-century social reformers took advantage of recent publishing technologies. Early antislavery publications such as Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821–39; Baltimore, MD) and Rev. Peter Williams, Jr.’s Freedom’s Journal (1827–29; New York City), the first African American newspaper, were of great importance. Abolitionists, especially women, often depended on such print media to promote antislavery effectively (Goodman 1998: 64–65 & 104). William Lloyd Garrison, a journalist by profession, established and edited the Liberator (1831–65; Boston, MA), the most prominent newspaper associated with immediate abolitionism. Although produced under male-dominated power structures, some women gained prominence in the early antislavery publications. Elizabeth Chandler commenced the Genius’ ‘Ladies’ Department’ in 1827, while the Liberator featured a ‘Ladies’ Department’ between 1832 and 1837 (Bacon 1999). The contributions and speeches of African American women such as Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Forten and Sarah Mapps Douglass also appeared under their

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own names and pseudonyms. Between 1840 and 1843, Lydia Maria Child edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840–70; New York City). The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, pioneered textile industrialization in the United States between the 1820s and 1840s. Many women were employed in this emergent industry; some even became the primary family wage earner. Their periodicals revealed the breadth of opinion among female mill operatives: the Lowell Offering (1840–5; Lowell, MA) captured genteel voices, whereas the Voice of Industry (1845–8; Lowell, MA) was concerned with class and gender exploitation. Indeed, the Voice even questioned some of the Offering’s published perspectives (Mattina 1996). The Voice’s ‘Female Department’, headed between 1846 and 1848 by the Female Labor Reform Association’s Sarah Bagley, was ‘devoted to woman’s thoughts’ and ‘defend[ing] woman’s rights’, emphasizing that ‘[woman] is a social, moral, and religious being’ (S.G.B. 1846). Such periodicals, though a minority in the early nineteenth-century labour movement, articulated an early sense of a gendered working-class identity. Other reformers established a variety of women’s rights periodicals during the 1850s. Amelia Bloomer’s Lily (1849–56; Seneca Falls, NY), Paulina Wright Davis’ Una (1853–55; Providence, RI) and Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck’s Sibyl (1856–64; Middleton, NY) focused, among other concerns, on women’s rights, temperance, antislavery, dress reform and physiology (Russo & Kramarae 1991: 40). These periodicals created a community, as evinced by the welcome received from a small but enthusiastic readership. ‘“Woman” has a right to speak here’, one reader wrote (Anon. 1849). ‘We need her influence now – shall ever. We welcome the Lily to the field.’ These periodicals became important both personally and collectively. Editors published letters sharing personal experiences and overviews of women’s rights conventions. Readers could reply to letters, and articles and editors in turn replied to readers, creating an interactive dialogue. ‘The more I see, and think, and feel, of Woman’s necessities and wrongs, the more I desire to see them righted’, wrote Mary C. Vaughn (1851) of Oswego, New York. In spite of social and geographical differences, many kinds of social reformers could contribute to this ever-expanding network. But these periodicals also encountered and perpetuated the ‘particular rhetorical problems’ of the antebellum women’s rights movement (Solomon 1991: 3). The Sibyl was ‘needed, greatly needed’ to teach women their ‘relationship to humanity – to arouse her inherent, but latent powers’, wrote H.E.S. (1859). This affirmed a commitment to multiple reforms and the sense of empowerment such periodicals fostered. However, these early consciousness-raising attempts periodically used problematic rhetoric and sometimes even blamed the oppressed. ‘We talk of the slavery of woman’, C.M.G. (1857) of Killawog, New York wrote, ‘and so she is; but she forges her own chains, at least those that make her the most abject slave.’ ‘My sister, you are right, and yet not fully so, in regard to woman being her own

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bondholder’, Hasbrouck (1857) replied. Across the nineteenth century, the social reality of chattel slavery shaped the worldview of many Americans, implicitly revealing the interplay between racial tensions and exploitative, misleading rhetorical strategies (King 1988; Stevenson 2014). In the face of financial pressures and social disdain, many of these periodicals folded by the mid-1850s. During the Civil War (1861–5), antislavery gained greater prominence over other reforms. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (known as the Reconstruction Amendments), adopted between 1865 and 1870, failed to incorporate women into the provisions for African American manhood suffrage (Tetrault 2014: 19–45). This led to the 1869 split of the women’s movement as well as a revived periodical culture. Both radical and more moderate periodicals, primarily run by women, presented a transformed message in conjunction with support for a controversial reform: woman suffrage. Historian Linda Steiner (1983: 1) remarks upon the sense of community created by suffrage periodicals. Understood through nineteenth-century terminology such as ‘sisterhood’ or ‘sorority’, such periodicals espoused a sense of community through a ‘self-consciously emphasized interdependence’ that celebrated qualities of loyalty and commitment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s Revolution (1868–70; New York City) was the organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Many of its articles precipitated the split of the women’s movement. A heated debate between contributor Jane Elizabeth Jones and Stanton, aptly titled ‘Sharp Points’ (1868), argued for and against the proposed Fifteenth Amendment. The Revolution, like its predecessors, espoused a ‘rhetoric of racism’ by appropriating the experiences of African American women for the benefit of white women’s enfranchisement (McDaneld 2013). But in other contexts, the Revolution challenged what co-editor Parker Pillsbury denounced as ‘Colorphobia’ – or, racism. Pillsbury perceived an urgent need to stop discrimination ‘on account of race, complexion or sex’ (1869). The Revolution continued to present multiple viewpoints in the wake of the 1869 schism. It acted as ‘a centralizing and organizing force for its readers’, while its offices became ‘a rallying place for like-minded women to gather, talk and support each other’ (Rakow & Kramarae 1990: 16). An important sense of community endured. ‘The sisterhood includes me,’ Mattie Chappelle (1870) surmised, ‘No matter who I am.’ New periodicals continued to be short-lived and experience financial pressures, while support for radical reforms could destabilize their circulation base. Even the Revolution – controversially financed by George Francis Train, a racist Democrat who supported woman suffrage – went bankrupt. Anthony sold the Revolution for a symbolic $1 when she assumed its $10,000 debt in 1870 (Rakow & Kramarae 1990: 18). The premier West Coast suffrage newspaper, Abigail Scott Duniway’s New Northwest (1871–87; Portland, OR), was similarly plagued by financial difficulties. A family enterprise, the

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New Northwest was printed by Duniway’s sons and publicized by Duniway herself. It eventually folded due in large part to a lack of subscriptions (Ward & Maveety 2000: 16–17). In contrast, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin’s Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (1870–6; New York City) was funded by the wealth these sisters amassed as New York City’s first female stockbrokers and likely through associations with business tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Its comparative financial freedom meant the Weekly could feature content ‘designed to challenge, provoke, and excite’ its readers (Passett 2003: 44). The Weekly embraced radical views towards women’s rights, suffrage and free love, as well as spiritualism and politics. ‘It is popularly styled woman’s rights. It should be woman’s wrongs,’ one reader wrote: I should consider myself a despot and tyrant if I should deny to woman political rights which I claim for myself. I look upon every man in this broad land who denies these rights to woman as guilty of the highest injustice. (G. 1871) As the mouthpiece for Woodhull’s path-breaking but controversial 1872 presidential campaign, the Weekly quickly gained notoriety. Editorial support for taboos such as divorce gradually contributed to its decline. A more moderate periodical flourished as others folded. Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell’s Woman’s Journal (1870–1931; Boston, MA) was the organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the rival to NWSA. The Journal generated a solid circulation base across every American state by 1875 (Rodier 2004: 99). Often remembered for its suffrage advocacy, these efforts were in reality one among many. For one reader, the Journal helped create ‘a fellowship’ of women against ‘the demands of fashion’ (C.M.S. 1873). It engendered a sense of community in the hope that women and men would be incited to political action. However, the Journal followed the Sibyl in that it periodically blamed women for their situation. ‘In this particular work of emancipation – unlike any other that ever existed’, T.W. Higginson (1871) wrote, ‘the chief labor lies in convincing the oppressed class that they are oppressed.’ African American women occasionally contributed to such late nineteenthcentury periodicals. Some emerged as prominent journalists by century’s end (Wade-Gayles 1981), often in association with reform periodicals, the black women’s club movement and racial uplift. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Florida R. Ridley’s Woman’s Era (1894–7; Boston, MA), connected to the Woman’s Era Club of Boston, became the first newspaper edited by African American women. In its first edition, Ruffin and Ridley expressed the need for a ‘medium of intercourse and sympathy between the women of all races and conditions; especially true is this, of the educated and refined, among the coloured women’ (1894). The Woman’s Era emphasized how racial

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exploitation continued in the wake of chattel slavery (Anon. 1894). As Jim Crow legislation expanded and lynching became widespread, particularly in the southern states, African American women’s print culture examined oppression relating to race and gender. The radical women’s press established coalitions across social movements and created a community between the rank-and-file and prominent reformers across the United States. This crossed racial and class boundaries to support mutually beneficial initiatives, yet points of contention still endured – in both word and action. The Woman’s Journal even persisted for a time into the early twentieth century, thriving for a period following women’s enfranchisement under the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Similar processes would emerge in the print culture associated with feminism and women’s liberation during the late twentieth century.

Literally a ‘lifesaver’: Women’s liberation Just as the antislavery movement influenced the emerging women’s movement, historians such as Sara M. Evans (1979) suggest that the Civil Rights Movement similarly offered stimulus for women’s liberation. The print culture of this new women’s movement again challenged a male-dominated media to reject the idealization of domesticated or overly sexualized women. Like its predecessors, women’s liberation print culture encountered funding difficulties and often failed to be fully inclusive. Schisms resulting from race, gender and class, as well as sexuality, forced activists to productively consider how all these questions intersected. From the late 1960s, activist print culture highlighted the many and sometimes competing feminist ideas arising from the women’s movement. Some early short-lived examples included Cell 16’s No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation (1968–73; Cambridge, MA), Turn of the Screwed (1970–1; Dallas, TX), lesbian feminist newsletter Ain’t I a Woman (1971–4; Iowa City, IA), the Third World Women’s Alliance’s Triple Jeopardy: Racism, Imperialism, Sexism (1971–5; New York City) and the Chicana Encuentro Femenil (1973–4; San Fernando, CA). Others enjoyed greater longevity, such as Women: A Journal of Liberation (1968–83; Baltimore, MD), Azaela: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians (1977–83; New York City) and the literary journal Common Lives/Lesbian Lives (1981–96; Iowa City, IA). The sense of community such print culture engendered was widely appreciated. Brooke Spear-Williams (1971) of Reston, Virginia, hoped to become ‘vitally involved in liberating sisters from all kinds of oppression, from high school to Vietnam’, but equally saw the need for a ‘Woman’s Liberation library’ – or, at the very least, newsletters. Tensions between theory and lived experience also emerged. ‘I work for money and live for the

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hope of liberation. And I’m aware at all times that those two are probably in conflict’, wrote Rebecca Taskel (1971) of Baltimore, Maryland. ‘Sisterhood seems to be growing,’ she said, heartened by the knowledge. But print culture also highlighted and reproduced the problems which splintered the women’s movement. An early issue of No More Fun and Games featured an article entitled ‘The Slave’s Stake in the Home’ (Densmore 1969). Echoing the nineteenth-century radical women’s press, analogical reasoning (King 1988) was used to controversially suggest that the ‘slave’ in question was actually the wife. Tensions between competing feminist perspectives were increasingly palpable. One of the Redstockings’ many anthologies, Feminist Revolution (1975; New York City), critiqued what it saw as the deradicalization of women’s liberation in favour of the cultural feminism of Ms. (Willis 1984: 113–14). At the same time, the Redstockings, like Betty Friedan’s National Organization of Women, normalized heterosexuality and were resistant to lesbianism. The liberal feminist Ms. magazine (1972–89, New York City; 1991–, Los Angeles, CA) was one of the most prominent and long-standing of these many publications. Journalist Gloria Steinem became acutely aware of the need for a mode of communication between women. Together with an editorial team of women, Steinem founded Ms. as a commercial magazine and a feminist resource. Initially a mass-circulation commercial success, its first edition sold out in eight days. Ms. became both ‘an actual organization’ and ‘a locus point’ where the 1970s women’s movement was articulated and redefined (Farrell 1998: 1–2). But Ms. would later encounter problems because advertisers eschewed a magazine perceived as too political. Many looked to Ms. as women had looked to the nineteenth-century radical women’s press. The sense of community it fostered was paramount. For readers, Ms. became both ‘a sister sharing in a mutual process of consciousness-raising’ and even ‘a parental figure’ able to solve problems (Farrell 1998: 115 & 164). As early as 1972, one woman saw Ms. as ‘literally a “lifesaver” ’ (Farrell 2008: 53); it gave her ‘the courage to go on believing that women were not put on this earth to be the handmaidens of men’. Its editors also attempted to foster diversity. The abstract illustration featured on the cover of the first issue, Steinem later reflected, ‘solved our problem of being racially “multibiguous” because she’s blue: not any one race’ (Pogrebin 2011). These attempts certainly resonated with some readers. ‘Being a Chicana did not detract from my enjoyment of your magazine’, wrote Marti Maram of Goleta, California (Farrell 1998: 71). But some women of colour did not engage positively with Ms. or its feminist debates. ‘Despite the proselytizing of the Gloria Steinems and Betty Friedans, black women and their Third World sisters have yet to join the organized women’s movement in significant numbers’, wrote Emily F. Gibson (1975) of Rochester, New York. In 1986, famous African American novelist and Ms. contributing editor Alice Walker resigned because of the magazine’s lack of diversity (Pogrebin 2011).

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In contrast, Conditions (1977–90; Brooklyn, NY) celebrated racial and sexual diversity. An important publication in the history of both lesbian and African American print culture (Enszer 2015: 161), Conditions described itself as ‘a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians’ (1977). Its first edition nonetheless revealed another common challenge for feminist publications – unanimity amongst editors. ‘This collective [editorial] process is a difficult one,’ they revealed (Bulkin et al. 1977): We have found that the four of us do not always agree or identify with viewpoints expressed by the women we publish, or with each other. Because we do not proceed from a single conception of what Conditions should be, we feel it is especially important to receive critical and personal reactions to the writing we publish. These publications nonetheless offered each other support. ‘One of the most exciting and healthy things to happen lately in the black community is the coming out of black lesbians,’ Walker (1980) wrote in Ms. ‘Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue (which also includes work by many nonlesbians) reflects this with power, intelligence, and style.’ Feminist and women’s liberation print culture fulfilled a similar role to its nineteenth-century predecessors. The focus on certain questions, especially sexuality, may have been relatively new, but newsletters and magazines facilitated and encouraged a sense of community. If editors did not always realize their goals of inclusivity, the necessary process of acknowledging and working through such issues challenged activists to prioritize coalitions between women of different racial and class backgrounds.

Networked feminism: Intersectional politics Today, the digital realm introduces many to the women’s movement. The architects of online feminism are aware of the connections between different new media platforms. ‘The feminist movement, repeatedly declared dead by mainstream media, is actually very much alive – and it’s online,’ claim Valenti Martin Media (2013), creators of #femfuture. Increasingly, digital feminism relies on alternative media to subvert the power concentrations of mainstream media (Couldry & Curran 2003: 6–7). It can be described as radical because of the degree to which non-mainstream media platforms are directly associated with grassroots social movements (Downing 2001: 10). Digital feminist action is the product of technological advancement and the broader history of women’s communications. The younger feminists of the 1990s rejected the apparent homogeneity of feminism and women’s liberation. Instead, they actively celebrated differences of race, ethnicity and

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sexuality. As Rebecca Walker (1992: 41) proclaimed in Ms., ‘I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the third-wave.’ Girls and women produced the grrrl zines which encapsulated this new generation of feminism (Piepmeier 2009). An example of participatory media, grrrl zines anticipated the rise of feminist blogging in the twenty-first century (Keller 2012). Some earlier publications managed to transcend these cultural and technological divides. After Ms. became affiliated with the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2002, it emerged online, developed digital subscriptions, a somewhat active blog and the tagline: ‘More than a Magazine, a Movement’ (2016). Similarly, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture (1996–; Oakland, CA and Portland, OR) began as a zine and then a print magazine; it has since diversified online as Bitch Media. Digital feminism shapes and builds online communities in a manner not previously possible, yet it has also facilitated the creation of a community and a renewed feminist consciousness in a way that echoes its predecessors. The rise of new media reinvigorated and transformed feminist commu­ nication. Online feminism now offers a space for the production, reception, construction and reconstruction of feminist knowledge (Rhodes 2002: 118). No longer limited to print-based technology, feminist blogging is accessible in the United States and across the globe. When Feministing.com (2004–; San Francisco, CA) celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2014, it became the ‘most widely read feminist publication of all time’ (2014). Many feminist blogs engage with grassroots activism, often around specific feminist, antiracist and anti-homophobic platforms. Embracing a variety of intermedia projects, examples such as Bitch Media and Everyday Feminism (2012–; Philadelphia, PA and various cities, CA) maintain a strong social media presence and bridge the divide between digital and face-to-face activism by supporting public speakers, campus engagement and interactive online courses. What has been termed ‘hashtag feminism’, particularly on Twitter, can produce recognizable outcomes (Fotopoulou 2016: 4–5). An intersectional rationale now constitutes the centre of much digital feminism. Many platforms strive toward non-judgemental inclusiveness by celebrating anti-racist, anti-homophobic, sex-positive and body-positive perspectives which embrace gender fluidity (Snyder 2008: 175). These imperatives can be traced to the theory of intersectionality, developed by critical race legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). Applied as a theory for interrogating multiple axes of oppression, intersectionality has developed a ‘digital vitality’ which renders it central to how feminist activism is produced, interpreted and responded to online (Collins & Bilge 2016: 86). For Harriet (2010–; Boston, MA) centralizes intersectionality, celebrates the ‘beauty and complexity of Black womanhood’ and brings a womanist tenor to its feminist analysis (Anon. 2015). The mission of Everyday Feminism is to ‘help people heal from and stand up to everyday violence, discrimination and marginalization through applied intersectional feminism’ (2017). Both

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explicitly and implicitly, many feminist new media platforms directly and indirectly reveal a commitment to intersectionality by coveting diversity. But feminist digital initiatives are not always linked to grassroots activism and not-for-profit social movements. Some are associated with for-profit media syndicates and corporate structures, where the network conditions of the digital era mean the ‘struggle for representational space’ can become ‘merely a quest for popularity’ (Fotopoulou 2016: 14). One particularly active example is Gawker Media’s Jezebel – Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing (2007–; New York City), a blog which nonetheless creates interactive sites for subversive communication. Jezebel actively encourages its readers to question the mainstream media. When editor Anna Homes outlined guidelines for respectful online engagement in ‘The Girl’s Guide to Commenting on Jezebel’, one reader replied, ‘I do love it here’ (Holmes 2008). Another viewed Jezebel as a ‘brilliant and fun blog’; her life would continue if she were to become ‘Jezebel-less’, but she concluded, ‘I do adore this place’ (Holmes 2008). Online community engagement, unlike print-based interaction, can now be nearly instantaneous, transcending readers’ geographical dispersion to an unprecedented degree. While digital feminism largely aims to overcome divisions derived from race, class and sexuality, problems nonetheless remain. For activists seeking to draw facile inter-movement parallels, one site of digital controversy is the rhetorical re-emergence of analogy (Collins & Bilge 2016: 109–11). Online feminism might also be seen to have only a ‘vaguely stated aim of “inclusiveness,” ’ indicating that audiences do not always achieve the respectful diversity the platforms covet (Cook & Hasmath 2014: 976 & 986). Technology itself can also generate paradoxes. The ‘bubbles’ of information digital algorithms create can lead to ‘separate spheres’ of black and white feminism online; when individuals feel most comfortable in their own bubbles, cyclic racism can be perpetuated (Tolson 2014). These limitations are possible to subvert, but individuals are more likely to become trapped in a predetermined digital bubble. Moreover, the experiences, accessibility and goals of different feminists are not always identical. Digital technology, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016: 86) argue, has ‘transformed feminism’ by increasing both participation and ‘media-content production’, yet ‘the question of who among digital feminist activists has access to major social media outlets, who is authorized, who is disenfranchised as divisive, or elitist, or unhelpful to the feminist cause, suggests enduring racialized power dynamics’. Additionally, feminists habitually experience threats and harassment which transcend the digital and enter the real world. Digital activism thus becomes more connected to embodied vulnerability than it might initially appear (Fotopoulou 2016: 15). Digital technology offers comparative financial freedom because editors are less burdened by the costs associated with print and distribution.

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However, the often unpaid or underpaid nature of the labour, especially on social media, supports capitalist enterprises and facilitates ‘digital networked capitalism’ (Fotopoulou 2016: 15). Feminist blogs both independent from and connected to broader media conglomerates nonetheless contribute to the distribution of feminist ideas through what is often a vaguely intersectional framework.

Conclusion Historical reflection upon feminist communication networks in the United States demonstrates that the controversies of the women’s movement did not merely emerge in the twenty-first century. Complete unity and homogeneity never really existed, making it important to observe how divisions were perpetuated and resolved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the radical women’s press to the digital age, feminist print and digital culture has created a sense of community in spite of such divisions and geography. This has been fostered through connections between readers and famous feminists, whether via letters to the editor or comments on a blog. Each era experienced technological developments and recognizable patterns of financial strife, as well as transformations relating to the democratization of access. These publications have never been limited to the metropolis; they always existed nationally, across a variety of cities and regional centres. Both rhetorically and at the grassroots level, feminist activists have repeatedly facilitated connections between social movements. As feminist commentator Jessica Valenti (2014) suggests, action is more important than talk. While the discussion must start somewhere, feminists should remain cognizant of the many perspectives which shape activist spaces, past and present. As feminist scholar Brittney Cooper emphasizes (2014), white women’s feminism often demands equality whereas black women’s feminism demands justice. As a white woman but also an Australian and an expatriate, I am constantly frustrated and disappointed by how so many feminist debates underestimate the degree to which racism, classism and immigration shape peoples’ lived experiences. It is important to acknowledge how subversive networks of feminism enabled women’s rights and feminist debates, and the sense of community this has engendered, since the nineteenth century. Yet, rather than isolating contemporary feminist activism from what amounts to a highly checkered record amongst so many of our predecessors, it is necessary to recognize past failures in order to transform present-day activism. This understanding and empathy is essential today, as feminist print and digital culture continues to do the important work of connecting activists in the United States and, increasingly, throughout the world.

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Acknowledgements This research has been made possible by the generous support of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.

References Anon. (1849), ‘Woman’s Wrongs’, Lily, March: 1. Anon. (1894), ‘The Slavery Case in Boston’, Woman’s Era, September. Anon. (2015), ‘Mission Statement’, For Harriet. Available online: http://www. forharriet.com/p/about.html#axzz41f2R5NPu (accessed 30 January 2018). Bacon, J. (1999), ‘The Liberator’s “Ladies” Department,’ 1832–37: Freedom or Fetters?’ in M.G. Carstarphen and S.C. Zavonia (eds), Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity, 3–20, Westport: Greenwood Press. Bulkin, E., Clausen, J., Klepfisz, I. and Shore, R. (1977), Conditions: One, New York: Irene Peslikis. Chappelle, M. (1870), ‘A Word to My American Sisters’, Revolution, April: 28. C.M.G. and Hasbrouck, L.S. (1857), ‘Slavery of Fashion and Habit’, Sibyl, May: 1. C.M.S. (1873), ‘Dress Reform and Moral Reform’, Woman’s Journal, May: 31. Collins, P.H. and Bilge, S. (2016), Intersectionality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cook, J. and Hasmath, R. (2014), ‘The Discursive Construction and Performance of Gendered Identity on Social Media’, Current Sociology, 62: 975–93. Cooper, B. (2014), ‘Feminism’s Ugly Internal Clash: Why Its Future Is Not Up to White Women’, Salon, September: 24. Available online: http://www.salon. com/2014/09/24/feminisms_ugly_internal_clash_why_its_future_is_not_up_to_ white_women/ (accessed 30 January 2018). Couldry, N. and Curran, J. (eds). (2003), Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241–99. Densmore, D. (1969), ‘The Slave’s Stake in the Home’, No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, 2: 14–20. Downing, J.D. (2001), Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Endres, K.L. and Lueck, T.L. (eds). (1996), Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues, Westport: Greenwood Press. Enszer, J.R. (2015), ‘“Fighting to Create and Maintain Our Own Black Woman’s Culture”: Conditions Magazine, 1977–1990’, American Periodicals, 25: 160–76. Evans, S.M. (1979, 1980), Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, New York: Vintage Books. Everyday Feminism. (2017), ‘About Everyday Feminism’, Everyday Feminism. Available online: http://everydayfeminism.com/about-ef/ (accessed 30 January 2018).

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Executive Directors. (2014), ‘Feministing Is 10 Years Old!’ Feministing. Available online: http://feministing.com/2014/04/14/happy-10th-birthday-to-us/ (accessed 30 January 2018). Farrell, A.E. (1998), Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Farrell, A.E. (2008), ‘Attentive to Difference: Ms. Magazine, Coalition Building, and Sisterhood’, in S. Gilmore (ed), Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, 48–62, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fotopoulou, A. (2016), Feminist Activism and Digital Networks: Between Empowerment and Vulnerability, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. G. (1871), Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, August: 5. Goodman, P. (1998), Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, Berkeley: University of California Press. H.E.S. (1859), ‘The Sibyl Needed’, Sibyl, August: 1. Higginson, T.W. (1871), ‘Slaves and Women’, Woman’s Journal, June: 3. Holmes, A. (2008), ‘The Girl’s Guide to Commenting on Jezebel’ (blog comments by Rooo sez BISH PLZ and Penny), Jezebel, July: 4. Available online: http://jezebel. com/376527/the-girls-guide-to-commenting-on-jezebel (accessed 31 May 2017). Jones, J.E. and Stanton, E.C. (1868), ‘Sharp Points’, Revolution, April: 9. Keller, J.M. (2012), ‘Virtual Feminisms: Girls’ Blogging Communities, Feminist Activism, and Participatory Politics’, Information, Communication & Society, 15: 429–47. King, D.K. (1988), ‘Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14 (1): 42–72. Mattina, A.F. (1996), ‘“Corporation Tools and Time-Serving Slaves”: Class and Gender in the Rhetoric of Antebellum Labor Reform’, Howard Journal of Communications, 7: 151–68. McDaneld, J. (2013), ‘White Suffragist Dis/Entitlement: The Revolution and the Rhetoric of Racism’, Legacy, 30: 243–64. Ms. Magazine. (2016), Ms.: More Than a Magazine a Movement. Available online: www.msmagazine.com/ (accessed 30 January 2018). Passett, J.E. (2003), Sex Radicals and the Quest for Woman’s Equality, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Piepmeier, A. (2009), Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, New York: New York University Press. Pillsbury, P. (1869), ‘Colorphobia’, Revolution, December: 2. Pogrebin, A. (2011), ‘How Do You Spell Ms.,’ New York Magazine, October: 30. Available online: http://nymag.com/news/features/ms-magazine-2011-11/ (accessed 30 January 2018). Rakow, L.F. and Kramarae, C. (eds). (1990), The Revolution in Words: Righting Women, 1868–1871, London: Routledge. Rhodes, J. (2002), ‘“Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action”: Women Online’, College Composition and Communication, 54 (1): 116–42. Rodier, K. (2004), ‘Lucy Stone and The Woman’s Journal’, in S.M. Harris and E.G. Garvey (eds), Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910, 99–120, Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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Ruffin, J. and Ridley, F.R. (1894), ‘Greeting’, Woman’s Era, March: 24. Russo, A. and Kramarae, C. (eds). (1991), The Radical Women’s Press of the 1850s, New York: Routledge. S.G.B. (1846), ‘Introductory’, Voice of Industry, January: 9. Snyder, R.C. (2008), ‘What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay’, Signs, 34: 175–6. Solomon, M.M. (ed). (1991), A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840–1910, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Spear-Williams, B. (1971), ‘“Getting” It Together in the High Schools’, Women: A Journal of Liberation, 2: 53. Steiner, L. (1983), ‘Finding Community in Nineteenth Century Suffrage Periodicals’, American Journalism, 1: 1–15. Stevenson, A. (2014), ‘“Symbols of Our Slavery”: Fashion and Dress Reform in the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 20: 5–20. Taskel, R. (1971), ‘Our Sisters Speak’, Women: A Journal of Liberation, 2: 55. Tetrault, L. (2014), The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tolson, T.N. (2014), ‘Race and the Internet: Online Feminist Failings’, National Woman’s Studies Association Conference. Valenti, J. (2014), ‘When Everybody Is a Feminist, Is Anyone?’ The Guardian, November: 24. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/nov/24/when-everyone-is-a-feminist (accessed 30 January 2018). Valenti Martin Media. (2013), ‘The Future of (Online) Feminism’, Valenti Martin Media. Available online: http://www.valentimartin.com/the-future-of-onlinefeminism-infographic/ (accessed 30 January 2018). Vaughn, M.C. (1851), ‘Correspondence’, Lily, June. Wade-Gayles, G. (1981), ‘Black Women Journalists in the South, 1880–1905: An Approach to the Study of Black Women’s History’, Callaloo (11/13): 138–52. Walker, A. (1980), ‘Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life’, Ms., April. Walker, R. (1992), ‘Becoming the Third Wave’, Ms., January/February. Walters, R.G. (1978, 1997), American Reformers: 1815–1860, New York: Hill & Wang. Ward, J.M. and Maveety, E.A. (eds). (2000), ‘Yours for Liberty’: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Willis, E. (1984), ‘Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism’, Social Text (9/10): 91–118.

5 Evolution of Hacktivism: From Origins to Now Marco Romagna

In a 2017 interview, former member of the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec Hector Monsegur (known as Sabu in the hacking scene) affirmed that hacktivism had mostly resulted in ‘chaos’ rather than ‘sense’ every time a digital hack or disruption occurred without people understanding all its possible consequences (Johnson & Stephens 2017). In 2011, when Monsegur was actively engaged with LulzSec (Coleman 2014), his opinion might have been different. In the last thirty-five years, hacktivism has also been chaos, but behind the apparent disorganized actions, illegal hacks and the ‘lulz’,1 many people believed that hacking skills could help to promote social change and improve society or part of it (Sorell 2015). Borrowing part of Milan (2015: 550) and Denning’s definitions (2001: 241) hacktivism is here defined as the sum of ideologies, individual and collective actions typical of traditional activism, applied in cyberspace using hacking techniques, while addressing or exploiting network infrastructure’s technical and ontological features, with the final goal of reaching a sociopolitical change in society. Through comparison with previous works,2 this chapter narrows down the number of actions and behaviours that are often considered hacktivism, by giving a key role to the hacking component. Hacking is here identified with the less positive connotation developed by mass media and security industry in the last thirty years, abandoning that romanticized interpretation typical of the first hackers’ generations. I will illustrate the development of hacktivism dividing its history into three main phases and focussing on the most relevant sociopolitical aspects of its evolution. Phase

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1 covers the earliest incidents in the late 1980s until the first years of the New Millennium when the events of 9/11 and the development of the Web into Web 2.0 and 3.0 significantly transformed the Internet and the way users interact. Phase 2 starts in 2003–4 when hacktivism became a common means of protest (Denning 2015), and Anonymous gained international attention (Coleman 2014). The beginning of phase 3 is instead relatively unclear insofar as there are discrepancies among scholars. Some place its end earlier in time; others (Milan 2015) do not consider it yet concluded. While I agree with Milan (2015: 553) that many individuals and groups are in different ways aligned to Anonymous and share values that stem from the collective providing a certain level of continuity, I will argue that the end of phase 2 coincides with the apex reached by Anonymous and LulzSec between 2010 and 2012 and the attendant arrests of some of their most visible members (Coleman 2014). Phase 3 begins with the end of LulzSec. Anonymous remains the most important group, but other smaller teams (affiliated and aligned to it or completely unrelated) find their new dimension and engage in their own fights and operations (human rights, internet freedom, counter-terrorism, environmental causes, sociopolitical ideologies and so on). To conclude, I will briefly consider the possible developments to emerge in the light of the current landscape. It is important to underline that, like any other social phenomenon, hacktivism also evolves and mutates. Therefore, the phases have to be read as conventional creations to help structure and understand the topic and not as closed spaces without common access points. To offer a better understanding of the concept, the next paragraph is dedicated to exploring the main elements that characterize hacktivism, and to illustrate in which way these are relevant for its history and most recent development.

Conceptualizing hacktivism: Collective identity/ action and hacking Mass media have always sensationalized hacktivism,3 depicting it as a criminal activity; as meaningless actions of bored teenagers eager to test their skills or to have fun; and more scientifically, as a form of ideological and sociopolitical protest in line with traditional activism. Cybersecurity reports and scientific publications have instead focused their attention on understanding what hacktivism symbolizes and to what extent it might represent a threat for governments, corporations and society in general. From a legal perspective and because of its hacking element, hacktivism usually results in illegal activities which struggle to meet ethical or moral justification (Denning 2001), particularly in those episodes that involve unskilled young people (known as script kiddies) who use scripts or

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programs developed by others to attack computer systems and networks. Nevertheless, the origins and motivations of hacktivism are deeply rooted in the hacking subculture and in the values of long-established activism. Some of these concepts and values have been borrowed by hacktivists to develop an independent phenomenon with its own characteristics, beliefs and goals (Samuel 2004). Hacktivism is commonly linked to group operations (Jordan & Taylor 2004; Milan 2015; Samuel 2004), although there have been episodes of lone actors (Milan 2015). As Milan (2013: 89) points out ‘the “we” [which forms the group’s identity] becomes the sum of the various self-contained “I”s’. Tasks are assigned based on technical skills, while knowledge is always shared among members (Milan 2013). The hacktivist keeps his/her own identity, but must give away part of it for the benefit of the collective (Samuel 2004). Milan (2013: 79) explains that ‘individuals become functional to the group they are part of, [while] the group [itself] attributes meaning to the individual’. For this reason, the concept of ‘collective action’ provided by Melucci (1995: 43) becomes relevant in explaining hacktivism, as it identifies ‘a purposive orientation constructed by means of social relationships within a system of opportunities and constraints’. The action is the final step of a process that the sociologist (Melucci 1995: 44) sees as a necessary development of collective identity. When hacktivists engage in collective actions they are, as individuals, still autonomous and independent, but at the same time they have to interact and communicate by sharing common beliefs, goals and objectives as if being part of a unique body. In line with a general refusal among hacktivists of a top-down organization, they seem to prefer a network-horizontal approach that emphasizes the autonomy of the individual within the group, in a way that mirrors the technology of cyberspace (Milan 2013). This situation has been observed several times, for instance among the core members of Anonymous/LulzSec (Coleman 2014), and among other hacktivists groups recently interviewed. Yet, this horizontal system should not be idealized: if on the one hand, there is evidence of a leaderless structure that uses a democratic procedure to take decisions, on the other hand, there are often some strong personalities that inevitably take the lead and are able to influence the agenda, targets and motivations of the whole group (Milan 2013). As noted above, hacktivism cannot be conceptualized without considering the hacking component. With ‘hacking’ I do not only mean the typical methods used to illegally access or disrupt computers or network infrastructure (Jordan & Taylor 2004), but also similar techniques (like a DDoS attack) that can be exploited to hinder or limit the operability of computers or ICT systems and to corrupt at least one aspect among confidentiality, integrity and availability of the information therein stored. The cases illustrated in this chapter will focus on those episodes where ideological and sociopolitical goals are pursued by groups of hacktivists

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through hacks or disruptive actions in cyberspace. As a consequence, less invasive methods like website parodies, creations of web pages to spread a message or the simple use of forums or social networks for communications do not satisfy my definition of hacktivism, since the hacking component appears to be almost irrelevant. The same can be said for those data leaks that were obtained without any form of hacking (as it happened with some WikiLeaks’ cases). These tools are nevertheless part of a broader category (not addressed here) that I call cyberactivism. Milan (2015: 554) argues that technical expertise is progressively losing importance, as software makes it easier for anyone to engage in disruptive actions. This is true only so long as there are people able to create such software: without technical expertise and hacking skills, operations like the ones launched by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) with their Floodnet tool (Samuel 2004), or operation Payback promoted by Anonymous with the LOIC4 (Coleman 2014) would have been impossible. It is not intended by this last point to diminish the importance and the role played by all those activists who have engaged in different levels of hacktivism. It serves to point out that the history and essence of this phenomenon cannot be told without considering the immense role played by the technical hacking component, the hacking subculture (Samuel 2004) and the hacker-activists.

Phase 1: From hackers to hacktivists It can confidently be argued that hacktivism is the result of a slow but evolving process. In the beginning of the 1980s, the first hacker-activists were mainly focused on values of the hacking subculture (freedom of intellectual property and information, unlimited access to computers and data, open source software; see Sorell 2015), rather than on sociopolitical motivations typical of classical forms of protest. An example was the German Chaos Computer Club active since 1981 in addressing the social implications of one of the original hacking ideas: information wants to be free (Jordan & Taylor 2004: 14). According to Milan (2015: 551), ‘[h]acktivists see cyberspace as both an arena for civic engagement and an object of contention in its own right.’ In the late 1980s, curious hackers appealed by sociopolitical issues met a more politicized side that was instead interested in the novelties that hacking skills could bring to their cause (Milan 2013). According to Jordan and Taylor (2004) the shift from hacking values to more traditional sociopolitical ones became evident only in the mid-1990s when a politically motivated hacking movement emerged. The first recorded episode of hacktivism was likely the 1989 WANK (worm against nuclear killer) malware unleashed by a group of hackeractivists based in Australia into the DECnet computer networks shared

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among NASA and the US Department of Energy to protest the launch of a shuttle carrying radioactive plutonium (Denning 2015). Later, the advent of the internet brought more visibility to the hacktivists (a fundamental element in hacktivism), increasing the possible impact and creating more interaction beyond national and physical borders. In 1994, the Zippies used for the first time DDoS attacks to flood thousands of e-mail accounts in the UK to protest a bill that would have outlawed outdoor dance festivals (Denning 2015). Months later, an international team known as Strano Network organized a ‘net-strike’ to protest against nuclear and social policies of the French government (Denning 2015) confirming the growing political ideals over traditional hacker values. Between 1994 and the beginning of 2000 there were dozens, if not hundreds, of episodes of hacktivism, and it was possible to recognize at least two main courses of action that, in a way, set the path for its future development. The first is in line with the sociocultural values of new social movements and connects hacktivism with the political dimension of anti or alternative-globalization movements (Samuel 2004). The second is linked to regional and international geopolitical tensions that lead towards patriotic and nationalistic forms of hacktivism (Karatzogianni 2014), not unusually aimed against minorities.

The struggle to find a hacktivist dimension at the end of the 1990s This new deal of cyberprotests was amplified by two groups that hit the scenes at the end of the 1990s: Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). CAE (made up of practitioners, but not hacktivists) focused its attention on exploring the intersections between art, critical theory, technology and political activism. The group theorized the concept of electronic civil disobedience and argued that hacking expertise should have been used to offset the existing imbalance of power with the establishment and to increase the political effect of civil disobedience (Jordan & Taylor 2004: 71). Ricardo Dominguez formed EDT (made up of trained activists and hackers) in 1997. At that time, Dominguez had abandoned CAE because of the group’s failure to put theories into practice. EDT engaged in active protests through electronic civil disobedience inverting the concept developed by CAE (Samuel 2004): instead of a small core of skilled hacker-activists pursuing a technologically advanced form of protest, they opted for a low-level technical knowledge and asked the support of many individuals (often not hacktivists) (Jordan & Taylor 2004). EDT designed a computer-based program called FloodNet that reloaded a URL many times causing the targeted website or network server to slow down or crash. FloodNet was halfway between a DDoS attack and a virtual

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sit-in, and it was used (among other operations) in 1997 to support the Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Mexico) by hindering numerous websites of the Mexican government (Jordan & Taylor 2004). With this operation EDT showed how the internet was able for the first time to promote a cause outside the national limit of a state. More importantly, it proved that hundreds of supporters who were not directly affected by the Zapatista struggle, but felt the need to express solidarity to the local population, could be involved from all over the world and could nonetheless have an active role in the protest without being physically present. At that time, EDT met with criticism from the hacker community since their operations were considered against the spirit of hacking. Nevertheless, EDT’s members adopted a no-anonymity policy and a transparent approach to electronic civil disobedience taking personal responsibility for their transgressive or illegal actions. They claimed that it was the same necessary risk activists would have faced during a street protest (Dominguez 2008). In the same period, many other hacktivists chose instead to make anonymity one of their strongest points. While this line of thought is understandable, it might negatively contribute to misleading the public opinion and to diminishing its level of trust, especially when operations are particularly aggressive (Fish & Follis 2016). Modified versions of FloodNet were used by other groups in the following years: in 1999 the British Electrohippies blocked the computer network service of the World Trade Organization, during the WTO meeting in Seattle. The cyberoperation paired up with street demonstrations, and involved thousands of participants (Samuel 2004), once again showing how the hacktivist community was concerned with ‘offline’ issues and eager to provide its support. Next to DDoS attacks, hacktivists started defacing websites and replacing homepages with messages of protest. One example of this is the 1996 infamous ‘Department of Injustice’ statement that appeared on the US Department of Justice website (Denning 2015). In 1998, the group Milw0rm penetrated the computers of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, and inserted an anti–nuclear weapons agenda and peace message. The same happened one month later when the group hacked the British web hosting company Easyspace (Denning 2001). While the focus of the above-mentioned groups was on sociopolitical tensions, other teams created the foundations for patriotic hacktivism: operations conducted to promote goals usually linked to national identity, or to support government during regional or international geopolitical tensions or conflicts (Samuel 2004). Denning (2001: 272) shows that this type of hacktivism can also be motivated by causes connected to internal struggles and minorities, as happened in September 1998 with the defacement of forty Indonesian websites. Hacktivists displayed the message ‘Free East Timor’ on homepages and denounced Indonesia’s human rights violations in the former Portuguese colony (Denning 2001).

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This form of hacktivism has given birth to what is sometimes referred as state-sponsored hacktivism. This is a difficult category to study, for there has always been a complex interaction between hacktivists that voluntarily embrace the national cause and governments that subsidize, support and motivate hacktivists. A question that arises (though I will not answer it here) is whether state-sponsored hacktivism is real hacktivism. In the 1990s, there were several episodes of patriotic hacktivism, some of which have yet to end. During the Kosovo conflict, pro-Kosovo hacker-activists defaced websites leaving messages that praised a ‘Free Kosovo’; at the same time nationalistic Serbian hacker-activists (the Serb Black Hands) engaged in heavier forms of cyberattacks, even targeting NATO’s computer networks (Denning 2001). Old skirmishes have continued between hacktivists that support opposite sides in the Israel–Palestinian conflict and in the Indo-Pakistani one (Samuel 2004). Karatzogianni (2014) defines these events as ethnoreligious struggles because the ethnic and religious components are particularly strong in the motivations and in the messages, as proven by hundreds of defaced websites marked by the Indian flag or the Pakistani half-moon. Episodes of patriotism that could easily trespass into state-sponsored hacktivism have been registered among Chinese and American hacktivists. In 2001, after a collision between a US drone and a Chinese Navy jet, over 140 hacktivist groups (among them the notorious Honker Union of China and China Eagle) defaced and hindered with DDoS attacks more than 1,400 American websites (Denning 2015).

Phase 2: Consolidation and Anonymous The New Millennium witnessed the evolution of hacktivism from sporadic (but growing) episodes into common operations launched by transnational networks of individuals eager to intervene in real-world issues (Milan 2015: 554). I believe this consolidation is in a way connected to two main factors: the first is the steady growth of the internet and the evolution of the Web. The creation of more accessible technologies allowed even unskilled users to engage in operations (Milan 2015), and the internet became a platform with improved functionalities and better interconnectivity. Secondly, the first hackers’ ideology ‘information has to be free’ reached more concrete results, as the monopoly of information was no longer limited to a few mass media channels. This last step likely promoted more widespread information and an increased interest in discussing sociopolitical issues, stimulating participation especially in geographical areas where freedom of information and of expression are not self-evident. The way hacktivists pursued these rights and ideals has been criticized not for the goal per se, but for the means to obtain them (Samuel 2004). A technique they started using more

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steadily in this period was data leak: the leakage of data became popular with WikiLeaks (Sauter 2014) and was used to unmask corruption, crimes, abuses of powers and in general illegal or immoral activities of corporations, governments and individuals. Nevertheless, these actions sometimes resulted in severe consequences for the targets and for people that were only incidentally linked to them. The growth of the Internet has also increased the sense of empowerment among individuals and especially among hacktivists (Denning 2001). Nowadays, a small but well-equipped team can influence the public opinion through carefully planned cyberoperations and be more effective than a large group of people marching on a street. Nevertheless, Denning observes that this does not necessarily mean they will succeed. This phase of hacktivism is mainly characterized by the rise of Anonymous. The group significantly evolved to meet its apogee in this period and was able to adapt and develop well into phase 3 until recent times. Anonymous represents an anomaly in hacktivism: instead of the typical small groups formed by less than twenty members, thousands of people have joined the group in different waves (Coleman 2014) creating a collective that reached almost (if not completely) the dimensions of a social movement. While the emergence of an Anonymous-style movement surfaced in 2004 (Milan 2015), the real hacktivist actions started only in 2008 with Operation Chanology against the church of Scientology (Olson 2013). Anonymous’ affiliates engaged in dozens of operations in the following years, selecting the most disparate targets. Among the many small groups that originated from it, the most notable was likely LulzSec, since its members covered (for a certain period) an important role within Anonymous: they attacked companies like Sony Pictures and News Corporation (Milan 2015) until their arrests in 2011 (Olson 2013). Unlike EDT and other earlier groups, Anonymous was particularly skilful at attracting and manipulating the media coverage surrounding its raids (Sauter 2014: 60). It has also been able to adapt and evolve, committing new people to its cause and making use of techniques that spread from traditional DDoS (Sauter 2014) and website defacements to more invasive attacks (Olson 2013). It would be incorrect to think that hacktivists’ operations in this period were conducted only by Anonymous. While the collective attracted much media attention, many other groups developed from phase 1. Episodes of patriotic and state-sponsored hacktivism were registered during the series of cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007 and the RussoGeorgian war in 2008 (Karatzogianni 2014). In both cases hacktivists engaged in strikes with different levels of complexity. Since the end of the 1990s and probably with diverse crews, also the Honker Union of China remained quite active in cyberspace, with attacks against Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines (Yip & Webber 2011). Ethnoreligious conflicts found fertile ground in the events that followed the ‘Arab Spring’ (Karatzogianni 2014), and many new cells of hacktivists appeared in the international panorama, likely inspired by the actions of Anonymous.

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Phase 3: Post Anonymous and the present The arrests of LulzSec’s members did not stop Anonymous (Olson 2013), creating an environment akin to a mythological hydra: as heads were severed more grew to replace them. In a way, Anonymous became stronger because it went through a diversification of actions, targets and goals. For instance, since 2014 Anon Philippine (a branch of Anonymous particularly active in Eastern Asia) has been extremely dynamic, as witnessed by the many attacks against Chinese websites, and against the Filipino government. A relevant operation for its intrinsic meaning was #OpMyanmar, launched by Anonymous in August 2012 to support the Rohingya Muslims (described by the UN as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world) and to ask the end of what Anonymous claimed was a genocide. The campaign gained international attention among many hacktivist groups, gave birth to Anonymous Myanmar/Burma and brought the atrocities that were happening in the country to the attention of the public. This operation reached its peak in 2013 (when it became known as #OpRohinga) and met the support of, among others, Anonymous Indonesia (Larson 2013), likely involved also because of the religious connection with the Rohingya population. The campaign continues (though less actively than in the past) with attacks against governmental websites and political defacements that denounce the humanitarian crisis. The partnership with other groups has often characterized the agenda of Anonymous, particularly in large-scale attacks (Denning 2015). Two examples include ‘OpIsrael’ against the Israeli state, and the more recent ‘OpISIS’ (Peters 2015) against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Both operations show how hacktivists tried to intervene in the tensions that involved African and Middle-East countries in the Mediterranean. In 2014, the operation dubbed #OpIsraeliBirthday involved more than twenty groups (Denning 2015), including the Afghan Cyber Army, AnonGhost, Anonymous groups from Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, the Gaza Hacker Team, the Izz adDin al-Qassam Cyber Fighters and the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The attacks against Israel generated counteractions from Israeli hacktivists, in line with the classical patriotic and ethnoreligious ideals embedded in the hacktivists’ groups of phase 2. A recent new development in hacktivism regards cyberattacks against not only ISIS, but terrorist associations in general. Teams like Ghost Security Group, Ghost Squad Hackers, New World Hackers and Skynet Central have made this fight their personal mission. Using hacking techniques that are more advanced than the traditional defacements, they shut down websites and forums and expose individuals they consider terrorists or who are deemed to sympathize with terrorist organizations. Among these teams, Skynet Central (a group of twenty skilled hacker-hacktivists) represents an example of former Anonymous members who felt that the collective was no longer able to meet

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its agenda, and therefore preferred to abandon it and engage in actions with more specific targets and more effective results, usually without drawing too much attention. Skynet has been involved in cyberattacks against possible terrorists in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East, but has also targeted Turkish institutions because of the country’s recent civil–military political developments, especially against the Kurdish population (Skynet Central 2017). Turkey has become another hot zone for hacktivism as witnessed in spring 2017 by an explosion of patriotic hacks against Dutch websites. The Turkish Hacker Team (together with other groups), after some diplomatic tensions between the Netherlands and Turkey, DDoSed and defaced several Dutch websites, displaying the Turkish flag and leaving clear pro-Turkey messages (Fox-IT 2017). Southeast Asia too remains a fertile ground for hacktivism. An example is the campaign of defacements launched in 2017–18 by a group of young Indonesian hacktivists known as Owl Squad. Owl Squad has mainly been active against Indonesian governmental websites to support the residents of Benoa Bay. The bay is at the centre of the Indonesian government’s reclamation efforts to increase tourism. Owl Squad, in line with the local population, claims the plan is part of an irresponsible environmental policy that will severely undermine the already delicate ecosystem of Benoa Bay. The group also defaced European and Northern American websites to show Western populations how their tourism is indirectly creating negative consequences for the Benoa Bay community. Focused primarily on illegal activities, Owl Squad has embraced the original spirit of hacktivism. The group avoids permanent disruptive operations and often saves the settings of websites before defacing them, allowing agency or a ‘quick fix’ to be returned to the legitimate owners of websites (Squad 2018). In this way, it can be argued that Owl Squad’s interpretation of hacktivism gives credibility to the group’s approach, allowing for wider acceptance of its activities among a broader public including the media and security industries.

Conclusion Hacktivism has clearly evolved over the last thirty-five years. From the first defacements and DDoS attacks that were mainly used to raise awareness of specific sociopolitical issues, hacktivism has become more pragmatic, more diverse and even more ‘aggressive’. It is often performed by resolute hacktivists with good hacking skills, who engage in various forms of protests to seek concrete and tangible outcomes. Anonymous has lost and changed its initial spirit, becoming a more serious and politically engaged collective, able to influence a whole new generation of hacktivists. While

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these developments highlight the potential of the group, this progress does not come without its limits and I believe it will take time before another group can meet the same success as Anonymous. Nowadays, hacktivism has partially gone back to its hacking origins: smaller groups which work underground, often undetected, seeking specific targets and exploitable information rather than the constant attention of the media. It could be argued that many hacktivists have partially abandoned the purpose of involving the average internet user and instead pursued a self-made form of justice, manifesting their own ethical or moral ideals, which are more in line with a ‘new’ hacktivism mode of vigilante justice on the one side and of patriotism on the other. As long as geopolitical tensions exist, so will hacktivism. Whether hacktivism will completely supersede traditional forms of protests remains to be seen. The more cyberspace becomes essential in people’s lives, the more we will see hacktivists exploiting its weaknesses and strengths to promote their cause, whether good or bad.

Notes 1 Slang abbreviation for ‘laughing out loud’: fun or amusement, mainly at another’s expense. It became popular among the users of 4chan forum and Anonymous’ members. 2 See Samuel (2004); Jordan & Taylor (2004). 3 The expressions ‘hackers on steroids’ and ‘Internet hate machine’ coined by Fox’s journalists after the first operations of Anonymous became extremely popular among hacktivists (Coleman 2014). 4 Low Orbit Ion Cannon is an open source network stress testing and denial-ofservice attack application used to launch a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

References Coleman, G. (2014), Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, New York: Verso. Denning, D.E. (2001), ‘Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy’, in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (eds), Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, 239–88, Santa Monica, US.: RAND. Denning, D.E. (2015), ‘The Rise of Hacktivism’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Available online: http://journal.georgetown.edu/the-riseof-hacktivism/ (accessed 13 March 2017).

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Dominguez, R. (2008), ‘Electronic Civil Disobedience Post-9/11’, Third Text, 22 (5): 661–70. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820802442454 (accessed 18 March 2017). Fish, A. and L. Follis (2016), ‘Gagged and Doxed: Hacktivism’s Self-Incrimination Complex’, International Journal of Communication, 10: 3281–300. Available online: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5386/1707 (accessed 6 March 2017). Fox-IT. (2017), Turkish Hacktivism Activity. Available online: https://foxitsecurity. files.wordpress.com/2017/03/20170323_turkish_hacktivism_writeup_public_ final.pdf (accessed 6 September 2019). Johnson, B. and D. Stephens (2017), Founder of Hacker Group LulzSec Explains the Chaos of Hacktivism. Available online: https://www.marketplace. org/2017/04/28/tech/founder-hacker-group-lulzsec-explains-chaoshacktivism (accessed 28 April 2017). Jordan, T. and P. Taylor (2004), Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause. London: Routledge. Karatzogianni, A. (2014), Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994–2014: The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and Cyberconflict. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Larson, S. (2013), Anonymous Puts Plight of Rohingya People in Twitter Spotlight. Available online: https://venturebeat.com/2013/03/25/anonymous-puts-plightof-rohingya-people-in-twitter-spotlight/ (accessed 27 February 2019). Melucci, A. (1995), ‘The Process of Collective Identity’, in H. Johnston and B. Klandermans (eds), Social Movements and Culture, 41–63, Minneapolis, US.: University of Minnesota Press. Milan, S. (2013), Social Movements and Their Technologies. Wiring Social Change, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Milan, S. (2015), ‘Hacktivism as a radical media practice’, in C. Atton (ed), The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media, 550–60, New York, US.: Routledge. Olson, P. (2013), We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency, London: William Heinemann. Owl Squad. Interviewed by: Romagna, M. (March–April 2018). Peters, M. (2015), ‘“We are Anonymous”: Can Hacktivism Help in the Fight against ISIS?’ Centre for Geopolitics & Security in Realism Studies. Available online: http://cgsrs.org/publicationDetail.php?id=35 (accessed 6 September 2019). Samuel, A.W. (2004), ‘Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation’, PhD diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Sauter, M. (2014), The Coming Swarm, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Skynet Central. Interviewed by: Romagna, M. (December 2016–May 2017). Sorell, T. (2015), ‘Human Rights and Hacktivism: The Cases of Wikileaks and Anonymous’, Journal of Human Right Practice, 7 (3): 391–410. Available online: 10.1093/jhuman/huv012 (accessed 6 September 2019). Yip, M. and C. Webber (2011), ‘Hacktivism: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration of China’s Cyber Warriors’, in D. De Roure and S. Poole (eds), Proceedings of the 3rd International Web Science Conference, 15–17 June 2011, Koblenz, Germany, New York: ACM.

6 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista: The Protofeminism and Radical Organizing of Journalist Jovita Idár Annette M. Rodríguez

The interrelated struggles and campaigns of Jovita Idár bear a tremendous relationship to twenty-first-century activist social movements. Concerns such as police and state violence, so powerfully resisted by Black Lives Matter; the questions of US-Mexico border militarization and the rights of the undocumented; the insistence on community land commons seen in Indigenous counteractions against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines; global anti-war campaigns; insistence on educational equity and access for marginalized people; and the continuing concerns of feminist campaigns were all central to Idár’s organizing efforts – long before women had the right to vote and long before signs reading ‘No dogs or Mexicans allowed’ were removed from public schools and restaurants (‘No Mexicans Allowed’ 2017, Orozco 2009). Tracing the activist, educational and journalist activities of Jovita Idár provides opportunities to examine the development of rhetorical devices calling for political participation by an otherwise disenfranchised population, as well as bi-national networks of resistance, whose attention centred on embodied experience and lived conditions. We might also expose the largely masculinist narrative of resistance in the US southwest borderlands as both inadequate and inaccurate.

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In countless situations as Mexicans and Mexican Americans were threatened with violence, attacked and killed, the teacher, writer, organizer and activist Jovita Idár would insinuate herself – offering her talents, training, voice and body as resistance.

The lynching of Antonio Gómez and La Crónica’s campaign of journalistic resistance On the evening of 19 June 1911 just before 9.00 pm, over 100 spectators assembled in Thorndale, Texas, to participate in and watch the lynching of a thirteen-year-old Mexican child named Antonio Gómez (‘Lynching of Boy Deed of Fiends’ 1911). The child was dragged by men and their horses with a weight around his neck; in their first attempt to lynch the boy, six men hanged Gómez from a telegraph pole using a ladder. The boy kicked free gasping for air, landing on the ground only to be repeatedly kicked in the head and pulled back onto the telegraph pole using the chain around his neck. Over 100 of ‘the best citizens of Thorndale’ watched the slow and brutal murder of the child until he was hanged to death, after which Gómez’s body was dragged through the streets of Thorndale until it began to fall apart (Washington 1912). In an uncommon occurrence, members of both the black press and the dominant press reported on and condemned the lynching of a Mexican in south Texas. Booker T. Washington included the murder of young Antonio Gómez in The Chicago Defender’s summary of the twelve months previous of lynchings in the nation. Washington emphasized that local reports noted the child ‘was but 13 or 14 years old, and he weighed less than fifty pounds … he was in dying condition when he reached the place where he was finally hanged’ (Washington 1912). While Antonio Gómez’s lynching was covered in local and national media, the Laredo, Texas-based, Spanishlanguage newspaper La Crónica distinguished itself by not only detailing the brutality of the murderers and spectator-participants, but La Crónica also emphasized the humanity of the child. Narciso Idár, publisher of La Crónica, was careful to begin his articles with Antonio Gómez’s name, age and weight: ‘Antonio Gómez es el nombre de un niño de edad y de 40 á 45 libras de peso, que fué lynchado la noche dé lunes’ (‘Antonio Gómez is the name of the child who weighed forty or forty-five pounds, who was lynched Monday night’). In his coverage of the Thorndale community’s murder of Gómez, Idár referred to Gómez repeatedly as the child ‘el niño’, reinforcing the malice of the attack on the child by a group of adult killers (‘Cobarde, infame e inhumano lynchamiento’. Idár1911). The coming months brought trials for those identified as the lynchers, but ultimately the murderers went unpunished (Villanueva 2017: 78). Though

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there were over 100 spectator-participants for the slow killing, reportage of the lynching throughout Texas worked to distance the killers from guilt and from the general population. Judge W.E. English conducted an enquiry into the lynching, and with the help of the local newspapers: Judge English said the lynching was done by half a dozen men and that the report that the “Best citizens of Thorndale” participated in the lynching was untrue … Judge English said that many of the leading citizens of Thorndale had co-operated with him to secure all the facts. (Recer 1994: 109–10) Yet, La Crónica devoted several column inches on the lynching of the Mexican child condemning the attackers and the community at large (‘Cobarde, infame e inhumano lynchamiento’. Idár 1911). In the story titled ‘Valiente cobardia de los linchadores de Thorndale’ (‘The Brave Cowardice of the Thorndale Lynchers’) unlike other media outlets who covered the murder of Gómez, La Crónica did not simply condemn the violence, but went further by explicitly mocking the assembled killers. Further La Crónica connected the murder to a continuum of largescale injustices against Mexicans in Texas. La Crónica made explicit the relationship between racist societal inequities and the lack of educational opportunities for Mexican children and their vulnerability to violence, with the Gómez murder as a brutal example (‘Cobarde, infame e inhumano lynchamiento’. Idár 1911). Idár called for educational opportunities for ‘Méxican-texanos’ and called for the unity of talented and intelligent men to combat the ignorant. Idár called for the establishment of fraternal orders to fight ‘La guerra en Texas, en contra de los mexicanos no es una Guerra official’/‘The war in Texas against Mexicans, which is not an official war’ (‘Cobarde, infame e inhumano lynchamiento’. Idár 1911). La Crónica followed their reportage on the torture and killing of Antonio Gómez with printed letters to the editor that congratulated La Crónica for their coverage of the child’s brutal, public murder. M. Guerra (1911) wrote, ‘Ojalá que como usteo h’u i era más periodistas que sa lieran á la defensa de nuestra raza, cuando se trata de hechos tan vergonzosos y tan infamantes para el – país clásico de la libertad’ (‘It is my hope that here will be more journalists who come to the defense of our race, when it comes to facts so shameful and so infamous for the – classical country of freedom’). Guerra emphasized the role of the Spanish-language press, along with his critique of the US failures as a whole, situating the murder and injustice scornfully in the ‘país clásico de la libertad’.1 Indeed, the Idár family’s publishing enterprise has been characterized by José E. Limon as ‘a campaign of journalistic resistance’, and members of the Idár family would write and distribute the family’s weekly newspaper, while also establishing Evolución published by Narciso Idár’s children Jovita and Eduardo (Límon 1974: 86).

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Jovita Idár as educator, journalist and activist for the political organization of marginalized Tejano peoples Jovita Idár was particularly moved by the public lynching of the Mexican child, Antonio Gómez. Idár was a writer for La Crónica, co-publisher of Evolución, founder of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, one of the organizers of the Cruz Blanca (which gave medical care to those caught in the border battles of the Mexican Revolution), a woman who established schools for Mexican and Mexican-American children, and a teacher. In addition to her tireless journalistic work, Idár had focused efforts on the extension of both Englishand Spanish-literacy to Mexican and Mexican-American children and raised funds to open free kindergartens (‘Our Texas’ 1989). Her commitment to establishing schools that served children disallowed from even the most basic of educational opportunities followed her first job after obtaining a teaching certificate. In 1903, Idár began teaching at Los Ojuelos, a village that had only 178 residents (Danini 2017). There she witnessed the lack of basic facilities for impoverished children and became committed to building facilities and educating Mexican and Mexican-American children for free. While establishing schools and working as a teacher, Idár studied for and passed the US census exam – a strategic move that allowed for a more accurate count of the as yet underserved populations. Idár’s prescient understanding of the significance of US census has continued resonance in 2018, as the US Federal Administration worked to alter census data collection, a change that would require people declare their citizenship status – a first in US census history. This change was designed to undercount immigrant, and in particular, Latinx populations (Barbash 2019). Such a change, as Idár was aware over a century ago, would strip resources from already underserved peoples. Idár worked to become the only certified census taker in Laredo in Ward 2 (‘Lady Census Taker’), foundational to pressing for economic and structural support for Mexican and Mexican-American peoples in the area. After releasing an essay ‘El Estudiante Laredense’, (‘The Laredan Student’) published in both English and ‘castellano,’ Idár was celebrated in Laredo’s El Democrata Fronterizo (1911) as ‘a young, intelligent and notable writer’.2 Idár soon resigned her position at the Los Ojuelos school to join La Crónica and, to independently found schools serving Mexican and MexicanAmerican children, such a move was augmented by her tactically precise data collection via the US census process. Idár’s clarity of vision aligned with the mission of the newspaper – to ‘work for the progress and the industrial, moral and intellectual development of the Mexican inhabitants of Texas’ (Danini 2017).

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For Idár, who had so keenly focused her energies on Mexican and Mexican-American children, the events of 19 June 1911 would have been devastating. That year, weeknights – like the Monday Antonio Gómez was lynched – Idár was teaching Spanish in her home from 5.00 to 9.00 pm (‘Little Locals’; ‘Local News’). As she sat instructing her students, the child Antonio Gómez was being chased, dragged. As Jovita Idár rehearsed conjugations and colours with her students – blanco, negro, marron, yo soy, tú eres, nosotros somos – forty-five-pound Antonio Gómez struggled, gasped and fought for his life. Certainly this Mexican child could have been one of Idár’s students. And while it is possible that the child’s weight may have been misreported – average weight for a healthy twelve-year-old is about ninety pounds – it was more likely that Gómez was significantly younger – nine or ten years of age. Two months later, Idár wrote in La Crónica: A great part of the scorn with which the foreigners (Americans) around us see us results from the lack of education, and, moreover, because of the gross ignorance of an immense majority of our compatriots and because it is no longer easy to educate those great masses of workers, we can endeavor, even to the point of sacrifice, if necessary, to enlighten our children so that at least we can avert this evil in the future. (Danini 2017) Deceptively domestic, the twenty-six-year-old educator became a powerful journalist and organizer in Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Examination of the complex constellation of Jovita Idár’s founding of schools, La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, the Cruz Blanca, and her engagement in the Spanish-language journalistic tradition suggest a model for how those most marginalized – by citizenship status, racialization, economics, rurality and language – organized resistance in newly created spaces of racial terror. Three months after the lynching of the child Antonio Gómez, a political conference of over 400 Tejano leaders was held in Laredo, Texas. This group of Tejano leaders was made up of teachers, journalists, representatives from mutual aid societies and local Tejano socialites and called El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (Acosta n.d.; Límon 1974). The Idár family invited Tejano lodge and mutualista society members along with the Mexican consuls statewide. The meeting, which also sought participation of Tejanas and Mexicans specifically from both sides of the border, sought ‘to advance education, culture, and civil rights for Mexican Americans’ (Montejano 1987: 116). The assembly – the first of its kind – was held to address the loss of land to new white migrant-settlers, to address discrimination in the school system, and to clearly ‘denounce the pattern of officially sanctioned lynchings of Mexicans’ (Montejano 1987: 116).3 For decades, thousands of Mexicans killed or ‘disappeared’ in Texas appeared in the brush, on riverbanks, on streets, in newspapers and in the public consciousness.

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Indeed, in North from México: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States, one of the earliest comprehensive studies of Mexicans in the Southwest first published in 1949, Carey McWilliams asserted: ‘more Mexicans were lynched in the Southwest between 1865 and 1920 than blacks in other parts of the South’ (Sandoval 1979: 4). An important factor was the enormous increase in populations of white settler colonials in Texas. In the decade that preceded El Primer Congreso Mexicanista, a massive population increase would transform south Texas – between 1900 and 1910, the population would increase 47 per cent, and, by 1920, double again. Texas would double its population from 1900 to 1920. This population increase included refugee Mexicans, but also represented a huge influx of migrant Euro-Americans from the US Midwest (Ribb 2001: 72). While much of the emphasis on population growth in Texas at the turn of the twentieth century has been attached to immigration from Mexico, other factors drove migrations into Texas, such as new technologies like irrigation and the railroad, which opened up opportunities for travel, agriculture and commerce. New White settlers in south Texas sought to acquire Mexican land, as much of the lower Rio Grande Valley was deeded by a Spanish land grant.4 Indeed, in 1910 almost all of Hidalgo County was Mexicanowned. Anti-Mexican violence coupled white supremacy with land lust, and many companies and speculators benefitted from both legal and extralegal processes of land disentitlement. For instance, the Colquitt Act announced that properties could be summarily seized anywhere in Texas for nonpayment of taxes (‘Deeds Will Be Good’ 1900). Tax sales were announced in English only, disadvantaging Spanish-speaking Mexicans. In addition, the notices were posted inside local Sheriff’s offices and courthouses, places not frequented by Mexicans (Isbell 2004). It was these conditions that disadvantaged Mexicans and MexicanAmericans that Jovita Idár sought to counteract through her campaigns of literacy and her published offers of legal document translation. Idár’s push for education was not an engagement in progressive respectability politics, instead, hers was a pragmatic and radical practice aimed directly at protecting the property and the lives of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Texas. Education was not assimilative – but necessary for protection, protest and a struggle for justice. Idár’s legacy was commemorated in the 2016 exhibit Life and Death on the Border at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum organized by the public history group ‘Refusing to Forget’. Monica Muñoz Martinez – one of the group’s founding members – writes of Idár section of the exhibit: ‘the cross-border organizing, journalistic traditions, efforts for women’s suffrage, and challenges to racism and discrimination received recognition for creating a foundation for later civil rights organizations like the League of United Latin American citizens (LULAC), La Raza Unida political party, and the Chicano movement’ (Martinez 2018: 284).

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Further, Idár’s reportage of anti-Mexican violence resisted narratives still in currency today. Historians of the US West position violence and lynching as inevitable historical products of westward expansion. The few works that have examined violence against Mexicans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often conflate lynching murders with generalized stories of ‘frontier violence’ and ‘local vigilantism’, suggesting the West was a lawless land with rampant vigilantism. In the twenty-first century, the US-Mexico border has continued to be constructed as a place of expected violence, where the deaths and murders of Latinx peoples are normalized. Idár’s journalistic documentation and resistance to anti-Mexican violence petitioned to legal systems, documented legal systems, resist the ubiquitous ‘wild west’ narratives.5

Jovita Idár early feminist activist The meeting of the Gran Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección also marked Jovita Idár’s founding of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women), which was the first attempt in Mexican-American history to form a feminist social movement. The 1911 Congreso marks a fascinating and unexpected moment of proto-feminism where Mexican and MexicanAmerican women claimed space as public speakers and social movement organizers, and specifically ‘promote[d] cultural and moral values among Texas Mexicans, provide[d] protection from abuse by public authorities, and combat[ted] segregation of Texas Mexican students’ (Acosta n.d.). Idár’s founding of La Liga was one of the most potent results of the Congreso Mexicanista gathering, developed to resist anti-Mexican violence and racism, and to support property and educational efforts for Mexicans/MexicanAmericans. As the founding president of the La Liga, Jovita Idár focused on education and raising funds for impoverished Mexicans and MexicanAmericans (Danini 2017; Limón 1974: 98). La Liga, once established, was run by working-class Mexican and Mexican-American women who established and operated schools of their own founding for impoverished children in the US-Mexico borderlands. Its members supplied food and clothing to the community’s families and raised funds through sponsorship of literary and theatrical productions. La Liga is one of the first known attempts by MexicanAmerican women to organize for both social and political causes. Literacy was critically at the centre of all La Liga’s efforts. The practices of La Liga, with its interlocking concerns of the alleviation of conditions of violence and poverty, the extension of literacy, and the production of spaces for literary endeavours, were all inextricably linked to the Spanish language journalistic tradition. While writing for La Crónica, Idár ensured La Liga’s activities were publicized, and in 1916, she founded another newspaper: Evolución.

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Alongside this she contributed to the newspaper El Progreso, where she penned scathing editorials and began anti-violence movements for the protection of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.6 These journalistic practices presented an alternative to dominant English-language sources and were critical to organizing community campaigns of resistance. Further, these endeavours supported community imaginations and engaged practices of mutual support and resourcefulness. In the social media of their time – the society pages of the weekly newspapers – Idár and other members of the radical La Liga were careful to cultivate attractive public personas and to deploy reminders that they were benevolent school teachers. Details of events geared towards children would associate La Liga and Idár with genteel expectations. As Idár and other women journalists penned editorials critical of the new white supremacist social order under pseudonyms in Spanish language papers, they simultaneously constructed domestic scenes with children in articles about La Liga and its members. La Liga’s activists strategically made themselves hypervisible as teachers of kindergartners, and invisible as revolutionaries and subversives, hidden in plain sight in Spanish. Newspapers would report on the organizing of children’s birthday parties by the teachers – one such teacher Leonor Magnón Villegas, who would soon co-found La Cruz Blanca (The White Cross), a medical aid society, with Idár. The Laredo Weekly, an Englishlanguage newspaper, would describe the birthday party for four-year-old Raymond Jose Martin – an afternoon party that included ‘the breaking of the piñata … refreshments of ice cream cake, candies and fruit … and then more games [that] concluded the afternoon’s pleasure’ (‘Given Birthday Party’). Such scenes would render harmless the powerful social organizers Idár, members of La Liga and other Mexican women activists. Yet, this was not only a domesticating strategy. Idár and La Liga members were deeply attentive to the everyday lived experiences of Mexicans and Mexican children. They were attentive to not only provide access to education and the arts, but also to the experience and expression of joy. In the ‘May Festival’, children of the Laredo Kindergarten established by Leonor Villegas de Magnón and Liga teachers would perform a tradition song ‘Los Ratones’. Laredo Weekly Times reported that the ‘eight tiny tots crept on to the stage, and from their costuming as little gray rats to the way they rendered their selection they brought down the house.’ Embodying the little rats was followed by a performance of the ‘Butterfly Dance’ where ‘daintily-winged little dancers were indeed very much like their fragile namesakes flitting about gracefully as though from flower to flower’. The sweetness of attention to staging, music and costuming would have been a tremendous relief in the lives of the marginalized and impoverished children whose families were negotiating the instability and exploitation of the US-Mexico borderlands. The event, held at the town’s Royal Opera House, would allow them and their families to experience theatre spaces in which they would otherwise

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be unwelcome. The crowded theatre would also witness a wonderfully feminist version of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Joan of Arc’ overture and a resistant ode to the Japanese people – though the US population had been awash in state-sponsored anti-Japanese propaganda. The teachers created a Japanese scene for a play with ‘elaborate Japanese costumes, with kimona [sic], fan and parasol’, meant to celebrate the country the United States had declared actual and ideological war against. Yet, against the clearly honorific intent of the Laredo teachers, the local newspaper listed the dramatic players in the Japanese playlet as ‘the Little Japs’ (‘The May Festival’). Idár would continue to insert radical political commentary into her community work, for instance during the celebration of the fourth anniversary of the YWCA that she organized. Idár included addresses such as: ‘The YWCA and Social and Economic Problems Affecting Women in the United States’, ‘The War, Women, and the YWCA in Europe’, ‘Women of the Orient Face to Face with Modern Problems’ and ‘Mexico, the Link Between Two Continents’. Betraying her proletariat leanings, the program was opened by the overture from ‘Poet and Peasant’ (‘Celebrated Anniversaries’).

La Cruz Blanca and assistance to the Mexican Revolution All the while engaging in journalism, resisting racist, anti-Mexican violence, tutoring community members in the evening, establishing free schools for impoverished children and promoting a rich cultural life for the Mexican and Mexican-American communities of south Texas, Idár and her network of Mexican and Mexican-American women established and joined La Cruz Blanca. La Cruz Blanca was founded in 1913 Leonor Villegas de Magnón. Magnón, Idár and members of La Liga became medics of the Mexican Revolution and ‘crossed into Mexico and began tending to wounded soldiers’ (Danini 2017).7 The battles of the Mexican Revolution continued for years as various armies struggled for control of the country. The women of La Cruz Blanca engaged in on the ground actions – many of them teachers, who crossed countless times at Laredo to provide medical attention to the wounded of the Mexican Revolution. Reporters on the US side of the border noted the conditions were too dangerous for them to investigate and give reports of the battle conditions even as members of La Cruz Blanca put themselves in danger while providing medical care and while informing the media on both sides of the US-Mexico border of wartime conditions. The Laredo Times noted the role of La Cruz Blanca and the paper’s unwillingness to send its own correspondents to the scenes of battle.

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Many have been killed on both sides, and there are a great many wounded reported. Some of the wounded have been brought to this side for treatment at the local branch of the Red Cross Society [La Cruz Blanca], which is under the charge of Mrs. Leonor V. Magnón, while others are being treated in the hospital across the river … It is impossible for any reporter of The Times to cross the river to get the information which we would like to give our readers, and for this reason alone we ask their indulgence until such time as we can obtain the absolute facts of the fighting, when we shall be glad to publish all that we can learn of the battles, their results and their full details. (‘Eager for News’) Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s home, which included a preparatory school she had established with La Liga, was eventually transformed into a makeshift wartime hospital. Even while threatened by US Calvary, Texas Rangers and local white Texans and being accused of sedition, La Cruz Blanca provided aid, comfort and saved lives on both sides of the arbitrary border. Magnón and Idár resisted the US Army, who rounded up combatants crossing the river north in search of aid (mostly members of Venustiano Carranza’s revolutionary army). They devised elaborate disguises for bleeding soldiers, changing them into donated street clothes to get them to medical help on Magnón’s property. These were drastic and desperate actions as many of the Mexicans were suffering critically. Some horrible sights are to be witnessed at the two emergency hospitals established in this city by the local Red Cross society [La Cruz Blanca], who are taking care of the wounded rebels in two places—the Magnón preparatory school room and the Villages garage just completed. Here you can see wounded rebels almost disemboweled, some with their arms and legs in shreds, others with their breasts penetrated by bullets and some with feet or hands shattered. (‘Horrible Scenes at Hospital’) In 1914, even while occupied with bandaging and treating increasing numbers of the wounded, Magnón and Idár argued to have over forty such Mexican men released from custody at Fort McIntosh. The women appealed to Texas Governor Oscar B. Colquitt and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan until Bryan ordered the men freed (Jones n.d.). These women worked as a collective, as dependent on assistance and support from the local community as the combatants were on them. Medical supplies and clothes were donated to La Cruz Blanca; ‘visitors’ to soldiers provided disguises for the men pursued by US state power (de Magnón 1961).8 As a journalist, Jovita Idár found herself consistently on two battlefields. Journalism was dangerous business in Texas. Carlos Morales Wood, the editor of Valentine’s Patria Mexicana, was shot in 1914 between five and nine times outside of the Palace Drugstore. Texas Rangers Ira Cline and

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H.L. Roberson called their attack a response to ‘resisting arrest’. The two Texas Rangers explained they had an arrest warrant for Morales Wood as he had ‘accused rangers, soldiers and Americans … of being murderers, cut throats and thieves’ in Patria Mexicana. Another local paper, The Alpine Avalanche, agreed, arguing that Morales Wood’s journalistic work ‘incited riot and created prejudice’ (McNamara 2001). Threats, attacks and murders of outspoken Mexicans and Mexican Americans became even more open and widespread as ‘black lists’ of ‘bad Mexicans’ were circulated, and groups of white authorities and citizens terrorized Mexicans. In fact, at least half of all Mexican families would leave the Lower Rio Grande Valley during September and October of 1915 (Investigation of Mexican Affairs 1919, 1181–1184). Idár found herself in one of her most life-threatening situations in a confrontation with the Texas Rangers. She came close to being killed not while eluding live fire and hostile authorities at the border, but while working the letterpress at El Progreso in 1914. In a 1984 interview (Idár 1984), her younger brother Anquilino described the campaign of intimidation: My sister was standing at the door when Hicks, Charlie Ramsey, and another Ranger went to El Progreso and she stood at the door, says, ‘Where you going?’ Says, ‘Want to go inside, could you please step aside?’ And my sister says, ‘No. You have come to this door and I am standing here and you cannot come in here because it’s against the law.’ And so my mother was worried about my sister, because they gonna’ kill her. So daddy said, ‘No, they won’t kill her. If she stands her ground.’ So she stood at the door. What they did the next morning real early, about 5 o’clock in the morning, my sister wasn’t there so they broke the door. They had hammers. Sledge hammers, and they broke the line of that machine, hit the keyboard, hit the press, all the type, they threw it on the floor like that … the loose type that was on the stands … they pulled all these boxes and emptied them on the floor. Wrecked everything. They broke the press … And they broke the windows, left them open and everything. And then they went out. But there was nothing we could do. Nothing my sister could do, my father, or anybody. (Idár 1984) The Texas Rangers eventually succeeded in shutting down El Progresso. While they sought to silence the threat of Idár’s courageous activist journalism, Idár would return to La Crónica, and later after her marriage and relocation to San Antonio, she continued her life of activism and advocacy. In San Antonio, Idár established a free kindergarten, translated for Spanishspeaking patients at the county hospital, edited and wrote for a Methodist newsletter, and became active in local progressive politics. In the face of virulent anti-Mexican hostility and violence, Idár’s relentless educational,

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organizing and journalistic efforts continued. Ultimately, diabetes and tuberculosis would accomplish what anti-Mexican white supremacy could not – Idár’s life of tremendous service and struggle would end in 1946.

Conclusion By utilizing Idár’s work to make visible the contours of twentieth-century proto-feminism at the US-Mexico border, we engage in something exceeding a recovery project or a counter-narrative. Idár as a teacher, organizer and creative centre of the Spanish language periodical tradition is not merely a representational intervention. Examining her work and her practices allows entry into a kind of ontological question of, what does it feel like, what does it mean to be in the newly created spaces of racial terror? And how must we persistently resist terror with courage and joy? As was true a century ago, political and social conditions at the USMexico border call for transnational networks of support led by networks of local community activists. As continuities like ethno-racial inequities, refugee migrations and the criminalization of activism are exacerbated by a bellicose US immigration complex that includes the US Border Patrol, US Customs and Border Protection, US Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), US National Guard troops and state and local authorities, it becomes even more pressing for targeted immigrant populations to be supported by political activists and actors on their behalf. Resistance to anti-immigrant rhetoric that has increasingly become lethally anti-immigrant in federal policy during the Trump–Pence era requires the actions modelled by Jovita Idár and her protofeminist organizer compatriots. Idár demonstrated the enormous capacity of an independent press to unveil state injustice – inviting retributive attacks from the Texas Rangers. Today, journalists documenting abuses against immigrant asylum seekers (along with immigrant advocate organizations) have been targeted by US federal authorities. Operation Secure Line, a secret US federal database, was recently revealed to list ‘ten journalists, seven of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, and 47 people from the U.S. and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles “unknown” for targeting at the US-Mexico border’.9 Such targeting by US federal government agencies suggests the continued relevance and promise of an independent media documenting injustice. The lynching of the Mexican child Antonio Gómez spurred some of the most passionate and pressing coverage by Spanish-language newspapers in 1911. Today the deaths of Mexican and Central American children on the US-Mexico border are not accomplished by mobs, but instead in the custody of US border authorities. In 2018, on Christmas Eve, an eight-

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year-old Guatemalan boy Felipe Gomez Alonzo died in US custody while being detained. Just weeks earlier, a seven-year-old girl Jakelin Caal died while being detained by US Border Patrol. These are not the spectacular lynchings of a century ago, yet the loss of life of children separated from their parents seeking asylum (largely from Central America) reminds us that the refugee crisis that accompanied the Mexican Revolution mirrors the refugee crisis brought by US covert-interventionist wars in Latin America and their states’ resultant instability. As Jovita Idár and La Liga Femenil Mexicanista and the Cruz Blanca had done a century ago, immigrant rights activists continue to resist inhumane conditions for displaced peoples and border crossers, focusing on the lived conditions and unnecessary deaths of children.

Notes 1 As A. Gabriel Meléndez chronicles in So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958, more than 190 Spanish language newspapers were founded in the Southwest between 1880 and 1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 6. 2 Notably, the essay was said to have been published in both English and Castilian, a perceived-elevated Peninsular Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain. 3 Four years after the meeting of Tejano and Mexican leaders, violence against Mexicans had escalated so much so that in 1915 The San Antonio Express reported the ‘finding of dead bodies of Mexicans, suspected for various reasons of being connected with the [bandit] troubles, has reached a point where it creates little or no interest.’ The San Antonio Daily Express, 11 September 1915. 4 There is excellent work on the transition from Mexican-owned Texas land to white-owned Texas land. Hidalgo County archivist Fran Isbell’s We Are Cousins is a ranch history available online at http://www.wearecousins.info/ blog/?v=7516fd43adaa

In addition, James Lewellyn Allhands’ Gringo Builders (Joplin, Missouri, Dallas, Texas, 1931); Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Guide to Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in South Texas (Austin: Texas General Land Office, 1988); and J. Lee and Lillian J. Stambaugh, The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (San Antonio: Naylor, 1954).

5 See Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 and Mari Matsuda’s (2004). Law, Race, and the Border: The El Paso Salt War of 1877 in Harvard Law Review, 117 (3): 941–63. 6 After La Crónica folded following Nicasio Idár’s death in 1914, Jovita Idár began writing for El Progreso, published in Laredo by Villegas de Magnón’s brother.

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7 The tradition of women nurses was exceeded when many in La Cruz Blanca joined Carranza’s revolutionary army. See Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s serial memoir of the period, ‘La Rebelde,’ Laredo Weekly Times, 16 April 1961, 16 May 1961. 8 After being five times decorated by the armies of the Mexican Revolution for her bravery, Leonor Villegas de Magnón would return to act as the principal of the Laredo Kindergarten in 1921, post–Mexican Revolution. ‘The May Festival’, Laredo Weekly Times, 29 May 1921. 9 Tom Jones, Mari Payton, and Bill Feather, ‘Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates through a Secret Database,’ NBC San Diego 7 https://www.nbcsandiego.com/investigations/ Source-Leaked-Documents-Show-the-US-Government-Tracking-Journalists-andAdvocates-Through-a-Secret-Database-506783231.html

References Acosta, T.P. (n.d.), ‘Congreso Mexicanista.’ Handbook of Texas Online. Available online: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/vecyk (accessed 6 September 2019). Barbash, Fred (2019), ‘How Wilbur Ross “Aggressively” Tried to Alter the 2020 Census and “Conceal” Why, According to a Federal Judge.’ The Washington Post. 15 January. Danini, C. (2017), ‘1900s Journalist and Educator Jovita Idár Championed Rights of Mexican Americans.’ San Antonio Express-News. 25 December. El Democrata Fronterizo (1911), ‘La Disciplina Escolar.’ 28 October. Hood County News (1989), ‘Our Texas: Texas Women Celebrate Achievements.’ 1 February. The Houston Post (1900), ‘Deeds Will Be Good: The State Can Pass Valid Title through Land Bid in at [sic] Tax Sale.’ 17 May: 6. Idár, A. (1984), interview. Audio courtesy Eric Idár Mendoza, San Antonio–based cinematographer and great-great-grandson of Federico Idár, Jovita Idár’s brother. Idár Mendoza is currently filming a documentary on Jovita Idár. Transcription of interview with Aquilino I. and Guadalupe Idár available at University of Texas at San Antonio, 1984-10-26. http://lib.utsa.edu/ specialcollections/reproductions/copyright Idár, N. (1911), ‘Cobarde, infame e inhumano lynchamiento de un jovencito mexicano en Thordale, Milam Co., Texas.’ La Crónica. 29 June. Idár, N. (1911), ‘Valiente cobardia de los linchadores de Thorndale.’ La Crónica. 13 July. Investigation of Mexican Affairs, 54: Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Sixty-Sixth Congress, First Session, Pursuant to S. Res. 106, Directing the Committee on Foreign Relations to Investigate the Matter of Outrages on Citizens of the United States in Mexico (Washington, DC: United States Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), 1181–4.

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Isbell, F. (2004), [Film] Interview in Border Bandits, Dallas, Texas: Trans-Pecos Production. Jones, N.B. (n.d.), ‘Villegas de Magon, Leonor.’ Handbook of Texas Online. Available online: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fvi19 (accessed 6 September 2019). La Crónica. Guerra, M. (1911), ‘Importante carta.’ 20 July. Laredo Weekly Times. (1920), ‘Celebrated Anniversaries.’ 7 March. Laredo Weekly Times. (1914), ‘Eager for News.’ 4 January. Laredo Weekly Times. (1921), ‘Given Birthday Party.’ 17 November. Laredo Weekly Times. (1914), ‘Horrible Scenes at Hospital.’ 4 January. Laredo Weekly Times. (1910), ‘Lady Census Taker.’ 10 April. Laredo Weekly Times. (1911), ‘Little Locals.’ 5 February. Laredo Weekly Times. (1921), ‘Local News.’ 26 June. Laredo Weekly Times. (1914), ‘Saw Some Horrible Sights.’ 4 January. Laredo Weekly Times. (1921), ‘The May Festival.’ 29 May. Limón, J.E. (1974), ‘El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo.’ Aztlán 5 (Spring, Fall). de Magnon, L.V. (1961), ‘La Rebelde.’ Laredo Weekly Times. 16 April and 16 May. Martinez, M.M. (2018), The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McNamara, J.D. (2001), ‘Murder in Marfa,’ 21 May 2001 Big Bend Sentinel, 5. Montejano, D. (1987), Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986, Austin: University of Texas Press. Nashville Tennessean (1911), ‘Lynching of Boy Deed of Fiends: Foulest of Blots on Good Name of Texas – Child of Only 13 Years Dragged behind Horse.’ 25 June, A1. ‘“No Mexicans Allowed”: School Segregation in the Southwest,’ Latino USA, 17 March 2017. Orozco, C.E. (2009), No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, Austin: University of Texas Press. Recer, D. (1994), Patrolling the Borders of Race, Gender, and Class: The Lynching Ritual and Texas Nationalism, 1850–1994, Thesis, University of Texas at Austin. Ribb, R.H. (2001), ‘José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers: Myth, Identity, and Power in South Texas, 1900–1920’, Diss., University of Texas at Austin. Sandoval, M. (1979), LULAC: Our Legacy, the First Fifty Years. Washington: LULAC. From the Refugia Castillo League of United Latin American Citizens papers, University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research (Box 1, Folder 1). Villanueva Jr., N. (2017), The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Washington, B.T. (1912), ‘Gods of Hemp Rope Indicted: The American People Must Put Their Foot Down on Lynch Law’, The Chicago Defender. 30 March, 1.

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The Art of Activism

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7 ‘Reggae Became the Main Transporter of Our Struggle … and Our Love’: Willie Brim – Cultural Custodian, Bush Doctor and Songman of the Buluwai People of North Queensland Victoria Grieve-Williams

This is a story about the life and works of an Aboriginal man from the Buluwai, Rainforest Bama, whose country is in the tablelands north of Cairns in North Queensland, Australia. The Rainforest Bama, people of the rainforest, are a distinctive group from other Buluwai, living in different regions and landscapes and notable for their small stature, unique to pockets of rainforest environments in Australia. This story is about a person who has adapted modern technology to further the aims of his people who were first colonized in the late nineteenth century, only four generations ago. The photograph introducing this chapter was taken in the 1890s and includes Willie’s great-grandfather and extended kin. Willie Brim, tribal elder and leader of the Buluwai people, was born in 1960. He has experienced what he calls three lives; firstly, the highly regimented ‘Christian’ lifestyle imposed by the Seventh Day Adventist Church that established the Mona Mona Mission on Buluwai lands (1930– 62); secondly, the advent of the hippie settlements around Kuranda in the

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FIGURE 7.1 Buluwandji young warriors preparing for ceremony being initiated into tribal life. Quartz crystal was used for cutting the skin during initiation. Each scar represents levels of initiation; the more scars, the higher the seniority level. Toby Brim (Tjiauwin), Willie’s great-grandfather, is pictured standing in the back row third from the left. Image courtesy of Willie Brim.

1970s and 1980s; and thirdly, the life of a traditional owner, accepting and practising responsibility for cultural rights and the revival of the music, song and dance of his people. His introduction to reggae was the catalyst for his transformation into a reggae guitarist and songwriter and the formation of the band Mantaka that has taken an Aboriginal message to the world. Willie lives on his own country, ‘out in the scrub’; about 15 kilometres from Kuranda, a town that is about 30 kilometres from Cairns, the main city in North Queensland. Because they live on their own lands, far from white settlement, the Buluwai people are considered to be a remote Aboriginal people in the Australian context. The media activities of the people in the remote ‘homelands’ of Australia are potentially another chapter in themselves. Aboriginal people have picked up new media with gusto and are developing music, radio, film (often shot on mobile phones), animation

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and products in local languages as well as English, and using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to share their culture and innovation. This chapter about Willie Brim and the Buluwai people is an example of this phenomenon that has its roots in the continuing Aboriginal culture of the Buluwai people.

‘We hardly listen to anything else’ When Willie Brim and other adolescents from the six Aboriginal families living at Mantaka were introduced to the music of Peter Tosh and Bob Marley in the 1970s, Willie found that it immediately spoke to him. It was the conscious lyrics that caught his attention. Willie had been brought up ‘in a strong Christian era and Bible talk was the main talk that people spoke’, so when he heard the music of Peter Tosh he ‘fell in love with the lyrics’. White hippies began to move up around Kuranda to live alternate lifestyles at this time and it was they who introduced reggae, jazz, blues and other contemporary music to Willie and his contemporaries. When he heard reggae music he was motivated to learn that style of play and then develop

FIGURE 7.2 Willie Brim outside his Grandad Cecil Brim’s house at Mantaka in Kuranda, 1979. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim.

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a new sound, one that everyone knew as Mantaka music, named from the place where they grew up, on the Barron River that was originally known as Mantaka. Willie was almost eighteen when this band was formed in 1977–8, and he was the youngest member. The year 2018 marks forty years of Aboriginal reggae in Australia. The band No Fixed Address also formed in Adelaide, South Australia, at the other end of the continent in the same year. Other members of the band Mantaka included Irwin Riley (bass and vocals), Ashley Coleman (lead guitarist), Alvin Duffin (drums) as well as Willie Brim (rhythm, lead singer). They were drawn from the six Aboriginal families that lived there and were jamming every afternoon after school. Willie began with a box guitar and they also used boxes and bottles for percussion. People from the newly arrived hippie community supported them by lending instruments when they needed them for gigs, until they were able to buy their own. The impact of reggae on Willie was such that firstly it made him relax. He had been raised on church music and solemn hymns within a highly disciplined and punitive lifestyle. The popular music of the time was country and western, for example, Loretta Lynn’s music in the film Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and the music of Patsy Kline (1950s–60s), heard on the radio and remembered for ‘the sweet voices of those girls’. These were the only genres of music they had heard. When he first heard the music of Bob Marley on cassette – the song ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ with the lyrics, ‘most people think the great god will come from the sky’ – Willie thought, ‘he is singing about us and the black people of the world!’ Listening to Marley’s lyrics more closely he realized he was talking about love and the truth of the suppression of black peoples’ rights. While it came across as radical and anti-white to a lot of people then, Willie realized reggae was how black people were expressing their worldview in their music and he thought ‘Wow!’ He then began to use his education at school, where he excelled at mathematics and English studies, to drive his music and his love of culture. He wanted to craft the band to take the Buluwai message to the world. In Willie’s words: ‘We have just been going on the love of music and believing that our message has to be spread worldwide.’ The band had been doing covers, mainly of rock and roll artists such as AC/DC, Chuck Berry, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Slade, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin – so they were known as rock and roll artists in the very beginning. Then Willie’s brother Ash suggested they try reggae. Willie, being the main songwriter, developed the song ‘Living in Kuranda’ that asserted the viability of their lifestyle in their community home and became one of their most popular songs. It took them a while to get the reggae sound right; Willie said it was like riding a bike, you fall off and then get right back on again – but then suddenly ‘Bang!’ They had it and it opened up the way to write many more reggae songs.

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Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine I say look all around now What do you see No concrete jungle But green trees Now everybody is feeling fine Cause the feeling of Kuranda Is in my mind Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine Well I’m going downtown To see my friends Who are just living Around the bend I’m going down For a party For a while To see my friends See my friends Waiting with a smile When you’re living in Kuranda Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine Living in Kuranda is fine Living in Kuranda is mine. Mantaka also had fun ‘reggaefying’ some of the old songs like ‘Put Your Sweet Lips a Little Closer to the Phone’, the Jim Reeves song ‘He’ll Have to Go’ and the Drifters song ‘Under the Boardwalk’, giving them a reggae feel that the audience enjoyed as they knew the songs well. Now his sons Aden and Astro have formed a band with Isaac Crowley, Zennith, that includes Willie as the ‘poet-a-rhymer’, working on the lyrics and performances with them. Willie says even his ‘babies’, his grandchildren, are into reggae music, playing and listening – ‘we hardly listen to anything else’. In this way reggae became the main transporter of the struggle of the Buluwai people and also carried a message of love out to people as well. And, Willie says, it was love of the land that drove them to this sound. In a recent tour of the Northern Territory with Zennith, Willie was pleased to find that so many Aboriginal bands have ‘dropped all the other genres’ and

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also chosen reggae or ska as the main transporter of their cultural message, their survival and resilience in the face of enduring colonization. Peter Tosh’s album called Bush Doctor was also a revelation to Willie, whose hair is naturally formed in dreads. He says, ‘I could see myself sitting there on the album cover!’ However, the Buluwai do not subscribe to Rasta as they have their own cultural tradition, their own language and spirituality. Some twelve years ago, when Willie was a ranger ‘helping the brothers and sisters mapping country’ in a position that took him right across the north of Australia through Queensland and the Northern Territory, as far as Broome in Western Australia, the ‘top end boys’ would call him the Bob Marley of the ranger service. Willie said, ‘No, look that’s not Bob, this is our ancestors, our ancestors all had dread locks, come on now, don’t be silly!’ It is there in the old images and photos. ‘When we wear dreads people try to say we are like Jamaicans or Africans and I say no, dreads come from this land.’ Willie says this is the Christian or Western type of mentality, whereby every development is understood as imported and the local, the Aboriginal, is disregarded. Music became a part of the knowledge sharing underlining the importance of ‘the Dreaming’, that is, the philosophy of the Buluwai people, under the stewardship of Willie and the other band members. Willie says that the mapping of country for the purposes of Native Title and other contemporary requirements, for example, feeds into this process. The Buluwai experience the emotions of being on country and then they are able to sing about it, including through Mantaka and Zennith. As musicians they entertain but also have a message, and the vehicle for getting the message out to their own people, other Aboriginal people and the world is through reggae. They consciously devise their music so that people can hear the message. Willie says that when Aboriginal people write songs they write about spirituality whereas the tradition in reggae music has been to write about ‘the system, the man, the wrongs the oppression’. Aboriginal people are also involved in cultural resurgence transmitting a message about the culture and the values and ethics of the ancestors, building resilience as well as resistance. This approach to reggae has been continuous since 1977–8; history and cultural revival through music, dance and the transmission of culture. This is not to say that the reggae songs of Mantaka are not political: they are political in the sense of speaking back to settler colonial oppression with a message of cultural survival. The band Mantaka went on to play as the support act with many Australian top-name bands and visiting overseas bands – the Eurogliders, Red Gum, UB40, Warumpi Band (a four-month tour). They stayed in Sydney for some time on two occasions in 1982 and 1984 performing at gigs. On several occasions they went to Adelaide to play at the Spirit Festivals. In 1984 the band was revised with the introduction of a new bass player Robert Denman and a percussionist Alby Baird when they toured with the

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FIGURE 7.3  Willie Brim and Irwin Riley performing with Mantaka at the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) celebrations at Kuranda State School, 1983. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim.

Warumpi Band from Brisbane to Canberra and then back to Sydney. The band never toured internationally but their music has been listened to in other countries, including Jamaica.

‘When we dance, we dance for three days and nights’ When the band Mantaka broke up Willie continued his work with culture and music. He and other Buluwai teamed up with non-Aboriginal people to form a ‘barrier-breaking force that is now out there’ in the celebration of Aboriginal music and dance. A local man Don Freeman was looking for Aboriginal actors for a play they had developed that was to have totally Aboriginal actors and dancers. There were seven actors who took up the challenge – David Hudson, Willie  Brim, Irwin Riley, Alby Baird, Dion Riley, Neville Hobbler, Wayne Nicholls – and it took about twelve weeks to piece it all together. The elders were involved – including Granny Danny Coleman, Granny Maggie

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Donahue – who were the guides as to what was appropriate to share with the broader community. It ‘ran like a dream, the way we dedicated ourselves and our art to this cultural revival in Kuranda.’ While the old ladies were big fans of the soapie ‘Days of our Lives’, ‘they threw that away to come and watch us dance every day’ so Willie knew they were onto something important. ‘They were the ones that gave us, the young men, the go-ahead to do what we were doing.’ Willie says, ‘when we dance we dance for three days and nights and that’s something Christian people find real hard to swallow’, and he laughs. Audiences were surprised by the humour in the production, how Aboriginal people could poke fun at themselves. Willie says, ‘Well we are a funny people when you get to know us properly, and we know that laughter is the best medicine.’ The Tjapukai Dance Theatre was formed in 1987. They were doing so well in Australia that the challenge became to take this cultural revival to the rest of the world. The group was sponsored by Qantas airlines to tour the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia. Willie says this became another expression of the Aboriginal cultural practice of walking over country, fulfilling the requirements of a cultural custodian, known as ‘walkabout’ – he says, ‘talkabout walkabout, it was flyabout!’ He filled one and a half passports and catching a plane became like catching the bus to work. There is a documentary of the Tjakupai Aboriginal Dance Theatre on YouTube made by following the troupe into every country they visited. He found out things ‘you won’t read about’ when talking to the cultural people in the Pacific and the Americas and entering into cultural exchange. Essentially, other Indigenous peoples believe Aboriginal people to be their ‘fathers’, and they were approached with a kind of reverence, an understanding that Aboriginal culture is the oldest living human culture in the world with much to offer the rest of the world. It is the case that the oldest human culture in the world is here in Australia; for example, rock art in Buluwai lands has been carbon-dated earlier than the pyramids of Egypt. The remains of Mungo Woman from western New South Wales have been assessed as 80,000 years old. Willie says we are only now beginning to take freedom from colonial domination to practise culture in the way that it can contribute to the well-being of all peoples of the world. The activities of the Tjapukai Dance theatre have been the catalyst for the resurgence of Aboriginal dance and culture in the Cape. The opening of the gates for communities to rethink who they really are as a race of people has led to the annual four-day Laura Festival of Aboriginal Dance. Willie says the world is now waking up to Aboriginal culture only through modern technology, without which Aboriginal people could not take their message to the world as geographic remoteness precludes the opportunity for human contact. Aboriginal culture has the capacity to be free of the overlays of racism and colonialism that have produced aggression and conflicts, the

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source of human misery in the world. Music and dance have the capacity to heal people from the deep impacts of colonization and racism. This is for white people too. In this, he sees that the cultural teaching is a matter to do with the spirit and your spirit has no colour, so the teachings of Aboriginal philosophy, glossed as the Dreaming, are there for everyone. In this connection Willie has developed a series of short videos that tell the stories of the ancestor heroes and contain the paradigms for human behaviour on Earth. Willie says the process was an enlightening one for him, he was new to these aspects of culture and he came to understand more about the Dreaming. ‘Since the Bama did not have a written language these stories told in the videos are essentially artefacts of our culture, as valuable as an ancient vase or carving.’ These videos of the Buluwai stories include ‘The Great Flood’; ‘Wangal the boy who became a Boomerang’; ‘Damarri and Guyala’; ‘Kunindooran’; the ‘Making of Buda Dji Dreaming’ and can be found on YouTube. This is another vehicle Willie Brim is utilizing to shore up his cultural traditions and ensure the wide dissemination of the values and ethics of his people.

‘Fortunately I’m one of the unbroken ones’ Willie Brim, b. 1960, is of the second generation ‘born out of the bush’ and on the white man’s mission in North Queensland. His grandfather and great-grandfather, he says, were living ‘at gunpoint’, when as recently as 100 years ago the white settler colonials were involved in massacres of Aboriginal people. Also glossed as ‘clearances’, ‘dispersals’ and called ‘bushwhacking’ the impact was the same; the targeted killing of the older men, and indiscriminate killing of others, including women and children. Then the picking up of the stragglers, who had fled to the bush to escape the attacks. No doubt any adults found fleeing were also shot and mostly it was only terrified children who survived. This is how Willie’s grandfather Cecil Brim and his grandmother Dinah came to be in Mona Mona Seventh Day Adventist Mission on the banks of the Barron River in North Queensland. As small children they came by trooper, walking or on horseback. Willie says that the reason for the frontier violence was to take over the land for cattle stations and that the occasional Aboriginal spearing of a bullock was a ruse to go and kill as many people as possible. He says that when outsiders come into their country they refer to it as ‘cattle country’ and the Buluwai can say, ‘no, cattle have only been here for 120 years, it is our country’. In Australia the most revered of national holidays is ANZAC day. Like Memorial Day in the United States, it is a day when the nation stops to remember those who made the ultimate blood sacrifice when part of the

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Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) were in wars, including the First and Second World Wars. Willie says, ‘Up here (the colonization) is so fresh that people won’t celebrate ANZAC day because it is only 100 years since they stopped shooting our people up here in the hills.’ Willie’s father Ivan Brim joined the ancestors in July 2017 at the age of 84. Born in 1933 on Mona Mona Mission he spent all of his early life there until the mission disbanded in 1962. Willie’s parent’s marriage was a forced marriage by the missionaries; for the Aboriginal people on Mona Mona there were no love marriages. After the mission days Ivan worked on the roads, cattle stations, railways and in forestry supporting his family, until he retired. Ivan’s father and Willie’s grandfather, Cecil William Brim, was the last child to ‘walk out’ with the troopers, from the traditional ways of life in 1916. He was taken to Mona Mona mission to be incarcerated into another world, never to return to his freedom as a true Buluwai. His father Gurawin (Toby) was from Kuranda, Buluwai country, and his mother Bundarra (Annie Annie) was from the area that is now Bilwon, a Tjapukai woman. Cecil was born at the turn of the century and was about fourteen years old when he came to the mission. He had seen a great deal of frontier violence. He was in ceremony to be initiated at the time of an armed attack and, as shots were fired, the boys took to the bush. Many people, including the old men who were conducting the ceremony, were killed out of a violent and deep desire to destroy Aboriginal people and culture. The usual practice after a massacre was to burn people after they had been killed or severely wounded. Sympathetic white people who knew them pulled Cecil’s mother and two brothers out of a fire and they were sent north. Cecil remained with his sister and the two of them were taken to Mona Mona. Dinah, his grandmother, died when Willie was an infant. Her people are Kuku Yalanji on the headwaters of the Palmer River. Dinah was called a ‘half-caste’ in the language of the times; her mother was raped; there was no consent required for white men. Her people had promised her in marriage. Dinah’s story as a child survivor of the massacre of her people is similar to that of Cecil’s; she was amongst a group taken to a place now tellingly called Butchers Hill at Lakeland Downs, 50 miles south of Cooktown, where a massacre took place. Troopers went around looking for the children who had run away from the carnage, and brought them by horseback to Mona Mona. Willie lived with his grandfather in his teenage years and every school holidays he was listening to the wisdom of the old man, observing and understanding the natural world – for example, how to find birds eggs, when the fish are running and the time for certain bush foods. He and his family are still able to eat seasonal ‘bush tucker’, that is, foods from the natural world. One of the earliest memories he has of his grandfather was him saying: ‘Kids! Kids! Run! The preacher is coming!’ Aboriginal people preserve to this day the fear of having their children removed from their families.

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FIGURE 7.4 Willie’s great-grandparents Toby Brim (Tjiauwin) and Annie Brim (together right of centre) with family standing in front of their Bayu (traditional Buluwai shelter) at Mona Mona Seventh Day Adventist Mission, North Queensland. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim.

Willie Brim is proud of the fact that ‘the fifty-year concentration camp they set up here to break our language, our spirit, our soul’ after the killing times has not fully succeeded and there is a core of Buluwai people who are deeply engaged in their own culture. They have Bularoo the Creator and their own religion. Willie says some people are really connected and others are lost. He does not blame anyone but the Europeans who came and colonized them through genocidal violence and the introduction of a new religion and language. In this the Buluwai people are alongside Rasta, not opposed but a part of the same movement. ‘We love a beautiful peaceful community it is what the Buluwai people aim for’ and now ‘they have built a new ghetto for us in Mantaka’ that has grown from three houses when Willie was an adolescent to forty houses now. Many people living there experience trauma and dislocation from their traditional ways of being and doing.

‘We had our own black power movement up here’ Willie is grateful to have survived in an environment where he had to balance the two major influences on his life, that of Christianity and the culture passed down to him from the elders. He could find nothing to connect these two systems of belief. He says Christianity was the norm, he grew up in it and did not know any different; he thought all white people were that way.

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The stories of his elders affected him deeply, so much so that they have impacted on his life more than anything else. Growing up, he says, he and the other adolescents used to watch the sun going down over the mountains on a Friday and they knew that when it did, the next day they could not be themselves. They ‘had to be another person’ on the Sabbath, with the services and Bible studies. And the punishment for transgressions was a harsh physical punishment with sticks, whips or similar. The treatment used to break the spirit of young adults and this existed up until the mid-1970s. In the community context the warmth and love of the people towards the children was tangible. Willie remembers fondly the grand old aunties of Kuranda who had survived the killing times and the mission days and who had a great deal of time and love for the children. When he was ten years old there were just 300 people living in Kuranda; it was a small place and for a time he had a great friend from one of the few white families in the town. Then the hippies arrived and they were a puzzle to the local Aboriginal people – ‘they were not like these farmers and they were not like these Christians.’ While these two groups were removed from Aboriginal people and not part of their world, exhibiting a very critical, even hostile, behaviour towards them, the hippies were very different. Willie wondered, ‘Where did they come from?’ They wore few clothes ‘their dress code was next to nothing, their swimwear was nothing’. Willie’s granddad was sent to Mona Mona and the first thing was that he was forced to wear clothes and ‘came out looking like a white man’. The hippies then reversed that. When the Aboriginal people went to the river to collect water or to do their washing, the hippies were there swimming with no clothes on. Willie thought they were the spirits of the ancestors because they were so free and free-loving ‘they seemed to get on better with us than the Christians and the farmers!’ In fact, they got on very well and made friends with the children and they are still friends to this day. Willie says he classes himself as a black hippie because of that early connection. ‘There was no other connection with white people except for the Christians, the rednecks and the police who seemed to be just there to lock us up.’ The hippies gave them freedom. They brought a lot of laughter, a lot of fun that ‘broke us out of the shackle and chain of the Christian era, the rednecks and the farmers in the way that they mistreated us and had a total dislike for us’. They showed how relationships between black and white could be different, positive and supportive. Racism was rife in the area when Willie was in his formative years and racist abuse such as ‘black bludgers’, an insult meaning a person who shirks work, was an ordinary experience. They were sworn at with coarse language that if they used back to these white people, they would go to jail for. There was one rule for the whites and another for the blacks. Willie says that he and his family still receive racist abuse and death threats over the phone from time to time – he thinks, ‘Jeez, don’t they know that era is over?’ And he laughs.

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During the 1960s and 1970s young Australian Aboriginal people found a vehicle for activism towards justice through the idea of Black Power and the Black Panther Party for Self Defence. They became aware of this US-based movement through newspapers, radio and television. In 1971 Dennis Walker and Sam Watson co-founded the Australian chapter of the Black Panthers – the Black Panther Party (BPP) – and declared it to be ‘the vanguard for all depressed peoples of the world and in Australia the Aboriginal people are the most depressed of all’. The headquarters of the organization was in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, some 1,700 kilometres from Kuranda by road. The party’s activities were widely reported within Australia by radio and television. It was this movement that influenced the band No Fixed Address to write the song ‘We Have Survived (the White Mans’ World)’ in 1978 as they had grown up with this information and activity around them during the 1970s. It is testament to the remote isolation of the Aboriginal communities in far north Queensland that Willie and his contemporaries knew little of this in their formative years. Willie says that they were ‘stuck in the bush here’ and came from a small community that was very tight and they created their own system of looking after each other from local racism. They had their own strong men who would battle with the rednecks of the day and the local newspaper the Cairns Post reported on them as the ‘black mafia’. He says that was the only Black Power movement they knew of. It was later that the members of the band Mantaka connected with the Aboriginal rights movement and No Fixed Address, another popular Aboriginal reggae band. Both were in Brisbane in 1982 for the Commonwealth Games when Aboriginal people from across the whole country came to demand Land Rights and protest against the Queensland government’s repressive Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protection Act. ‘We jammed together, we clicked together, we became friends immediately.’ Willie Brim and Bart Willoughby are friends to this day. When Mantaka was doing the east coast tour in 1984 No Fixed Address was preparing to tour the UK. They were to meet up in Melbourne for a gig to farewell No Fixed Address but a semi-trailer truck accident on the Hume Highway prevented their travel to Melbourne. At the time it was very disappointing because this was the first black band going overseas ‘to cause a ruckus for us all’ and they wanted to be there to send them off.

‘There’s healing in its own right there’ Willie loves to watch Indigenous Community Television (ICTV) delivering cultural and community programs to remote communities in Australia on Channel 601, via the VAST satellite service. He watches for the music from the remote communities that he says ‘is so alive – I just love it!’

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FIGURE 7.5  The poster for the national tour of Mantaka and the Warumpi Band 1984. Image courtesy of Willie Brim.

It makes my hair stand on end now as I am talking, it keeps me in flow with all of our music brothers in the north. Community people load up the music clips and it is so full of talent and for me as a musician it is full of promise to have all of this raw music and that the community can stay free and dance. I have great admiration for our people and the kind of music they are creating, the rest of Australia don’t know what they are missing out on. If only we could get it out to the country and the world

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FIGURE 7.6 Willie Brim (R) with his sons Astro Brim (Middle) and Aden Brim (L) who are part of Zennith (Reggae/Roots/Hip-hop band) 2010. Photo courtesy of Willie Brim.

then people might appreciate what Aboriginal people can do for your wellbeing just by listening to it. There’s healing in its own right there, true. The band Zennith is a part of this movement. Willie says, ‘I’m glad that I am still here at the time to see it all unveiling and there is hope and a future for our next lot of musicians and for the women too, I would like to see more women empowered.’ He quotes, for example, Natalie Rize of Blue King Brown who is doing world tours with Jamaican backup singers and has been instrumental in bringing Jamaicans to Kuranda. Willie has enjoyed taking visiting Jamaicans out bush to explain the culture to them – they are fascinated to learn this. ‘This is the kind of brotherhood we like to create, real brotherhood, not just false brotherhood because there is money involved but because we are brothers as black people.’ It was Bob Marley and Peter Tosh who had him recognize this brotherhood and now the band has been inducted into the House of Marley, ‘so the Jamaicans and the Marley boys are talking about Aboriginal reggae and that is a great thing.’ As a result of this new consciousness Bunny Rugs, lead singer from the band Burning Spear, had offered to work with them on their next album before his untimely death. The keyboard player from Jimmy Cliff’s band Stevie is working with Zennith. Meanwhile Willie’s bush knowledge and the teachings of his grandfather are telling him that there is a looming crisis in the natural world, that time and place, the seasons and the species, are out of sync. He has observed the impacts of climate change first-hand, such as the crocodiles moving south by hundreds of miles; originally only as far south as Rockhampton they now appear near Caloundra not far north of Brisbane. The crocodiles go

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wherever the barramundi fish go and the heating up of the waters in the north is pushing them further south. In the far north, the migratory animals are coming in later, seasonal flowering and fruiting is happening earlier, species are disappearing at almost a daily rate. Willie says the stories of the Dreaming predict another massive water rise in their country and this means a global catastrophe. According to Dumarri, the creative ancestor who controls the rainstorms – a tempestuous figure, like the Lightning Brothers’ story from Central Australia – if the ceremonies are stopped the people will be punished. Willie, cultural custodian of the Buluwai, is part of a connected group of Aboriginal elders across Australia, working from within culture to hold back future catastrophe. Willie Brim is an exemplar of the ways in which Aboriginal people from remote Australia are utilizing modern performance and media forms to progress their aims of sharing unique and important cultural perspectives with the world. Reggae is an important vehicle: culture is the message. It is now showcased in recordings, performances, tours, a documentary, YouTube videos and strong international connections. This song commemorating the journey of ancestral heroes over country contains many important cultural messages, and it is a fitting way to end this story of Willie Brim, child of Guyala. I want to be just like Guyala Don’t want to be just like Dumarri I want to fly high in the sky And watch this world Go floating by – Floating right on by Floating by Two brothers come sailing from the north Coming down by raft Past each place he knows Old Guyala Guyala Guyala Guyala Coming down Wangetti way Wamindungjang where they gonna play yeah With the Law Coming up Barron River Bringing laws, bringing laws, to the people Gamingunjay, Yirragangay, Bulawangay, Yaggalay I want to be just like Guyala Don’t want to be just like Dumarri I want to fly high in the sky And watch this world Go floating by –

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Floating by Floating right on by Sitting on the banks was Guyala He was making this fire right Higher and higher Hey Dumarri don’t you stand I want you to give me hand We gonna make this fire right Fire Berrigunang, Berrigunang Berrigunang I want to be just like Guyala Don’t want to be just like Dumarri I want to fly high in the sky And watch this world Go floating by – Floating by Floating right on by. Notes: This chapter is based on two interviews with Willie Brim – on 26 April 2017 and in November 2017 – as well as an interview with him by Peter McCabe in 2014 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H_M-rmdY7v0, accessed on 27 November 2017. An earlier version of this chapter was published in Transition, Issue 126, 2018, pp. 43–57 (Article) by Indiana University Press.

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8 Cockpit Country Dreams: Film, Media and Protest in the Long Journey to Save Jamaica’s Cockpit Country Esther Figueroa

In Cockpit Country the hours form slowly like stalagmites a bird sings pure note I-hold-my-breath the world turns and turns Olive Senior, Cockpit Country Dreams. (Senior 1985) At dusk, thousands of bats fly out of caves, filling the fading light, darting around objects as they head to the far coast. At dark, fireflies light up the trees, an infinity of stars the sky, and within the night chorus, there is a frog that laughs. At dawn, there is bird song, moisture dripping from leaves, the breaking light catches the silver of spider webs and through the mist trails the calls of parrots. Cockpit Country was born about twelve million years ago when the island that is now Jamaica rose out of the sea, and is thus made of

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limestone, the compressed calcified bodies of millions upon millions of marine creatures. Containing Jamaica’s largest intact rainforests, Cockpit Country is located in five parishes in the west-central interior of the island, its ecology directly connected to half of Jamaica. Cockpit Country forests generate oxygen, clean air, cooling temperatures, carbon sequestration and plentiful rainfall that percolates down through the limestone into huge aquifers that hold and release about 40 per cent of Jamaica’s fresh water. This is the source of many waterways, including six of Jamaica’s most important rivers. These ecological services, valued annually at over a billion dollars, are essential to Jamaica withstanding global warming and climate change.

Cockpit Country’s environmental, historical and cultural legacy Time and weather have eroded Cockpit Country’s limestone foundation, leaving a tapestry of rugged round topped hills called cockpit karst, often inaccessible, with steep sides and deep valleys. The karst have acidic hilltops and alkaline bottoms that produce very different environments. This geological discontinuity creates isolation, and, along with high humidity, heavy rainfall but a drought-like lack of surface water, engenders Cockpit Country’s extraordinarily high levels of biological diversity, remarkable evolutionary adaptations and rare and endangered species, with more plants and animals threatened with extinction than anywhere else in the Caribbean. Cockpit Country is rich in human history and a symbol of resistance, independence, self sufficiency and pride to the Jamaican people. After Spanish conquest in 1494, Cockpit Country became a refuge to Taino and African peoples escaping enslavement and genocide. In Cockpit Country, the Maroon people have a distinct culture that evolved out of indigenous Taino and African knowledges, spirituality and practices. They used their superior local knowledge to fight the red-coated English soldiers for almost a century, until 1739 when England signed a treaty granting them autonomy. Maroon autonomy predated emancipation by ninety-nine years, and Jamaican independence from Britain by 223 years. Since colonial times, landownership in Jamaica has been an elite enterprise in the hands of few people. The best land was owned by the plantocracy, so the vast majority of Jamaicans were landless and/or pushed into marginal interior lands. In these lesser valued lands, they created thriving communities of mutual interdependence with practices like ‘day-for-day’ where community members would help each other with construction, planting, reaping, etc. These communities were proudly able to feed themselves and each other. The people of Cockpit Country are a remnant of a once common

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and entrenched rural culture of self-sufficiency based not on individualism but collective collaboration. All of this – the people, culture, landscape, plants and animals, biodiversity, ecological connectivity, climate change resilience, significance of Cockpit Country to the people of Jamaica – came under threat of bauxite mining. Our road led to places on maps places that travelled people knew. Our river, undocumented was mystery. My father said: lines on paper cannot deny something that is. (My mother said: such a wasted life was his). Olive Senior, Cockpit Country Dreams. (Senior 1985)

Aluminium: The metal that made modernity while destroying communities and the environment Aluminium is lightweight, durable, versatile; it has become essential for aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, bombs, explosives, armament, ships, trains, buses, automobiles, electrical lines, architecture, infrastructure, household appliances, food and beverage packaging, computers and other electronic devices – the list goes on and on. Necessary to the military industrial complex, it is designated a strategic metal and stockpiled in its various stages. Aluminium is derived from bauxite through a process that strip mines the ore, processes it into aluminium-oxide, smelts that into molten aluminium, which is then manufactured into any number of shapes, sizes and alloys – from the thinness of aluminium foil to an entire airplane fuselage. Jamaica has exported bauxite since the early 1950s when the major multinational aluminium corporations set up operations, buying about a tenth of the country’s land mass, and building processing plants, roads, railways, aerial tram lines and ports. By the 1960s and into the mid-1970s, the small island of Jamaica was the number one producer of bauxite and alumina in the world, providing North America with the majority of the raw material needed to make aluminium. All aspects of the aluminium process are toxic, destructive to the environment, detrimental to the health of all living creatures, and in the hundred-plus years that aluminium has been commercially produced, the industry has displaced millions of Indigenous and rural peoples across

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the  world. In rural Jamaica, the bauxite industry has been a primary contributor to a decline in agriculture and social collapse, displacing about 300,000 rural residents (Windsor Research Center 2014). This has led to both rapid and unplanned urbanization of many parts of Jamaica and migration of Jamaicans abroad, especially to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. Aluminium smelting is the most energy-intensive industrial process in the world. Since the dominant cost is energy, aluminium companies have always required the cheapest energy available. In addition to coal plants, electricity has historically been generated by huge hydroelectric dams that flood thousands of acres of land and water ecosystems, usually home to Indigenous peoples. Bauxite can be found in over 25 per cent of Jamaica’s soil, but over the last sixty-plus years most of the high-grade bauxite has already been extracted. In Cockpit Country there are large bauxite reserves, and over the years prospecting licences and mining leases have been granted for most of Cockpit Country. The Minerals Vesting Act of 1947 makes all bauxite minerals the property of the Crown (i.e. the government) and therefore landowners do not own the minerals within their property.

Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group and documentary production to raise awareness In 2006, Cockpit Country communities and Jamaican environmental organizations became aware of the granting of two bauxite prospecting licences that covered large areas of Cockpit Country, raising the fear that bauxite mining was imminent1. A coalition of over thirty organizations and over 100 individuals calling themselves the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group (CCSG) was formed to stop any mining in Cockpit Country. Lobbying efforts included information gathering, scientific and social research, publishing findings, fact-sheets, newsletters, letters to the newspapers, editorials, meeting with policymakers and other stakeholders. Apart from face-to-face interaction and PowerPoint presentations, print was the primary communication format. CCSG member, Diana McCaulay of Jamaica Environment Trust suggested we make a video to reach a larger audience in a more popular way. In the early part of 2007, with only three days of filming and barely enough footage, we made Cockpit Country – Voices from Jamaica’s Heart, which featured residents of Cockpit Country arguing against bauxite mining and explaining the negative effects already suffered by neighbouring St. Ann communities. The participants in Voices were representative of the Save Cockpit Country coalition: the leader of the Accompong Maroons, a Maroon elder knowledgeable of medicinal plants, the principal, environmental

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science teacher and students from Westwood high school (one of the leading regional girl schools in Jamaica), small farmers, community members, environmentalists and a pastor. While making the film, I stayed in Windsor Trelawny deep in northern Cockpit Country, home to the famous Windsor cave, and Michael Schwartz and Susan Koenig of Windsor Research Center, with whom I would work on several Save Cockpit Country campaigns. It was my first time and I was taken by the karst hillocks, the clouds, the mist, the birds (oh!) and did I  mention mosquitoes? In our campaigns we emphasized the importance of bats and birds because they eat billions of mosquitoes; clearly we need more bats and birds! Clouds of mosquitoes swarm. The best way to dress is in bee keeping gear. You can hear the loud whine of mosquitoes in my footage. The people I interviewed for the film were articulate, memorable and beloved by me, but the one who especially stole my heart was Miss Lilly, big, strong and beautiful Miss Lillian Bolt. At the time I was unaware of a certain nephew named Usain and for me she will always surpass the fastest man in the world. Miss Lilly of Sherwood Content was a local entrepreneur and farmer whose yams were especially famous. She showed me the lime tree she planted in her backyard to remind her of where she had come from – Lime Tree Garden, St. Ann, a community completely destroyed by bauxite mining and where no lime trees now grow. Kaiser Bauxite, though mining in St. Ann, also owned thousands of acres in Trelawny. Miss Lilly described what she called the great ‘injustice’, Kaiser buying her parents’ land in St. Ann and ‘dumping us in the forest’. They were resettled to a place with zero infrastructure, were promised a school, church, market and roads but none of these were ever built. Miss Lilly walked 4 miles to get to school, often in rain, and was tired when she got to classes. She attended maybe once or twice a week. Windsor no longer has a community and there are no St. Ann residents left; many went home to St. Ann to die or moved away. This injustice is repeated and repeated across bauxite-mined Jamaica, where thousands of displaced Jamaicans are decades later still waiting for the titles to the land onto which they were resettled. Miss Lilly’s response to bauxite mining in Cockpit Country was, ‘There is no way! There is no way! We are the people of the community, so at least we have a choice. So each and everyone would have to stand up and fight for their rights’ (Figueroa 2007). In 2007, Cockpit Country – Voices from Jamaica’s Heart aired in primetime on Jamaican television leading to an immediate and loud public outcry, forcing the Minister of Mining to withdraw the prospecting licences and declare there would be no mining in Cockpit Country. Voices was also screened across Cockpit Country, in town squares, rum bars, churches, schools, meeting halls and hundreds of DVDs were given away.

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Cockpit Country is vast with very bad roads and many places you can’t get to but in the most circuitous ways. Michael Schwartz of Windsor Research Center was once a motocross racer and that is a good thing when having to drive often on trails that aren’t really roads, but not such a great thing when you are driving for endless hours. My memories of Mike are primarily of us driving and driving and my spine compressing and compressing. Mike travelled to every community in Cockpit Country, with computer and projector, his newsletters, maps, PowerPoint presentations and my films, visiting tiny communities in far-flung places, to discuss the threats of mining and work with them to stay informed, organized and prepared to fight against any incursion on their lands. In 2012, I was in the middle of the sea in Pedro Bank, about 80 kilometres from Jamaica on Middle Cay, a 10-acre sized atoll crammed with hundreds of fishers who aren’t supposed to live there, who have no proper sanitation or garbage disposal and where rare booby birds nest in burning garbage, documenting these horrors as part of ongoing marine conservation efforts. I was on the roof of the small coast-guard station filming when my phone rang. It is the best place for phone reception and all through the night one can listen to the intimate details of the soldier on duty’s phone conversations with his baby-mother, girlfriend or whomever. It was Mike. They had hired someone to make a video about Cockpit Country but he hadn’t completed it, could I? Yeah sure, why not? This became our second video in the campaign; it is called Cockpit Country Is Our Home (Figueroa 2012). I watched what had already been shot, hours upon hours of gorgeous footage of wild life and Cockpit Country scenery where almost nothing happens. You could imagine the hushed narration about stalking the rare Jamaican Yellow Boa snake. There was absolutely no story. The video was supposed to be for a Jamaican audience to make them care about the biota and beauty of Cockpit Country, but no Jamaican would sit and watch nothing happening and no story. I decided to personify, we have to personify Cockpit Country and everything in it. And that began one of the most fun video productions ever. At the last minute Mike got local Save Cockpit Country activist Lorna Christie to wrangle up our voice talent, and that night I recorded amidst persistent night-time noise, Duandale’s shoemaker voicing the turtle, the young math teacher the bat, a mother the laughing frog, Lorna’s young son the snail and a very bright schoolmate the snake. I had to convince her it was okay to ‘talk bad’ – the script was in Jamaican vernacular, something that bothered some, and a reason given by a television station for not broadcasting the video. The next day I recorded Cockpit Country herself, Asburger Harwood, a lifelong resident who had fought for the right to her land despite the bauxite beneath it. The video begins, ‘I am Cockpit Country,’ and when Asburger says in her gravelly voice, ‘I am rugged!’ You absolutely believe her. I have

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watched people in Cockpit Country watching Voices and Our Home and have seen their faces light up with recognition, of the place, themselves, their worth, the value of Cockpit Country and their desire to keep Cockpit Country and their way of life intact.

Cockpit Country boundaries, a media campaign and peaceful protest By 2007, every Jamaican government had agreed that there would be no mining in Cockpit Country, but how to define Cockpit Country remained contested. There were at least six proposed boundaries, of which the CCSG boundary was the largest, taking into consideration not just karst morphology, hydrology and biodiversity, but the historical and cultural aspects of Cockpit Country. The fear was that the government would define Cockpit Country in the smallest way possible, leaving large parts open to mining while declaring an environmental victory. Saving Cockpit Country strategies therefore focused on influencing the government to declare the largest boundary possible. In 2009, the government commissioned the University of the West Indies (UWI) to study the various boundaries proposed for Cockpit Country, and in 2013 commissioned a UWI-headed team to travel across Jamaica to have public consultations about Cockpit Country, mining, the boundary issue and what should be Cockpit Country’s fate. Their published report concluded that most residents of Cockpit Country vehemently opposed mining and quarrying within Cockpit Country, and among their recommendations were: ●●

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The Government of Jamaica should not authorise any form of mining and quarrying activity within the Cockpit Country as the level of emotion is too high and (because of) the level of opposition and resistance by community members and leaders, communitybased organisations; The Cockpit Country deserves some form of legal protection. The declaration of a protected area and national park is the first step towards the ultimate goal, which is the nomination of the Cockpit Country as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. The official boundary for the Cockpit Country should be comprised of a Core, a Transition Zone and an Outer Boundary. (Webber & Noel 2013)

In 2014, in anticipation of a boundary declaration, Windsor Research Center and I developed and rolled out a four-month Save Cockpit Country media campaign that included a weekly informational half-hour radio show

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about the importance of Cockpit Country, radio ads in the form of ‘Did You Know’ tips, content on radio talk-shows, page-sized newspaper editorial ads in the form of informational posters, which also circulated digitally on social media, along with the tips. My two films aired on television, and I made an additional six Cockpit Country shorts, all films available on YouTube. No boundary was declared. The residents of southwestern St. Ann in communities such as Gibraltar and Madras, on the eastern edge of the Cockpit Country, have witnessed mining impoverish and destroy nearby communities and fear mining encroaching into their communities. Noranda Jamaica Bauxite Partnership, a partnership with the Jamaica government who is majority owner, was already prospecting for bauxite in their communities. When Noranda started constructing a large bauxite road that was outside the boundary of their Special Mining Lease 165 and crossed into Cockpit Country, residents were alarmed. In May 2015, community members contacted Mike and we documented the illegal road being built, the illegal pits being mined, and we worked with the communities to organize against the mining. They decided to organize a demonstration and invited the media to cover it. On 21 July 2015, with the support of communities across Cockpit Country and Jamaica, the St. Ann communities organized a very joyous, democratic and successful day-long protest against Noranda and bauxite mining. The form of the protest – placard holding, speeches, poetry, singing, dancing and joking – was not what Norando and local officials expected; they had come ready for angry confrontation and violence. Towards the end of the demonstration they tried to provoke violence by bringing in their own security guards to block access to a road that demonstrators were planning to walk on. They brought in the police, including a hostile plain-clothed policeman who was video recording everyone (while I was recording him). There was a mysterious fire that the police were going to use as an excuse to shut down the demonstration, but community members quickly doused it. In the face of corporate and state aggression, the demonstrators continued to drum, dance, sing, make up songs and laugh. On 23 September 2015, as follow-up to the St. Ann protests, a delegation of over sixty community members came together from across Cockpit Country under the banner Cockpit Communities for Conservation. They travelled to Kingston with copies of a letter demanding that Special Exclusive Prospecting License 145 be rescinded and no further expansion of mining in western St. Ann and Cockpit Country be allowed. The letters were to be delivered to all the governmental agencies with purview over mining and environmental protection. The first stop was the National Environment Planning Agency (NEPA), where the group met with Peter Knight, the CEO. Various members of the group spoke about their concerns over mining in Cockpit Country.

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Accompong Maroon youth leader Tyshan Wright was especially powerful. In response to Peter Knight’s assurances that cabinet was very close to making a decision on the boundary that would be pleasing to the delegation, Tyshan questioned whether Maroons had been consulted, and continued: There are some of us that believe that slavery is a thousand years ago. Slavery is like yesterday for me! Our blood of our ancestors still wet the soil. Me still smell it right now. So me want dem fi know seh di whole Cockpit land is sacred to the Maroon people. It sacred to the Maroon people ita nah just trees. Di blood of wi brother, wi sister, we uncle - it wet it. We forget the foundations which our ancestors have laid down for us. And I can tell you this, as a Maroon, and I speak on behalf of the Maroon people, I tell you this: We will fight with every last breath in our body to ensure seh we preserve and keep it. We will chant the drum day and night and root the ancestors dem from down ina di abyss until we mek sure seh di Cockpit stay fi di born and di unborn! (Figueroa forthcoming) After NEPA, the delegation went to the Mines and Geology division to deliver their letter to the Commissioner of Mines but he was absent. They were met with hostility by the personnel at Mines and Geology who refused to dialogue with the group, treated them with disdain, at one point not even letting them sit on the wall of the passageway as they waited. Eventually, two of their representatives were allowed to present the letter to an administrator without me being able to document the transaction. When one of the letter presenters explained to the group the civil servant’s convoluted argument for not meeting with the group, a tall youth said, ‘That is 100 percent stupidness. Dem a destroy our homes, our communities and dem a rob and cheat Jamaicans out of what dem really own. Dem don’t want really (fi) see unu.’ He then put his hands together in a gesture of supplication and addressed the civil servant, ‘The accommodation, t’ank unu, see me, but hear what, a Jamaica and the youths are the future, not through unu a ina di upscale communities, but the youths are the future’ (Figueroa Video Archive). He had noted the great social divide in Jamaica, made clear his refusal to accept his inferior place and that the future was his. Though the attempt at meeting with government officials had become more and more frustrating, the day ended with a well-attended press conference, where members of the delegation talked about the threats to their particular areas, and closed with invigorating Maroon drumming, singing and dancing by members of the Accompong Maroon youth group.

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The role of media and petitioning in the declaration of Cockpit Country as a Protected Area In 2007, when CCSG formed, one of their actions was to draft a petition calling on the then Prime Minister to protect Cockpit Country and declare it a World Heritage Site. On 24 July 2017, the Office of the Prime Minister launched an online portal which allowed Jamaicans to petition the government on any topic. If the petition garnered 15,000 online signatures in forty days, the Prime Minister would respond. Jamaicans are not normally comfortable signing petitions, and the requirements of the portal such as internet access and an email address further excluded many Jamaicans. Therefore, no petition on the site had garnered anywhere near 15,000 signatures. But all of this changed on 21 August 2017, when JET uploaded a Save Cockpit Country petition to test the portal and press the government to finally declare the Cockpit Country a protected Area (www.savecockpitcountry.org). The numbers of signatures began building slowly, but accelerated as the coalition became broader and more diverse, especially when social and broadcast media, civil society and the Jamaica Diaspora got fully involved. IRIE FM, Jamaica’s number one radio station, has been an avid supporter of previous Save Cockpit Country efforts, and again joined in with roundthe-clock information on Cockpit Country, an outside broadcast and programming to promote the online petition. They made all their offices available for people to sign the paper petition. Over the years I have worked closely with Ka’bu Ma’at Kheru, Program Director of IRIE FM and host of the internationally popular radio show Running African Forum. Ka’bu and I came up with the idea of declaring 22 September Save Cockpit Country Day to focus efforts and push the signature numbers over the finish line before the 30 September deadline. Other media houses, social media, civil society, diaspora organizations, communities, churches and individuals all joined in and intensified their efforts. However, these efforts were disrupted when at about 3.30 pm on 21  September, when the petition had reached over 12,000 signatures, the Office of the Prime Minister closed access to the petition for eighteen hours. The office claimed that computers had been hacked and used for auto-signing, and that people were being forced to sign against their will, or were signing something they did not understand. This was, of course, absurd since the portal is designed in such a way that there are three steps that petitioners have to take before their signature is counted, making it impossible to auto-sign or sign against their will. If the government had not stopped the petition, it would have easily reached 15,000 on Save Cockpit Country Day.

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Nonetheless, well before the deadline on 22 September, the petition passed the required 15,000 signatures. On 30 September 2017, when the petition closed, it had garnered over 20,000 online signatures. In addition, on 17 November, Diana McCaulay delivered 16,647 paper petitions to the Prime Minister. On the afternoon of 21 November 2017, Prime Minister Andrew Holness (2007) to great applause began his statement to Parliament with the following statement: Mr. Speaker, for several years, the public has been actively engaged in a robust, constructive discourse on the delimitation of the boundary of the Cockpit Country. Discussions have been ongoing for decades; transcending administrations but Mr. Speaker, the wait is over, today; after extensive consultations and deliberations we are announcing the areas to be designated as the boundary of the Cockpit Country and of the Cockpit Country Protected Area. The administration chose the boundary proposed by the Jamaica Bauxite Institute; it is the smallest boundary comprising what is called the ‘core’ of Cockpit Country; they then expanded it to include forested areas in the Litchfield-Mateson’s Run in St. Ann, declaring an area of about 74,726 hectares that would constitute the Cockpit Country Protected Area (CCPA). And again to great applause the Prime Minister declared: Mr. Speaker, one of the major points of discussion over the Cockpit Country has been the issue of mining. Mr. Speaker, the Government is declaring that no mining will be permitted in the Cockpit Country Protected Area. Though happily most of the existing forest reserves and the ‘core’ of Cockpit Country are protected, the CCPA constitutes only about 67 per cent of the preferred CCSG boundary. Unfortunately, the CCPA does not prohibit mining from most of the areas currently within prospecting licences and mining leases, leaving western St. Ann, northern St. Elizabeth and northern Manchester open for mining. It therefore does not much disturb the bauxite industry, of which the government is co-owner and depends on for foreign exchange and income (McCaulay & Koenig 2017). Listen child, said my father from the quicksand of his life: Study rivers. Learn everything. Rivers may find beginnings in the clefts of separate mountains Yet all find their true homes

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in the salt of one sea. Olive Senior, Cockpit Country Dreams. (Senior 1985)

Reflections on what made the campaign to save Cockpit Country successful For some the long journey has ended in victory, the Cockpit Country is now protected. For myself, there seems to be no point in talking about winning and losing, but only the need to continue caring for lifetimes to come. Thinking about movement building and protests, my experience with Save Cockpit Country shows me firstly the importance of intact local communities with strong relational networks and democratic processes. When people know each other and trust levels are relatively high, when there are strong local institutions and there are still people within a community that others believe in, organizing is quite easy because information will flow, people will gather and go on record, and collective decisions can be made fairly quickly. Faceto-face communication is key. Having existing civil society organizations and actors are also important as it is difficult to build opposition from zero capacity. With Cockpit Country there were already well-established environmental and civic groups in place, and already committed and knowledgeable actors. One could then broaden the coalition into more diversified layers and segments of society. The legal framework is important. Existing environmental laws were protective mechanisms that one could reference, and the 2002 Freedom to Information Act could help access hidden government information. Having access to policymakers, journalists, media makers, creative industry players, private sector leaders and celebrities was important in obtaining timely political information, getting campaign messages out and rallying people to take action. The online petition drive needed to reach the highest number of people in the shortest amount of time – here celebrities, broadcast and social media – played the most important roles. WhatsApp messaging was especially useful. Ongoing scientific and social research and gathering and sharing information were vital to lobbying efforts. Credible data is necessary when others are using data in opposition. If the government is claiming that there are X millions of value in mining Cockpit Country, you need the data substantiating that there is a higher value in not mining. Cockpit Country is of international interest because of its biodiversity and Maroon heritage; therefore, international organizations and individuals funded research and helped create an international focus on Cockpit Country. This is important because the Jamaican government is very sensitive to international opinion

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and media coverage. The campaign also needed national support, which was easy to generate because of the unique place that Cockpit Country plays in the Jamaican national imaginary. Funding is important. We didn’t have much of it, but what was available was used for research, media campaigns and community costs, such as transportation, food and refreshments for gatherings, and telecommunications. Lastly, the leadership and participation of the Maroons, the Indigenous people of Cockpit Country, were essential. If you want to defend land, the best people to defend that land are those to whom the land is sacred and who are willing to die to protect it. The Maroons always said they would fight to the last breath to save Cockpit Country and, given their history of resistance to incursions into their territories, no politician was willing to test the veracity of that call to action2.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on twelve years of research, interviews, local knowledge and my personal involvement as an activist documentary film-maker and leading media campaigner in the movement to keep Cockpit Country free from mining. I have prioritized this experiential knowledge over engagement with academic work in developing this chapter. Likewise, my intentions in producing media are always to privilege local knowledge and voices in forms that are inclusive and accessible to the very people whose lives are being directly affected. 2 The campaign to save Cockpit Country is ongoing. The people continue to be embroiled in fighting against bauxite mining; media outreach and protests have been and continue to be staged. New community-based organizations have been started, new individuals are involved, and existing entities and individuals including myself are back in the fray and it is again a forefront issue as we fight the government, which has issued a lease for mining in the Cockpit Country (see Figueroa 2019a and 2019b).

References Figueroa, E. (2007), Cockpit Country – Voices from Jamaica’s Heart. http://youtu. be/x2Psj_UcqQY (2012), Cockpit Country Is Our Home. http://youtu.be/ ylqTfu07PJA, Fly Me to the Moon. Feature documentary about aluminium and modernity. Figueroa, E. (2019a), ‘Cockpit Country Still Under Threat From Bauxite Mining’, The Gleaner, 28 July. Available online: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/ focus/20190728/esther-figueroa-cockpit-country-still-under-threat-bauxitemining (accessed 31 August 2019).

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Figueroa, E. (2019b), ‘On Planet Earth, Everything is Connected’, Stabroek News, 22 July. Available online: https://www.stabroeknews.com/2019/features/in-thediaspora/07/22/on-planet-earth-everything-is-connected/ (accessed 31 August 2019). Holness, A. (2007), Statement on the Delimitation of the Cockpit Country and the Cockpit Country Protected Area. Jamaica Information Service. https://jis.gov.jm/ media/Cockpit-Country-Boundaries.pdf McCaulay, D. and Koenig, S. (2017), Cockpit Country: People and Places Left Out, Jamaica Gleaner. Senior, O. (1985), ‘Cockpit Country Dreams’, Talking of Trees, Kingston: Calabash. Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency, Cockpit Country Biodiversity Manual. http://nhmj-ioj.org.jm/ioj_wp/wp-content/uploads/Biodiversity_Manual_ Cockpit-Country_Acknowlegdement.pdf Webber, D. and Noel, C. (2013), Technical Report. Public Consultations on Defining the Boundaries of Cockpit Country, UWI Mona, Centre for Environmental Management, Jamaica. Windsor Research Center (2014), Various scientific and social research, newsletters, reports, maps, presentations, information relating to Cockpit Country: www. cockpitcountry.com Available online: Bauxite Mining an Unequal Sacrifice, http://cockpitcountry.com/bauxiteNews.html (accessed 2 March 2019).

9 The Hacktivist Cultural Archive: From Science Fiction to Snowden, Worms to the Women’s March Nicholas M. Kelly

During ‘Project Chanology’, a 2008 campaign of online and in-person demonstrations against the Church of Scientology, members of Anonymous gathered at Scientology centres across the globe. Many sported reproductions of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by ‘V’, the vigilante hero of the 2006 film V for Vendetta.1 In many ways, the gatherings were miniature recreations of the final scenes of Vendetta, where hordes of Londoners, each wearing the Fawkes mask, pour through the streets of the city, protesting the film’s oppressive government. This blurring of fact and fiction was not lost on anons. In We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists, Chanology protester Mike ‘Sethdood’ Vitale remarks, ‘You know the ending scene, where everyone is wearing the Guy Fawkes mask? That is very reminiscent of what Anonymous thinks Anonymous is … You have this massive crowd of people, who are anonymous, that is going to fight against a bigger thing and win’ (2012). Since Chanology, the Fawkes mask has become the de facto symbol of Anonymous, likely more associated with the hacktivists than the anarchic freedom fighter they styled themselves after. In this same time, Anonymous and hacktivism both have attracted increased media and scholarly attention. Works such as Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (2014); Molly Sauter’s The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (2014);

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Cole Stryker’s Epic Win for Anonymous (2011) and Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous (2012) have all explored the group’s history. Information Security researchers have written about hacktivism in publications such as the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (Denning 2015). While the Fawkes mask is an iconic example of hacktivists turning a cultural artefact to new political uses, it is, by no means, a lone example of hacktivists turning to the realm of culture for ideas, for assistance in articulating a political or social message. Just as the broader realm of hackerdom has long borrowed from science fiction (SF) novels, role-playing games and punk rock songs to craft internet personae and imagine new hacks, so, too, have hacktivists turned to cultural texts to define group identities, communicate political ideals and find both technical and personal inspiration. Looking at hacktivist groups like Anonymous, and hacktivist texts and projects like the ‘WANK Worm’, ‘The Hacker Manifesto’ and Community Memory, this project will illustrate that an archive of cultural works exists that has influenced the history of hacktivism, and that there is a long history of hacktivists referencing and appropriating cultural texts. This project will show how cultural references and appropriations serve to empower hacktivists. The hacktivist cultural archive has allowed hacktivist to solidify and express community identities, internally and externally. The archive helped hacktivists convey political messages and communicate the stakes of political and technological struggles. It has also served as a source of both personal and technical inspiration to hacktivists, who have emulated characters in cultural texts as well as recreated hacks seen first in fictions. We will conclude observing how the types of online organizing strategies once used by hacktivists are now used by some of the world’s largest political movements. We will see how online activist groups use digital media to amplify marginalized voices and how these groups also turn to the realms of fiction, film and aesthetics to articulate political platforms.

Appropriation and identity Before turning directly to historical examples, an operating definition of hacktivism is needed. This chapter will take a broad view of hacking and hacktivism, drawing on early definitions of ‘hack’, as seen in Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. There, a ‘hack’ is not gaining illicit access to a computer system but using digital technologies in inventive ways, finding clever solutions to technical problem ([1984] 2010: 10). Here, then, hacktivism will be defined as using computers or digital communications networks in unexpected, innovative or subversive ways, doing so in the name of political or social activism. Following this definition will show how many moments in computing history are, in fact, examples

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of proto-hacktivism. Even though early events and projects referenced may not be exact reflections of groups like Anonymous, early hacktivist activities are undoubtedly kindred projects which use computers and digital technologies in the name of activism. These early projects and hacktivists also demonstrate the long-standing bond between hacktivism and cultural texts. Terms established, the Fawkes mask serves as an ideal starting point to consider cultural appropriations and the generation of hacktivist group identities. A foregrounded theme of the Vendetta plot is that ideals and ideas can transcend oppressive forces that control, imprison or kill individual dissenters. The film begins with Evee, the woman who will take up the ‘V’ persona after V’s death, discussing how the symbol of Fawkes persists long after any memory of Fawkes as a person. Evee remarks: ‘We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but four hundred years later, an idea can still change the world’ (2006). After he is fatally wounded, V makes a similar observation to his killers, explaining they can’t defeat him as ‘ideas are bulletproof’ (2006). In ‘Message to Scientology’, a video that functions as Anonymous’ declaration of war, Anonymous repeats these sentiments, and that the strength of ideas will stop Scientology. The robotic voice proclaims in the video, ‘We cannot die; we are forever. We’re getting bigger every day–and solely by the force of our ideas, malicious and hostile as they often are … Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are Legion … Expect us’ (2012). Anonymous’ remarks echo the film and suggest Anonymous, like V, is an anarchic liberator, who will rescue people from Scientology’s ‘campaigns of misinformation; [and] suppression of dissent’. They illustrate how Anonymous finds strength in the notion they are ‘legion’, their solidarity, their ideas make them undefeatable. The sentiment is an empowering, heartening articulation of strength through unity. It also allows each individual to appear, like V, larger than life. These sentiments, notably, have analogues which go further back than Vendetta. In 1986 the hacker ‘zine Phrack published Lloyd ‘The Mentor’ Blankenship’s ‘Hacker Manifesto’.2 In it, Blankenship offers an indictment of world governments, international military-industrial complexes and the US education system, suggesting they are responsible for far larger crimes than any computer hackers, who only access the system to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Speaking to an imagined reader – characterized by a ‘three piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain’ – Blankenship narrates scenarios where intelligent, curious youth are regarded as underachievers, misfits because they don’t follow social conventions, punctuating the stories with ‘Damn kid, they’re all alike’ (1986). Blankenship concludes the manifesto inverting that sentiment, stating hackers are alike in the sense they shared these formative frustrations, frustrations that led them to the open,

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egalitarian world of computers. This, Blankenship says, gives hackerdom unity and strength. ‘You may stop this individual,’ he writes, ‘but you can’t stop us all … after all, we’re all alike’ (1986). It’s again the language of empowerment through shared experience, and a profile of the Mentor in Phrack points to several other shared reference points in this hacker community. Blankenship’s ‘Pro-phile’3 points out his ‘Mentor’ handle comes from the SF novels of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and that his online alias is ‘The Neuromancer’ (a reference to another SF work). It adds that Blankenship wrote a hacking column for skateboarding magazine Thrasher, and that he was a ‘serious science-fiction collector and role-playing gamer, [and played] guitar, bass, and keys in various bands’ (Tischler 1989a). Looking through other pro-philes in Phrack shows how widely many of these touchstones are shared. Handles like ‘Crimson Death’, ‘Taran King’, ‘Erik Bloodaxe’, ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’, ‘Lex Luthor’ and ‘Wizard of Arpanet’ are common in Phrack pro-philes, documenting hackerdom’s interest in SF and fantasy genres.4 Shared cultural interests continue to unify contemporary hacker and hacktivist communities. Anonymous member/spokesperson Barrett Brown has said that a shared set of pop culture references, a ‘common symbology’, allows anons to identify each other, and has said Anonymous’ shared in-jokes make Anonymous something like ‘Freemasons with a sense of humour’ (in We Are Legion 2012). By appropriating cultural texts, hackers and hacktivists can articulate to outsiders who they are, adopting larger-than-life personae. They can also define what interests and ideals they share, producing the solidarity they identify as a source of strength. Another frequent side benefit of hackers and hacktivists’ abilities to develop and cultivate larger-than-life personae is that these dramatic guises attract media attention, attention that can raise the influence and profile of a group. In Epic Win for Anonymous, Stryker observes Anonymous enjoyed the early reputation they developed when media reports characterized the group as ‘hackers on steroids, treating the web like a real-life video game’ (2011: 152). As with many aspects of Anonymous, however, earlier examples of similar events exist. In ‘Crime and Puzzlement,’ Electronic Frontier Foundation co-creator John Perry Barlow recounts discussions he had with members of the hacker group the Legion of Doom, a name borrowed from a DC Comics supervillain team. Asked why they picked the name, LOD’s Elias ‘Acid Phreak’ Ladopoulos remarked, ‘You wouldn’t want [a name] like Legion of Flower Pickers or something. But the media ate it up too. Probing the Legion of Doom like it was a gang or something, when it was really just a bunch of geeks behind terminals’ (1990). Again, cultural appropriations are used to build an image that courts media attention. These adopted threatening personae can, sometimes, even work a bit too well, as was the case with LOD member Blankenship. During Operation Sundevil, an early, significant US government campaign against hackers, the offices of Steve Jackson Games were raided. SJG was Blankenship’s employer and

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a producer of role-playing games similar to Dungeons and Dragons. The Secret Service they were concerned about a game Blankenship was working on, one based on the ‘cyberpunk’ literary genre pioneered by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Demonstrating how fact and fiction can blur, Barlow writes that the Secret Service ‘told Jackson, based on its author’s background, they had reason to believe [the game] was a “handbook on computer crime” ’ (1990).

Allusion and communication Cultural references and appropriations have helped hacktivists define and communicate their group identities, as well as court media attention (for good or ill). Hackers and hacktivists have also drawn on cultural texts to explain the stakes of technological struggles and the meanings of hacktivist technologies, as well as to articulate political messages. Drawing on cultural references to illustrate the social significance of new technologies and the struggles over who will control them has a history which traces at least as far back to the first instances of computers leaving the confines of universities and research institutions. The significance of computers’ potential democratization is documented through posts recorded as part of the ‘Community Memory’ project, begun in 1972. As Levy recounts in Hackers, Community Memory centred on a terminal placed in Berkeley, California’s, Leopold’s Records. The terminal functioned as virtual bulletin board, on which users could post and search messages. A handout from the organizers described it as a ‘communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interests, without having to cede judgement to third parties’ (in Levy [1984] 2010: 152). By making the computer publicly available, Community Memory was taking a step towards democratizing access to computers, which, in the early 1970s, were largely available only to universities, corporations or research institutions. This can be called proto-hacktivism (which is a term I use to refer to a form of hacktivism long before this term existed) using computers for the political project of empowering people. The service allowed users to find things like local health clinics or guides on how to make their own authentic New York bagel. It also featured expressive, even poetic, posts, such as the writings of ‘Dr. Benway’, a user whose nom-de-plume references the novels of William S. Burroughs. While parts of Benway’s writings might seem outlandish, their use of cultural allusions illustrates a clear awareness of the stakes of the Community Memory project, stakes that Benway attempts to communicate to readers through cultural allusions. In one post/ poem, Benway writes ‘FIND 1984, YOU SAY … JUST STICK AROUND ANOTHER TEN YEARS … 1984/WILL/FIND/YOU!’ (in Levy [1984]

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2010: 152–3). By invoking 1984, Benway seeks to conjure the twin spectres of information control and technological surveillance, two real threats posed by the age of computation, threats made all the more real by the imbalance of access to computers. However, as Levy notes, Benway’s writing bears an awareness that the Community Memory project and the democratization of computers is a potential remedy to that threat. Levy writes that Benway’s ‘dire predictions of big-brotherism’ are, in fact, ‘predictions rendered ironically by the use of 1984-style computer technology in a radical and creative fashion’ ([1984] 2010: 177). Benway is turning computer technologies to new expressive uses, simultaneously using 1984 to portray the very possibility of such unconventional uses. After writing ‘1984/WILL/FIND/YOU’, Benway concludes stating, ‘AND ITS GO BE RIGHTEOUS’, signalling computer technology might, in fact, be a source of hope (in Levy [1984] 2010: 152–3). Drawing on a widely familiar cultural text like 1984 offers Benway a sort of rhetorical empowerment, a widely understood touchstone that indicates the stakes of computer access. Apple would later use this exact tactic in its lavish commercial for the Macintosh, featured during the telecast of the 1984 Superbowl. The commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, depicts an Orwellian dystopia which is symbolically destroyed when a hammer is flung through a giant screen depicting the ‘Big Brother’ character, who is proclaiming his party’s control of information will ensure their hold on power. The commercial concludes stating the new, easy-to-use Macintosh will ensure the year 1984 ‘won’t be like 1984’ (1984). Cultural references have been employed to symbolically communicate the significance of technologies internally and to promote hacktivist tools for protest acts. A notable example of this is the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC). During Project Chanology, LOIC was used to assist in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Scientology websites. A DDoS attack is an attack where multiple users work to flood a website with requests for information, in a manner akin to pressing refresh over and over on a web page. The aim is to overload the site so that legitimate users cannot gain access. LOIC automated the process, allowing for a rapid rate of information requests, enough that a single LOIC user, Brian Mettenbrink, was reportedly responsible for 800,000 page requests to Scientology websites over one weekend (We Are Legion 2012). LOIC takes its name from the Command & Conquer videogame series, where the LOIC is a high-tier weapon acquired late in the game, one which allows the player to destroy enemy assets from across the game’s battle map. The LOIC tool was designed to be easy to use, so even anons without technical skills (such as Mettenbrink) could participate in the DDOS actions. Without having to explain how it works, the Command & Conquer reference communicates what LOIC does represent. The allusion explains LOIC’s purpose: to remotely strike at the enemy.

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With the 1989 ‘WANK’ worm hacktivists drew on cultural texts to articulate the politics which motivated an attack. WANK was a selfreplicating virus that infected NASA and US Department of Energy computers associated with the Galileo space probe. It displayed a message announcing WANK meant ‘Worms Against Nuclear Killers’ and quoted the lyric ‘You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war,’ from ‘Blossom and Blood’ by Australian punk band Midnight Oil. The content indicated WANK was made to protest, broadly, nuclear proliferation, and, specifically, the Galileo probe, whose nuclear power source was controversial as it could present a hazard were the craft to suffer issues at launch. With the Midnight Oil lyric, hacktivists drew from culture to articulate their politics, but there’s an even more fascinating feature of WANK. The name and idea for a ‘worm’ virus, a self-replicating, autonomously spreading virus, both come from The Shockwave Rider, a 1975 SF novel by John Brunner, a novel that ends with the creation and release of a self-replicating ‘tapeworm’ (1975: 249). The creator of the world’s first worm, Robert Tappan Morris Jr., was also fan of Brunner’s work. After the ‘Morris Worm’ hobbled roughly 6,000 machines on the then-young internet, the news media quickly discovered the role Brunner’s book played in the worm’s creation. The Los Angeles Times reported that Morris’ mother described The Shockwave Rider as ‘her teenage son’s primer on computer viruses and “one of the most tattered books”’ (Dean 1988: G1).

Textual and technical inspiration Today, the idea that fictions could offer not just technical inspiration to hackers and hacktivists, but technical training, is a significant feature of works of some tech-savvy authors, in particular SF author, blogger and EFF special consultant Cory Doctorow. In 2009, Doctorow published Little Brother and, in 2013, its sequel, Homeland. The novels follow the exploits of a young hacktivist, Marcus Yallow. In Little Brother, Yallow works to expose illegal police operations undertaken by the US Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack. In Homeland, he participates in the Occupy protests alongside Anonymous and, eventually, goes on the run after leaking a trove of documents describing US government surveillance of electronic communications. Doctorow makes clear he wants his works to teach and inspire aspiring hacktivists. In Little Brother’s introduction he writes, ‘This book is meant to be something you do … You can use [the book’s] ideas to defeat government censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn’t want you to’ (2009: 2). Within the opening pages of the novel, Yallow dispenses a wealth of technical knowledge to readers. In

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technical, but accessible, detail, he walks readers through how to bypass the surveillance software on his school-issued laptop. He goes on to discuss TOR, ‘The Onion Router’, software that encrypts and masks the origin of internet traffic by directing it through nodes on volunteer network. Describing uses of the system – while simultaneously pitching it to young readers – Yallow remarks that TOR has been used to liberate access to the internet in places where the net is policed, and that pedigree ‘means that it’s perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school’ (2009: 10). Doctorow’s novels actively endeavour to provide technical guidance and inspiration to potential hacktivists. There’s also good evidence that Doctorow’s novels have provided at least one hacktivist personal inspiration or empowerment. In 2017, Doctorow released Walkaway, a dystopian SF novel. The jacket for the hardcover edition provides an insight into the connections between hacktivism and the SF community. On the jacket Doctorow receives praise from SF heavyweights such as William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside these remarks is a blurb from none other than Edward Snowden, who writes, ‘A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we’ll inhabit’ (in Doctorow 2017). Snowden’s blurb placed alongside the SF luminaries says much about shared communities and demographics. It also sees the hacktivist claiming that Doctorow’s writing is something readers can draw on, learn from, something that might inspire them to build a better world. That Snowden would make such a comment should be little surprise to keen-eyed viewers of Laura Poitras’ 2014 documentary Citizenfour. In Citizenfour, Poitras records Snowden’s initial meetings with journalists Glen Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, meetings which would lead to the first publications from the Snowden archive and Snowden’s eventual emergence onto the public stage. After the revelation of Snowden’s identity Citizenfour shows Snowden preparing to leave Hong Kong’s Hotel Mira. Poitras follows Snowden as he packs his belongings, and, on Snowden’s nightstand, scattered among a pair of laptops, is a hardcover copy of the recently released Homeland. Again, Homeland is the novel in which Yallow comes into possession of a trove of secret US government documents, documents which would reveal clandestine electronic surveillance programs. At the end of Homeland, Yallow passes these documents to be made public before disappearing, knowing his actions will make him a fugitive. Before Yallow makes this final handoff, he ruminates on his decision, worried that ‘the system’ could be so corrupt the revelations will have no impact. However, as Yallow prepares to walk away from his previous life, what motivated his ultimate decision? He remarks that if the ringleader of the unlawful programs aren’t held accountable, it wouldn’t be because ‘the system’ had failed, but ‘because people like me chose not to act when we could’. He concludes saying, ‘The

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system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solution from now on’ (2013: 264). On Snowden’s nightstand was a book which concludes with a fictional hacktivist doing something extremely similar to what Snowden was doing at that moment he was meeting with Poitras, Greenwald and MacAskill. That same book concludes with the hacktivist explaining why people like him need to act when they can, why he chose to build a better world. Certainly, such sentiments, found in the pages of fiction, would be a welcome source of inspiration, would be heartening, empowering for someone about to risk so much to follow his own sense of civic responsibility.

Conclusion: The hacktivist cultural archive As these examples show, in the background of the history of computing, hacking and hacktivism, there exists an archive. It is an archive of cultural texts that have bound hackers and hacktivist communities together through shared culture references and interests. It is an archive that has been a source of empowerment. Hackers and hacktivists have drawn on the archive to create larger-than-life personae, to generate and express community identities, both internally and to the outside world. Politically minded hackers and hacktivists have drawn on this archive of cultural texts for metaphors and allusions that help them convey the significance of technologies and technological issues. This archive has also served as a site of technical guidance and inspiration, providing hacktivists imaginary hacks and technologies to recreate for real-life objectives. This archive of cultural works also holds the capacity to serve not just as a source of personal inspiration, but as a source of reassurance and courage. Although the realms of computing, activism and culture have interacted and influenced each other for more than half a century, the shared history of these phenomena continues to see dramatic new developments. On one hand, there have been striking divisions of political identity and objectives in hacktivist groups. For instance, while segments of Anonymous continue to support pro-government-transparency, pro-democracy and pro-free-speech initiatives, the political tenor of 4Chan, the internet image board on which Anonymous first coalesced, has shifted far to the right. As Angela Nagle (2016) observes in Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump, 4Chan has served as common discussion forum for internet users aligned with the ‘Alt-Right’. Sites such as 4Chan even played a significant role in promoting the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the murder of anti-Nazi protester Heather Heyer and efforts to downplay connections between the Alt-Right and white supremacy in the aftermath of Heyer’s death.5

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In contrast to the disturbing trends on hacktivist enclaves like 4Chan, the history of hacktivism and online activism has also seen heartening developments in that new activist communities are now using digital technologies and online organizing strategies to highlight social justice issues and amplify marginalized voices. As Wired writer Bijan Stephan (2015) points out, the Black Lives Matter movement has deftly employed smart devices and social media technologies to bring greater visibility to the state of race inequality in the United States, similar to how the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s used television and telephone technologies to bring visibility to those same issues. Just as Anonymous used the internet to organize a global series of protests during Project Chanology, organizers of the Women’s March have used digital communications technologies to coordinate global demonstrations in protest of structural inequality. Just as the members of Anonymous have developed a shared iconography, just as hacktivists have referenced works of fiction to articulate political messages, so has the Women’s March turned to the realm of aesthetics and fiction to help express their political program and convey their sense of marginalization. While Anonymous has become symbolically linked to the Guy Fawkes mask, participants in the Women’s March have attempted to employ the Pussyhat as a symbol of solidarity, one designed to protest comments made by US President Donald Trump and transform the word ‘pussy’ into a word of empowerment.6 The Women’s March has also employed the imagery of dystopian science fiction to call attention to the political marginalization of women and political efforts to exercise control over women’s bodies. Since the first Women’s March, protesters have employed signs and outfits referencing Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a work which depicts a dystopian society where women’s lives and reproductive rights are controlled by a patriarchal government. The red garments described in Atwood’s novel and seen in the book’s TV adaptation have become a common sight at Women’s March events and other international protests regarding women’s rights and reproductive freedoms. Indeed, as Atwood herself has observed, a unique advantage of the costume is that it allows women protesters to be heard even in venues where laws might prevent them from literally speaking. ‘Because [the red cloak] is a visual symbol, women can use it without fear of being arrested for causing a disturbance, as they would be for shouting in places like legislatures,’ she remarked.7 While the future tenor and objectives of hacktivism and online activism is uncertain, and online political discourse and agitation alike may continue to become increasing varied, what is clear from examples of hacktivist groups’ (and online activist groups’) close relationship with the realm of culture is that the hacktivist cultural archive is a collection of works that bear examination. This is doubly the case, because, as we see with the examples of Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March, the internet and social

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media platforms are increasingly common places where political and social movements organize and communicate. Indeed, it seems highly likely that in the future the lion’s share of all political action will have some online component. By examining the appeals, values and aesthetics of these works, by assessing which components of these texts resonate with hacktivist or online activist communities, a better understanding of what motivates and unites these communities can be achieved. Fortunately, the history of the connections between hacktivism and the cultural sphere offers many more examples of inspirational debts owed to realms such as fiction, film, music and videogames, meaning there is much to study and much to be learned. Moreover, as the broader history of hackerdom and the hacktivist culture indicates, the relationship between the hacktivist community and its evergrowing archive of valorized cultural works is a relationship marked by both a deep history and clear prospect of more to be studied in the future.

Notes 1 An adaptation of a graphic novel by Alan Moore. 2 Also called ‘The Conscience of a Hacker’. 3 The ph in ‘Phile’ emulates the ph used in the term ‘phone phreaking’, a precursor to modern computer hacking where individuals would use specific tones to manipulate the phone system, enabling free calls on the network. 4 See Randy ‘Taran King’ Tischler’s Pro-philes of these figures in (Tischler 1986; 1987; 1988; 1989b; 1989c; 1992). 5 See Ashely Feinberg’s Wired article ‘The Alt-Right Can’t Disown Charlottesville’ for more on the relationship between 4Chan, the Alt-Right and the events at the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ Rally. 6 As explained on Jayna Zweiman and Krista Suh’s Pussyhat Project homepage, it is important to note that while the Pussyhat was initially envisioned as a symbol of solidarity, there has been a significant amount of discussion regarding how the hat symbolically excludes communities of colour and the transgender community. 7 See Peter Beaumont and Amanda Holpuch, ‘How The Handmaid’s Tale dressed protests across the world.’

References ‘1984’ [Television Advertisement] Dir. Ridley Scott. CBS, 22 January 1984. Anonymous (2008), ‘Message to Scientology.’ 21 January. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ (accessed 2 May 2017).

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Barlow, J. (1990), ‘Crime and Puzzlement.’ EFF.org. 8 June. Available online: https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/crime_and_ puzzlement_1.html (accessed 10 May 2017). Beaumont, P. and Holpuch, A. (2018), ‘How The Handmaid’s Tale Dressed Protests across the World.’ The Guardian, 3 August. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/how-the-handmaids-tale-dressed-protestsacross-the-world (accessed 14 March 2019). Blankenship, L. (1986), ‘The Conscience of a Hacker.’ Phrack. 9 September. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html (accessed 7 May 2017). Brunner, J. (1975), The Shockwave Rider, New York: Del Rey. Citizenfour (2014), [Film] Dir. Laura Poitras. USA: Praxis Films. Coleman, G. (2014), Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, London: Verso. Dean, P. (1988), ‘Was Science-Fiction Novel Germ of a Computer Virus?’ Los Angeles Times. 8 June: G1. Denning, D. (2015), ‘The Rise of Hacktivism.’ Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 8 September. Available online: http://journal.georgetown.edu/the-rise-ofhacktivism/ (accessed 16 May 2017). Doctorow, C. (2009), Little Brother [Online Edition]. Tor Books. Available online: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.pdf (accessed 14 May 2017). Doctorow, C. (2013), Homeland [Online Edition]. Tor Books. Available online: http://craphound.com/homeland/Cory_Doctorow_-_Homeland.pdf (accessed 14 May 2017). Doctorow, C. (2017), Walkaway, Great Britain: Head of Zeus. Feinberg, A. (2017), ‘The Alt-Right Can’t Disown Charlottesville’. Wired. August. Available online: https://www.wired.com/story/alt-right-charlottesville-reddit4chan/ (accessed 14 March 2019). Levy, S. ([1984] 2010), Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Sebastopol, CA.: O’Reilly Media. Nagle, A. (2016), ‘The New Man of 4Chan.’ The Baffler. March. Available online: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle (accessed 19 May 2017). Olson, P. (2012), We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency, New York: Little, Brown and Co. Sauter, M. (2014), The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Stephan, B. (2015), ‘How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power.’ Wired. November. Available online: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/ how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/ (accessed 19 May 2017). Stryker, C. (2011), Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web, New York: Overlook Duckworth. Tischler, R. (1986), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile I.’ Phrack. 3 March. Available online: http:// phrack.org/issues/4/1.html (accessed 8 May 2017). Tischler, R. (1987), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile VIII.’ Phrack. 17 February. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/11/2.html (accessed 8 May 2017).

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Tischler, R. (1988), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile XX.’ Phrack. 12 October. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/20/2.html (accessed 8 May 2017). Tischler, R. (1989a), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile XXIII.’ Phrack. 18 January. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/23/2.html (accessed 7 May 2017). Tischler, R. (1989b), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile XXVIII.’ Phrack. 7 October. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/28/2.html (accessed 8 May 2017). Tischler, R. (1989c), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile XXIX.’ Phrack. 17 November. Available online: http://phrack.org/issues/29/2.html (accessed 8 May 2017). Tischler, R. (1992), ‘Phrack Pro-Phile.’ Phrack, 1 August. Available online: http:// phrack.org/issues/40/3.html (accessed 8 May 2017). V for Vendetta (2006), [Film] Dir. James McTeigue, USA: Warner Bros. We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists (2012), [Film] Dir. Brian Knappenberger, USA: Luminant Media. Zweiman, J. and Suh, K. (2016), ‘About.’ Pussyhat Project. Available online: https:// www.pussyhatproject.com/our-story (accessed 13 March 2019).

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10 On Solitude and Solidarity Olivia Guntarik and Verity Trott

The political current shifts, turns, slips. Twitter makes waves. Each small tweet moves like a ripple in the world. One message sticks and instigates a town square rebellion. We watch the late night news. Scan the faces searching for our sisters in the growing group of protesters. Elsewhere, across another land and sea, there is the rhythm of an uprising and in the pulse a familiar echo. In this moment, there is something to be said about narratives that move us. We gaze afar to the historical fragments and prop them up against our most instinctual memories. This permits us to see the darker side of Thailand’s political crisis. We hear a renewed call for women at the grassroots. The country has just sworn in its first female leader. Young and ready, her rise to the top has been swift. A colossal task awaits her to continue to please her voters, to keep the fragile peace. The people are hopeful. ‘It’s a new dawn’, ‘a new ethos’. This is progress after all. The year is 2011. Social media is on fire and lighting up the online networks at an unprecedented scale. It is obvious that the younger sister of a disgraced former prime minister has much to live up to when it comes to the protection of human rights. She has garnered a strong female following, women who demand more justice. As observers of the country’s political situation, we are quick to alight on the narrative, to tap into the intense media coverage. We are fortunate to have Thai friends who were generous in providing first-hand accounts of what was happening on the ground. We track the circulatory narrative from one of celebration to one of defeat; our attention finally coming to rest on the piteous end of her regime three years in, and as public sentiment turned sour. Soon enough a storm of hateful comments was unleashed. The vitriol does not escape us as the

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comments blinked like fireflies across our screens. Who were these women? How did their views express solidarity for women’s rights? Like moths circling the light, we were mesmerized. We perched at the crevice of the campaign with fascination, fossicking through key political messages to gauge a sense of the pulse of the protests from our home-base in Australia. So distant again from what was taking place in a country we could only imagine through the screen. This was a defining moment in history and we wanted to acknowledge the women’s plight, our own engagement with their cause. We followed the protest movement from the moment Thailand’s new leader was elected in 2011, highlighting various women’s responses to her leadership over time as a way to engage with the themes of solitude and solidarity. On this subject, we were particularly inspired by the poetics of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Excerpts from this novel are presented here to argue against writing conventions, as a way to apply literary techniques to life as lived experience, and to show how fiction can reveal the hidden realities of our time.1

Wildflowering Some people have asked if women’s forms of activism in one part of the world have their parallels in other parts (Jeffery & Basu 2012). Others insist on privileging location (Basu 2018). Both ideals we believe to be true of women’s social movements, as much as we believe in the voices of other women who (upon seeing the revolt in Tahrir Square) have been able to reflect back on their own struggles. We too sense the shared responsibility and purpose, the flash of possibilities: She is crying and I am crying because her victory is mine. To view the world today through a feminist of color lens shatters all barriers of stateimposed nationality. The Egyptian revolution is my revolution. (Moraga 2015: xvi) We want these connections to be real because we want to believe in the power of the collective. And yet something else, it seems, has brought us closer in the form of communication technology and this makes fighting the cause and locating shared understandings across our differences evermore real than to be speaking in isolation. This is what García Márquez (2014: 16) was referring to when he put the glare on the ‘scale of our solitude’. He was speaking of the solitude of Latin America in the grander scheme of things. Where much of the violence – the struggle between civilian and military forces, the armed conflicts and the unresolved cases of civilian deaths and the ‘missing’ in Mexico and Central America, the ongoing terror

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of colonial violence and the mnemonic effects of historical lynching – is a history already relegated to the margins and amnesia. The disconnect and disparities between what is experienced on the frontier, how solidarities are routinely hierarchical, are the things at stake here. Solitude (soledad), for García Márquez, is part of the inevitabilities of life, a human condition and dangerous if excessive (Hall 1973). The baroque world he painted was one of absolute solitude, cultural disintegration, of narcissism, egoism, where self-serving dictators become intoxicated by their own power, where people worked tirelessly but never feel exhausted even though they have not slept for more than fifty hours, where they would spend ‘the whole day dreaming on their feet’ (García Márquez 1983: 44). This was not a world of altruism, humanity and moral ideals. The possibility of a redemptive history was itself a fiction. This is how the writer is able to extend her narrative, apply the conceptual textures of solitude to form so that ideas translate into alchemy and other wondrous substances to fuse with the political solitudes of nation-states. This is the rose garden we might have entered but did not. Truth relies on the teller’s creativity and so it is that García Márquez dares the reader to enter his narrative world, and into an oracle of the psychopathic roots of human existence. Human experiences are told through multigenerational stories as they emerge and converge through the lives of the individual, the family, the aliveness of the text as a way to turn our attention to the idiosyncrasies of history. Here is how, as author, he laments the realities of humankind; questions the foundations of what we know to be true. How is it possible to change the course of history, to act collectively for our common humanity? Of course, there is something else to be thinking about here as we watch another televised image of death which seems familiar – a woman’s hands shooting to her nostrils in repulsion – the stench of complacency in the air. Could this be the image that infuses our magical thinking? Following a talisman, we play with danger as we skirt around the heart of statesanctioned violence, the machinations of media control, the numbing narrative that capitalism is synonymous with freedom. The very things that conspire to distance us from the realities of our common humanity. All of this not new. We’ve been here before, have we not? Like a forbidden fantasy circling under our noses, we are both repulsed and secretly transfixed by this image but unable to move. This is also a tale of ‘corpse magic’ one might say; after all, this is about things that can never be returned, and so, we must fill the void with lies and accompany the lies with visions of progress, which is part of the ‘magic of the state’ (Taussig 1997). Sunk up to his neck in a morass of dead branches and rotting flowers, he flung the dirt of the garden all about after having finished with the courtyard and the backyard, and he excavated so deeply under the

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foundations of the east wing of the house that one night they woke up in terror at what seemed to be an earthquake, as much because of the trembling as the fearful underground creaking. (García Márquez 1983: 268) We refuse to unsettle the foundations because we do not want to upset the status quo. The real and the imagined are one and the same. This is what García Márquez called the poetization of space (Williams 1989) – interventions into our worldviews that make it possible to imagine a New World. In so doing, what we know to be true is never straightforward and simple, truth and reality never pure. The media weaves a complicated universe of symbols, worldviews, first-person accounts, sweeping generalizations, conflating our realities, memories and sensibilities. These get naturalized as truth. What we imagine is something else entirely, an illusion. We see this in the way that the media tracked the leader’s every move. And so it is that we come to understand how Yingluck, Thailand’s first female prime minister, came to power at the age of forty-four after a landslide victory. A campaign that centred on poverty eradication, tax reduction and national reconciliation. An election victory underscored by a series of earlier political protests. Citizens clashed with the military; the city streets descended into chaos. Protesters took umbrage with the Democrat Party–led government, which they believed had masterminded a military tactic for governance. Protests escalated; attempts to negotiate a ceasefire failed and forced a military crackdown. Hundreds were killed; thousands more were injured. Multiple images tumbling with our own imagined realities. There is a play of illusion here akin to the allusions braided through García Márquez’s novel. The play of weather and dialogue, the rain constant, the tensions high, women occupying contradictory positions, all adding to the sense of drama and illusion in the text (Deveny & Marcos 1988). Time and place are uncertain entities. The atmosphere is foreboding, hints of a ‘fearful solitude’, a ‘suicidal drive’, characters mesmerized by the latest ‘great inventions’ in a city that reflects the dread of the human condition, that is both mirror and mirage. There is a sense that something extraordinary, even magical and supernatural, or terrifying, will happen. There is unpredictability and disorder, a body that is surely being buried alive. Indeed, the body is something to be inscribed, to be fabricated with illusions, with magic, with regimes of ‘truth’ (Lash 1984). Only these truths are not what they seem. The body is a surface, a shifting context, a blank country of vicissitudes upon which to project a new narrative of progress. We see this in the play of intimacy, distance and irresolution as the narrative weaves through strange and familiar characters. A plan gets ‘enveloped in a web of pretexts, disappointments and evasions until it turned into nothing but an illusion’ (García Márquez 1983: 18). One character ‘falls into the isolating solitariness of obsessive enquiry and finally

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into the solitude of madness’ (Burns 1985: 25). The character of Amaranta can only know solitude by being in a heightened state of isolation. In her solitude, other thoughts intrude like uninvited guests but perhaps even this is an illusion of her selective memory. Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, Amaranta thought about Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones. (García Márquez 1983: 182) Reality gets churned up with other memories, better ones. The protesting on the streets is visual and arresting. There is a stream of red movement, like a blood river, protesters flooding the streets, everywhere clothed in red, armed with red flags, as they descend upon the city, shouting their protest calls in unison, clutching banners scrawled with the Thai script in which we had no literacy; political demands we could not understand. Somewhere along the line we learn the protesters are the National United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), known as the ‘Red Shirts’. Red, as we know it, is the colour of passion and leadership and loss. Red is fire. Courage. This much we know. Driven especially by female commentary, we observe a buzz of activity around Yingluck’s leadership. In this chaotic vortex, something piques our curiosity. We gravitate towards one site, which documents the top ten worst prime ministers in the world. On this list, Yingluck is #2; her brother at the top. Most of the comments foreground Yingluck’s simple-mindedness, laziness or ineptitude. ‘the most stupid prime minister. The worst.’ ‘Skipping meeting is her hobby and cry in front of public is her only one speciality … She does make the woman’s pride down. Just show her face and read the script is her job.’ ‘Satan on earth.’ ‘arguably the best-looking world leader at the moment and possibly one of the most beautiful of all time.’ How odd, we think, to be making references to her looks when people were dying. But this is the internet age when anyone can do and say as they please. The public is invited to post a message. Do you agree or not? Visitors are free to vote (a thumbs up or down). Some of the comments racking up heightened support. We watch as the thumbs up icon reaches fever pitch with anywhere between 3,000+ and more than a million votes; the numbers rise and stagger, hit the jackpot like a Pachinko machine in a game to win. Followers of the page are able to share the website using Twitter

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or Facebook. The algorithm is performing perfectly; it is in sync with the public mood. How easy it is to share a political opinion. The atmosphere is charged! Alive and kicking. The sharing and endorsement of other people’s opinions highlights the sense of freedom people felt to express their views candidly. The comments illustrate how participants were not afraid to level their criticism to the people at the top and to speak out. The peer endorsement offered the means through which people were able to develop their political identities and consciousness.2 The sites offered an unconventional space for women to speak out without censorship against the government.3 We ourselves were witnesses to these persuasive lines of correspondence. Like a lifeline someone threw us, the digital networks provided a bridge to tap straight into the public’s agitation. We dived into this alternative space that we saw had allowed women to share their defiance and collective subjugation. And yet we recognized that such solidarity was also dangerous because of its illusory qualities. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. (García Márquez 1983: 17) Illusion is never about the present or the past because it is always obsessed with an idealized future. Reality is shunted to the sidelines like an unwilling silent partner. They could not return because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to grow before their eyes. (García Márquez 1983: 17) The leader’s popularity grew before our eyes, and yet the public forums suggested otherwise. The media always at the ready to endorse her rise to power. The protesters always ready to defeat her. Nothing but a puppet for her brother, they claimed. ‘just follows her brother order, Thakin Shinawatra, to achieve authority, asset and etc. by corruption.’ ‘She do everything what her brother said. She doesn’t know what’s right and wrong and totally can’t think by herself.’ ‘Bad like her brother go to hell.’ The comments encapsulated the rising discontent towards Yingluck’s leadership, indicating that people were not afraid to express their views in a relatively public forum. This political engagement highlighted

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alternative and counter-narratives that were added to and shared. People created memes in response to one another’s comments or specific political comments Yingluck expressed. There were ‘crying’, ‘nepotism’ and ‘in jail’ memes, and we laughed along to them because they were relatable. These were shared over and over, and we followed the digital traces until our own journey into the labyrinth spiralled into either an unending maze of media or a wall of dead ends due to our own incapacity to read the Thai alphabet and when we couldn’t always rely on our friends to do the interpreting for us. Despite the dangers of this digital precipice on which we precariously stood, what was clear as day to us was the feeling of a community of citizens networked together by different modes of shared experiences. We watched as these practices of sharing and influencing ebbed and flowed between the screen and the street, peaking in intensity online and then spilling directly into the physical space as images of the fighting on the streets hit our own screens. Many accused Yingluck of abusing her powerful family connections. Others criticized her self-serving policies, total disregard for women’s rights and issues of domestic violence and genderbased discrimination. Women used digital and social media as extensions to their offline identities.4 Thai academics and other high-profile female activists lent their voices to the cause. She did not get up again. Lying on cushions, as if she really were ill, she braided her hair and rolled it about her ears as death had told her it should be on her bier. Then she asked Ursula for a mirror and for the first time in forty years she saw her face, devastated by age and martyrdom, and she was surprised at how much she resembled the mental image that she had of herself. Ursula understood by the silence in the bedroom that it had begun to grow dark. (García Márquez 1983: 230) The eternal realist, García Márquez reminds us that truth is but a chameleon, the trick of narrative light serves as both its guard and symbol. The online commentary reflected a larger pattern found in other social media sites, suggesting a general and mixed sense of both hopefulness and despair that Yingluck’s leadership stirred in other women. Women’s rights groups and similar activist organizations played key roles in conveying alternative perspectives that the media may not necessarily have picked up. The online and offline social worlds pushed and pulled against one another, working symbiotically to attract more supporters, and to distance others, as momentum for the protests swelled and dipped. Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of her customers, who accepted as something certain an establishment that did not exist except in the imagination, because even the tangible things

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there were unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it, the disembowelled phonograph with a nesting hen inside, the garden of paper flowers, the calendars going back to the years before the arrival of the banana company, the frames with prints cut out of magazines that had never been published. (García Márquez 1983: 314) Through this focus on the tangible, García Márquez (1983: 9) portrays a cautionary tale about material determinism that is also expressed in the opening chapter: ‘Things have a life of their own … It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.’ And so it is that the magic of technology is able to do wondrous things. It can put us in two places at once: create the illusion of bringing people together, show through beautifully networked algorithms of big data constellations how content can be organized around the logic of machine thinking. But machines can also mutate into mad monsters. A strong military machine facilitates nation building, becomes the divinely selected instrument for salvation, for spreading propaganda, for shaping the political discourse, for persuading and controlling the people. If there are counter-movements, the machines will indeed come into their own as a life force to obliterate the resistance. Anything that can potentially undo the magic of the nation.5 A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun’s rays. Jose Arcadia Buendia, who had still not been consoled for the failure of his magnets, conceived the idea of using this invention as a weapon of war. (García Márquez 1983: 3)

Art adrift and the garden of forked pathways It is easy to believe how we can get caught up in the wonder of the narrative. The better question to be asking here is not how we turn ourselves over to ideas but what to make of narratives that move us and compel us to fight for what we believe. If the other is placed within history, then narrative conventions must also inscribe the wrongs suffered by the other in that idiom. The other exists only to verify one existence. The tyranny of distance instils complacency, makes it easier to frame the other as exotic. Here is how proximity confronts, defies us to come to terms with violent atrocities, to see such events as something different; so we come to live with history in a different way. Be still, Octavio Paz (1985: 29) warned, for man does not want this; his is a world of indifference and remoteness: ‘His language is full of

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reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats.’ For a long time, we joined the swirling sea of ever-growing Big Data, of ever-more political and military narratives transmitted through endless reams of digital information. We fell into the rhythms of daily life, and with new considerations about the nature of reality. ‘How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators,’ claimed Nietzsche (1974). This is how we came to focus on new literary trails. What to put together? What to exclude? How to read the signs in this chaotic digital vortex? We resort to mixing up the narrative to expose its juxtapositions. A woman holds up a salute during a protest against the coup at Terminal 21, a popular shopping mall in Bangkok. The salute is said to symbolise admiration and thanks and is shown as a farewell to loved ones. In this case, the loved one is reportedly Thai democracy. (The Guardian, 3 June 2014) A Buddhist monk wearing a face mask stands along with volunteers near the Government house during ongoing anti-government demonstrations in Bangkok. (The Telegraph, 13 July 2018) Throughout the day, the protesters flashed the three-finger salute from the ‘Hunger Games’ films that is meant to signal a silent defiance of authoritarian governance. (Beech, The New York Times, 22 May 2018) The narrative becomes a ‘transmedia’ text glowing with an aura of divination (Scolari & Ibrus 2014; Clandinin 2016). Images. Bold and big fight for position in this telematic kingdom overflowing with arresting, prophetic symbols. Women standing together in salute. We, as viewers, scroll down and down and through the pages. Click. Question. Dream. Translate. Zoom. In. Out. Hover. Activate a meme. Vicariously live through an avatar. Zone out entirely. There is a woman with a message to the United Nations: ‘UN Please help us. Protect democracy in Thailand.’ It’s hybrid storytelling conveyed across

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multiple platforms. The logos of the familiar multinational corporations are there. Everything is always already tweetable, likeable, shareable and attachable. This is multiplatform storytelling at its best,  a form of organizational hybridity, community blending their value systems with organizational tactics, using old forms in new ways to spread the message. Some messages stick. Others are deleted, censored, moderated and modified, fall away into the abyss of digital disarray. We have what is called ‘compassion fatigue’ for social problems, from too much information, too many images of death, too many media portrayals of the ‘distant suffering of others’ (Tester 2001: vii). Our own attention flits between the digital and the real, visualizing the protests as performance, the people as central mouthpiece to the cause. Sometimes, the protests turn violent. Yet we see everything from the perspective of the people, or so it seems. It feels real. You feel the heat, smell the scent of death, the suffocating blood writhing through your body, your eyes burn and bulge with terror. Expectation. And suddenly, you are chanting the songs of the uprising, yourself, on the street. The protest songs are visual, a teleological reminder of your environment, of your roots: The smell of the buffalo is mixed with the smell of the young men and women of the farmers/It’s not upper class like the people of heaven. (a  Thai protest song; see Mitchell 2011: 469) It is a trick of ear and eye. The song is uploaded to YouTube. It’s in the public sphere now for all the world to feast on. You will die for this. This is truth-telling. This is what it means to believe and to organize; when the body acts instinctually. It is hybrid organizational commandeering at its best, facilitating a fast-paced and flexible ‘repertoire switching’; online and offline worlds collide (Chadwick 2013: 284). For the war begins again, the nation is prepared and the media responds but where are you? It becomes harder to see where the edges rest, as your own body cuts into the fray, the real and the imagined, the body moving between unconscious and conscious states. Michael Taussig (2009: 249) calls this an instinctual urge, for it is: the bodily unconscious that this connectivity directs us–another sort of intelligence working, as it were, in a subterranean manner, like the signals that operate between the moon and the oceans in relation to the tides and the flow of menstruation, or the message that urges wood boring beetles northwards along with global warming into untouched forests.

Faith in stone and other dreamworlds Today, it is already a long way into the future. We have followed the movement since 2011 with Yingluck’s victory, which we also know had triggered the

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uprising built on the banks of previous protests. Perhaps nothing much has changed. Protests have and will continue with fresh outbreaks of resistance in Bangkok. There have been more accusations of political corruption. More women opting to speak out. A protest leader was killed in pre-election clashes. Shot dead, states the Huffington Post, ‘a clear setback for Yingluck’ (28 March 2014). We Google this in 2019, from where we live Melbourne, and discover the protest leader’s name is Mainueng Kor Kunthee, a poet. This leads us to the following thread. From all accounts he was soft spoken and polite – but effective. To many of those gathered on Monday for his funeral, it was his criticism of Thailand’s harsh lèse-majesté law – Article 112 of the criminal code that punishes those deemed to have insulted the King, Queen, heir or regent – that was his downfall. An unknown gunman killed him on April 23 in a car park, pumping bullets through the window of his car in broad daylight. (Ghosh, The Straits Times, 29 April 2014) And then further down this passage, we read another voice magically inserted into this obituary. It was like a phantom story disturbing the living with the ghostly whispers of the dead, and it filtered into our theatre of illusion like a ray of light: The subtext to the funeral was never far from the surface. A 64-year-old housewife Sumalee Kongmanee was there, and told The Straits Times: “I never knew Mainueng, but I heard him on the radio. He talked about how some laws are not fair – like Article 112. I haven’t studied much, but I know what he said is right. She was not the only one to have been swayed enough not by actually encountering the poet but by hearing what he said, to come to the funeral. (Ghosh, The Straits Times, 29 April 2014) The Thai crisis deepens. ‘Jubilant scenes.’ ‘The people’s coup.’ ‘A true ally should make reasonable requests to bolster long-term relations with the Thai people.’ Elsewhere the nation is being touted a development success story. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell and to share. Where is past and present in this space? Poverty in Thailand was reduced from 21 per cent in 2000 to 12.6 per cent in 2012 and 7.5 per cent in 2015. Between 1999–2005 the economy grew annually by five per cent, which created jobs and improved education ….7.1 million people live in poverty. A statement of facts and significant statistics by an unnamed blogger.

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More big data. More beautiful images. More stories orbiting awkwardly around the death count, tripping over one another. The rise and fall of a leader. The rise and rise of a Régime. On this day … 7 May 2014: Yingluck is dismissed from office under claims she abused her power to benefit her party and her family. We see that she has already reached her expiration date. She faces charges under Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Commission for mishandling a loss-making subsidy scheme for rice farmers. This multibillion-dollar scheme was popular in Thailand’s rural rice-farming provinces in the north and northeast, and helped Yingluck win the votes of millions of farmers when she came to power in 2011. She made promises she could not keep. The time is nigh. A court has found her guilty of political violations. More news coverage. More carefully placed images. In some, the national flag is draped behind her body framing her face like a proud American president. In others, a string of pearls glint from her chest. She responds to questions from an American reporter; the voice of an English translator dubbed over her own. Occasionally, she glances nervously to something we can’t see off-screen. There are further reports of corruption, negligence and mismanagement. But up until then she had refused to leave her post: ‘I will remain here,’ Yingluck tells journalists as she is interviewed on the street. ‘I will not flee anywhere. I may be a woman, but I have the courage to face all possible scenarios.’ A month on … A sixty-six-year-old female protester claims: ‘I am here because I don’t want a coup. I want elections and democracy.’ (Murphy, Humanosphere, 5 June 2014) Many years later … We are here because the past is no longer a foreign country. However much one tries to resist returning to the past, to do things differently, the past will continue to haunt and shame us. And so, we repeat the words of García Márquez who understood the tricks that memory plays. the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. (García Márquez 1983: 335).

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We bring these words together to expose the contradictions and the lies and through the literature of social protest. We weave a spell around the fantasy to bring to view the hidden realities of our age. We amplify and elevate the voices of the women most affected, retelling their experiences anew. This, to us, is solidarity.

Acknowledgements We dedicate these words to the courage of our Thai translators and those at the coalface of protests who have died in the line of fire.

Notes 1 We adapt the techniques of magical realism to play with form, juxtaposition and point of view. Readers might also recognize our experimentation with the cut-up method of historical enquiry popularized by William Burroughs who lauded its divination qualities. Burroughs famously claimed: ‘When you cut into the present the future leaks out’ and this imperative rang true for us in presenting an analysis of protest through Thai women’s voices. See Guntarik & Trott (2016) for a more conventional academic adaptation of our research on women’s political participation in Thailand. 2 For examples of research that have focused on specific minority ethnic groups’ uses of social media, see Byrne (2008); Harp, Bachmann & Guo (2012); Piela (2015). These studies highlight how these uses can be understood as cultural and contextual. 3 For creative approaches to analysing how political ‘participation’ is defined see Enteen (2005); Garlough (2013); Lai (2010); Newsrom & Lengel (2012); Radsch & Khamis (2013). These studies examine alternative and unconventional forms of activism including art practice, performance and literature. Such forms resonate with minority communities such as migrant women who have used online spaces to oppose and challenge dominant conceptualizations of themselves as other. The impact is seen through the reach, relevance and accessibility of the medium. These authors illustrate how cultural and creative forms allow everyday citizens to connect with political messages, and how these forms in turn have historical foundations in solidarity. 4 Women have used social spaces to intervene in violent acts such as silencing, exclusion and casting stereotypes (Enteen 2005). Feminist organizations have functioned to preserve and maintain women’s agency by augmenting existing

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practices online and off (Núñez Puente 2011). Opposing the notion that online worlds allow largely for anonymity, online selves are able to closely resemble realworld individual profiles (Nakamura 2013). This shows how women’s identities cohere in the presentation of their activist personae across digital and face-to-face spaces, highlighting the ways identities can be strategically positioned. Carefully polished profiles that leverage the most effective networking techniques in social media litter the internet. In this way, activist academics and protest leaders become key spokespeople, the ‘go to’ expert witness for journalists in offering an interpretative context to political issues on the ground. 5 Homi Bhabha (1990) addresses the concept of nationalism and its relationship to belonging and exclusion in his edited volume Nation and Narration. He concedes he was remiss in excluding the voices of communities that have not yet found their ‘nation’, an anomaly that this volume seeks to address in including voices from and about the Global South.

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Scolari, C.A. and Ibrus, I. (2014), ‘Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling’, International Journal of Communication, 8: 2191–200. ‘Suthin Tharatin, ‘Thai Protest Leader, Killed in Pre-Election Violence’ (2014). Huffington Post, 27 January. Available online: www.huffingtonpost.com (accessed 1 November 2018). Taussig, M. (1997), The Magic of the State, London and New York: Routledge. Taussig, M. (2009), What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Tester, K. (2001), Compassion, Morality and the Media, Buckingham: Open University Press. Williams, R.L. (1989), ‘The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel García Márquez’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 104 (2): 131–40.

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11 Facebook, WhatsApp and Selective Outrage: The Impact of Digital Activism on the Intersectional Identities of Antirape Feminist Activists in India Pallavi Guha

India is a country of diversity, and Indians have multiple identities of caste, class, gender, region/location and religion. Often these social identities intersect and create intersectional identities of victims of sexual violence. This notion of intersectionality provides a way to understand the shifting, fluid, complex natures of all our inherited and social identities (Collins & Bilge 2016; Crenshaw 1991), which influences the way violence against women is framed in the media and received by the audience. The growing focus on rape and sexual assault on women in the 1970s and 1980s was driven at least partly by an infamous rape case in which a tribal teenage girl Mathura was gang raped inside a police station by three or more policemen (Kazenstein 1989; Patel & Kajuria 2016). After eight years of legal deliberation, the Supreme Court of India stated in its judgement that Mathura had not been raped but had consented to have sex with the men (Patel & Kajuria 2016). Feminist activists protested and demanded to review the judgement in the Mathura case. This forced the Indian government to amend the existing rape laws in India, which had previously put the burden of proof on the victim (Nagar 2000; Patel & Kajuria 2016). Similarly, feminist

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activists also protested the rape of Rameeza Bee of Hyderabad and Maya Tyagi of Delhi, while in the custody of police (Kaizenstein 1989). This became a watershed moment for Indian feminist activism and rape laws in India. In a country, where social media platforms are limited to only 12 per cent of the population, issues of the ‘digital divide’ and digital literacy are widespread in India.1 Hence, developing a bridge between mainstream media and social media activism is important. However, it is essential to note how the genesis of India’s feminist movement lies in the nation’s independence movement. It is fair to say that the Indian independence movement influenced the early part of the twentieth-century women’s movement in India (Kumar 1993). Women participated in the movement and demanded gender equality along with supporting the gaining of independence for the country (Kumar 1993; Ray 1999). After Independence in 1947, the women’s movement became more focused on its demands, which were firmly based on equality for all women despite caste or class (Kumar 1993). Feminist activists demanded rights and equal social justice for low caste and class women and asserted that biological differences between the sexes should not create unequal public and private spaces for men and women. From the 1970s, the women’s movement in India was inspired by feminist ideals from Anglo-western countries in Europe and the United States (Kumar 1993; Nagar 2000). It was during this time that the women’s movement became part of the feminist movement in India (Kumar 1993). The movement saw a rise in awareness around inequalities based on intersectional identities such as caste, class, religions, region, language and tribe (Ray 1999; Nagar 2000). There was an increased focus on women’s rights to control their own bodies, as well as issues of violence against women like rape, dowry, domestic violence, regionalism, communalism and others (Nagar 2000). Feminist activists also focused on sexual harassment and sexual violence experienced by women in both public and private spheres during the 1970s and 1980s (Nagar 2000; Patel & Kajuria 2016). By the 1990s, however, left-leaning women activists criticized India’s feminist movement which they felt focused too heavily on bourgeois concerns, such as seeking political legitimacy and attention from policymakers (Kaizenstein 1989), and that aimed at steering the course of the feminist movement towards class, caste and religious affiliations (Patel & Kajuria 2016). This decade also witnessed the rise of the political feminist movement, where women demanded political reservation in the local and national governments (Kumar 1993; Patel & Kajuria 2016).2 Since 2000, the focus has been largely on the rights of the LGBTQ community along with an increased focus on rape and sexual harassment cases. Compared to previous women’s organizations, newer feminist activists and organizations are more intersectional and likely to embrace the struggles of all women irrespective of sexuality, class, caste and religion (Patel & Kajuria 2016). This has meant that feminist activism in India has

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been inclusive of sexuality in their struggle and issues such as the rights of the LGBTQ community, religious rights of women and violence against women in conflict areas (Patel & Kajuria 2016). Yet despite this inclusive turn, violence against subaltern women still rarely receives the attention that other forms of violence attract. Whenever political parties or the state are affiliated with women’s groups, violence against women is rarely prioritized. As the following example demonstrates, if a political leader has had a rape or sexual harassment claim levelled against him, the issue is rarely addressed in ways that seek justice for the female victim and their families. In 1996, a 16-year-old girl from Suryanelli, Kerala, was abducted and raped by forty-two men for over forty days. Prominent political leaders were accused of raping her, and after eighteen years and many lower court acquittals, twenty-four out of forty-two of the accused men were convicted. However, the Indian Supreme Court doubted the rape claim (Jacob 2015). This led to the Suryanelli rape victim lamenting: ‘no one ever gave me a name like Nirbhaya or Amanat … I will never be the nation’s pride or the face of women wronged’ (Losh 2014). In making this statement, the Suryanelli rape victim was referring to the lack of justice in her rape case. At the age of sixteen, she had been abducted and trafficked, and raped sixtyseven times for forty days (Meera 2015). She would never be a symbol of women wronged because in effect neither the court nor the media supported her claims. This was partly due to the complexity of her court case – many of the accused had been acquitted – and there were different judges assigned to her case over time. The case was prolonged over an eighteen-year period before a verdict could be reached. The media on its part, in turn, played a complex role variously supporting, silencing, contradicting or sabotaging her claims. The oppositional and tenuous nature of the media, in both highlighting and ignoring her case, clearly expresses what one scholar terms as the media’s ‘selective outrage’, wherein the media selects its ‘victims’ to lead the coverage and the agenda (Arora 2014). After she accused a senior leader of a leading political party as one of her rapists, the media narrative shifted to the politicized version of the incident, accusing her of leading a smear campaign. In essence, the media sought to frame this sex-trafficking case involving a political leader as a ‘scandal’ rather than as an instance of rape. Such an environment often means that victims are unable to garner sympathy for their case. The claims, accusations and actions are questionable in the eyes of the media, which in turn drives the public agenda and ongoing media coverage, leading to a ‘she said/he said’ scenario. In this case, the media tainted the claims of the victim, repeatedly questioning her claims and continuously asking, ‘why didn’t she simply escape?’ She was never given a voice or a platform to speak for herself. There would be no activism surrounding her case and the public still would never know the truth.

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In the recent past, however, the growing accessibility of social media platforms has made it possible for young feminist NGOs to bypass mass media gatekeeping. This had helped feminist activists and feminist NGOs to continue their activism through other media platforms. Indian feminists’ activists have been effectively using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to disseminate information and build activist networks to support campaigns promoting non-violence against women (Chattopadhyay 2011; Losh 2014). In the following section, I provide a more detailed analysis of these digital forms of feminist activism and their impact on sexual harassment issues.

Feminist activism and social media: Reclaiming public space After the gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in 2012, feminist activists, NGOs and citizen groups used social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to protest against such brutality (Dey 2016). These online spaces provided feminist activists tools for promoting advocacy and awareness (Chattopadhyay 2011; Dey 2016; Khamis 2010). Social media networks became not just tools of advocacy but also tools to disseminate information on protest movements (Dey 2016; Losh 2014). The internet and social media fostered a new direction for feminist activism in India, where women were able to share their experiences of sexual harassment and street harassment – otherwise known as eve-teasing in India (Dey 2016; Eagle 2015). According to Eagle (2015: 350): ‘Hashtag activism is part of the important work of awareness-raising, contributing to a larger conversation about eve teasing—a practice that, with silence, can continue unquestioned and under the guise of simply being a part of the culture.’ Similarly, Dey (2016: 200) highlights the way feminists are using social media to circumvent gatekeeping by the mass media. She argues that online spaces have: helped organizations and individuals to be less dependent on the established mass media in conveying their messages to a broader audience base. The action and reaction followed each other in very short cycles, and the speed of diffusion of new ideas, tactics and arguments considerably increased. The Internet and social media have also been used to generate useful debates and meaningful conversations related to gender. Yet while the benefits of these online tools are clear, the work of generating support for feminist activism in India is not without its challenges. After the 2012 Delhi gang rape incident, there were cybervigilante demands in social networking sites for violent punishments like chemical castration, the death penalty and stoning for the perpetrators and other rape accused

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(Dutta & Sircar 2013; Losh 2014). The voice of the Indian feminist position against the death penalty was duly lost in this digital conundrum (Dutta & Sircar 2013). ‘Hashtags such as #inhumanebastards or #death4rape indicated how rage and desire for retribution may have also been an important part of online discourse at the time’ (Losh 2014: 14). Likewise, Indian feminist activists Dutta and Sircar (2013: 295) question how activists should address competing public demands, especially those calling for the death penalty: Feminist voices have been a part of these protests, but the chorus of slogans made it difficult to decipher who was saying what. There were loud calls to end state apathy on violence against women, make public transportation safe, make the police more vigilant, speed up judicial prosecutions, amend rape laws, and stop victim blaming. But demands for the death penalty, chemical castration, and death by stoning of rapists were louder … In the face of the grave loss, anger, and trauma that gave rise to demands for revenge, how would feminist ‘rational’ political reasoning stand its ground? How were we to converse with the parents who demanded the death penalty for the rapists who had brutally tortured, raped, and murdered their twenty-three-year-old daughter? Such challenges complicate the relationship between activism and social media, as well as how best to address the demands of different publics while communicating key messages to specific communities. Across this complex online and offline environment, there is no doubt that opportunities abound, allowing activists to speak directly to the public and appeal to public consciousness (Guha 2015). Messages can be channelled to specific communities in targeted ways and in forms that circumvent those who might otherwise shape public discourse. And yet a crucial question remains unresolved: How to act in ways that bring justice to the victim/s concerned? In the next section, I show how feminist activists have addressed this question by discussing social media spaces as new public spaces in India, which have significantly supported anti-rape feminist activists to reclaim public spaces. I do so in the context of addressing the challenge of generating a ‘balance’ of voices and messages across digital and face-to-face space in forms that have paved the way for feminist organizations to play a more active role in seeking justice for victims of rape and sexual assault in India.

Balancing voices across competing environments Across rural and urban areas in India, I spoke with thirty-five feminist activists and journalists between January and October 2016 in India,

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and over telephone and Skype calls from the United States where I live.3 The interviews helped me to understand how activists balance online and offline spaces in extending their activism from real-life to online spaces in order to reach the public and in ways that transcend geographic boundaries. Many rural activists working against sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape in their local communities are now able to reach out to the public across the country, garnering support for their work and inspiring other feminist activists. They show how feminist activists are able to network and build an agenda despite having limited to no resources or access to digital tools. Most of my interview participants had a personal experience of sexual harassment, which is what compelled them to become feminist activists. In many cases, the personal became political, social and finally networked wherein I am referring to both online networks and offline real-life networks. For the feminist activists from the rural areas, networking is less about social media networks and more about community networking. For instance, Sutapa talks about an open space or ‘chatal’ (meaning courtyard in Bengali) in her village, where all the women come together and meet in the evening and engage in conversations, ranging from their daily life to any abuse they are experiencing. This is considered a safe space, where women network with one another and look for solutions to their problems. Similarly, Sampat Pal said that girls in her organization meet regularly to discuss women’s issues in a supportive communal environment. In contrast, Kavita, a feminist activist and community journalist, tells me about her experience with online forms of networking and how Facebook helped her in reporting incidents of sexual violence. As Kavita reads and writes only in the Devanagari script of Hindi, the availability of the script in Facebook and WhatsApp had a profound impact on her work. Kavita says: ‘When people read the kind of reporting I do, they give me information about other incidents and ask me to report on that.’ This approach parallels Adishi’s experience working for the organization Feminism in India: Social media platforms can be tiring and frustrating, but also quite helpful. With the kind of dependence that we have on social media platforms these days, they become good carriers of information. The downside of social media is the enormous amount of online assault directed towards us, which most of the times is possible because of the nature of these platforms. But overall, braving these assaults is worth it (though we really shouldn’t get all that just for saying things like rape is not acceptable under any circumstances). At the end of the day, people tell us the kind of awareness and sensitization they’ve gained because of what we do.

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Social media offers other benefits to the disenfranchised such as the ability to bypass mass media gatekeepers and interact with the public directly. Deya, a feminist activist working for a non-profit, says the benefit of social media platforms is in engaging and involving a larger community: I think the message is reaching a lot more people because many people are on social media more often than following the news. The press quotes others on any issues, while in social media, you can directly get the news. I am creating an online petition on a matter, it’s being crowdsourced, so a lot of people have their say on what we should use the funding on, how we should create more programs on violence against women. Likewise, Dyuti considers the usefulness of social media platforms in amplifying the agenda, and particularly for networking purposes or when feminist activists work across similar issues. There are so many things we don’t get to hear or read in the mainstream media like women unable to go out because there are no street lights, or the abuse of Dalits and low caste women. Through Facebook and Twitter, we now get to know more of these issues. Taruna, a gender activist, echoes Dyuti’s thoughts: I am guilty of not following the mainstream media. I have no faith. I feel I get more news and information from online networks. It also lets me network with other like-minded feminists and I take the opportunity to engage in civil discussions with others who don’t agree with my thoughts. I don’t think all this is possible through the mainstream media. However, rural feminist activists like Mamoni, Anita, Usha, Sampat Pal, Sutapa and others still network in traditional ways by speaking to and reaching out to the community and meeting face-to-face. These activities include sit-in protests, takeout processions, door-to-door campaigns, inviting journalists to their programs and talking to people. Anita said: Talking can make a lot of difference. When a harassment case comes up, we first speak to the boys who are involved in it and tell them to respect women. If that doesn’t work, then we ask them to back off. We escalate it as and when required. Our ultimate defence is filing a complaint with the police. These protest activities, during a sexual harassment case, mirror what Adishi (from the organization Feminism in India) has to say about what it takes to engage a wider community in the case.

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We try to engage people through our articles, campaigns, posters, discussion group etc. We believe that sexual assaults are the result of the conditioning that everybody is imbibed with, which furthers rape culture and normalizes assaults. This normalization of violence continues to be reflected in high rates of rape and sexual assault in India. As Fiske and Glick (1995) argue gender stereotyping and sexual harassment are closely related. Many feminist activists in India recognize that in order to build an agenda on sexual harassment and rape it is necessary to promote gender awareness, particularly amongst publics where views on women’s rights are backward or outdated. As Sanjukta, a feminist activist, notes: I keenly follow conversations that happen in Twitter and Facebook on sexual harassment, violence against women and it is surprising to see that even white collar professionals have archaic views on women and their rights. Following the language is a big part for me, where I can plug in my thoughts on rape and sexual harassment. Instead of people coming to you, I share the agenda by becoming part of those conversations, by telling real stories. Some activists organize workshops and press meets for journalists, where the victims come and speak with the journalists. Shyama, who works for a nonprofit, frequently organizes workshops and panels for journalists, including distributing information on existing problems, experiences of the victims and how they plan on working on these issues. Shyama tells me that different tactics work for different messages. For instance, social media platforms work best to spread information on an event or protest. Panels, workshops and press meets are more effective, for discussing the agenda and arranging interviews with the victims, because it gives a face to the names of the victims. Some non-profit organizations provide trauma counselling to survivors of sexual violence, and also help in their personal and professional rehabilitation. For Sutapa, it is easier to send a message through WhatsApp to the journalists she knows than posting on Facebook. As Sutapa highlights: I am still learning how to use social media platforms effectively. But WhatsApp has been immensely useful for me in connecting with various journalists. They have been instrumental in letting people know what we are working on, for instance we do a lot of self-defence workshops for women to fight sexual harassment and abuse and we ask the help of the journalists to disseminate the information. Outside the city contexts, it can be said that feminist activists and local journalists have a shared sense of responsibility. This approach helped

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activists in their work to spread information about cases of rape and sexual assault that might not otherwise get covered in the same way if the media outlet was working alone. Sometimes, the local journalists don the hat of the activist. Kavita, a journalist of an all-women-run community newspaper and website ‘Khabar Lahariya’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, reveals: There are lots of times when after the FIR (First Information Report) is lodged, no action is being taken by the police. Then the aggrieved party reaches out to me and asks to follow me. I reach out to the higher officials DIG (Deputy Inspector General) or SP (Superintendent of Police) and ask for their byte on the pending issue, then the police officials start investigating the matter. Usha shares a similar experience: There are times when local journalists call us to give information on an incident. They will tell us that an incident has happened at this place, you should go and do something. Our journalist supporters help us in every possible way (in the words of Usha in Hindi, this translates as humare patrakar samarthak bahut sahayog karte hain). Face-to-face environments are increasingly overlapping with digital space in ways that can both bolster and limit the work of giving support to and balancing the voices of disenfranchised populations in violence against women cases. In terms of social media’s limitations, Meijias (2013) suggests that social media platforms can deepen socio-economic inequalities by commodifying social labour, privatizing social spaces and surveillance. In India, feminist activists have attempted to reduce these inequalities by networking with the public, policymakers and other feminist activists across digital and face-to-face environments. In doing so, they are able to emphasize the voices of those who would otherwise go unnoticed and unreported in the public, political and media spheres.

Multifaceted challenges of anti-rape feminist activism There is no denying that social media has played an important role in connecting activists and journalists in India, though these connections have been the subject of some criticism. In other words, online platforms provide a deluge of information but cannot sustain the conversation or build a political agenda. In the case of the interviews I conducted, the feminist

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activists agreed there were challenges in reaching out to policymakers and law enforcement officials through social media sites. Adishi, a feminist activist, opines: My experience so far has been both challenging and enriching. Challenging because people are still insensitive to a large extent towards sexual assault. Being actively involved in sexual assault activism brings you face-to-face with this prevailing insensitivity among a lot of people even today and almost always unhinges you in more ways than one. The only upside of this is the urge to keep working even more vehemently to do away with this insensitivity and lack of knowledge. And to carry on, despite all this hatred, (the work) enriches you at the end of the day. Sutapa shares a story on how policymakers and police respond to cases of sexual harassment and rape: A girl was raped in our village but the police refused to file the FIR (First Information Report) against the boy who raped her. The police kept saying that we should settle it, but we refused to budge. So, we sat on a dharna4 in front of the police station and refused to move ’til they filed the FIR. But they kept abusing and threatening us – (dekhbo kotokhon boshe thakbi meaning ‘we will see how long you will continue with the protest’). This continued ’til late into the night, when a political leader of the ruling party came to the police station and called us. In front of the cops, he abused us and told us to take some money and settle the case. But we refused and continued with our dharna. Then, I thought of getting in touch with the highest official of the District, (because) once he was in our village and he had shared his mobile number with our organization. He was very responsive, and immediately called the police station after speaking with me and asked the officer on duty to take our FIR. We could lodge the FIR and that was the first step in getting justice for her. When the case made it to the court, it was covered by the media. I think it’s important for the people to know that you can’t get away by raping or sexually harassing someone. This case in particular did not bring about any policy change, but it did have the effect of strengthening the determination of the women in the village. The case worked to sustain the group’s efforts to keep fighting against sexual violence. Japleen of Feminism in India believes the organization’s agenda is to build the public agenda, first and foremost. For this reason, there has not been any direct conversation with the policymakers. Some feminist activists in India, especially the ones who operate in rural India, have been using social media platforms to change policy but have been met with many

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challenges. For example, Usha has been struggling to make sense of the Facebook community standards: We had a Facebook page for our organization. Once a girl was being abused and harassed by some boys. We took some pictures and posted them on Facebook but Facebook took them down. We tried again and our page was first blocked then deleted, citing nudity. I don’t think we did anything wrong, so now I use Facebook but not so frequently. Many of the issues highlighted, through my participants’ voices, focused on the significance of social media access, usage and literacy, giving rise to important questions such as who has the knowledge and the resources of the tools of social media at any given time to set the agenda. In January 2017, Usha sent me an email stating that Feminism in India’s email system had been hacked and the organization had to change its email address. Sampat Pal said her daughter-in-law and son maintained the email account and that she herself did not use Facebook or Twitter as a social networking tool. Similarly, Sutapa acknowledged that she was still learning the tricks of Facebook but was more comfortable with WhatsApp. Technological challenges aside, all the feminist activists I interviewed understood the significance of each platform’s international reach as well as its limitations. There are times when anti-rape feminist activists from rural areas require the support of the media and local activist groups to tell their stories on a global scale. Usha relies on a small communications firm to maintain the Facebook page of the organization, and Sampat’s Facebook page is maintained by her son and daughter-in-law because they are able to use this platform effectively and have access to a wide network. However, for many other activists, limited digital access and lack of literacy placed restrictions on them being able to engage more powerfully and effectively with the public and policymakers on digital platforms. For them, the question remains, whose story is told and who tells them? Between these supposedly democratic spaces of social media platforms, digital tools and traditional local community interactions and support groups, many voices remain unheard and many women’s experiences of violence in India continue to slip through the gaps.

Conclusion: Intersectionality and selective outrage Social media platforms have made a significant difference in the ways newsrooms and activists work (Lasorsa et al. 2012). Digital advances in online news and for media channels mean that greater exposure of cases of

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violence against women can be presented to wider publics in the form of breaking news (Moon & Hadley 2014). Social networking sites retain an important influence for connecting with journalists and disseminating news, given many journalists now require a direct response or statement through social media platforms. Subhro Niyogi, a journalist from Kolkata, claims: ‘Survivors have used social media platforms to garner support. We do look at these platforms to get reactions from the people.’ Clearly, the digital world has allowed more people to participate in sharing their experiences of violence. Yet, over the years, the nature of reporting has not changed significantly in cases of rape and sexual assault (Jolly 2016). This is particularly true of violence that has occurred in rural regions of India. In effect, social media activism is dependent on where the incident of rape or sexual harassment has occurred. A journalist, who did not wish to be identified, points out: ‘Sources from social media platforms is highly dependent on where the rape has happened. If it’s in an urban locale, chances of getting information and [developing a] campaign is much higher.’ What is also clear is that awareness of the intersectional identity of the victim plays a significant role in both the media and public understandings of the victim’s experience. Other than caste, class and religious identities, where the victim is located can make all the difference. Many of the feminist activists and journalists interviewed for my study agreed that the media does not always work in ways that are beneficial to the cause. There is selective outrage on social media depending on who the victim is and where they are located; caste, class and religion still play a role in how cases related to violence against women are covered and presented to the public. In other words, gender inequality is still pervasive in decisionmaking, politics and media in India, despite the increasing pervasiveness of social media.

Notes 1 The idea of the ‘digital divide’ refers to the growing gap between the underprivileged members of society, especially the poor, rural, elderly and handicapped populations who do not have access to computers or the internet; and the wealthy, middle-class and youth living in urban and suburban areas who have access (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/digitaldivide/start.html). Moreover, I am drawing on an understanding of digital literacy, which is defined as the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share and create content using information technologies and the internet (Cornell University Digital Literacy Resource). 2 Political reservation is the equivalent of affirmative action in the context of the Indian legal system.

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3 Most of the feminist activists are referred to on a first-name basis as they preferred not to use their last name (since surnames can identify a person’s caste). Several feminist activists did not wish to be identified, so I used pseudonyms to protect their identities. In these cases, I also de-identified and removed the name of their affiliate organization and location. 4 Dharna is a word used in both the Hindi and Bengali language. The Cambridge Dictionary defines dharna as ‘a way of showing your disagreement with something by refusing to leave a place.’

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Kumar, R. (1993), ‘The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1990’, London and New York: Verso. Lasorsa, D.L., Seth, C.L. and Avery, E.H. (2012), ‘Normalizing Twitter’, Journalism Studies, 13 (1): 19–36. Losh, E. (2014), ‘Hashtag Feminism and Twitter Activism in India’, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 3 (12): 10–22. Meera, K.R. (2015), ‘The Girl with No Name’, The Hindu BusinessLine. 27 November. Available online: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/cover/ the-girl-with-no-name/article7919602.ece (accessed 15 April 2019). Mejias, U.A. (2013), Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moon, S.J. and Patrick, H. (2014), ‘Routinizing a New Technology in the Newsroom: Twitter as a News Source in Mainstream Media’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 58 (2): 289–305. Nagar, R. (2000), ‘Mujhe Jawab Do [Answer Me]: Feminist Grassroots Activism and Social Spaces in Chitrakoot (India)’, Gender, Place, and Culture, 7 (4): 341–62. Patel, V. and Khajuria, R. (2016), ‘Political Feminism in India: An Analysis of Actors, Debates and Strategies’, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Delhi. 1–38. Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304024552_Political_ Feminism_in_India_An_Analysis_of_Actors_Debates_and_Strategies_Prof_ Vibhuti_Patel_and_Radhika_Khajuria (accessed 15 April 2019). Ray, R. (1999), Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India, New Delhi: Kali for Women.

12 #SocialMediaAffordances: A Consideration of the Impact of Facebook and Twitter on the Green Movement Mina Momeni

The use of social media impacts individual and group participation in political activism. Various scholars have studied how social media can be effectively used to shape, mobilize and facilitate political movements and revolutions (Gleason 2013; Herrera 2014; Hwang & Kim 2015). What is not yet fully understood is how social media’s affordances assist political activism in a complex range of contexts and platforms. Using the Green Movement in Iran as a case study, this research applies the theory of affordances to identify some of the prevalent mechanisms and properties of Facebook and Twitter that facilitate social activism and political movements. Young Iranian citizens’ use of social media, during and after the 2009 presidential election, which mobilized the Green Movement, will be examined to demonstrate how social media’s affordances expanded users’ engagement even though government officials tried to control their online participation.

The Green Movement The Green Movement is the name given to a series of political protests staged in Iran in response to perceived corruption by the political elites in

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2009 (Mottahedeh 2015; Sohrabi-Haghighat & Mansouri 2010). When the Iranian government announced the victory of President Ahmadinejad, two of the opposition’s candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi1 and Mehdi Karroubi,2 claimed that the voting process was manipulated and that the election was rigged and Mousavi lodged an official complaint. Many citizens became outraged by the evidence of vote rigging in the election and mobilized behind him. On June 15, 2009, one of the most momentous anti-regime protests since the Iranian Revolution of 1978 was organized by Mousavi and his supporters in Azadi Square, in Tehran (Mottahedeh 2015). Hundreds of the opposition’s supporters gathered to peacefully demonstrate their discontent about the election results. The slogan ‘Where Is My Vote’ was written on placards carried by protesters and the motto rapidly trended on social media. People used social media as an efficient organizational resource to increase the movement’s political opportunities and reach international allies (Sohrabi-Haghighat & Mansouri 2010). Individuals exchanged messages on Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media to spread the word, and invited others with similar beliefs to join the protest. Young Iranian citizens tried to make their issues known and publicly visible. Their efforts were ultimately effective because of the ‘publicization of issues’ (Marres & Rogers 2005). Due to the significant role of social media in the Green Movement, some have called the post-election aftermath a ‘Twitter Revolution’ (Berman 2009). However, the subject matter that needs further consideration is what specific social media affordances enabled this form of engagement in Iran and made social media a valuable tool for such a movement. The Iranian regime’s attempt to disrupt and disable internet communication was in and of itself an acknowledgement of social media’s ability to successfully mobilize activist events and protests. During the protests, the government first slowed the speed of the internet and later blocked access to social media across the country to prevent the spread of any information about how they reacted to the peaceful protest: with extreme violence and aggression. However, internet users started using antifilter software, and ‘some youths have tried to produce and distribute antiproxy programs’ (Golkar 2011: 57). There were various ways to get access to the blocked sites, such as using web proxies and VPN (Virtual Private Network). Consequently, Iranian youth were able to access social media to notify each other about the latest news on the protest as well as upload and circulate pictures and videos of the protest to reveal how the government turned their peaceful demonstrations into a violent event in an effort to suppress the movement. In spite of immense internet suppression in Iran, ‘the BBC says it was receiving around eight videos a minute at the height of the 2009 unrest’ (Moshiri 2011: 30). Wojcieszak and Smith indicate that one of the reasons that social media became an efficient tool for political activism in Iran was that ‘about half of the population is under the age of 35’ (2014: 93). The rate of growing internet use in Iran is higher than in

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any other country in the Middle East (OpenNet Initiative 2009). According to Sohrabi-Haghighat and Mansouri, ‘the number of Internet users has grown exponentially: from 200,000 users in 2001 (The number of Internet users has grown fourfold 2004) to 25,669,000 in 2009 (Two thirds of the country’s population use mobile phones 2009)’ (2010: 25). The age of Iran’s population directly correlates to the increased use of social media for political protests and the ways in which social media is engaged to increase communication and international visibility.

The theory of affordances The term affordance was originally coined by James Jerome Gibson in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. According to Gibson (1979: 127), ‘The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’ Gibson explains that the earth has been altered and modified by humans and a variety of artificial materials, such as concrete, iron and bronze, have been used to change the environment and its natural materials. Gibson (1979: 130) asks, ‘Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment? To change what it affords him.’ Affordances can guide behaviours because they show ‘the reciprocity of an acting organism and specified features of an environment’ (Zhao et al. 2013). Donald Norman further elaborates on the theory of affordance in his book The Design of Everyday Things (1988). According to Norman, the information that is provided through the design of an object can assist people learning how to utilize a new device or operate a device in an unknown situation. For instance, building a Lego project is still possible without any special assistance or instructions. Some pieces of Lego have different shapes, sizes and colours, and a number of pieces are physically interchangeable, yet in Norman’s experience, when he asked people to construct the Lego project, no one had difficulty putting the pieces together because ‘the visible affordances of the pieces were important in determining just how they fit together’ (1988: 124). Norman uses the term ‘perceived affordances’ in relation to product design and how the features of any object suggest how it might be used. Norman notes, ‘Affordances refer to the potential actions that are possible, but these are easily discoverable only if they are perceivable: perceived affordances’ (1988: 145). Our encounters with objects are facilitated by their affordances. Various scholars have applied the concept of affordances to social media in different contexts. Gleason (2013) explores the practical applications of social affordances in an analysis of the relationship between Twitter and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The brevity of tweets facilitates viewers’ understanding of content. Users learn about the event quickly by clicking

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a hyperlink in a tweet that takes them to a YouTube video, photograph or blog. Since a large percentage of #OccupyWallStreet tweets are user generated, Gleason (2013: 967) indicates, ‘Twitter is an information-sharing community that supports participation in a social movement.’ Lawrence et al. (2014) gathered and analysed tweets from journalists over the course of the 2012 US presidential campaign to expose the degree to which political journalists are using social media technologies and how the affordances of Twitter have affected the traditional pattern of the American campaign. By examining numerous particular affordances of Twitter such as liking, retweeting and information seeking, they indicate that ‘journalists covering presidential politics during the conventions expressed opinions in ways and to a degree that has not traditionally been permissible in their primary professional forums’ (Lawrence et al. 2014: 799). In their research, Hayes, Carr and Wohn (2016) claim that being able to like, favourite or upvote any content in social media is one of the most common affordances of this platform. Their research demonstrates how a simple one-click response on social media such as a like on Facebook can convey diverse and complex meanings about users and their social context and how their interactions on social media can have significant implications for political activities (see also the parallel concept of social media ‘materialities’ advanced in Mortensen, Neumayer & Poell 2019). This chapter applies concepts and borrows from these theorists to explore how the affordances of social media were employed during the Green Movement. By examining the content posted on the Facebook page of ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ and concentrating on two particular Twitter hashtags, #NedaAghaSoltan and #iranelection, that were trending during the movement, this study demonstrates how these affordances assisted young Iranian citizens in mobilizing the Green Movement, increasing national and international support, and making their voices heard. By doing so, Iranian youth were attempting to expand political discourses, influence the Iranian regime’s actions and develop democracy.

Direct communication Direct communication via social media occurs when individuals share their original ideas and concerns with one person or a group of people directly. Social media platforms afford a direct connection between users and provide users with the opportunity to communicate their individual convictions and stories without the necessity to obtain consent or support from others or prevailing media outlets. Direct communication via social media is also linked to the velocity of communication and immediacy. Other users can respond instantly to issues that are being discussed and provide oppositional or supportive convictions.

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Facebook and Twitter are social networking systems that enable their users to communicate personal views directly. By creating a profile, users can add or follow other users, and, by posting texts, pictures, videos and links, they can share their generated content with other members of their network instantly. Furthermore, users can create or join a group to communicate with other people with common interests. This direct and immediate connection is a substantial affordance of Facebook and Twitter that allows these platforms to spread news rapidly and unites people when a crisis happens. Furthermore, as Cammaerts (2015) points out, social networking sites incorporate ‘one-to-one, one-to-many’, and ‘many-to-many’ systems of communication. This combination creates a pattern of affordances that can be ascribed to different social media platforms; consequently, these affordances provide different feasible actions for activists and protesters. According to Margetts et al. (2015), although it seems unimportant when individuals spend small amounts of time participating in online activism, when these acts are undertaken by hundreds of thousands of people, large mobilizations can incite change. During the 2009 Iranian demonstrations, young citizens were posting pictures and videos of the protest and sharing related news to encourage members of their networks to join them. Demonstrators created several Facebook groups and fan pages to support the opposition parties’ candidates and used social media as a communication channel. One of the most popular Facebook pages was called ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ and had 353,601 members. This page became a platform for protesters and activists to post and share what was happening in Iran. Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, were arrested during the demonstrations, placed under house arrest and, at the time of writing this, continue to be under house arrest today (Toner 2016). Moreover, the government arrested thousands of protesters and numerous reformists (Parsa 2016: 206). The Iranian regime has tried to boycott any news related to the opposition’s leaders and prisoners to avoid further public reactions. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the rulers of the Islamic Republic have regulated the media through a series of laws. Article 24 of the Iranian constitution explains: ‘Publications and the press are free to discuss issues unless such is deemed harmful to the principles of Islam or the rights of the public. The law shall determine the details of this exception’ (The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran 1979). In the absence of free and independent media, social media became a significant platform for young Iranians that enabled them to publish the information that the regime was severely struggling to hide from the public. The most recent news about the condition of the leaders of the opposition and other activists that are still in prison has been spread on the ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ Facebook page. One example of the ways direct and immediate communication supports and facilitates social justice and activism is a statement by Mousavi and

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Rahnavard’s daughters that was published on the ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ Facebook page on March 3, 2011. The statement indicated that although the totalitarian government claimed that Mousavi and Rahnavard were not under house arrest, their attempt to meet their parents at their house was unsuccessful; security forces that were at the location did not let them enter the house and continually insulted them. Due to the fact that the mainstream media in Iran is under the strict control of the government and such news would have never been disseminated via the regime’s media, social media provided the opportunity for young Iranians to publish information directly and enlighten audiences both inside and outside the country. Direct communication via Facebook facilitated the publication of important information during and after the 2009 presidential election in Iran. On 1 May 2012, a video message from Mousavi was published on the ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ Facebook page. In the video, Mousavi talks about the rights of social workers and teachers and how the government should support them. In his message, Mousavi explains that the regime is not capable of governing and does not value the rights of the working class. Mousavi bravely elucidates that prisons are filled with irreproachable people and political prisoners.3 Such an enlightening message that condemns the Iranian regime could not have been broadcast on television, which is under the strict control of government, yet it was published on Facebook. Being able to have direct communication through social media is particularly significant for political activism in countries that restrict freedom of speech. Another example of how direct communication is an effective affordance employed through Facebook is Mohammad Nourizad’s letter to Iran’s supreme leader. Nourizad is an Iranian activist, film-maker and journalist who wrote a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticizing his policy against the movement. The letter was published on the ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’ Facebook page on 31 October 2011, and indicates that to achieve the ideals of revolution, the regime is abusing its own people, forcing them to flee to other countries because of the government’s brutality (Kamali 2012). Nourizad states, ‘As commander in chief of the armed forces, you did not treat people well after the election. Your agents opened fire, killed the people, beat them and destroyed their property. Your role in this cannot be ignored. […] Your apology can cool down the wrath of the people’ (Nourizad 2011). This letter was a daring manifesto at a time when no one could publicly criticize the supreme leader. Facebook’s direct communication practices enabled activists such as Nourizad to spread the letter publicly and to break the taboo of criticizing the country’s top religious and political authority, which was not possible via mainstream media in Iran.

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Dynamic interaction The interactive features and functions of social media facilitate dynamic interaction and communication between its users. Social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, enables real-time conversations between users in various parts of the world, which can also expand interactive communication. Individuals can simply share, like, reply and comment on other users’ posts without requiring extensive technical knowledge of the platform. Furthermore, having access to this platform via a variety of devices, such as desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, increases the potential and dynamics of this platform. Zhang and Lin state, ‘Social media is the latest development of Internet-facilitated communication platform that has the potential to enhance interactive communication to a higher level’ (2015: 674). Dynamic interaction on social media consists of user-to-user interaction and user-to-content interaction. User-to-user interaction occurs when individuals participate in an online discourse and exchange their ideas about a subject. The use of the sign ‘@’ to tag or address other users directly encourages users to participate in a discussion. In this way, the platform provides interactive tools to employ on Twitter. User-to-content interaction occurs when users express their reactions to content that is posted online by liking, sharing and retweeting. Norman’s concept of perceived affordances indicates that any artifacts that are well designed can provide accurate indications as to how artifacts can function (Norman 1988). This concept can be applied directly to the interactive functions of social media. Liking, sharing, posting, reposting, commenting, updating and replying are actual properties of Twitter and Facebook that are designed visually and structurally in a way that can be perceived by users easily. As soon as any content spreads on Facebook and Twitter, users of different ages with various technological abilities are able to show their reactions from almost any location with internet access, making these platforms more interactive. Dynamic interaction by social media users in political activism can rapidly spread content about an event and assist participants not only in making their own voices heard but also by allowing them to participate in elevating other peoples’ voices and experiences. Dynamic interaction through social media accelerated and expanded the circulation of news during the Green Movement. The most shocking cellphone footage, which went viral across the internet during the 2009 Iranian election protests and was shared by supporters of the Green Movement, was a forty-second video of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian philosophy student who was shot dead. On 20 June 2009, Agha-Soltan and her music teacher were going to participate in the protests that were organized against the results of the election. She was shot when she stopped her car and ‘got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far

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from the anti-government protests they had ventured out to attend’ (Fathi 2009). The video is extremely tragic, depicting Agha-Soltan falling to the ground after she was shot in the chest; blood started to seep from her mouth when she turned her face to the camera. The video of the death of AghaSoltan was sent to an Iranian in the Netherlands who shared it with the BBC, CNN, Facebook and YouTube. Most news organizations pixilated Agha-Soltan’s face due to the footage being so graphic, yet the full video was published on social media without hesitation (Zelizer 2010). The ability to share and comment on this video was an essential affordance that facilitated activism through visibility and dialogue. According to Zelizer, ‘calling her death “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history” and naming her “a battle cry for Iranian protesters, her face is a symbol for the thousands of people who suffered under the government’s heavy-handed crackdown” ’ (2010: 10). Agha-Soltan became a symbol of Iranians’ protests and freedom of expression as well as an icon of the antigovernment movement after she was killed (Fathi 2009; Howard & Hussain 2011; Zelizer 2010). During the protest, numerous unknown Iranians were killed, and Agha-Soltan was one of the individuals who became publicly known, due to the footage that spread all around the world through shares and reposts of the video and any related news about her. This kind of rapid circulation and public reaction could not have happened without social media’s capacity for dynamic interaction. Beyond simply communicating events through original posts and tweets, social media allows users to share other peoples’ posts to begin a conversation between users. This interaction is a unique affordance of social media that enables users’ online participation about a topic by allowing them to repost, comment or reply to other users. Hashtags have a classificatory function, enabling users to track conversations on Twitter and Facebook; consequently, they increase dynamic interaction, an affordance that encourages users to follow stories and participate in generating more content. Since 2009, the tragic story of Agha-Soltan has been narrated on Twitter using #NedaAghaSoltan. Individuals from various countries, especially young Iranian people, have been generating diverse content, posting her pictures, the latest news about her family, pictures of her grave and songs that are dedicated to her to keep the story alive and look for justice using #NedaAghaSoltan. For instance, Pawntia Pieer, an Iranian-American actress, tweets: ‘We will never forget #NedaAghaSoltan, shot & killed by the #Iranianregime #All4Freedom #PMOI @coe@UN’ (Pieer 2014). The latest tweet using #NedaAghaSoltan is from the Crime Documentary website, posted on 20 November 2016, which is a link to a video called For Neda, an interview with Agha-Soltan’s family by Iranian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan which indicates that individuals are still involved and concerned about Agha Soltan’s lamentable story. Keeping her story alive online demonstrates

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the brutality of the Iranian regime during the Green Movement has not been forgotten and is being narrated and archived on social media. Facebook and Twitter both afford dynamic interaction between users, and consequently they provide a participatory environment. Nevertheless, dynamic interaction on Facebook is more limited to the actual social networks of users, while on Twitter, users have broader social networks. The capability to reach wider audiences enabled Twitter to be a more dynamic interactive platform during the Green Movement.

Searchability Twitter is an influential microblogging platform where users can tweet short messages of up to 280 characters. Twitter subscribers are able to follow other users and read, like and retweet any posts on their profile. Using the octothorpe (or pound symbol #) before any word or unspaced phrase can instantly transform it into a searchable link. Searchability via hashtags is an affordance of social media platforms that provides a proliferation of information and facilitates learning about various opinions related to a cause. Search functionality is substantially noteworthy since vast amounts of content have been published on social media. Hashtags also provide interaction between users regarding a specific topic that is being discussed and assist in spreading tweets to wider audiences. In online political activism, searchability enhances users’ ability to access and follow protest-related content, keeps them involved and connects users to each other. Zappavigna indicates, ‘Hashtags signal the potential presence of other users in the social network, and social metadata allows different dimensions of their discourse to be retrieved and aggregated’ (2015: 289). During the Green Movement, individuals from all around the world could follow up-to-date news about the movement by searching #iranelection. According to Chowdhury, the most engaging topic of 2009 for Twitter users was the Iranian election, and #iranelection was one of Twitter’s trending topics of the year (2009). Mottahedeh states, ‘Four days after the election, Mashable reported that subscribers on Twitter had produced 221,744 tweets per hour about Iran on 16 June, with over 22,500 tweets per hour dedicated to the hashtag #iranelection alone’ (2015: 17). Twitter later turned #iranelection into a hyperlink and introduced it as a trending topic on its front page. Using #iranelection in texts, links, pictures and videos enabled protesters to make information about the movement publicly accessible and searchable. Young Iranian citizens attempted to communicate their situation nationally and internationally to develop solidarity among the

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movement’s supporters. The international reaction to the Green Movement encouraged Iranian youth to keep fighting for their rights. The #iranelection hashtag narrated the story of the election. It is particularly significant because, as Mottahedeh notes, ‘foreign journalists started reporting that they were being banned from the protests’ (2015: 10). Consequently, the news, pictures and videos that were generated and disseminated by citizen journalists played an important role in informing people about the progress of the movement and could encourage them to participate in the political process. During the Green Movement, protesters could follow one of the leaders’ Twitter accounts to learn about the leader’s most recent decisions about the demonstrations. Hossein Mousavi’s official Twitter is @mousavi1388, which has 22,381 followers, and ‘one of the highly re-tweeted messages from mousavi1388 by another user was “TR@mousavi1388 I am prepared for martyrdom, go on strike if I am arrested #IranElection” ’ (Gaffney 2010). This tweet indicates that Mousavi could anticipate that the government was planning to arrest him and that his arrest could affect the movement. Although searchability is advantageous to activists and protesters, it is also an affordance that can be used by officials for surveillance and to repress political movements. By searching for the identities of organizers and participants, authorities can limit their online activities or arrest them to suppress the movement. Furthermore, the information generated by citizen journalists can be easily searched and found by officials, and as Ali and Fahmy explain, ‘Citizen journalists have often become targets in authoritative regimes. They may be subjected to harassment, intimidation, and even death. However, some individuals still find ways to circumvent their respective governments and bring first-hand breaking news to audiences, mainly Western ones’ (2013: 58). Moreover, Croeser and Highfield (2015) argue that while social media can be employed by activists to circulate information, mobilize movements and attract international audiences, these platforms can also be used for surveillance and censorship, and this capacity can decrease the use of these platforms for activism. Search functions on Facebook allowed Iranian officials to investigate the identities of users and restrict their online political activities. For instance, a young Iranian activist, Amir Golestani, was imprisoned for his political activism on social media. Golestani was the administrator of a Facebook page called Zendegi-e Sagi (Living Like a Dog), where he was publishing critical opinions about the Iranian government. According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (2016), Golestani ‘was sentenced to seven years in prison with a group of other social media activists in April 2015 for “assembly and collusion against national security” and insulting the sacred’. Therefore, as Highfield and Croeser (2014) assert, although social media, particularly Twitter, affords a public space for political discourse, this space can also be subjected to criticisms and fears. Searchability is an affordance that can serve

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to both liberate and suppress political movements. Although social media assists Iranian youth in publicizing their issues and fighting for their rights, it also allows the Iranian autocratic regime access to its citizens’ online activities and their information.

The green path of hope The Green Movement lasted about twenty months and demonstrated the power of unity to the Iranian regime. Many Iranian citizens and Western observers thought that the Green Movement could potentially change the government,4 yet the movement was demobilized. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, called the election an ‘absolute victory’ and prohibited all street demonstrations (Dareini 2009). Parsa indicates, ‘the Islamic Republic’s leaders called for severe repression. Some members of the ruling elite also called for the execution of the leaders of the Movement without any trial and conviction’ (2016: 28). The government arrested many protesters and the leaders of the Green Movement and, at the time of writing this, they are still under house arrest (Khosronejad 2013). The Iranian regime intimidated and arrested journalists; they blocked social media, the political opposition parties’ web pages and international broadcasters’ websites (particularly BBC, BBC Persian and VOA) to restrict the circulation of the news nationally and internationally. According to a report published in 2009 on OpenNet Initiative, ‘Iran is the only country in the world to have instituted an explicit cap on Internet access speed for households,’ and after the 2009 election, the Iranian regime improved its technical ability to increase their control of the internet and their complex surveillance methods. Despite the fact that the Iranian government restricts users’ access to the internet by filtering web pages, uses bandwidth throttling to frustrate users, monitors the online activities of its citizens and in many cases even identifies and arrests individuals for their online political activism, young Iranian people continue to use social media to increase political discourses and to convey their messages. Before the 2009 election, authorities in Iran constantly emphasized that they did not approve the use of social media by Iranian citizens. For instance, Khamenei attacked Twitter and Facebook and questioned their influence by calling them ‘deviant websites’ (Burns & Eltham 2009). However, after observing the power of social media, Iranian officials began to use Twitter and Facebook, reflecting a significant shift in the regime’s approach and attitude with social media. Khamenei’s official Twitter account, which was created in March 2009, has 547,549 followers and is active in the English language. Khamenei’s tweets mostly reflect his opinion about the

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relationship between Iran and other countries. In one of his recent speeches, Khamenei even expressed his opinion about Facebook likes: ‘the number of “likes” on social media doesn’t determine the true value of a piece of work’ (Carbonated.TV 2016). President Hassan Rouhani also has a Twitter account with 810,440 followers. Iran’s highest officials joining social media is a remarkable shift as the regime cannot effectively condemn using this platform anymore. Although the Green Movement may have been repressed and some scholars argue that social media can only have temporary effects on these kinds of activist events, this study demonstrates how the specific affordances of Facebook and Twitter made these platforms effective tools to develop political discourses, not only during the movement but also after the movement was suppressed by officials. Social media facilitates change by mobilizing communities and giving voice to those who are often silenced. As Lippmann states, ‘When the officials fail, public opinion is brought to bear on the issue’ (2002 [1927]: 63). The affordances of social media, particularly direct communication, dynamic interaction and searchability, empowered young Iranian citizens to make their issues publicly known. For Iranian youth, social media platforms became an alternative media outlet, providing a means through which to publicly share their opinions, to communicate with others and to develop freedom of speech and democracy. They strongly challenged the government by disseminating news about the regime’s atrocities during the protests. Although the Iranian regime blocked Facebook and Twitter, the officials’ eventual use of these platforms obviously indicates that their resistance towards using digital technologies has diminished. Regardless of how social media evolves in the future, it is clear that its use for and impact on both activism and government is increasingly prevalent around the world.

Notes 1 Mir Hossein Mousavi is an Iranian politician, painter, architect and reformist who was the last Prime Minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989. 2 Mehdi Karroubi held several key positions in the Iranian government, such as chairman of the parliament and head of the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee. 3 On 29 April 2004, the chief justice of Iran, Ayatollah Mahmud HashemiShahrudi, said: ‘We have no political prisoners in Iran’ (Radio Free Europe 2004). 4 Although the vast majority of Iranian youth were looking for a revolutionary change, the opposition leaders were not actually aiming to overthrow the Islamic regime. They emphasized that everyone should respect the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 60 (1): 171–87. Herrera, L. (2014), Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet, London and New York: Verso. Highfield, T. and Croeser, S. (2015), ‘FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement’, The Fibreculture Journal, 26: 137–59. Howard, P.N. and Hussain, M.M. (2011), ‘The Upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia: The Role of Digital Media’, Journal of Democracy, 22 (3): 25–48. Hwang, H. and Kim, K. (2015), ‘Social Media as a Tool for Social Movements: The Effect of Social Media Use and Social Capital on Intention to Participate in Social Movements’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 39 (5): 478–88. Kamali Dehghan, S. (2012), ‘Letters to Iran’s Supreme Leader: Journalist Sends Protest Mail to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’, The Guardian, 12 July. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/12/letters-iran-supremeleader-khamenei (accessed 8 March 2019). Khosronejad, P. (2013), ‘Digital Art, Political Aesthetic, and Social Media: Case Study of the Iranian Presidential Election of 2009: Editorial Introduction: Digital Ethnography, Resistance Art, and Communication Media in Iran’, International Journal of Communication, 7: 1298–315. Lawrence, R.G., Molyneux, L., Coddington, M. and Holton, A. (2014), ‘Tweeting Conventions: Political Journalists’ Use of Twitter to Cover the 2012 Presidential Campaign’, Journalism Studies, 15 (6): 789–806. Lippmann, W. (2002 [1927]). The Phantom Public, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick and London. Margetts, H., John, P., Hale, S. and Yasseri, T. (2015), Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marres, N. and Rogers, R. (2005), ‘Recipe for Tracing the Fate of Issues and Their Publics on the Web’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 922–35, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Mortensen, M., Neumayer, C. and Poell, T. (2019), Social Media Materialities and Protest: Critical Reflections, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Moshiri, N. (2011), ‘New Media Technology and the Uprisings in Iran and Tunisia’, in Danesh T. and Ansari N. (eds), Iran Human Rights Review: Access to Information. The Foreign Policy Centre. 13 May. Available online: https://fpc. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/1369.pdf. (accessed 14 April 2019). Mottahedeh, N. (2015), #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mousavi, M. (2012), ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Video Message Commemorating International Workers’ Day and National Teachers’ Day’, Facebook. 1 May. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/mousavi/videos/vb.45061919453/4 42078275808956/?type=2&theater (accessed 8 March 2019). Mousavi, K., Mousavi, N. and Mousavi, Z. (2011), ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’, Facebook. 3 March. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/10150094689492606/ (accessed 8 March 2019). Norman, D.A. (1988), The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, New York: Basic Books.

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Nourizad, M. (2011), ‘Mir Hossein Mousavi’, Facebook. 1 November. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mir-hossein-mousavi-‫ریم‬-‫نیسح‬-‫یوسوم‬/ ‫دمحم‬-‫یرون‬-‫داز‬-‫رد‬-‫نیمهن‬-‫همان‬-‫باطخ‬-‫هب‬-‫تیآ‬-‫هللا‬-‫هنماخ‬-‫یا‬-‫یم‬-‫دینیب‬-‫هیاپ‬-‫یاه‬-‫ِتخت‬‫بهر‬/10150335886752606 (accessed 8 March 2019). OpenNet Initiative (2009), ‘Internet Filtering in Iran’, OpenNet Initiative. 16 June. Available online: https://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran (accessed 8 March 2019). Parsa, M. (2016), Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Pieer, P. @PantheaPieer. (2014), ‘We Will Never Forget #Neda Agha Soltan, Shot & Killed by the #Iranian Regime #All4Freedom #PMOI @coe @U’, Twitter. 21 June. Available online: https://twitter.com/PantheaPieer/ status/480589278074789888 (accessed 8 March 2019). Right.is (2016), ‘Ayatollah Khamenei Drops a Nugget of Social Media Wisdom’, Right.is, 24 June. Available online: https://www.carbonated.tv/news/ayatollahkhamenei-says-social-media-likes-do-not-determine-value (accessed 11 April 2019). Sohrabi-Haghighat, M.H. and Mansouri, S. (2010), ‘Where Is My Vote?’ ICT Politics in the Aftermath of Iran’s Presidential Election, International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, 8 (1): 24–41. Toner, M.C. (2016), ‘Five Year Anniversary of the House Arrests of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Zahra Rahnavard’, U.S. Department of State. 14 February. Available online: https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ ps/2016/02/252495.htm (accessed 12 April 2019). Wojcieszak, M. and Smith, B. (2014), ‘Will Politics Be Tweeted? New Media Use by Iranian Youth in 2011’, New Media and Society, 16 (1): 91–109. Zappavigna, M. (2015), ‘Searchable Talk: The Linguistic Functions of Hashtags’, Social Semiotics, 25 (3): 274–91. Zelizer, B. (2010), About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhang, C.B. and Lin, Y.H. (2015), ‘Exploring Interactive Communication Using Social Media’, The Service Industries Journal, 35 (11–12): 670–93. Zhao, Y., Liu, J., Tang, J. and Zhu, Q. (2013), ‘Conceptualizing Perceived Affordances in Social Media Interaction Design’, Aslib Proceedings, 65 (3): 289–303.

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13 Examining the Alt-right: A Media Analysis of Hate Speech through Bendigo’s Anti-Muslim Protests Grace Taylor

This case study examines the emergence of an alt-right activist group opposed to the development of a mosque in Central Victoria, Australia. Between 2014 and 2016 the group, identifying as the United Patriots Front, publicly supported legal action that progressed all the way to the High Court and stalled commencement of the construction. Amplified by active engagement with alternative media, their rhetoric centred around opposition to immigration and multiculturalism and was covered extensively by mainstream media (newspapers and television). Positioned as distinct not only from the political left but also the right, the group promoted an anti-establishment agenda, bypassing traditional processes of political participation and debate. Through textual analysis of mainstream media coverage over key dates, this study explores how a movement fuelled by a potent mix of digital media and physical protest was represented by the mainstream media. In June 2014, the local government council for the Central Victorian city of Bendigo approved the planning permit for the development of a mosque on the outskirts of the city. This was met with opposition from some members of the local community who mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the development would be detrimental to the city. In August 2015, this case was dismissed by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) and planning for the development commenced. Over this

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time, tensions in the community rose and a group identifying as the United Patriots Front (UPF) emerged. They engaged in prolific online activism to mobilize opposition to the development, including coordinating protest rallies and disrupting council meetings. Support for the mosque was in turn demonstrated through another community group, the Bendigo Action Coalition (sometimes referred to as the Bendigo Action Collective), formed in response to the ongoing activity of the UPF. The significant portion of the UPF’s campaign against the development took place over a two-year period. This began in June 2014 when the original planning application was approved by the council and concluded in June 2016 when VCAT’s initial decision was upheld by the High Court. Following VCAT’s August ruling in support of the council’s initial approval, the UPF organized their second and largest protest rally. This was held in Bendigo on 10 October 2015 to coincide with a number of international protests initiated by similar, primarily US-based groups, opposed to immigration and intolerant of Islam. The Bendigo rally was covered by local, state and national Australian media, and content ranged from opinion editorial to photo galleries, letters to the editor and long-form investigative pieces. Drawing on a sample of coverage of the days either side of this event, this study examines how the UPF and their activity were represented in mainstream media. The findings present a preliminary investigation into the role of alternative media in modern activism, specifically in this case by an alt-right group, and how the mainstream media represent this type of activity.

Defining the ‘alt-right’ Social movements have traditionally been defined as the collective action of  groups of people who share interests and form a common identity to enact  change. Generally prioritizing a human rights agenda over economic well-being (Habermas 1981), the struggle for progressive social transformation (Downing 2001) is a defining feature of social movement theory. Though alt-right activism mirrors the process of progressive activism described above, where disagreement arises is around the intention of this action. The significant difference that this disagreement pivots on is the issue of free speech. Elster (1998) describes how social movements help to facilitate decision-making through discussion among free and equal citizens. Yet, while the rhetoric of the alt-right is dominated by social issues including multiculturalism, gender equality and freedom of expression, the way these topics are framed by the alt-right sits at odds with a progressive human rights agenda. ‘Alternative right’, or ‘alt-right’, has emerged as a term that is widely used by activists themselves and, increasingly, the mainstream media, and

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is claimed to have been coined by US activist Richard B. Spencer. Spencer is a former employee of conservative publication Breitbart News and the president of rightist think tank the National Policy Institute. ‘Alt-right’ overlaps with a range of terms used, often interchangeably, in both the media and academic literature. ‘Conservative’, ‘right wing’ and ‘far right’ are widely used in relation to political position, while ‘nationalist’, ‘whitesupremacist’, ‘neo-Nazi’ and ‘extremist’ are used when discussing social ideologies (Adams & Roscigno 2005; Blee & Creasap 2010; Dentice 2011; Ekman 2014; McVeigh & Cunningham 2012; Perry & Scrivens 2016). The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) provides the below definition of the alt-right: The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value. For key reasons, I have chosen to use the movement’s own term for itself rather than critics’ characterizations such as ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘white supremacist’ movements. ‘Alt-right’ has been used throughout this analysis as it is the term most commonly applied in media and activist circles. Further, the SPLC’s definition offers specificity that is lacking in terms like ‘conservative’ or ‘extremist’, thus giving a narrower framework within which to view the activity being discussed here. Future investigations into alt-right movements would benefit from further interrogating the terminology and its evolution over time.

Alternative media As identified by the SPLC, use of alternative media is a defining feature of alt-right activism. Alternative or radical media enables the expression of an alternative view or perspective (Downing 2001), playing an important and democratizing role in challenging both traditional media and dominant social agendas. It can help address bias in mainstream media, censorship by governments and even provide access to otherwise inaccessible content through the practice of citizen journalism and user-generated content. This has added many and varied voices to global conversations that undoubtedly benefit from the diversity. Conversely, alternative media faces a constant challenge of legitimacy and authority and has the capacity to undermine

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the very foundations of values it seeks to uphold, that is, the dissemination of truth. Bypassing fact-checking practices, vetting and accountability demanded of the fourth estate, alternative media lacks, at best, credibility, and, at worst, authenticity. While media activism is often described as being democratic and progressive, it has also been identified as having the capacity to be politically conservative or reactionary (Caroll & Hackett 2006) or an agent of social control (Shoemaker 1984). It has even been suggested that the strategic adoption of alternative media, by anti-establishment and terrorist organizations alike, demonstrates how propaganda strategies and tactics have enjoyed a renaissance in the age of digital media (Coombs 2015). Though the wider scholarship has until recently encompassed far more leftwing social movements that seek to prompt progressive change (Castells 2015; DeLuca, Lawson & Sun 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Gitlin 2012), there is a rapidly growing body of work addressing the emergence of the altright and their use of digital platforms (Daniels 2018; Hawley 2017; Nagle 2017; Sparrow 2018). The practice of connective and collective action also takes new forms on the web and for activists this offers both new recruitment opportunities (Blazak 2001) and platforms for the production and consumption of digital storytelling (Hertzberg & Lundby 2008). Altright groups like the UPF are challenging many of the definitions that have come to be associated with activism and the rapid rate of change protest is experiencing at the hands of digital media is no small part of this new evolution.

Rhetoric of fear If we look to the media for our orientation in the world (Silverstone 2013), it is understandable that consumers seek comfort in the familiarity of echochambers (Hochschild 2016) that confirm their pre-existing biases. This is an environment in which alt-right activism has thrived. Using rhetoric that willingly confuses nationalism with racism and freedom of expression with hate speech, the alt-right manufacture discontent (McCarthy & Zald 1977) to appeal to a public seeking affirmation of their social experience either not represented elsewhere or perceived to be under attack. In this environment, online activism and digital sites can play a critical role in the mobilization of support for alt-right ideologies. Along with the relative anonymity of digital participation, a sense of belonging reinforced by inter-group bias creates a bubble of safety for expression without risk of social retribution (Effron et al. 2015). However, the remix and remediation (Cheong 2014) of this rhetoric is not restricted to alternative media (e.g. memes and social media). Mainstream,

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traditional media (e.g. newspapers, television and radio) is faced with a difficult challenge regarding the oxygen of amplification (Phillips 2018) in the reporting of hate speech. This is indeed a criticism made by one reader in a letter to the editor included in this analysis, demonstrating the problematic nature of reporting on the commentary of activists in this space. With this in mind, the power of framing and political language (Lakoff 2014) remains central to any analysis and is an important conceptual lens through which to examine these anti-political activities. Framing is used to great effect by altright activists who appear particularly willing participants in the production and consumption of a rhetoric of evil (Silverstone 2013), in which the idea of ‘otherness’ (Hall 1997) is used to consolidate a nationalist identity that puts any minority in direct opposition, complicating to no end the task of reporting without amplifying.

Research focus I began research into the Bendigo demonstrations when protests against the mosque broke out in 2014. My research took the form of media analysis of online content, beginning with keyword searches across a range of newspapers (Figure 14.2). From these searches, I identified six articles from different Australian media outlets surrounding one of the rallies in October 2015, and conducted an in-depth media analysis of each. To provide historical context, I also documented the events in the form of a timeline, identifying both legal proceedings and community action (Figure 14.1). This included following the initial submission of the planning application of the mosque through to the High Court decision, which marked the end of legal proceedings. The bolded events in the timeline below detail major legal rulings while the shaded events are protest activities undertaken by the UPF and their supporters. The timeline clearly demonstrates the relational timing of the events. Figure 14.2 below shows the volume of articles that referenced the Bendigo demonstrations between January 2014 and June 2016, exceeding 35,000 overall across the seven outlets surveyed. This huge number demonstrates how extensively the media documented the events over the two-year period, contributing to public awareness and building the profile of those involved. News coverage increased around the significant legal rulings and the subsequent protest activities, reaching its highest leading up to, and immediately following, the second rally on 10 October 2015. The media analysis I conducted was undertaken to examine how the event was represented across the spectrum of mainstream Australian media (newspapers and television). A sample was chosen from six different outlets in order to examine how the story was represented according to a range of political sympathies and for a variety of audiences, including local, state

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Date

Event

10 January 2014

Mosque planning application submitted to City of Greater Bendigo

14 January 2014

‘Stop the mosque’ Facebook page formed

20 March 2014

Forty objections to the development lodged

7 April 2014

Bendigo Bank order closure of an account financing the objections to the mosque

18 June 2014

City of Bendigo approves plans for mosque

11 July 2014

VCAT sets the date for a challenge to be heard following lodgement of complaints

15 March 2015

Anti-mosque protesters attempt to crash an event at mosque site

5 August 2015

VCAT upholds decision to approve mosque

29 August 2015

First anti-mosque rally held in Bendigo

16 September 2015

Bendigo council meeting shut down due to protesters

24 September 2015

Injunction rejected thereby allowing construction to commence

10 October 2015

Second anti-mosque rally held in Bendigo

14 October 2015

Public denied access to council meeting

16 December 2015

Court of Appeals rejects mosque appeal

17 December 2015

Objectors announce intention to challenge decision in the High Court

2 February 2016

Objectors lodge documents to High Court

26 February 2016

Third anti-mosque rally held in Bendigo

15 June 2016

High Court rejects appeal against the mosque, thereby granting final approval, all legal means of objection now having been exhausted

FIGURE 13.1  Timeline of legal proceedings and community action.

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KEYWORDS

Bendigo mosque

United patriots front

Bendigo action coalition

Bendigo action collective

The Saturday Paper

1

3

1

1

ABC News

2,560

2,095

1,705

1,338

The Guardian

197

11,600

52

15

The Age

102

128

63

23

The Australian

280

135

125

14

The Herald Sun

1,840

907

392

90

The Bendigo Advertiser

11,000

121

-

305

FIGURE 13.2 Number of articles found using keyword searches of online archives.

and national. The Saturday Paper, for example, is written for an audience thought to be highly politically engaged and likely to have completed higher education. The Bendigo Advertiser, on the other hand, is written for an audience concerned with locally concentrated issues and more likely to have lower levels of literacy and general education. Long-form articles were chosen where available, as well as a variety of media types, including letters to the editor, interviews and photographic galleries, to demonstrate the range of ways the issue was covered. Headline:

Bendigo mosque clears first legal hurdle

Publication:

The Saturday Paper

Date:

10 October 2015

This editorial by freelance writer Kevin Childs was published in The Saturday Paper, a weekly Melbourne-based newspaper dedicated to longform narrative journalism. The story is the only one they ran covering the Bendigo mosque issue over the course of the timeline outlined above. In the article, Childs gives a recap of events leading up to the day of the second protest, setting the scene around the period in time where the conflict peaks. He describes court appearances and council meetings where those who opposed the mosque were present, and includes quotes and anecdotal descriptions of events gained presumably through his own eyewitness account or council transcripts as they are not credited to anyone else. Throughout the article, the only directly attributed quotes that appear to have been given solely for the purpose of this story are from Bendigo’s (then) mayor, Peter Cox. Cox is quoted recounting the distressing experience of

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attempting to maintain control of a council meeting aggressively disrupted by protesters and conceding that the council’s failure to communicate with the community contributed to ‘the seeds of violence’. Though there is reference to commentary published on the UPF website and social channels as well as their actions, there are no quotes from any members. When considering the UPF’s use of communications as a tool for participation in this debate, this representation is significant. Whether they declined to be interviewed for this story or were never approached is unknown, yet their actions and political stance dominate this coverage. Theatrically described as ‘brawling’, ‘chanting’ and ‘edging towards violence’, they are a lively element in this recounting of events. Subheadings throughout the story also set the tone with ‘Violent protests’ and ‘Multicultural Bendigo’ providing opposing depictions of the conflicted rural town and placing the UPF and their ‘fellow opponents’ at the heart of this discord. As Cox is the only interviewee, his view becomes central, implicitly instating him as the moral compass of the story.

Headline:

Pro and anti Islamic groups protest as Bendigo mosque rages

Publication:

The Herald Sun

Date:

11 October 2015

This article ran in the Herald Sun the day after the second Bendigo rally and covers events on the day. Neither the UPF nor the supporters of the mosque are represented particularly favourably; however, the actions of the UPF garner them more attention. The authors Paul Anderson and Andrew Jefferson do not attempt to conceal their personal views, describing the UPF and their supporters as ‘a Caucasian sea driven by a patriotic tide … tattooed tradies, louts, bikies and blokes who looked like they’d wandered straight from Crocodile Dundee’s drinking hole.’ By contrast, supporters of the mosque are disparagingly described as ‘an eclectic and confused gathering of differing Left-wing factions … pirates, environmentalists, clown wigs and masked vigilantes’. The language in these two descriptions alone reveals a lot about both the prejudices of the authors and the audience for whom they are writing. Meanwhile, the police are described as having ‘won the battle’ on the day, preventing major violent outbreaks and making only four arrests. This view that civil disruption is in fact the main threat is a different perspective to that taken by Childs in The Saturday Paper and one that is reinforced through the imagery used to accompany the story.

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There are fourteen photos interspersed throughout the story. Many featuring the UPF show crowds of almost exclusively white males with their middle fingers raised in a sign of aggression and disregard for authority, wearing Australian flags around their shoulders or clashing with police. The images are full of violence and aggression and reinforce the headline that describes the protest as ‘raging’. By contrast, images of mosque supporters include children, and people standing motionless, passively holding banners and signs with messages including ‘Give peace a chance’ and ‘No room for racism’. They are not shown to be participating in this conflict, but simply standing in opposition to it in a passive and non-confrontational way. The Headline:

Protests against mosque in Bendigo

Publication: The Bendigo Advertiser, Photo gallery Date:

11 October 2015

authors have chosen to show extremism and violence juxtaposed against ‘confused’ inaction and passive resistance. This photo gallery was published by Bendigo’s local paper on 11 October 2015, the day after the second protest. The gallery caption reads: ‘Protesters gathered showing their discontent with current issues including the building of a mosque in Bendigo, immigration policies and multiculturalism.’ The photos show streams of protesters proceeding through the streets and park in Bendigo, waving Australian flags, their faces painted and holding red balloons and signs with messages including ‘Stop Islamic colonisation. No more mosques’. Noticeably absent are the many mosque supporters who were also present on the day. Many of the images are tightly cropped so that protesters fill the frame in an overwhelming number. Shots taken from further away show the procession of protesters snaking their way through Bendigo’s gardens, adding to the sense of scale. Multiple flags give the march a look reminiscent of a battle, heightening the narrative of conflict and several photos show police lining the streets, monitoring proceedings. Like the images published in The Herald Sun’s story, these photos are used to construct a narrative of drama, conflict and violence. Again, it is the actions and presence of the UPF and their supporters that are central to the coverage.

Headline:

Bendigo’s anti-mosque protest: United Patriots Front nationalist group behind demonstration

Publication:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (government funded television)

Date:

13 October 2015

(ABC), News

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This article was published by ABC News’s 7:30 Report three days after the UPF’s second rally. Interviewed in this story is Julie Hoskin, a Bendigo resident who led the legal campaign against the mosque. She describes her work as focused on ‘planning and legal issues’ and denies any affiliation with the UPF. The article goes on to address the claim that a significant proportion of protesters were not locals. This distinction is one that is not made in the other articles reviewed here, each of which bundles the various people and groups in opposition together as one movement. (Consequently, in reporting not included for this analysis, the issue of residency received much attention with protesters accused of being flown in for the occasion.) The title ‘United Patriots Front nationalist group behind demonstration’ is one of the only hints we get to suggest the group are not necessarily residents of Bendigo, as is the subheading ‘UPF a fringe group, Victoria Police says’. 7:30 also interviews Victoria Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Casey who describes the UPF as ‘a fringe group that are trying to get traction wherever they can’. Further demonstrating the convoluted list of players, members from far-right Rise Up Australia Party are interviewed. Contradicting Hoskin’s attempt to maintain autonomy, the Rise Up Australia Party members state they are seeking to cooperate with other antiIslamic groups, including the UPF and Hoskin in order to get candidates into parliament to represent their issues. This selection of interviewees and their conflicting views of the protest and issues presents a fractured image of this movement. Unlike Sunday Night’s (mainstream television) representation that Fleming criticizes in his story for The Guardian (included below), this report downplays the influence of the UPF and other opposition groups. The fact that members of the UPF are not interviewed is again a noticeable absence. While other opposition and community group leaders are quoted, the UPF are not and it is only their actions that garner a mention. They are described using emotive language such as ‘controversial’, ‘disquiet’, ‘fear’ and ‘vitriolic’. This language is extremely powerful and depicts an extremist group whose priority is to incite fear, disruption and hate. Headline:

Bendigo mosque: Be thankful we have the freedom to demonstrate

Publication:

The Age, Letters to the Editor

Date:

18 October 2015

In this sample of letters to the editor published by The Age eight days after the second Bendigo rally, four members of the public comment on the event. It is noteworthy given the variety of views expressed in these samples

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that the headline chosen is about freedom of speech. The title is taken from the first letter which, though moderate in tone, is critical of the ‘pro group’ and describes them as ‘desperate for a cause to demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority’. Framing the UPF’s opposition as an example of citizens enacting their right to freedom of speech pivots the issue away from racism, intolerance and extremism and puts the UPF at the centre of a conversation about civic freedoms. The second letter is titled ‘Haven for those fleeing danger’ and criticizes protesters for ‘denying the constitutional right of freedom of religion’. Drawing on historic symbolism the author references the ANZACs and their sacrifice for both freedom and freedom of religion, arguing that protests against the mosque run counter to this fundamentally Australian value. The next two letters address media coverage of events. One, titled ‘Supplying oxygen to their cause’, laments coverage they feel is unrepresentative of the wider Bendigo community. Both point out that peaceful demonstrations in support of inclusion and diversity have gained little or no coverage next to the antagonistic, conflict-driven rallies of the opposition groups. What results from coverage like this, they say, is ‘a perception that is out of step with reality’. Overall, the letters selected are widely in support of the mosque or critical of its opponents; it is significant that despite this, the first letter from which the headline for the collection is drawn is not. Whether in an attempt to achieve balance, appear unbiased or just to provide a diversity of views, this has been included and put first deliberately, a decision that hints Headline:

The UPF and Reclaim Australia aren’t ‘concerned parents’ or a bad joke1

Publication: The Guardian, Opinion Date:

20 October 2015

at the controversy surrounding the topic and perhaps anticipated public response to publishing the letters. Published on 20 October, only ten days after the UPF’s second rally, this piece was written by journalist Andy Fleming in response to Channel 7’s Sunday Night report on the opposition to the mosque, rather than the event itself. The article is published as an opinion piece and contains no quotes. It is clearly the impressions of the author and as one of hundreds of articles The Guardian published covering this issue over the course of events; it does not attempt to recap events or provide any additional context. Fleming’s voice rings clear in this analysis and he seems concerned by what he sees as a dismissal of this influential group by the media. The subheading opens ‘Don’t get sucked in by the hijinks’, and goes on to describe a movement where ‘neo-Nazis are welcome’.

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Fleming discusses Sunday Night’s representation of ‘far-right activists’ as ‘everyday mums and dads’, criticizing the way the current affairs program fails to frame the UPF’s actions within the broader context of far-right movements and ideologies in Australia. He goes on to describe a number of movement leaders interviewed by Sunday Night, and provides background information excluded from the program that paints an unforgiving picture of the interviewees. Ultimately, Fleming’s thesis is that the investigative piece by Sunday Night has the effect of rehabilitating the UPF’s image, rather than providing critical examination.

Conclusion While this study provides some insights into mainstream media coverage of alt-right activism, the size of the sample presents limitations. For an issue spanning a two-year time period that was covered by numerous media outlets in thousands of articles, the scale of this research is too small to draw any conclusions that could be applied in a broader context. At best, it provides a hypothesis around media representation of alt-right activism that would need to be examined on a much larger scale in order to contribute meaningful information to the field. Further, interviews would need to be conducted with UPF members in order to understand the goals of the group and as a way to gain deeper insights about their deliberate impact on media coverage. As demonstrated, media coverage analysed in this sample varied widely across media outlets. Left-leaning publications, including the ABC, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper and The Age, tended to downplay the influence of the UPF and emphasize the fact they came from outside the Bendigo community. They are characterized as a group of far-right extremists attempting, without success, to sway public opinion. By contrast, The Herald Sun and The Bendigo Advertiser, both owned by News Limited, tended to have a more dramatic bent to their coverage, adding to the hype with images and rhetoric that depict conflict, anger and violence. The Herald Sun article titled ‘Pro- and Anti-Islamic Groups Protest as Bendigo Mosque Rages’ makes the conflict and dissonance within the community the main focus. While the article does not necessarily condone or criticize the behaviour of the UPF, it does seem to point the finger at issues of migration and multiculturalism for being the cause of the disruption. The analysis also reveals that the UPF are not once interviewed first hand for a story. They are represented by their actions, anecdotally or quoted from speeches at rallies and, when considering their use of alternative media as a tool for public engagement, this is an important factor. Whether by intention or mere circumstance, the UPF’s actions have, in most cases,

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spoken much louder than words and their presence is deeply embedded in this media coverage. They are represented as intolerant, at times ignorant and almost always extreme, and yet at the same time as strong, patriotic and willing to fight for their beliefs. In many ways, media coverage of this event demonstrates the aphorism that all press is good press, a concern actually raised in one of the letters to the editor published by The Age and titled ‘Supplying Oxygen to Their Cause’. The UPF’s campaign is run on oxygen and, while their actions create the flame, it’s the media, both left and right, that in this case have kept it burning.

Note 1 ‘Reclaim’ is a faction that split from the UPF and later dissolved.

References Adams, J. and Roscigno, V.J. (2005), ‘White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web’, Social Forces, 84 (2): 759–78. Blazak, R. (2001), ‘White Boys to Terrorist Men: Target Recruitment of Nazi Skinheads’, The American Behavioral Scientist, 44 (6): 982–1000. Blee, K. and Creasap, K. (2010), ‘Conservative and Right-Wing Movements’, Annual Review of Sociology, 36: 269–86. Carroll, W.K. and Hackett, R. A. (2006), ‘Democratic Media Activism through the Lens of Social Movement Theory’, Media, Culture and Society, 28 (1): 83–104. Castells, M. (2015), Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Cheong, P. (2014), ‘New Media and Terrorism’, Exchanging Terrorism Oxygen for Media Airwaves. 184–96. Available online: https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/ new-media-and-terrorism/106162 (accessed 6 September 2019). Coombs, W. (2015), Strategic Communication, Social Media and Democracy: The Challenge of the Digital Naturals (1st ed., Routledge New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research), New York, NY: Routledge. Daniels, J. (2018), ‘The Algorithmic Rise of the “Alt-Right”’, Contexts, 17 (1): 60–5. DeLuca, K.M., Lawson, S. and Sun, Y. (2012), ‘Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement’, Communication, Culture and Critique, 5 (4): 483–509. Dentice, D. (2011), ‘The Nationalist Party of America: Right-Wing Activism and Billy Roper’s White Revolution’, Social Movement Studies, 10 (1): 107–12. Downing, J. (2001), Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Effron, D., Knowles, E. and Smith, E.R. (2015), ‘Entitativity and Intergroup

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Bias: How Belonging to a Cohesive Group Allows People to Express Their Prejudices’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108 (2): 234–53. Ekman, M. (2014), ‘The Dark Side of Online Activism: Swedish Right-Wing Extremist Video Activism on YouTube’, Mediekultur, 30 (56): 79–99. Elster, J. (1998), Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gerbaudo, P. (2012), Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Press. Gitlin, T. (2012), Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, New York, NY: HarperCollins. Habermas, J. (1981), ‘New Social Movements’, Telos, 1981 (49): 33–7. Hall, S. (1997), ‘Spectacle of the Other’, in S. Hall (ed), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 223–90, London, California and New Delhi: Sage. Hawley, G. (2017), Making Sense of the Alt-Right, New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Hertzberg, B.K. and Lundby, K. (2008), ‘Mediatized Lives: Autobiography and Assumed Authenticity in Digital Storytelling’, in K. Lundby (ed), Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media, 105–22, New York: Peter Lang. Hochschild, A.R. (2016), Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York, NY: New Press. Lakoff, G. (2014), The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Mccarthy, J. and Zald, M. (1977), ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 82 (6): 1212–41. McVeigh, R. and Cunningham, D. (2012), ‘Enduring Consequences of Right-Wing Extremism: Klan Mobilization and Homicides in Southern Counties’, Social Forces, 90 (3): 843–62. Nagle, A. (2017), Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump, Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books. Phillips, W. (2018), The Oxygen of Amplification. Data & Society. Available online: https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/ (accessed 6 September 2019). Perry, B. and Scrivens, R. (2016), ‘Uneasy Alliances: A Look at the Right-Wing Extremist Movement in Canada’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 39 (9): 819–41. Shoemaker, P.J. (1984), ‘Media Treatment of Deviant Political Groups’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 61 (1): 66–82. Silverstone, R. (2013), Media and Morality on the Rise of the Mediapolis, Hoboken: Wiley. Sparrow, J. (2018), Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right, Victoria, Australia; London and Minneapolis, Minnesota: Scribe Publications.

14 Connective Crowds: The Organizational Structure of a Feminist Crowd in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc Campaign Verity Trott

Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012; 2013) logic of connective action places the organizational burden of activism on digital platforms, arguing that they work to facilitate protest networks. Numerous scholars have also helped to analyse the role of digital media and the internet in the structure of contemporary movements (Bimber et al. 2005; Chadwick 2013). However, the importance of how activists deliberately utilize their digital networks and the role of less visible interpersonal dynamics that influence the organization, facilitation, execution and reception of a protest have been insufficiently studied. Using a case study of the protest #TakeDownJulienBlanc, this chapter sets forth to extend Bennett and Segerberg’s theory, focusing on the role of individuals and less visible, interpersonal dynamics in the organizational structures of connective feminist activism.1 I also go a step further to deconstruct what a feminist crowd might look like to extend their conceptualization to feminist connective actions. Jo Freeman’s (1972) theory of the tyranny of structurelessness is drawn on to help illustrate the nature of informal groups.

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The organizational structure of the feminist crowd in #TakeDownJulienBlanc At the beginning of November 2014, the hashtag #TakeDownJulienBlanc started trending on social media in response to the ‘pickup artist’ Julien Blanc coming to Australia to host seminars on how to sleep with women. Blanc was an instructor for the US-based group Real Social Dynamics (RSD), which describes itself as a dating coaching company that teaches men how to seduce women with the goal of sleeping with them as opposed to dating them. Blanc was known for promoting aggressive, abusive and derogatory tactics such as choking women and forcing women’s heads into his crotch. His misogynistic and violent advice included: ‘choke women and they will have sex with you’, as well as sharing a domestic violence chart accompanied by the comment ‘May as well be a checklist.’ One night, Chinese-American activist Jennifer Li saw a video about Blanc’s aggressive harassment of women in Japan, and from her home in California she became the initiator of the #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Li initially thought to report him to his employer but discovered that this was a ‘pickup’ company called Real Social Dynamics (RSD). She was then spurred into tweeting that she was going to ‘take him down’. She soon found out that Blanc’s next scheduled destination was Melbourne and that he would be hosting ‘pickup artist’ seminars. These seminars were private classes in which predominantly young men could sign up and learn tactics from Blanc and other RSD ‘pickup artists’ on how to make women sleep with them. The initial seminar required registration and was free but to gain access to the more ‘practical’ content and have a more personal class, men could sign up for AUD$300 and spend two hours at a bar with one of the ‘pickup artists’ and gain live advice and coaching. As one of the interviewees stated, ‘it was a massive money making scam essentially.’ Once Li was aware of Blanc’s next destination, she created a change. org petition to protest venues from hosting RSD events, beginning with petitioning the Hotel Como in Melbourne. In addition to this petition, she created a YouTube video warning Australians about Blanc and his imminent visit to Melbourne. Trending online as a hashtag campaign, the protest grew to include physical protests, cold calling and protesting venues, and online global petitions. This campaign led to the revoking of Blanc’s visa in Australia, as well as the UK and Singapore. Several other nations have denied him entry. Moreover, a second wave of protests developed a little over a year later in January 2016, when another RSD ‘pickup artist’, Jeff ‘Jeffy’ Allen, attempted to come to Australia to deliver seminars in secret. In order to avoid protesters finding the location of the seminars and shutting them down as they did in 2014, Allen and RSD took measures to protect the details of where they were

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hosting their seminars. Some of the activists recounted how RSD must have put an alert out asking attendees not to post any pictures or information on social media, and that there was a process in which credit card details had to be provided to register and then attendees would be texted the details of the event on the day. Regardless of these efforts, activists were still able to discover where the seminars were being held. The networks established during the first wave of protests against Blanc were reignited and the protesters were quick to identify venues, launch another petition and pool resources to protest Allen, which resulted in the cancellation of his tour and Australian visa. Digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as well as change.org were crucial in the success of the campaigns, which initially began in California after being prompted by actions in Japan and climaxed in Melbourne, Australia before spreading to other countries.

Conceptualizing feminist connective action and #TakeDownJulienBlanc Bennett and Segerberg assert that while new styles of activism are emerging, they are not necessarily replacing traditional modes of activism. Their considerations include two newer organizational styles: Crowd-enabled connective action and a hybrid model labelled organizationally enabled connective action. This crowd-enabled connective action is what I intend to interrogate. Within a crowd-enabled connective action, media platforms act as communication and informal organizational hubs. A crowd-enabled connective network is characterized by personalized action frames that are easily adaptable and individualized by a wide collective of participants. Crucially, participants can join and engage with a cause without prescribing exactly to the beliefs and ideologies of others in the movement (Bennett & Segerberg 2012: 744). Much of this structure can be observed in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign as numerous individuals came together across geographical and formal borders, relying on various digital media platforms to join the protest, helping it spread and gain momentum. However, it was not just these digital platforms that took on the organizational burden. The ways key individuals operated in the informal organization of the campaign on private digital avenues, and the particular position these individuals already occupied in a wider activist network, also played a crucial role in the development and structure of the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign. Because Bennett and Segerberg’s research relies primarily on large data samples and social network analysis, they are not able to provide an analysis from what they call a ‘fine-grained ethnographic sense’ (2013: 76). Their

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digital analysis can be conducted only on data networks that are publicly available to scrape and collect. Given this limitation, the interpersonal and less visible relationships that occur offline as well as on private digital avenues cannot be fully accounted for. Consequentially, an examination of the #TakeDownJulienBlanc series of protests as an example of crowdenabled connective action prompts the questions: What is the structure of a less transparent feminist crowd-enabled network? What does a crowd look like in a feminist protest? What is it that leads to the development of a feminist connective action? There has been an explosion of literature that focuses on digital feminist activism in the wake of large-scale protests such as Slutwalk and #MeToo (Khoja-Moolji 2015; Mendes 2015; Mendes, Ringrose & Keller 2018; Thrift 2014), as well as research that looks at women’s engagement in more general digital actions such as Occupy (Boler & Nitsou 2014) and the Arab Spring (Newsom & Lengel 2012). Much of this research looks at the role of digital media in empowering or further oppressing women and contributes to a broader understanding of women’s political engagement online. Boler and Nitsou (2014) argue for the internet’s capability to subvert hierarchical structures and to create horizontal structures that are more aligned with the commitments of social movements supporting the oppressed. They argue that attempts to deconstruct patriarchal power dynamics and level the playing field from within can provide opportunities for minority voices to be heard. Yet Freeman’s (1972) rejection of a ‘structureless’ organizational practice counters the idea that power dynamics can be flattened out to be more inclusive. Freeman argues there is no such thing as a ‘structureless’ group and that structure is inevitable regardless of intentions. She sees significance in the development of activist ‘stars’ to fulfil the media and public’s demand for a leader and the resulting backlash these ‘stars’ experience. She also conceptualizes informal elites that develop in the absence of established structure who can perpetuate discrimination and exclusionary practices in organizational practices. As I shall discuss, many of these structural features emerged in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign.

Activist stars and #TakeDownJulienBlanc The power of leaders cannot be underestimated. We love our leaders, and according to Freeman some form of leadership and structure is crucial to the progress of movements (Freeman 1972: 152). These informal leaders or ‘stars’ are appointed by the media and the public when no formalized leader has been elected. They help to communicate the movement’s message and are often identified by the media because of their existing public profile regardless of how accurately they represent the movement

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(Freeman 1972: 158). We can see this in one leader’s evolution as the face of the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign. Kirsty Mac, a stand-up comedian, recounted her time selling tickets at a comedy venue and when a woman got up to perform on stage, a man in the audience yelled out, ‘show us your cunt’. This moment infuriated Mac and spawned her desire to get a microphone and give women a voice, ‘I wanted to see a female comic so I started to do it.’ Reflecting on the spontaneous nature of her decision, Mac created an act called Feminazi, stating that while she considered herself a feminist, she had no intention of waving a flag for her beliefs and concedes she simply liked the name. Mac began building an extensive online network of feminists on a mission ‘to get bums on seats’ and began messaging and befriending every feminist she could find on Facebook. One morning when Mac woke up she was alerted to the news that the Hotel Como had cancelled Blanc’s seminars, yet the ‘pickup artists’ were still going to meet up and run their event. Mac joined the campaign with vigour; cold calling hotels and venues to find out where Blanc might have been hosting seminars, informing hotel staff about the physical and emotional abuse he promoted and requesting that they not host his events. Once she had tracked down the new location she logged onto Facebook and made a post to her network of around 3,000 feminist friends, who were all part of her network from her comedy shows. Once she had done so, the campaign took on a life of its own. Mac’s profile as a stand-up comedian, together with her accumulated network of feminist activists, framed her as an accessible and easily identifiable face for the campaign. Mac reflected on her rapid elevation to a feminist ‘star’ and the backlash she sometimes experienced from the feminist community. When I came to Melbourne I was a lone ranger; I’m not affiliated with any feminist groups but I ended up having the biggest voice for a certain period of time, it wasn’t my intention. Around the Julien Blanc stuff, I was the first name people thought of around activism and feminism and that in itself created a bit of conflict because there were some people who felt that I hadn’t paid my dues. I just sort of came in and rose to the top. About three weeks after the Julien Blanc stuff I was invited to perform [at a feminist event] and I did an age joke and it wasn’t well received. When I started doing feminist comedy, it wasn’t for feminists, it’s for the fuckwit at the back of the room. So this was the first feminist gig I’d ever done and it was a room full of feminists so of course they hear things differently … I got hate mail after that. Because the truth is: the capacity people have to love you, is the same capacity they have to hate you. Because I was elevated to such a position of love and adoration, after that I’d broken their idea of being a perfect feminist, in a few people’s minds, and I got

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hate mail and that has hurt me far more than any messy rape message I’ve ever gotten on Twitter or Facebook. Feminism has to be across everything you know and so when you get cut down by another feminist it really hurts. (Mac, 22 July 2016) Mac’s response resonates with Freeman’s position that the public and media’s elevation of someone as the leader or ‘star’ of the movement can create issues and tension within the movement when those involved feel the ‘star’ does not represent them adequately or has not earned their place. Freeman described how women positioned as stars find themselves ‘viciously attacked by their sisters’, which is ‘painfully destructive’ not just to the individuals themselves, but also for the movement and the campaigns (1972: 158). Freeman’s warning about the risk of ‘stars’ being appointed is even more pressing in a digitally connected era. With hashtag campaigns proliferating and activists having the ability to engage in a multitude of informal actions, the risk of being appointed the face of a movement or a post going viral beyond intention can expose activists to abuse from both within the movement and outside forces.

Established groups and digital vanguards in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign Mac’s retelling of the protest identifies groups of people who were involved in the campaign. In her recount, she spoke about someone she called a ‘professional protester’ who tried to take control of the physical protest that occurred in Melbourne. She made a distinction between him and the group of people she referred to as ‘we’ when she mentioned that he took charge even though ‘we had all the information’. Similarly, the way in which activist James spoke about the man who created the petition calling on the Australian Government to revoke Allen’s visa identified him as an outsider. James complained that as a result of the petition, ‘they’ received a lot of criticism for weaponizing immigration policy, which was frustrating because ‘we didn’t tell this guy to start the petition’. The tension between particular activists and how some of them referred to a smaller informal collective ‘we’, characterizing themselves as distinct from other activists, highlights the structure that exists below the surface of a seemingly structureless crowd-enabled network. For Freeman, structurelessness becomes a way of masking power and informal networks, as was evidenced in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc protests, can generate their own exclusions, which in turn impacts the effectiveness of participation and the direction of a campaign.

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There were a few other key players that were present in the organization of #TakeDownJulienBlanc. First, there were a few established groups that played a role. Second, there were particular clusters of activists who had worked together on previous campaigns and who developed smaller teams to operate from within. Last, there were individuals who had little to no association with anyone else in the network and were perceived as ‘lone wolves’. Consistent with Bennett and Segerberg’s description of crowd-enabled networks there was evidence of a range of individuals and groups within the broader protest network. Some traditional groups were present within the action network yet operated as just another node in the network and remained in the background as promoters of the campaign. Notably, at the beginning of the protests, both Li and Mac reached out to established feminist groups for assistance. One of Li’s original tweets was directed at the feminist group Hollaback! that concerns itself with addressing street harassment. However, Hollaback! remained on the periphery and never stepped into the organizational side of the network for the campaigns. Mac also recounted how she reached out to Australian online feminist group Destroy the Joint. Once reaching out, Destroy the Joint quickly became involved and began calling the hotels to find out where Blanc was staying. In this way, Destroy the Joint acted as just another node in the organizational network, operating from behind the scenes and utilizing their skills to assist with the protest. During the second wave of protests, a group called Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) became involved and collaborated with other activists involved in the Melbourne protests. MFW was developed in response to Peter Dutton, the (then) Federal Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, calling journalist Samantha Maiden a ‘mad fucking witch’ in a text that was intended for former minister Jamie Briggs but mistakenly sent to Maiden. The instigator of the group, Melbourne activist Jane, decided to reclaim the derogatory and sexist slur to highlight and symbolize in a provocative manner the government’s abuse of all women, and in particular marginalized women, in a ‘sarcastic, cynical, and sweary kind of place’ as stated on their Facebook page. The MFW group was initially started at the beginning of 2016, just before the second wave of #TakeDownJulienBlanc, which was also known as #ShutdownRSD. On 14 January 2016, MFW made a call-to-action post on Facebook alerting its supporters that ‘Australia’s most hated misogynist’ Blanc was sending his wingmen to Australia and urgently requested everyone to bombard Dutton by either emailing or calling his office demanding he deport the RSD ‘pickup artists’. MFW used the momentum they had recently built targeted towards Dutton to contribute to and further propel the campaign.

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MFW is a collaboration between feminist activists who were already connected and who unite for a defined purpose when called to action by the primary administrator. In this way MFW diverges from the more traditional groups such as Hollaback! or Emily’s List and reflects the second type of node present in a connective feminist crowd: informal clusters of activists. Cathy Levine (1975) defines them as ‘small groups in voluntary association’, while Paolo Gerbaudo (2017) sees small groups on social media as ‘digital vanguards’. Gerbaudo explains that ‘digital vanguards’, teams of no more than twenty people, have played an important and often invisible role in contemporary activism (2017: 186). Gerbaudo’s theory of digital vanguards is reminiscent of Freemen’s analysis into informal elites; however, he provides a more contemporary analysis of these elites that situates them in the digital context. Much like Freeman, Gerbaudo outlines the contradiction between digital vanguards and the values activists maintain of ‘openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness’ and the consequential conflicts that can arise from this tension (2017: 185). Gerbaudo, like Freeman, calls for more transparent recognition of the nature of leadership in digital movements and argues for a better conceptual framework to regulate and manage assets on social media and digital platforms. A range of social media teams existed in the network that enabled the #TakeDownJulienBlanc protest to occur on a global scale. In the context of the Melbourne and Australian protests, a few social media teams emerged that came together in a broader digital vanguard hosted on a secret Facebook group and in which Mac was the core bridging agent. Activist Erasmus mentioned how the secret Facebook group had been carefully vetted and contained people who had previously been involved in similar activism and provided a space for them to share information with each other confidentially. This was important for those activists who have public profiles and those with concerns about safety, who wanted to support the campaign in a less risky way. Gerbaudo identified some of the motivations behind the development of such closed and non-transparent activist teams. He argued that often they developed out of concern and fear of possible infiltrators or opportunists, as well as a desire to maintain a level of control over the content production and the narrative of the protest (Gerbaudo 2017: 194). However, while Gerbaudo argued digital vanguards comprised a maximum of twenty people, the #TakeDownJulienBlanc core organizing group consisted of approximately seventy activists. Within this group of seventy, Erasmus identified ten particular women who took on larger roles, as well as smaller teams of individuals who worked together on areas that matched their skillsets. One of the social media teams comprised the two women who were part of the organizational team for the Reclaim the Night march in Melbourne in 2012 and the march for murder victim Jill Meagher in

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2013.2 Once Mac had discovered where the Melbourne seminar was going to be held, Sara Brocklesby and Natalie Pestana reapplied the skills they had developed and used for Reclaim the Night to create a Facebook page and event page to organize the St Kilda protest. Much like what Freeman and Gerbaudo described as activist elites, Brocklesby and Pestana took on the largely invisible role of managing the social media page and event because of their previous expertise and social capital within the Melbourne feminist community (Gerbaudo 2017: 191, see also Chadwick 2007 on hybrid organizational dynamics; Shaw 2012 on cross-platform activism; Papacharissi 2015 on affective publics).

Lone wolves Most of the activists involved in the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign were ‘single issue activists’ and preferred the flexibility of engaging in actions with one strong purpose without compromising their values for a broader united group. However, this type of approach combined with an informal structure brings with it risks of lone wolves acting on their own, as well as a crowd whose focus is too splintered on an issue that it may never achieve a necessary level of cohesion for a campaign to develop. Activist James recognized this challenge; however, he recounted that most of the people he worked with were seasoned activists. He also reflected on the complexity of being a male in a feminist activist community and how he considered his position as an identifying male working ‘behind the scenes’ in a feminist space. Further still, he outlined some of the tensions within a group of people comprising a broad church. We had a situation where someone had gone “I’m going to build consensus by inviting all of these people” and ended up adding some white feminist kind of non-intersectional, exclusive people into the space and it caused a lot of issues because there were all the die-hard activists who were really inclusive and really open and were just like what the fuck are they doing here. (James, 30 May 2016) James spoke about the difficulty of whittling down a list of people who were the central part of the organizing group and how they developed, in addition to the larger (approximately seventy members) secret Facebook group, a Facebook message thread with only around ten people. However, despite the efforts to contain the organization of the protest within a smaller collective or elite group, James conveyed the challenge of encountering and addressing lone wolves and individual activists who operated outside of the informally established digital vanguard.

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Anyone can come and be part of the demonstration or be part of the effort to shut these people down. In particular, what made it really difficult was the guy, the well-intentioned guy, who had a change.org petition calling on Peter Dutton to deport or cancel the visas of the RSD guys. A lot of the criticisms that were levelled against us was like “why are you supporting this petition; why are you weaponizing immigration policy?” And it was like, we didn’t tell this guy to start the petition. This white guy had already started the petition, and he had 70,000 signatures, so you can either choose to build a relationship with that to leverage that connection to those people to organize an on the ground demonstration or you can choose to ignore it and be really sectarian and when push comes to shove we said we’d just take the pragmatic approach. (James, May 2016) The man who created both Australian petitions calling for the cancellation of Blanc’s visa and later Allen’s was Melbourne man Matt Jowett. Jowett spoke about how he was aware of a piece of visa legislation that states under particular circumstances a visa can be revoked or denied and how he had seen this legislation used in a few cases. In addition, at the time, Jowett reflected on how domestic violence had been a focus of the Federal Government, so he felt they needed to be prompted to take action rather than just ‘talk a big game’ about addressing domestic violence. Jowett was not some completely independent actor operating in isolation of the rest of the activist community despite what some of the other activists described. He was an experienced activist with much of his training and experience based in climate change and LGBTQI-related actions and organizations. Like many of the other activists, Jowett’s early activism and  exposure to the organizational side of protests were shaped by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), who are recognized for providing great resources and work as a training ground for young activists within the community. In addition to the conventional ties Jowett established through these networks, he also maintained ties to feminist activists: ‘My previous housemate worked for Emily’s List. We had so many conversations over the years. So I was like yes I am unapologetically going to apply the label of feminist to myself’ (Jowett, 8 January 2018). Jowett described how he had seen Li’s petition targeting the Como Hotel and how it was doing very well, and he thought someone should try and take it up a step. Jowett stated that because he could not see a response happening it made him feel that there was a need for it, so he decided to fill that perceived gap. It was not until after he had started the petition that he became aware of who was already doing what and that there were people infiltrating the RSD groups to gather information. With such informal organizational structures, it is difficult for individuals who operate outside of the core elite to firstly even be aware that there

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already exists an established effort or group addressing the cause. Second, there are very few, if any, avenues for individual activists to contact the informal group if they wish to join the cause or collaborate for action. In spite of this, Jowett managed to get in contact with Li and political satirist Simon Hunt, known as Pauline Pantsdown, who was involved with creating and promoting the narrative of the protest online through memes and humorous posts. Jowett touched upon the difficulties of operating an informal group and how he can understand why at times there is a need for secrecy in organizing. He also expressed the frustration of how internal conflicts and disagreements can inhibit action, which is why he had chosen to start things on his own instead. However, he was reluctant to act as a lone wolf, so he deferred to similar past efforts and messaging to keep his action in line with the campaign as best he could. The consultative relationships Jowett maintained with Li and Pantsdown, combined with a conscious effort to maintain some of the messaging from Li’s Como Hotel petition in the development of his own, meant that Jowett did not act as a completely rogue lone wolf. You can’t have everyone on message all the time, that’s not going to happen, but I do feel like that the lack of a central organizing, not even central, but united or collaborative response meant that there was a bit of confusion about what was on message and what wasn’t … It definitely made it hard to have that unified approach, like already, what are our objectives? What are our tactics for getting there? That didn’t exist to a large degree. (Jowett, 8 Jan 2018) Even after the creation of the petition Jowett was not aware of who the rest of the activists in the core organizational group were and he never met anyone else that was involved offline. While Jowett was only distantly connected to the core organizational group in the protest network, he still operated in a conventionally established activist network with formal connections to activist groups like the AYCC. The informal structure of a crowd-enabled network can inhibit the visibility of core elite groups of activists and allow independent activists like Jowett to initiate action when no perceived collective exists.

Conclusion My interviews with activists Mac and Li highlight how the organizational structure of a campaign can be influenced. High-profile and highly connected individuals can play a crucial role in activism, exploiting their networks in ways that increase the spread of the message through personal connections.

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In the digital era, the burden of organization can be shifted onto a highly networked individual equipped with a palette of technology as opposed to traditionally established groups or a particular platform. While ‘stars’ may exist in an informally structured movement, members of a larger public inadvertently take on the role of appointing a spokesperson who has caught their eye. This is despite no official leader being elected and regardless of the spokesperson’s ability to represent the movement. These ‘stars’ are at risk of attacks from outside the movement, as well as by other activists levelling lateral violence from within the movement who feel these ‘stars’ are not qualified to represent their cause. I discussed how these individual activists can form part of larger informal organizational groups propelling protest campaigns forward. Core activists sitting at the heart of the campaign essentially operate anonymously behind the scenes. Clusters of identifiable digital vanguards, viewed as more seasoned activists in the community, adopt specific responsibilities aligned to their experience and skillset. This type of informal structure helps the core organizational elite to regulate a ‘no dickheads’ policy. Such an approach ensures lower risk of derailment, allowing the group to move past consciousness-raising efforts to achieve more practical outcomes. However, this can create a barrier for entry to other activists who feel passionate about the cause but have no means of knowing who campaign organizers are or how to connect with core activists. The lack of visibility of this informal elite means independent activists cannot see any collective effort early in the protest, opening up an unclaimed space for them to initiate their own actions. In the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign, what resulted was a seemingly cohesive campaign that achieved cross-continental success and led to the banning of various RSD ‘pickup artists’ and the prevention of their offline seminars in a range of countries. Beginning as a single hashtag tweeted out by Li in California, prompted by a video created by an expatriate in Japan, #TakeDownJulienBlanc transformed into a global feminist network of activists that contributed to a range of petitions, physical protests and cold calling, and that remains in existence capable of being reactivated for other campaigns in the future.

Notes 1 This chapter applied an ethnographic approach (Postill & Pink 2012), incorporating interviews and participant observations with activists both online and off. I joined various private feminist Facebook groups, focused on sharing feminist perspectives more generally, including some that were associated with the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign. A total of eleven activists involved in this

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campaign were interviewed. Becoming a member of these groups placed me in a trusted position as a feminist researcher and granted me access to the more granular and nuanced relationship dynamics within feminist circles. 2 Reclaim the Night is a movement that began in the UK and spans continents. It consists of marches in which women take to the streets to ‘reclaim’ physical space in response to police advising women to not go out at night after the murder of various women. Its North American counterpart operates under the name Take Back the Night.

References Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A. (2012), ‘The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics’, Information, Communication and Society, 15 (5): 739–68. Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A. (2013), The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, W.L., Segerberg, A. and Walker, S. (2014), ‘Organization in the Crowd: Peer Production in Large-Scale Networked Protests.’ Information, Communication and Society, 17 (2): 232–60. Bimber, B., Flanagin , A.J. and Stohl, C. (2005), ‘Reconceptualising Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment’, Communication Theory, 15 (4): 365–88. Boler, M. and Nitsou, C. (2014), ‘Women Activists of Occupy Wall Street: Consciousness-Raising and Connective Action in Hybrid Social Movements’, in M. McCaughey (ed), Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, 232–356, New York: Routledge. Chadwick, A. (2007), ‘Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity’, Political Communication, 24 (3): 283–301. Chadwick, A. (2013), The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, New York: Oxford University Press. Freeman, J. (1972), ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17: 151–64. Gerbaudo, P. (2017), ‘Social Media Teams as Digital Vanguards: The Question of Leadership in the Management of Key Facebook and Twitter Accounts of Occupy Wall Street, Indignados and UK Uncut’, Information, Communication and Society, 20 (2): 185–202. Khoja-Moolji, S. (2015), ‘Becoming an “Intimate Publics”: Exploring the Affective Intensities of Hashtag Feminism’, Feminist Media Studies, 15 (2): 347–50. Levine, C. (1975), ‘The Tyranny of Tyranny’, The Anarchist Library. Available online: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyranny-oftyranny (accessed 10 April 2019). Mendes, K. (2015), Slutwalk: Feminism, Activism and Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mendes, K., Ringrose, J. and Keller, J. (2018), ‘#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls

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of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 25 (2): 236–46. Newsom, Victoria A. and Lengel, L. (2012), Arab Women, Social Media, and the Arab Spring: Applying the Framework of Digital Reflexivity to Analyze Gender and Online Activism. Journal of International Women's Studies, 13(5): 31–45. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol13/iss5/5 Papacharissi, Z. (2015), Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Postill, J. and Pink, S. (2012), ‘Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web’, Media International Australia, 145 (1): 123–34. Shaw, F. (2012), ‘Hottest 100 Women’: Cross-Platform Discursive Activism in Feminist Blogging Networks’, Australian Feminist Studies, 27 (74): 373–87. Thrift, S.C. (2014), ‘#YesAllWomen as Feminist Meme Event’, Feminist Media Studies, 14 (6): 1090–2.

PART IV

Memory and Materiality

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15 Grassroots Feminist Music Activism: Finding a Place in the Archives Catherine Strong

This chapter starts with the premise that women are under-represented in music making, and that this under-representation is connected to the way that these people tend to be written out of historical accounts. Both these claims are, at this point, well substantiated and unpacked by other writers (see, for example, Leonard 2007; Lieb 2013; McCormack 2017; Reddington 2007; Strong 2014; Whitely 1997). As a corollary, the history of popular music is written overwhelmingly using a binary approach to gender, leaving the contribution of trans and gender diverse persons generally unacknowledged (Leibetseder 2017). This chapter will not go into detail revisiting how and why gender is such a powerful operative in the popular music industry but will address some of the means available to redress this gender disparity through considering the intersections of music, memory and history. In short, the processes through which the history of popular music is constructed (as in many other areas, both cultural and otherwise) favour (white) men (van Appen & Doehring 2006). Women’s lack of representation in histories and canons of important music leaves them with few role models, and also creates expectations in audiences about how music ‘should’ sound or who it should be performed by, reinforcing the construction of some types of music such as rock, as masculine, and other types such as pop, as feminine. This situation is only exacerbated for gender

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non-conforming (GNC), queer, trans and gender diverse people who do not fit easily into binary frameworks for discussing gender. It therefore appears that to create greater equality in music making it would not be enough to increase the number of people other than men playing, but there needs to be a meaningful record of what they do incorporated into the history and practices of music making. This chapter explores the intersections between the strategies used to counteract marginalization in music scenes, and those adopted to insert women and gender diverse persons into the collective memory and history of what matters in music, with a focus on the role of archiving. The examination of two manifestations of feminist activism in Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, Australia – the Rock’n’Roll High School (RNRHS) from the 1990s, and contemporary group LISTEN – will highlight the ways in which women and gender diverse persons’ roles in popular music can be overlooked and how this can be challenged. While Rock’n’Roll High School was extremely successful in empowering women (specifically) to participate in music making, it has not claimed a strong place in music history or in the collective memory of music in Melbourne, with its ongoing effects being diffuse and mainly connected to the memories and actions of individuals. By contrast, the turn to the archival which has happened in the decades since RNRHS was in operation has meant that LISTEN has established a more dynamic and collective relationship with the past (and future), foregrounding the position of women and LGBTQIA+ persons in popular music history-making and the passing on of knowledge in its practices.

Rock’n’Roll High School Rock’n’Roll High School was founded in 1990 by Stephanie Bourke,1 a classically trained pianist. It ran for seven years, taking in approximately 2,000 students over this period. These were mostly girls, with a small number of male students also being admitted. It was based in the innercity Melbourne suburb of Collingwood (Australia). The school offered lessons in playing (mainly rock) music but also taught students other skills for succeeding in the music industry, such as technical, production and management know-how. In interviews with ex-students of the school,2 the operation of the school was described as follows: So the standard enrolment structure was you had one-on-one lessons once a week, and then once you kind of got your skills you’d get put in a band with other people who had similar musical tastes. (Interview 1)

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In terms of its gender politics, the school had a feminist approach based in a binary understanding of gender. This gender politics emerged before the impact of Riot Grrrl, the feminist punk rock movement originating in the US North-West, was felt in Australia, but later displayed some influences from that movement (particularly aesthetically; see Strong & Rogers 2016). Interviewees described how this feminist approach was inscribed into many aspects of the school, from the emphasis on seeing girls play instruments well (in contrast to the more amateur punk approach seen in Riot Grrrl) and in styles that were not typically seen as feminine, through to critiques of how gender roles influence girls’ behaviour on a day-to-day level: We didn’t like the idea that you could just pick up an instrument and bash and make a sound; we wanted to be treated as respectable musicians, so we wanted to learn to play our instruments, we wanted to know how to jam. Whether or not we wanted that or not, that was drilled into us. That was certainly, I think, one of Stephanie’s big bug bears, was that we couldn’t just be helpless girls who got up there; we had to know how to do shit. (Interview 1) We used to call this tendency for young women to be self-disparaging we used to call it the chick-factor, where you would sort of giggle and pretend that you weren’t any good and apologise and assume that you were shit, people brought behaviours into the environment that were appraised in a political way and an attempt at consciousness raising I would say. (Interview 4) The school was very successful in increasing the participation of women in the Melbourne music scene. Interviewees discussed how the school gave them access to not just know-how, but also equipment that otherwise would have been beyond their means to afford. Many of the artists achieved high profiles, including some, such as Hecate and Brodie Dale, that made an impact internationally (see Strong & Rogers 2016, for details). Bands from the school, such as Tuff Muff, Sheraw and Gritty Kitty, were consistently well represented at live gigs across the city. This was not always entirely well received: some interviewees described encountering negative attitudes from male bands who resented the RNRHS bands’ abilities to get gigs, particularly high-profile support slots with overseas touring acts such as Sonic Youth and Hole. However, all interviewees were very positive about the impact that the school had on their lives, particularly how the knowledge and social capital acquired there enabled them to engage with the music scene both at the time and since: I think it was an incredible success in providing job opportunities and the confidence and capacity for those young people to move into

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related industries over time. And there’s a ton of us that were involved in Rock’n’Roll High School that are doing arts related activities or music related activities now. (Interview 4) I think the fact that I still go out and the amount of people I see that worked in Rock’n’Roll High School who are doing things, being active, whether they’re playing music or doing whatever. Because I stepped into the music industry, I often think about those early years, how many connections I had or I was able to network very quickly because I had some foundational people that I’d used, whether they were mixers, whether they were band bookers and I was quickly able to build a network - very quickly - and I think the fact that I even got [a] job [in the industry] was connected to the fact that I’d been playing in bands for seven years (…) So all that stuff is part of the legacy. (Interview 1) The interviewees all put the success of the school down to the dedication and incredible hard work put into it by its founder, and all expressed gratitude for the guidance they had received from her. However, one area where interviewees expressed some dissatisfaction with their experiences with the school is in how records relating to it have been dealt with since. Despite the impact that the school had on the Melbourne scene during its years of operation, information about it is now difficult to come by. Some media coverage of the school is accessible through various sources, and the newsletters of the school have been archived at the State Library of Victoria and the Fales Collection in New York. These resources, though, are disparate, with no public attempt having been made to collect or create a narrative around them, and recordings by most of the bands involved are almost impossible to hear. As one interviewee noted, ‘it’s really hard to find information about (the RNRHS)’. This has led to ex-students of the School feeling they have been deprived of access to their own past, and of being denied the opportunity to have their stories and histories made available to others: the lack of documentation, the lack of archiving - I mean, these are the things that people are really pissed off about. None of us have our music. … Everything belonged to the collective. I’ve got one DAT tape. I can’t count how many times I recorded. I don’t have masters either, I don’t actually have copies of a lot of what I’ve done. All the photos, everything … no-one knows where it is. (…) So that’s where a lot of that angst comes from. (Interview 1) So while RNRHS has left an important legacy in the continued presence of the women associated with it in the Melbourne music scene, accessing information and materials about it has become difficult, even for those who were part of it.

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The archival turn in feminism This lack of information about RNRHS sits at odds with an overarching archival turn in Western culture, and by feminists. Women, trans and gender diverse persons have been left out of many historical accounts as a matter of course in white patriarchal societies, and feminists have been part of an associated pushback towards a ‘democratisation of the past’ (Foote & Azaryahu 2007) that allows for input from more groups of people into how we think about the past. There has been an associated increase in feminist engagement with history, archiving and representations of the past to reinsert various groups into historical narratives through telling overlooked stories of influence, power and success. In the area of music, figures such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an electric guitarist from the 1940s who influenced early rock and roll developments (Wald 2007), or Delia Derbyshire, a pioneer of electronic music (Butler 2014), have been reinstated into accounts of how music genres develop. Histories of this nature raise awareness of the achievements of women and their legacies, and challenges orthodoxies about who can play what type of music. Feminists’ use and creation of archives, however, can also become futureoriented and impact on ongoing developments. Essentially, knowledge of the past – especially knowledge that highlights the socially constructed nature of aspects of the present that have become ‘taken for granted’ – has the potential to disrupt the ordinariness of things and create new possibilities for ways of being as people move forward. This is particularly the case with archives. In contrast to the more mainstream histories of popular music, which are often presented as part of clear pre-existing narratives and frameworks and which privilege the stories of certain powerful groups, particularly white men [Bennett 2015], Withers (2014) argues that feminist music archives present the stories being told as essentially unfinished, and therefore still able to be participated in by those who encounter these materials. The existence of the internet makes such encounters easier, and more likely to come about through chance. In fact: … the creation of archives has become integral to how knowledges are produced and legitimized and how feminist activists, artists, and scholars make their voices audible. Rather than a destination for knowledges already produced or a place to recover histories and ideas placed under erasure, the making of archives is frequently where knowledge production begins. (Eichhorn 2013: 3) This involved and activism-focused engagement with archival material can make the difference also between information about the past being collected, and it becoming meaningful. Aleida Assman has described this as the difference between ‘functional’ and ‘storage’ memory, which she defines as follows:

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Storage memory contains what is unusable, obsolete, or dated; it has no vital ties to the present and no bearing on identity formation. We may also say that it holds in store a repertoire of missed opportunities, alternative options, and unused materials. Functional memory, on the other hand, consists of vital recollections that emerge from a process of selection, connection, and meaningful configuration … In functional memory, unstructured, unconnected fragments are invested with perspective and relevance; they enter into connections, configurations, compositions of meaning – a quality that is totally absent from storage memory. (Assmann 2011: 127) This suggests that simply knowing things about the past is not enough; for the past to have an impact it must be incorporated into narratives that help us make sense of the world. Various studies on archivist/activists show how they are finding ways to do this (see Eichorn 2013; Reitsamer 2015). The next challenge for women, trans and gender diverse persons hoping to reconfigure the world of music is to pass on this knowledge or new ways of thinking about how things could be done. In his seminal book How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton (1989) discusses ways in which important aspects of the past are transmitted within societies, which he refers to as ‘acts of transfer’. Acts of transfer are the ways the meaning behind knowledge of the past can be passed between people and maintained over time. They ‘make remembering in common possible’ (39). Connerton identifies rituals (particularly acts of commemoration) and bodily practice as being key sites for these acts, and focuses largely on how these acts manifest as ways of maintaining religious and nationalist identities. Similar practices can be identified in music scenes; however; the ritualistic homage that must be paid in genres like rap to important artists from the past, the construction of canons of great works in all genres and the learning of the appropriate bodily dispositions in scenes and subcultures (for example, headbanging in heavy metal) often help not just to create a sense of community and identity in the present, but to connect participants to the music’s history. Such acts of transfer also exist in the women’s movement, where commemorative activities such as International Women’s Day and Reclaim the Night reaffirm feminist identities and provide space for recirculating stories of how previous generations fought against patriarchal structures. The challenge is how acts of transfer might work specifically in relation to feminist activism related to music, in order to retain this activism as part of functional memory in music scenes. Studies of media coverage of women in popular music have shown that there is a cyclical nature to this coverage, whereby periodically women are ‘rediscovered’, creating a situation where they become ‘a perpetual novelty’ (Davies 2001: 310). This is mirrored in music-related activism, which also emerges strongly in certain places at

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certain times (for instance, during the punk movement in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, or, most prominently, in Washington State in the United States in the late 1980s) and then – as is the tendency with social movements – dies away again. If knowledge of past movements is not retained, this potentially leads to a situation where new groups of activists, as they emerge, have to go through repeated processes of developing and then articulating a sense of outrage and working out what the strategies are for doing something about it, rather than being able to build on past strategies and successes. The knowledge about how to incorporate women into music making that was developed by the Rock’n’Roll High School currently resides in the realm of storage memory, as ‘missed opportunities’ and ‘unused materials’. There is still the potential for this to change, as a private archive that could be made public at any time does exist. At the moment, new groups cannot learn through the use of an archive what this group discovered. In the following section, I argue that the most recent example of music-related feminist activism in Melbourne, LISTEN, has not had resources to draw from the past, but that this group’s fundamental focus on archiving as a form of activism in itself may produce markedly different outcomes over time.

LISTEN LISTEN was started in 2014, in response to women’s marginalization in the history of Australian music scenes. The group’s founder, musician Evelyn Morris, posted on Facebook about her disappointment that few women had been included in a recently released book on the Brisbane underground scenes, and within a short space of time had received hundreds of comments on her post, mostly from other women agreeing with her sentiments. The LISTEN collective grew out of this shared moment, and the centrality of creating a lasting record of what women and LGBTQIA+ persons contribute to music is foregrounded in the aims on the group’s website (www.listenlistenlisten.org): We want to become visible – historically and in the present day – in our own words, on our own terms. LISTEN will present live events to engage the public, to showcase artists and to raise funds for an anthology to document the participation of women and LGBTQIA+ musicians in Australian underground music. The group’s recognition of the absence of these groups in the stories being told about Australian music is not connected, however, to previous attempts to counteract this (such as RNRHS). As Morris herself describes, her approach emerged from personal experiences:

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I think I had a fair few friends that we would talk about it behind closed doors, but it was always like—I feel like the way we used to talk about it is so different to how we talk about it now. We used to talk about it as like, we didn’t have a right to talk about it to anybody else, just to each other. We were always testing the water with whoever you were talking to, being like, are you going to get this? And apologizing for what we were saying. Whereas once there was a bit more support from other people, it was like we could just say it. People shared experiences, so it’s not just me. It’s not just me on my own, feeling crazy and pissed off that I’m not getting recognition or whatever. So it was like a very important thing for me personally. And I think for a bunch of other women as well. (Strong & Morris 2016: 113) This quote from Morris suggests that the processes that led to the start of LISTEN began at the fundamental level of realizing that a problem with gender existed in the music industry. That is, Morris’ realizations about not getting recognition did not stem from a point in time where women had lost ground, but from ongoing systemic under-representation and recognition. The lack of any acts of transfer from earlier music-related feminist moments, whether RNRHS or other iterations such as Riot Grrrl, or even feminist elements of the 1970s punk movement, meant Morris and those around her had to go through processes of rediscovering and essentially reinventing what it might mean to be a feminist musician, although these strategies draw on feminist theory and broader social movement tactics. The approach taken by LISTEN is distinctly different to RNRHS, and not only in its much more increased emphasis on the archival. Unlike RNRHS, LISTEN does not have teaching and training as its key focus, although this is an outcome of some of its activities. The focus is more on increasing the visibility and success of those already playing. This is done through a multifaceted approach that includes organizing gigs, putting out releases through the LISTEN record label, engaging with media in various forms, and, as mentioned earlier, creating and collecting writing that documents the activities that are taking place. The organization of LISTEN is more as a collective than RNRHS; while Morris has been an obvious figurehead for the organization, her direct involvement has decreased over time, and a large group of volunteers has taken responsibility for the various activities associated with the group (e.g. Chloe Turner runs the LISTEN record label). LISTEN also focuses more on changing the music industry itself to make it more accommodating to people identifying as women and LGBTQIA+ musicians and audiences. Issues such as safety in venues and the provision of gender-neutral toilets for people who may need them at shows have been tackled by LISTEN members using a variety of tactics ranging from policy interventions to social media campaigns (Turner n.d.).

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The language deployed in LISTEN is also noticeably different to RNRHS in regard to who is seen as being the beneficiaries of the group’s activities. Materials on RNRHS discuss gender as a binary, and there is very little discussion of sexuality. LISTEN, by contrast, foregrounds its intersectional and non-binary approach to gender issues. This clearly reflects shifts that have taken place in discourses around gender over the last few decades, and so should not be read as a shortcoming of RNRHS’s approach. However, the more inclusive approach of LISTEN ensures that the documentation that is produced by the group helps to incorporate other marginalized groups into the history of popular music. This change that has taken place in terms of the discourse around sexuality and gender can lead, though, to a rejection of previous music-related feminist formations because they are not seen as being relevant enough. Evelyn Morris discusses her relationship with Riot Grrrl in a way that suggests this: I guess a lot of trans-women have a lot of issues with Riot Grrrl because that whole kind of girls to the front movement meant that people who didn’t fully look like girls would get pushed to the back and with all the dudes. So Riot Grrrl, I don’t know. See I never really connected with Riot Grrrl when it was happening either. I think that’s been the case with heaps of different movements of feminism because I’ve never felt like a female or not. So that’s what I mean. I’ve read lots of different theory and I’ve investigated previous waves and stuff, and I have so much gratitude and respect for all that work, but I’ve never fully identified with it because I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like I’m winning at being female. So until there was a movement that felt less about essentialist stuff, just women, until that started to happen, I wouldn’t know how to talk with authority on any of it. It is not just the unavailability of information about previous feminist movements (as in the case of RNRHS) that leads to disconnections between different iterations of activism, but how previous movements are remembered and framed in terms of current concerns.

Conclusion Despite the archival turn and attempts to incorporate women’s histories more into what we know about popular music, RNRHS currently resides mostly in ‘storage’ memory, inaccessible to women looking for resources to help them make sense of and resist the continued marginalization of women in music making. However, it is possible that an approach like

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LISTEN’s, where thinking about the emergent pastness of women making music is incorporated into the reason for being for the group, may help retain feminist action as functional memory. There is a question still around whether it can incorporate the sort of rituals and bodily practices needed for ‘acts of transfer’, but at the very least LISTEN is committed to establishing the type of archive that has been shown to allow for the development and maintenance of feminist activism. There are, it should be noted, other forms of activism in this space that do speak more directly to this question of ‘acts of transfer’. In particular, the ‘Girls Rock’ camps, which have been held in many cities around the world including Melbourne, use a model not unlike RNRHS in that it is about teaching girls how to perform, play and write music3 (Giffort 2011). There is an overlap of personnel between LISTEN and Girls Rock (also manifesting as ‘Let’s Rock’ for older participants as of 2017), meaning knowledge about an educative experience is easily available to those engaging with LISTEN. A question that should be considered in future research is whether thinking about archiving and documentation, and the way that what is happening in the present will one day be the subject of history and remembrance, could have an impact on creativity or activism. Considering the imminent pastness of culture, particularly at a time when music’s past is more prominent than ever (see Reynolds 2011), may lead to different practices. This, of course, would be very hard to measure and would require extensive research and innovative methods of data collection. These case studies do raise other questions about how knowledge can be shared between generations of activists concerned about gender and music. ‘Acts of transfer’ may be difficult to achieve in part because there is nothing about ‘women in music’ or ‘gender diverse persons in music’ that necessarily creates a common identity. In fact, the opposite is often true, with women often pushing back against the tendency in music commentary to put all women or women-identified artists in the one category regardless of what type of music they actually perform. Unlike the communities around rap or heavy metal used as examples earlier, where there is a clear common point of interest musically, musical activism may arise at points in time or under circumstances that are so different to other manifestations that it may be artificial to suggest one should draw from the other. In this way, the premise underlying this article may be fundamentally flawed. It would seem, however, that the danger in past music activism being obscured or lost is that this makes recognizing the ongoing nature of gender inequality in music harder, and may lead to women, trans and gender diverse persons themselves reproducing the framing of their own participation as a novelty.

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Notes 1 Ms Bourke was approached to take part in this research but declined. 2 Conducted as part of an ARC Discovery project (DP160100537) on the history of popular music in Melbourne. 3 Some participants in the Melbourne music scene refer to RNRHS as being the inspiration for these camps due to the similarities in their approaches, but there is no evidence available at this time to support this claim.

References Assmann, A. (2011), Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation: Functions, Media, Archives, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, A. (2015), ‘Popular Music and the “Problem” of Heritage’, in S. Cohen, R. Knifton, M. Leonard and L. Roberts (eds), Sites of Popular Music Heritage, 15–27, New York: Routledge. Butler, D. (2014), ‘“Way Out of This World” Delia Derbyshire, Doctor Who and the British Public’s Awareness of Electronic Music in the 1960s’, Critical Studies in Television, 9 (1): 62–76. Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, H. (2001), ‘All Rock and Roll Is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press’, Popular Music, 20 (3): 301–19. Eichhorn, K. (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, Philadelphia: American Literatures Initiative. Foote, K.E. and Azaryahu, M. (2007), ‘Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35 (1): 125–44. Giffort, D. (2011), ‘Show or Tell? Feminist Dilemmas and Implicit Feminism at Girls’ Rock Camp’, Gender and Society, 25 (5): 569–88. Leonard, M. (2007), Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power, Aldershot: Ashgate. Lieb, K. (2013), Gender, Branding and the Modern Music Industry, New York: Routledge. Liebetseder, D. (2017), ‘Express Yourself! Gender Euphoria and Intersections’, in S. Hawkins (ed), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, 300–12, New York: Routledge. McCormack, A. (2017), ‘By the Numbers: The Gender Gap in the Australian Music Industry’, Triple J Hack. http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/by-thenumbers-the-gender-gap-in-the-australian-music-industry/8328952 Reddington, H. (2007), The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era, Aldershot: Ashgate. Reitsamer, R. (2015), ‘Alternative Histories and Counter-Memories: Feminist Music Archives in Europe’, in S. Baker (ed), Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-ItYourself, Do-It-Together, 91–103, New York: Routledge.

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Reynolds, S. (2011), Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, New York: Faber and Faber. Strong, C. (2014), ‘“All the Girls in Town”: The Missing Women of Australian Rock, Cultural Memory and Coverage of the Death of Chrissy Amphlett’, Perfect Beat, 15 (1): 149–66. Strong, C. and E. Morris (2016), ‘“Spark and Cultivate”: LISTEN and Grassroots Feminist Music Activism in the Melbourne Scene’, Journal of World Popular Music, 3 (1): 108–24. Strong, C. and Rogers, I. (2016), ‘She Riffs: Gender and the Australian Experience of Alternative Rock and Riot Grrrl in the 1990s’, Journal of World Popular Music, 3 (1): 38–53. Turner, C. (n.d.). ‘LISTEN Up’, Beat. Available online: http://www.beat.com.au/ music/listen-2 (accessed 6 September 2019). von Appen, R. and Doehring, A. (2006), ‘Nevermind the Beatles, Here’s Exile 61 and Nico: “The Top 100 Records of All Time”: A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective’. Popular Music, 25 (1): 21–39. Wald, G. (2007), Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Boston: Beacon Press. Whiteley, S. (ed). (1997), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, New York: Routledge. Withers, D. (2014), ‘Re-Enacting Process: Temporality, Historicity and the Women’s Liberation Music Archive’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (7–8): 688–701.

16 Postal Mail, Digital Platforms and Exhibitions: Mobilizing Publics to End the Carceral State Jose Luis Benavides, Erica R. Meiners, Sarah Padilla, Therese Quinn and Matthew Yasuoka

Whether lauded or derided, social media activism is now the norm. Each wave of communication and information technology has been adapted for use in organizing and mobilizing social movements (Karatzogianni 2016). Today, the internet, for better or worse, has the capacity to show solidarity instantaneously; it allows users to see when people support them, are acting with them in virtual space and plan to join them in public gatherings. Yet 60 per cent of the world population, or four billion people, still have no internet access, a number that includes 13 per cent of the population of the United States (Anderson & Perrin 2016; Chang 2015; Luxton 2016). Over 40 per cent of adults older than sixty-five and a third of adults with less than a high school education never go online, and those living in households surviving on less than $30,000 each year are also offline (Anderson & Perrin 2016). Erased within these statistics are a group forced to remain offline by their status – the incarcerated. This chapter shares the example of the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project (IDCP), which attempts to bridge the digital–non-digital divide in social movement organizing through our work to document and reveal the deaths

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of incarcerated people in one American state and to challenge the nation’s punishing and lethal commitment to incarceration, policing and surveillance. We created the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project, which uses the vehicle of an interactive website to serve as both exhibit and memorial, to document, archive, mourn, research and share findings about the death rates and causes of all people in custody in Illinois since 2010. IDCP probes the contradiction that online activism is promising and yet also not enough. For example, mourning is a public practice, but prisons obscure deaths, keeping grief, too, locked inside. Further, as all potentially democratizing information-sharing technologies are banned within these institutions, communication is strictly regulated and censored. Through collaborative research and online eulogizing IDCP aims to erode boundaries between the physical and the digital, the grievable and ungrievable, and official and personal narratives of death and mourning. This chapter explores how the IDCP team works alongside, rather than on behalf of, communities denied access to the internet while using webbased research, publication and exhibition strategies. In order for our project to function it needs to acknowledge, represent and address the technological divide and find ways to materialize the digital reach of the project into physical displays. People and the erasure of their deaths must be made material. Rather than reify oppositional dichotomies and top-down hierarchies of privileged hackers and knowledge-holders offering access to subjugated recipients, this chapter explores the ways that participatory digital and analogue methods and forms can reshape the meanings, practices and boundaries of public mourning, and challenge the carceral state.

Death and mourning in the Carceral State In 2000, the US Congress passed the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act.1 This Act requires every state to report deaths in custody from each state institution, including prisons. Each death is documented on a Custodial Death Report and every quarter the Department of Justice collects the data registering the total number of deaths in custody. Stripped of their individual stories, lives and identities, the deceased are transformed into statistics that are published each year. However, the accuracy of the data is up for debate. In an October 2015 analysis, the Department of Justice discovered that law enforcement departments under-reported arrest-related deaths by more than 50 per cent (Planty et al. 2015). Notably, the availability of this data has not spurred national, or even state-wide, conversations about the number of deaths in custody, the reasons for these deaths, nor any patterns discernible from studying the data. The numbers are significant: in our state, Illinois, according to 2014 reporting by Chicago’s WBEZ reporters Robert

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Wildeboer and Patrick Smith (2014), approximately 80 to 100 people die in Illinois prisons each year. If juvenile ‘boot camp’ jails and immigration detention centres are included, this number jumps higher. Further, the Act and these reports don’t ensure transparency or even the timely notification of the deaths of those in custody. For example, Toya Frazier died on 1 December 2015, one day after starting a three-year prison sentence for theft at the Champaign County Jail in Illinois. But Ms Frazier’s family didn’t hear this news from the sheriff’s office, county coroner or medical staff. Instead, the night she died in jail her sisters received the news in a call from another inmate. Her family contacted the jail but weren’t able to confirm the death. They learned more details the next day when the story was briefly reported in a local paper. Weeks after her death the family was still waiting for an official notification and full explanation. While the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail cell, also in 2015, garnered international news, like Ms Frazier the overwhelming majority of the people who die in custody in US jails, prisons and immigration detention centres remain invisible, with little and often no information shared with family, friends and the broader public.2 Unlike other nations, for example Australia, the UK and Canada, a death in custody in the United States does not trigger any inquest or investigation. The deaths of the overwhelming majority of people in prisons and jails across the United States are non-events. Our prison nation is an aspect of what historian Saidiya Hartman (2007) has termed the ‘afterlife of slavery’ in the United States. Approximately one in every fifteen African American men and one in every thirty-six Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to one in every 106 white men. People inside are deeply isolated and lack resources and direct contact with the world. Prison libraries, for example, were defunded in 2002 and federal funding for post-secondary educational programs in prisons was eliminated in 1994. Incarceration continues to facilitate, as the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 28) notes, ‘premature death’. The US carceral state is one of the primary engines of violence in communities across the United States. People – predominately non-white and poor – are still locked inside institutions with substandard medical care and hazardous contexts. Within this carceral state, deaths in custody remain largely invisible though processes that extend this violence and shape our democracy. Embargoed data, punished lives and obscured deaths, and frustrated grief: How do these affect our communities? What is at stake? The question of mourning is key to understanding the politics of life and death that have always defined the modern state. Judith Butler interrogates how our capacity to publicly mourn is ‘foreclosed by our failure to conceive of … lives as lives’ (Butler 2004: 12). She asks, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? … What makes for a grievable life?’ (2004: 20). Through her study of the ‘War on Terror’, Butler proposes grieving as a way of going beyond ‘narcissistic

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melancholia’ by contemplating ‘the vulnerability of others’ (2004: 30). Concrete walls and their paper equivalents figurally obscure the process of letting die that goes on every day in jails and prisons through a lethal cocktail of official neglect and public disinterest. The use of statistics and byzantine bureaucratic systems limits the grievability of those inside because their deaths are rendered by the institution as invisible. When deaths are disclosed, public discourse focuses on ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ portraying the individuals as unworthy of grief. The lack of public mourning for the tens of thousands of people in custody who die every year embodies the tacit acceptance of official explanations and justifications. Restoring public mourning and public grief for those who die while incarcerated is necessary to challenge the systems of public neglect that allow for the perpetuation of massive institutional violence.

Deaths in custody In 2015 a group of artists and scholars began meeting to talk about raising the visibility of the high numbers of people who die in prison and jail in our state. We were motivated by our collective experiences working inside prisons, producing art to facilitate social change and a shared commitment to abolition, or to ending the United States’ relentless investments in prisons, policing and punishment as a tool to produce public safety. IDCP began with three primary sites of work: The first was to gather, to educate ourselves and the public, and to archive as much information as possible about deaths in custody from the Department of Corrections (reports, policies, reporting practices and more). To these ends our team began meeting regularly in 2016 to scour official media outlets for news reports about deaths in custody and to submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for official government records that are not otherwise publicly available. These data – news reports and responses to FOIAs – are uploaded to the IDCP website for public access. A secondary aspect focused on soliciting material – eulogies, art, letters – from people inside about deaths in custody. And finally, we created public workshops to raise visibility about the deaths and the lives, of people inside prisons, jails and other detention centres across Illinois. IDCP builds on efforts to document and reveal details of police violence in the United States that have successfully yielded and made accessible to the public data about the deaths of US residents, primarily African Americans and other people of colour, including by The Guardian newspaper’s The Counted and Chicago’s Invisible Institute. While these initiatives are part of a new wave of journalistic accountability, reminiscent of Ida B. Wells Barnett’s 1895 report The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged

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Causes of Lynchings in the United States, as a community and university collaboration, the Illinois Death in Custody Project differs in focus and methods. First, the IDCP aims to involve the public in reporting and eulogizing deaths of those in custody, and gaining information about the broader context of incarceration in the United States. IDCP takes seriously the intents behind recent calls to #SayHerName and #SayTheirNames by offering loved ones and the broader community a site for public mourning and memorializing those whom the state has often effectively rendered invisible, and like these forms of hashtag-mobilized justice-work, our aim is to harness the power of online organizing to effect change. As a version of what Simon Stow (2010: 682) refers to as ‘tragic public mourning’, or a critical response that generates understandings of the ways that conflict and resistance is central to democratic politics, IDCP aims to increase visibility of the deceased and support action to challenge the conditions of US incarceration. We are attempting to understand how a digital archive can ‘democratise public memory’ by inviting and eventually producing ‘oppositional memory practices’ – or, stories about the deceased that interrupt official accounts (McGeough, Palczewski & Lake 2015: 232). While still in the early stages, investigations by the IDCP are already yielding insights: an analysis of death reports confirms what some journalists have flagged, that the first seventy-two hours of confinement poses the most risk for people in jails in the United States. Another overwhelming preliminary finding: the high rates of deaths marked as suicide in custody. According to the advocacy organization Prison Legal News, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and our findings from our FOIA research, suicide is still the leading cause of death for people confined in local or county jails (Zoukis 2016). While suicide is one of the leading causes of death in prisons, jail is for many a temporary and transitional cage. Furthermore, research suggests that the shock of sudden and inhumane confinement, stripping each prisoner of their lives and connections to the outside world, is a key factor behind the high rate of suicides amongst people who enter jail (Chammah & Meagher 2015). Both mental health and physical health rapidly decline within jail or the prison system because of a lack of access to proper care, in the form of both medical care and self-care. Our FOIA-ed data also shows staggering rates of HIV/AIDS-related and other deaths caused by conditions that are largely chronic outside. At the onset of this project, we thought it would focus on mourning by people who are incarcerated for other people who are incarcerated, but many of those who submitted to the project indicated a different need. They wrote about their fathers, whose funerals they couldn’t attend; about their mothers, whose eulogies they wouldn’t hear. They described the silent violence that occurs within institutions that disavow, dispossess and delegitimize individual grief, forcing it to the hidden periphery. And they wrote their own obituaries. The common denominator was that IDCP

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sent out requests and received back letters and reports using the postal mail system, which is automated, but still an old form compared to most used for researching and organizing now. In fact, we argue here that analogue, or old and digital, or new tools are essential to this project.

Hybrid tactics: Using old and new tools IDCP reminds us about the necessity and value of using old tools and particularly two created by the US federal government – the postal service and the Freedom of Information Act – to expose powerlines and to build resistance. This is critical for at least two reasons: First, as we noted earlier, many people have little or no access to digital forms. And next, because of the particularity of the prison and how this institution works to disappear bodies through its systems, preventing mourning and the need to shift public affect, hacktivism is not enough. For these reasons, it seems to us now that mourning death requires a kind of materiality. The body matters. We send out paper mail and receive paper, often covered with drawings, sometimes worn, overwritten, always revealing the touch that created the words and images. We also partner with largely analogue organizations that support communication to and within prisons and jails, including Black and Pink, which facilitates pen-pal relationships with LGBTQ prisoners and Stateville Speaks, a newspaper written by and for incarcerated people. Handwritten, not computer-produced, letters assert the variety of selves otherwise hidden behind prison walls. Mourning and trying to know and to see the loss of someone’s loved one, so that we can remember and ‘say their names’ together, are facilitated through the material. While we digitize and upload to the IDCP website the eulogies, FOIA responses and some other materials, we also linger over and archive the artefacts, appreciating the power of the physical object to convey both personality (the letters, the drawings, the eulogies) and impersonality (the manifestations of the state – contracts, form-letters, rules-and-procedures etc.). A key facet of the carceral state is the bureaucratic chasm between the inside of institutions of capture and the external public. As Michel Foucault notes, ‘punishment … will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process … it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception’ (Foucault 1995: 8), and this allows for the justice system to relieve itself of responsibility for punishing through ‘bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself’ (Foucault 1995: 9). Thus, the erasure of the state’s violence – its occlusion in both imagination and representation – requires a methodology that can reveal what the institution does in silence. It also demands a limber and shifting practice that recognizes its own perceptual constraints. Management of visibility plays a foundational role in modern disciplinary power.

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The relationship between carefully constructed perceptual constraints and power is most clearly realized in the figure of the panopticon, with its central tower that creates the conditions of ‘constant visibility’, while the arrangement of the cells creates ‘lateral invisibility’ (Foucault 1995: 200) Together, this process of individualization induces a feeling of permanent visibility that ensures ‘the automatic functioning of power’ because the individual doesn’t know if they are being surveilled at any moment (Foucault 1995: 201). Inequality in visibility undergirds the relation beneath the panopticon because it is the incomplete visibility and opacity of the tower coupled with the complete visibility of the individuals in cells that ensures it functions. The setup also has profound implications in terms of how individuals are shaped as the ‘object of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault 1995: 200). In effect, control of visibility allows for the state not only to hide the violence of the penal system, but also to define the very mode of power exercised within prisons. Central to this functioning lies the casting of people in state custody as objects of study, who cannot communicate. Thus, in order to challenge the normal functioning of power shifting visibility and opening up communication are imperative. In other words: how can the project transcend simply displaying or researching and allow for communicative exchange? Materiality plays a critical role here, since communication requires interlocutors. But the digital physical divide creates a chasm between the communicator sending messages from behind institutional walls and the keyboard communicator connected to the internet. IDCP works to draw a critical connection between materiality and the political, but also to raise the question of the gap between the digital and the physical. This subject is particularly vexing within the specific context of carceral institutions. People inside prisons, and especially in Illinois, are extremely isolated and communication with the outside world is deeply regulated. All prisons are located away from urban spaces, outside visitors are, at best, discouraged, and bringing material into or out of a prison is next to impossible. People inside prison also lack access to the internet, free telephone services and other modes of communication – Twitter, text messaging, Facebook. Therefore, mail or ‘snail mail’ has been an effective, and the only, tool for people inside to relay information to people on the outside. More widely, the lack of internet access has produced an entire cottage industry of mediated access (see, for example, Barker 2015). Predictably, states have attempted to curtail access even further such as Florida’s attempt to ban ‘inmate online presence’ (Reutter 2015) or Georgia’s ban on printouts from webpages (Electronic Frontier Foundation 2005). In a 2011 study of forty-three states, the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that only 7 per cent of participating states offered internet-based instruction in prisons, noting that most states ban internet access entirely (Gorgol & Sponsler 2011). Since 2011 some progress has been made,

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FIGURE 16.1 List of items forbidden in mail sent to Illinois Department of Corrections institutions. This was received by the authors in 2017 in response to a letter sent to an incarcerated individual; names have been redacted.

but it remains unevenly distributed. Seven states allow a highly restricted group of people who are incarcerated to purchase tablets, with very limited, monitored online access for $49.99 per month (USA Today 2013). This, of

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course, raises economic questions that mirror connectivity issues that are also persistent outside of institution walls as internet access is strongly tied to questions of economic inequality (Rideout & Katz 2016). In addition to these obstacles, what people are permitted to receive, even through the mail, is heavily restricted, as this list of items forbidden in Illinois Department of Corrections facilities, received in the mail early in our work, indicates: As we began the project we recognized the need to gather information about the Department of Corrections rules, policies and practices surrounding deaths in custody, and, essentially, to craft a list of the total number of people who had died, at which prison or jail, and by what recorded cause of death. None of this information is readily accessible. In fact, the state does not want this information to be available or accessed. Early on, we realized we needed to educate ourselves and our communities about the public’s right to know and to access information, and how to use the legal tools available for these purposes. We reached out to one of our Chicago partners in this project, the Uptown People’s Law Center, and asked them to offer a free public workshop on submitting FOIA requests to support individual- and community-level research and action. We recorded this workshop and it is available on our website. The rise of big data and the corresponding advent of ‘data activism’ by its very nature ‘is enabled and constrained by data and software, both its availability and its pursuit … this special relation shapes tactics, identities, and modes of organizing’ (Milan & van der Velden 2016: 3). We live in a time of exponentially expanding data, perhaps most cogently symbolized by Amazon’s Snowmobile program, a truck-based data-transfer program designed to transfer ever-increasing quantities of information (Finley 2016). As the digital universe doubles in size every two years (IDC 2014) it is easy to overlook the areas that escape easy public access, such as deaths in custody, where internal reports proliferate but are still not easily accessed (Lantigua-Williams 2016). Although the Obama administration pushed for increased transparency in some aspects of government, much was based around the policy ideal of discretionary transparency, which left the levers of power in the hands of officials or as experts observed: ‘no measures are taken against agencies’ tendency to avoid unwanted disclosures. Moreover, barriers of access to information become higher as information is released in the form of raw datasets that only professional intermediaries can decipher’ (Shkabatur 2012: 112). Bills such as the OPEN Government Data Act have been proposed that would massively expand public access to government records online, but they have yet to pass Congress (Harmon & Mackey 2016; Senate Bill 760 2017). Instead of an easy Google or Bing search to access information and document, the state still attempts to skirt accountability and requires an older and much more time-consuming Freedom of Information Act.3

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Critical examples of big data projects include: The Fatal Encounters project, which crowdsourced data on police killings in order to fill in gaps in public knowledge (Burghart 2017); The Gun Violence Archive, a project designed to aggregate sources on acts of gun violence across the United States for public use (Gun Violence Archive 2017); and Fatal Force, a database of data about police killings including officer names created by the Washington Post (Fatal Force 2016).4 Our work within IDCP illustrates sharp contradictions – the persistent reality that people die inside, with a punishing bureaucracy that will never acknowledge this; and an increasing digital landscape for organizing around these deaths, while the most affected population – those who are incarcerated – are forcibly shut out from this landscape. The interrelated challenge faced by IDCP and other ‘big data’ projects that operate in the United States carceral sphere is how to counter the dehumanization, institutionalization and criminalization of human beings through our project. How to turn records, official documents and data, cold stats, into something tangible, fleshy. The tools of datatification seem not enough. The central politics of IDCP stem from a desire to confront how the state and its institutions render some lives disposable. Testing the boundaries of grievability and instantiating public mourning guided our activism (Butler 2004). The act of ‘bringing out one’s dead’ serves to ‘challenge, … [defy], [and] register … the possibility of struggle and survival’ (Hong 2008: 97). Jesus Casquete (2006: 46–8) approaches demonstrations and activism as a sort of public ritual, which through its performance allows for the affirmation of group solidarity and consciousness raising (Casquete 2006). Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (2012) point to the importance of ‘corporeality’ in disrupting the ‘regulatory fictions’ that determine what counts as a liveable body in order to produce a ‘ “countering” within counting’ (loc. 1491). IDCP adds to these the possibility of the material – for us, pairing the digital with a physical archive, and moving towards public exhibition. This focus is linked to socio-museology or ideas codified in a 1972 UNESCO meeting in Chile, that urge exhibitors to break from traditional museological concerns and practices such as building and preserving collections, and attempt to instead address the dynamic needs of people and their communities, and the museum and exhibit as action (Mesa Redonda de Santiago de Chile, 1972, Vol. I; Revista Museum 1973, Vol. II). Sociomuseology has a range of expressions, including new, critical, popular, transformative and liberation museologies, among others, committed to the idea that museums and exhibitions are cultural forms that have critical roles to play in social transformation and justice (see, for example, Heijnen, 2010; Sandell & Nightingale 2012; Weldon 2010). Brazilian museums and universities incorporated educational strategies developed by Paulo Freire with museology, advancing ideas of social memory and cultural work as popular education. Other examples include the Dominican Republic’s Museum of Dominican Resistance, which records and shares the stories of those who

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survived dictatorship, and teaches the skills of oral history and archiving; and, in South Africa, the District Six Museum, which initiates programs aimed at focusing attention on the forced removal of a community. IDCP’s archiving and future exhibition project works within this lineage. Yet, despite the rich history of justice-focused cultural interventions both on- and offline, in our emphasis on materiality, we know we must be cautious using representation as a mode. As Emmanuel Levinas (1969) observes, ‘The metaphysical relation can not be properly speaking a representation, for the other would therein dissolve into the same: every representation is essentially interpretable as a transcendental constitution  … The sway [pouvoir] of the I will not cross the distance marked by the alterity of the other’ (1969: 38). In relation to our practice, this meant that the project could not simply represent participants, but rather needed to create a relational space. And while much has been written on the role of the internet in community building, the bureaucratic structure of the prison and the inaccessibility of the internet separate users of the project’s website, as well as from its other manifestations. This makes it difficult to materialize and realize the affirmation of grief, which at its core is a communal act. For example, one submitter was concerned about whether his words submitted to us would reach others beyond. Typically, online ‘sharing’ and ‘likes’ can serve as affirmations. This has significant overlap with theories about the social function of protest that emphasize how demonstrations affirm a community within space (Leetaru 2016). Yet, for activism that seeks to engage people who are incarcerated and the broader public in conversations together, it is imperative to figure out how to instantiate this function across three locations: the virtual/online, the public and inside carceral institutions. Our emphasis on the letter serves as a mechanism to do this. At first, we theorized the submission of eulogies as a way to break the boundaries of who can be grieved, but upon receiving the eulogies we realized that affirming who can grieve was more important for people inside. This creates a logistical issue in so far as, even if people read the website and respond to the letters virtually, getting those responses to the people who wrote eulogies is difficult due to laws about communication and prisons. It also raises questions: How do we set parameters and reasonable expectations and limits on our engagement? What is our commitment to each incarcerated person who responds to our call for submissions? A response and also a challenge are motivating digital participants from the public outside the prison walls to write condolence cards to people inside. The condolence card is a materialization of one’s recognition of another person’s grief. It is a social object that derives meaning from its relational form more so than the explicit content. Building from liberation and transformative museologies that advance cultural work for popular education and justice-centred action, we imagine an IDCP exhibition that serves as a site for remembering and mourning, letter- and card-writing, education and organizing.

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Conclusion: Future of IDCP Prison reform in Illinois, like many states, has often revolved around the dramatic rise in the prison population and the corresponding cost of this boom in population: a record high of approximately ‘50,000 inmates in a system designed for 32,000’ (CJSR Report 2016). Many of the stateinitiated reforms are motivated towards decreasing the population, specifically for those convicted for non-violent offences, in order to save money. Yet there is still little public attention to the conditions of each incarcerated person’s life. The IDCP reframes grief as both personal and social; it marks the loss of our loved ones. Single official accounts and personal eulogies may offer comfort and support visibility but together, they can foster the development of a public, collective, ‘crowd-sourced’ memory of those who lived – as beloved sons and daughters, partners, students and workers, and more – before they died while incarcerated. The development of a collective of these stories of those who died in custody would garner support for the urgent ‘present need’ to imagine and build more robustly democratic and noncarceral social systems. The work of IDCP is focused on these lives, through its goal of charting and revealing deaths in custody. As a platform for mourning both inside and outside of the prison walls, it aims to restore public mourning and erode carceral logics, including that some lives are of little worth. However, the IDCP website, with the complex ways it interacts and fails to interact with our target audience of family members of people in prison and the people in custody themselves, serves as a constant challenge and a reminder of the limits of digital activism. In effect, it has reinforced our interest in analogue interventions and forms – letter-and condolence-card writing, redacting FOIAs and preparing material displays, in particular. In creating and maintaining the IDCP website, requesting documents from the government, conducting FOIA and other workshops, receiving and responding to letters with eulogies, and redacting and slowly releasing government documents regarding these deaths in custody, we have struggled to always centre our project on the living, while at the same time remembering those whose who have died while incarcerated. While our tactics are hybrid, our goal is specific – to end the carceral state. And we are not alone: This struggle to challenge the carceral state is global, with recent instances from Sisters Uncut in the UK, who demand to end funding for criminalization and detention and seek support for the services and resources communities need, to the fight in our hometown Chicago – #NoCopAcademy – to stop the construction of a new $95 million police training facility at a moment when public schools are being shuttered, mental health services are scarce and the city already

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spends nearly 40 per cent of its general operating budget on policing (McCarthy 2017). Like others organizing and resisting in neighbourhoods across the world, we envision and are working to build communities that enable all to flourish.

Acknowledgements We are indebted to people inside prison who resist and survive, and to their families, and to wider mobilizations that organize and build stronger and safer communities for all. As a collaborative product, this chapter has no first author; our names are listed alphabetically.

Notes 1 In 2006 the Act expired and was then reauthorized in 2014 (a summary of the Act can be read here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/housebill/1447). 2 In the United States, a jail is where people are held pending trial; a prison is where people are sent once sentenced. The states and the federal government operate jails and prisons. An immigration detention centre is a federal prison where people who have been picked up and determined to not be in the country legally are held. However, despite these formal and institutional definitions, boundaries blur. Undocumented migrants are held in local jails across the United States, and, if they have been charged with a crime and are convicted, they will serve sentences in prisons and, when their sentence is completed, they will be deported. Many people spend years in jail, unable to post bail or denied bail, waiting for trial. Due to overcrowding, in many states people who have been convicted of a crime might serve their sentence in a local jail, not a prison. 3 California Democratic Senator John Moss started agitating for increased and systemic transparency, ‘open government’, during the late 1950s and met considerable opposition. Signed into law in 1966 by then President Lyndon Johnson, the FOIA did not develop teeth – laws waiving fees, the creation of timelines and sanctions – until after the Watergate scandal, when the bill was amended by Congress in 1974, overriding a veto by then President Ford. 4 Of course, data is not necessarily the best site for political contestation. A push for ‘the facts’ suggest both that data is objective and value free and should drive all policy and decision-making. This drive towards techno-rationality also obscures data’s fungibility. While seen as an objective tool, data requires a great deal of interpretation. This is why the same police killing data that shows the disproportionate impact of police violence on black people can also be used to ‘prove’ that the police kill more white people (Bialik 2016; Richardson 2015).

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files/uploads/docs/pubs/unlocking_potential-psce_final_report_may_2011.pdf (accessed 6 September 2019) Gun Violence Archive (2017), ‘About’. Available online: http://www. gunviolencearchive.org/about (accessed 6 September 2019) Harmon, E. and Mackey, A. (2016), ‘The OPEN Government Data Act Would, Uh, Open Government Data’, The Electronic Frontier Foundation. 10 June. Available online: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/open-government-dataact-would-uh-open-government-data (accessed 6 September 2019) Hartman, S. (2007), Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heijnen, W. (2010), ‘The New Professional: Underdog or Expert’, Sociomuseology III: Cadernos Sociomuseologia, 37: 13–24. Hong, G.K. (2008), ‘“The Future of Our Worlds”: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization’, Meridians, 8 (2): 95–115. IDC. (2014), ‘The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things’, EMC. April. Available online: https://www.emc. com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/executive-summary.htm (accessed 6 September 2019) Invisible Institute (2017). Available online: http://invisible.institute/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Karatzogianni, A. (2016), ‘Beyond Hashtags: How a New Wave of Digital Activists Is Changing Society’, The Conversation. 11 April. Available online: http:// theconversation.com/beyond-hashtags-how-a-new-wave-of-digital-activists-ischanging-society-57502 (accessed 6 September 2019) Lantigua-Williams, J. (2016), ‘7,000 Deaths in Custody’, The Atlantic. 28 July. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/7000deaths-in-custody-texas/493325/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Leetaru, K. (2016), ‘Data Is Not the Same as Truth: Interpretation in the Big Data Era’, Forbes. 4 January. Available online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ kalevleetaru/2016/01/04/data-is-not-the-same-as-truth-interpretation-in-the-bigdata-era/#491a2f014ffa (accessed 6 September 2019) Levinas, E. (1969), Totality & Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA.: Duquesne University Press. Luxton, E. (2016), ‘4 Billion People Still Don’t Have Internet Access. Here’s How to Connect Them’, World Economic Forum, 11 May. Available online: https:// www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/4-billion-people-still-don-t-have-internetaccess-here-s-how-to-connect-them/ (accessed 6 September 2019) McCarthy, N. (2017), ‘How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend Every Year on Policing?’, Forbes. 7 August. Available online: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ niallmccarthy/2017/08/07/how-much-do-u-s-cities-spend-every-year-onpolicing-infographic/#516ff8d5e7b7 (accessed 6 September 2019). McGeough, R., Palczewski, C. and Lake, R. (2015), ‘Oppositional Memory Practices: U.S. Memorial Spaces as Arguments over Public Memory’, Argumentation and Advocacy, 51: 231–54. Mesa Redonda de Santiago de Chile (1972), Vol. I (Reprinted 2012). Available online: http://www.ibermuseus.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Publicacion_ Mesa_Redonda_VOL_I.pdf (accessed 6 September 2019) Milan, S. and L. van der Velden (2016), ‘The Alternative Epistemologies of Data Activism’, Digital Culture & Society, Special Issue ‘The Politics of Big Data’.

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Available online: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2850470 (accessed 6 September 2019) Planty, M.,Burch, A.M., Banks, D., Couzens, L., Blanton, C. and Cribb, D. (2015), Arrest-Related Deaths Program: Data Quality Profile, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Available online: http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/ abstract.aspx?ID=270647 (accessed 6 September 2019). Railey, K. (2013), ‘Some Prisons Let Inmates Connect with Tablets’, USA Today. 17 August. Available online: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ nation/2013/08/17/tabletsforinmates/2651727/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Reutter, D. (2015), ‘Florida Withdraws Rule Proposal to Ban Prisoner Internet Presence’, Prison Legal News. 1 July. Available online: https://www. prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/1/florida-withdraws-rule-proposal-banprisoner-internet-presence/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Revista Museum (1973), Vol. II (Reprinted 2012). Available online: http://www. ibermuseus.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Publicacion_Mesa_Redonda_ VOL_II.pdf (accessed 6 September 2019) Richardson, V. (2015), ‘Police Kill More Whites than Blacks, but Minority Deaths Generate More Outrage’, The Washington Times. 21 April. Available online: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-more-whitesthan-blacks-but-minority-d/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Rideout, V. and Katz, V.S. (2016), ‘Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families’, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Winter. Available online: http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/01/jgcc_opportunityforall.pdf (accessed 6 September 2019) Sandell, R. and Nightingale, E. (2012), Museums, Equality and Social Justice, London and New York: Routledge. Senate Bill 760 (2017), ‘OPEN Government Data Act’, 115th Congress. Available online: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/760/text?q= %7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22S.+760%22%5D%7D&r=1 (accessed 6 September 2019) Shkabatur, J. (2012), ‘Transparency with(out) Accountability: Open Government in the United States’, Yale Law & Policy Review, 34 (1): 79–140. Sisters Uncut (2018). Available online: http://www.sistersuncut.org/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Stow, S. (2010), ‘Agonistic Homegoing: Frederick Douglass, Joseph Lowery, and the Democratic Value of African American Public Mourning’, American Political Science Review, 104 (4): 681–97. Weldon, R. (2010), ‘Transformative Museology’, Sociomuseology III: Cadernos Sociomuseologia, 37: 75–85. Wildeboer, R. and Smith, P. (2014), ‘Of Natural Causes: Death in Illinois Prisons’, National Public Radio. 8 July. Available online: https://www.wbez.org/shows/ wbez-news/of-natural-causes-death-in-illinois-prisons/5621d9b6-7c30-49c2a4e5-6f9a04296182 (accessed 6 September 2019) Zoukis, C. (2016), ‘Prisoner Deaths Continue to Rise’, Prison Legal News. 15 November.

17 Victims Go Viral: Digitally Dismantling Racist Lynching in the United States Karoline Summerville

The narrative of black experience in the United States often goes unrecognized because public memory overshadows African American struggles. What it means to be ‘American’ is perpetuated through various discourses. Presidential rhetoric, Hollywood cinema, the media and the Constitution paint the United States as a country that embraces freedom, equality and justice. Lewis (1987) argues the American story is especially spread through presidential rhetoric. A story, he argues, fulfils all the requirements of a myth – widely assumed, unquestioned and intended to be educational. The American narrative presents the country as a chosen nation where a heroic people – the nation’s citizens – live in a free world where economic improvement is inevitable and only occasionally confronts evil or military failure – neither of which threatens American pride. In the past, images portrayed African Americans as another evil to overcome. To support this claim, this chapter discusses examples of lynching photographs distributed on postcards as if to flaunt slayed black bodies. Furthermore, since the invention of camera phones and social media platforms, where pictures and text messages can be communicated in real time, Americans have experienced a way to play a more active role in public conversation, thus holding a stake in the larger national narrative. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a viral Twitter hashtag that grew into an activist movement against police brutality, is evidence

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that African Americans are taking full advantage of the opportunities these technologies offer for black stories to be seen and heard.

Visual narratives and public memory Public memory is constructed through dominant narratives or chosen histories which ultimately distribute frames that exclude other, sometimes more accurate, versions of public memory. Marginalized groups ‘get their past framed for them in a way that may or may not relate to their experience and knowledge of their past’ (Mutibwa 2016). America’s cyclical, contradictory history is an example of how public memory is circulated and reinforced to emphasize an image of freedom, equality and justice. Yet America was built on slavery, settles on segregation and rewards white predators who rape and kill members of inferior groups, rather than punishing them. Systemized racism prevails because America’s dominant narrative remains intact. American rhetoric guarantees racism is non-existent, even as it stands right in front of us (Florini 2014). Superior narratives overshadow and discredit inferior narratives to maintain the ignorance of America’s true history. Visual narratives are one way the African American perspective has been forced to the background throughout American history. Visuals omit imagination and give more control to the constructor of the narrative (e.g. writer, photographer, videography) rather than the viewer. Recent backlash against the perpetuation of whiteness in popular award ceremonies such as the Oscars shows the public understands the problematic nature of having one dominant perspective of America. This concept is critical to understanding how narratives are framed and how they impact meaning. The power of visual narratives manifests itself when stories are passed down to younger generations. Stories convert into memories and the values and emotions present in the story are transferred from individuals who experienced the narrative first-hand to secondary witnesses (Hoecker 2014). Walter Fisher (1989: 55) defines narration as a ‘depiction, anecdote, and characterization’, which in turn translates to argumentation by providing a ‘framework … for understanding human decision, discourse and action’. In the context of this chapter, Fisher’s narrative paradigm guides my analysis of lynching photographs as well as video footage of Rodney King’s beating and Philando Castile’s last moments. I argue the lynching photographs represent the dominant narrative: black bodies are harmful and deserve punishment. The recording of Rodney King’s beating acknowledges an alternative narrative, a third-person or outsider perspective of police brutality which led to a collective upheaval or public outrage. Lastly, the live stream account of Philando Castile’s death captures more closely what an encounter with a police officer looks and feels like for an African American.

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In the following paragraphs, I discuss still images of lynches and video footage of modern-day lynching in the form of police shootings to illustrate the role advancements in video recording technology – through the progression of still images to video recordings streamed live from a smartphone – serve as a catalyst in dismantling public memory of America as an ideal country.

Lynching in the United States: Photography, postcards and propaganda James Allen and John Littlefield collected photographs and postcards taken of lynches in the United States from 1880 to 1960. These were photographs and postcards people often sold and bought for souvenirs. Their collection illustrates the extent of racial violence and provides a counter-narrative on its own (Ohl & Potter 2013). My purpose here is to use their collection as a reference source to analyse images of past lynches and compare them to images of lynches in today’s society. After the abolition of slavery, white citizens needed to control black bodies and resorted to lynching as a form of terrorism to emphasize faith in white supremacy for whites and exacerbate fear in African Americans (Hill 2016). Photographs and postcards were propaganda used to normalize the narrative of lynching and racial violence from the white man’s point of view – regardless of the law, African Americans are not worthy of freedom, equality and justice. By portraying African Americans as a threat and constructing race mixing as taboo, blacks were given no consideration in the American narrative. This chapter focuses on three lynching photographs and postcards from Allen and Littlefield’s collection, which can be found in the photo gallery at without sanctuary. org.1 I provide a description of the photos with background information about the narrative behind each photo. Postcard 1. The charred corpse of Jesse Washington, a seventeen-yearold, hangs from a utility pole. His arms are mangled yet suspended as if he is flexing his biceps for the audience. A white garment hangs around his waist and highlights the shortness of his legs, which have been burned away. Washington was a suspect in the murder of Lucy Fryer whom he worked for as a farm labourer. After Washington was burned alive, he was dragged 7 miles to the town of Robinson, Texas, where many black people resided, and hung on display in front of a blacksmith shop not visible in the photo. The photo shows a large crowd, mostly white men, mostly looking directly at the camera. All the men are dressed in top hats and white-collared shirts in contrast to Washington’s naked, mangled body. One white man, in particular, is shown on the left side of the photo leaning on the utility pole Washington is hanging from with his arms folded as if satisfied after a long

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day of hard work. Another white man is pictured on the right side of the photo. His body is facing Washington’s hanging body, but he is looking back towards the camera with his hands on his hips. The back of the postcard shows a message that says, ‘This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it, your son Joe.’ The noted cross is an ink smudge to the left of the victim’s body in the photo (Allen & Littlefied 2018, Photograph #22). Postcard 2. Photographed on 1 August 1908, this postcard captioned “Black onlookers” shows the bodies of four African Americans – Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones and Joseph Riley, who are pictured suspended from a cedar tree. The bodies are all facing different directions and their hands are tied behind their backs. The photo is printed in colour and the green grass and trees act as a backdrop for the hanging black bodies clothed in white garments. Two African Americans can be seen walking towards the bodies. The words ‘taken from death’ are printed on the postcard. There is a typed inscription beside the image that states: ‘Four Niggers hanged by a mob in the State of Georgia for assaulting a white woman’, a false account of the hanging. In fact, the individuals were hung in Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky. The message on the back of the postcard reads, ‘I bought this in Hopkinsville 15¢ each. They are not on sale openly. I forgot to send it until just now I ran across it. I read an account of the night riders affairs where it says these men were hung without any apparent cause or reason whatever. A law was passed forbidding these to be sent thru the mail or to be sold anymore.’ This inscription reflects the earliest government efforts to ban the distribution of lynching images after an amendment was passed to forbid images circulating images of arson, murder or assassination (Allen & Littlefield 2018, Photograph #63). Photograph 3. An African American male stands naked on the back of a buggy. According to the photograph’s caption, the victim was forced to pose for the camera. His hands are cuffed and are the only tool he has to cover his nakedness. A mob of white men in collared shirts and hats stand behind him glaring past him towards the camera. The African American male also stares into the camera with ‘undiminished dignity’ with his lips curled into a snare. There is a blanket in the buggy seat – perhaps the same blanket hung around the victim’s body in the photo that depicts his hanging (Photograph 4). His body appears strong yet scarred. The outline of his abdominal muscles is as profound as the deep scars on his legs. On the edge of the photo, almost as if forcing an entrance into the photo, is a bearded white man who is holding a whip, grinning (Allen & Littlefield 2018, Photograph #38). Photograph 4. The same African American male described in Photograph 3 is seen hanging from a tree. His neck is crooked, recently snapped by the rope that hangs around it. White men are gathered around the tree, leaning their hands against the tree. It looks as if they are trying to push the tree over. There is a glare of sunlight in the top right corner of the photo beaming

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down at the victim’s limp body. A towel dangles around his waist. In the bottom right corner, two white men clasp their hands together – applauding the death of the victim (Allen & Littlefield, 2018). Many of the photographs are taken in black and white, which emulates the colour line that divides Americans on a physical, visible level. Blackand-white film at the time favoured the depiction of African Americans as dark figures. Since the picture is often blurred, black identity is rendered insignificant. Out of all of the photos in my case studies, only one photo pictures a black man who looks directly into the camera. In all the others, only white men look straight at the camera. The black man looks at the camera with a small grimace on his face. He looks like a daredevil prepared to overcome something. His facial expression confirms the characteristics that whites attribute to blacks: uncontrollable, angry and evil. Additionally, contrast between white and black more so highlights the juxtaposition between light and dark, good and evil – a simple religious argument for who in society holds the place of the saviour or the serpent. Often in the photos, a dark figure hangs with his head down defeated while the white men stand around the mangled body in power poses with hands on hips or arms folded in confidence and pride. Sometimes the men wear a smirk on their faces as if they are content with their own clever catch in their victory; yet another, black devil who needed to be controlled and ultimately defeated. In her book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, Amy Wood (2005) argues onlookers in the crowd during a lynching were motivated by a sense of authority in the lynching without having to actually do the deed. The postcards expanded that audience and allowed more people to participate in the ritual and reinforced power structures. The photographs permitted whites to see themselves as powerful, in control and righteous, and blacks saw themselves as prey. Eye contact in the images also illustrates control and lack thereof. White men and women in the crowds all look into the camera as if prompted to do so all at once. Their stares exhibit a calm hatred for the figure hanging above them. Their ability to turn their heads to the camera when prompted signifies life and control over their own bodies as well as over the body hanging from the pole, whose charred, lifeless head is limp, turned down and away from the camera. During this time period, Wood (2005) argues the public took photographs at face value and as the ‘objective truth’. The images depicted a ‘united and orderly white citizenry in full control and mastery over savage and inhuman black men’, which became the ideal and most popular photographic image of a lynching. The image, along with newspapers, portrayed a measured, organized killing. The image did not portray the procedures leading up to a lynching: the chasing down of the lynching victim, the dragging and thrashing of the body and the audience fighting for pieces of the victim’s clothing and body. Ohl and Potter (2013) quote Sutton E. Griggs’ account of

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a 1904 lynching paraphrased as a crowd ‘dashing wildly’ to get to the best spots to view the lynching and ‘scrambling’ for pieces of hair and one man ‘snatching’ the lynch victim’s eyeball. Lastly, the lynch mobs often left the body hanging as to make sure more and more people, both black and white, would see the result of their action. In the counter-narrative of lynching, leaving the body would be seen as animalistic and savage. In the dominant narrative of lynching, it is merely viewed as a strategic and necessary propaganda. Many scholars have studied the close connection between Christianity and American history. Parallels between Christianity and lynching justify racial violence against African Americans and denote lynching not as terrorism, but a sacrificing ritual (Finnegan 2010). Most lynches occurred in the most Christian-based states of the nation, a surprising fact on the surface but the ritualization of lynches made them more legitimate and justified (Ehrenhaus & Owen 2004). Wilbur Cash’s analysis of the intricacies of white, Southern culture and Christianity are illustrated in his quote: Blood sacrifice is the connection between the purpose of white supremacists, the purity signified in segregation, the magnificence of God’s wrath, and the permission granted the culture through the wrath of ‘justified’ Christians to sacrifice black men on the cross of white solidarity  … was central to the Christian narrative of salvation. (Ehrenhaus & Owen 2004: 278) Therefore, lynching became a necessary act and the blood of African Americans equated to animal blood and used in the Old Testament to relieve sin and serve as a form of deliverance for whites, God’s chosen people. Whites perceived they were simply conducting their religious duty in order to maintain the power given to them by God. If blacks were considered savage animals and animals were made for mankind, then blacks were to be owned and controlled by the white man. Therefore, although the law at the time no longer labelled blacks as slaves, white men and women did not necessarily believe the law was just; instead, the laws themselves were unrighteous. Lynching was therefore seen as a ‘performative act of faith’ (Ehrenhaus & Owen 2004: 278). In photograph 1, the postcard sender drew a small cross to the left of the body to denote a crucifixion or sacrifice of a black body, a body seen as savage or animalistic. On the back of the postcard, the sender wrote a note to his father: look at ‘the barbeque we had last night’ (Allan & Littlefield 2018). Equating a lynching and the burning of a body to a barbeque implies lynches were not treated seriously or as sombre rituals similar to a baptism or other religious rituals. Lynches were joked about in a cruel manner and religion justified them. The narrative portrayed to the greater public excludes the actual emotions of lynch mob participants.

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Religious aspects of lynches are also portrayed in the contextual elements of the photographs. Many of the bodies were hung from trees; sometimes clusters of bodies were hung together like bundles of fruit on a vine. The roots of the tree represent life and the bodies hanging on the tree symbolize fruitfulness. The more bodies hanging on a tree meant white supremacy is spiritually richer, more productive and in abundance. Leaving the bodies hanging in this religious context was a spiritual victory. Lynches near the water illustrated many of the same narratives in religious baptisms: beginning of a new life, a dying to self and a letting go of the old body for a new body. In the white man’s dominant discourse of the time, lynching was God’s will, a letting go of evil-doing. Such narratives allowed participants to create distance between what they felt to be right and their actions, attributing torturing and murdering of black bodies to God’s will.2 Today, as I shall argue, it is much harder to distance oneself from the abuse of black bodies. I now turn to examine video footage of Rodney King’s beating on 3 March 1991, which an onlooker video-recorded. Rodney King’s beating is one example of how moving images can change the meaning of a still image.

The death of Rodney King On 3 March 1991, California Highway Patrol, the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) and Rodney King, an African American taxi driver, became involved in a high-speed chase. Once the police stopped Rodney King, they pulled him from his car, hit him twice with a Taser as electric charge wires hung from his body and beat him. At this point, George Holliday, a Lake View Terrace resident and white male, pulled out his Sony Handycam to record the scene from his balcony. Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno stood over King with black, metal batons beating him and kicking him for the next eighty-one seconds. The officers tried to cuff King, who refused to comply at first, but the officers continued beating him even when he did follow orders (Gerland 1994). Holliday’s video brought about what has been discussed as the myth of the heroic citizen journalist and, more importantly, ‘raised the question of what it meant to bear witness’ to incidents of racial violence (Maurantonio 2014). The distance between Holliday’s point of view and the scene of the beating permits viewers to watch the incident unfold without feeling guilty for watching and doing nothing which ultimately implies participation. The notation of the date in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture also provides comfort to viewers because it serves as a reminder the incident has already passed. Therefore, the viewer is equally as helpless as the victim is. Not only can viewers relate to King’s powerlessness, the timer at the bottom

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of the screen emphasizes the length of the beating. Between the ticking of the clock and the swinging of bats and limbs, the viewer better understands the extent of the violence without necessarily having to hear the bats and feet collide with King’s body. The motion picture capabilities of the Sony Handycam Holliday used to record the event are the key component to disrupting narratives that support white supremacy in lynching. A still image of the Rodney King beatings would not have been as impactful because viewers could use the image to support their own assumptions about race. For example, people might assume Rodney King somehow deserved the beating, an assumption inevitably linked to his black skin and social constructions of black men as criminals throughout history. The movement in the video dismantles the myth of the black man as the evil antagonist and establishes the black male as a true victim. First, the video’s shakiness negates control and the calmness portrayed in the lynching photos. The officers’ movements mimic the hectic procedure of capturing a victim before their lynching – chasing, beating, dragging and wrapping victims in ropes (in the case of King, electrical wires). King’s movements are small, subtle and slow – much different from the movements of his attackers – quick, deliberate and forceful. The police officers’ movements reflect control or authority but the number of officers paired with the amount of blows thrown towards King in the video gives off a sense of recklessness. Standing alone, the video offers no background context to answer questions of why and how the police officers are treating King so violently. Instead, the video expresses a simple narrative of a victim and predator, a narrative that omits the high-speed chase that led to the altercation, as well as King’s criminal record of robbery and driving while intoxicated (Maurantonio 2014). Of course, there are arguments about the media framing of King’s encounter with police and a clean record would have made the video even more alarming. Such arguments lie outside the scope of this paper. Limited knowledge about King’s identity, from the inability to see his face or know his name and background in the video, places more focus on recognizable parts of him – his black skin. Thus, his black body became a universal symbol of the African American victim, of systemic racism and police brutality. On the other hand, the uniformed officers become the ironic criminals. Their uniforms are dark and almost blend in with the video’s dark background. In contrast, King is wearing light grey sweatpants and his white car is directly behind him throughout the background, illuminating him and casting the officers as dark figures overshadowing him. The white and black and light and dark contrasts contradict narratives that ‘depicted blacks as uncivilized animals and sexual fiends who hated whites and would attack them when least expected’ (Watts 2012), and reconstructs authority figures as uncontrollable figures who overexert their power on helpless victims who look different from them. Their uniformed and organized appearance

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is not reflected in their reckless, violent behaviour and leads viewers to feel deceived when they see police officers, who are supposed to protect citizens, actually abusing them. It is important to note the distinction between the three different tropes present in the video. There is King’s representation of the African American man in American society, the police officers who denote corrupted cops and the trope of the white audience, who are both innocent bystanders and heroes. The heroism is depicted through the man who captured the video (Holliday) and is credited for ‘catching’ the police officers. In both the lynching narratives and the narrative portrayed in the King video, white citizens are the heroes who ‘capture’ the criminal. The physical capturing of the criminal, who happens to be an African American in the lynching narrative, parallels with the metaphorical ‘capturing’ on camera the criminals who are white police officers. It does not matter to the wider white audience that the victim is African American. Since white viewers are unable to place themselves beneath the swinging batons because the black body in the image looks nothing like their own, white audiences can sympathize with the victim but never reach a deeper level of empathy. Therefore, white audiences identify more with the figure behind the camera because it is more likely they would witness the scene than be directly involved in it, as either the victim or the perpetrator. Hence, white viewers who are free of guilt and pain become the hero without taking any heroic action.

The death of Philando Castile Many communication scholars are in the midst of studying the impact of camera phones on interpersonal communication, computer-mediated communication and surveillance. There has also been increasing interest in the study of camera phones and body cameras and African American encounters with police officers (Benson-Allott 2016; Bud 2016; Taylor 2016). Since seventeen-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighbourhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in 2012, many African American deaths at the hands of police have been captured on video and spread through media, including various social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). Many videos show similar scenes to the one in the Rodney King video – from the vantage point of the characters in the frame. The Philando Castile murder, however, is recorded from a firstperson point of view (in terms of the camera angle), which offers a new narrative that disrupts and shifts the dominant American narrative that offers an ideal, deceptive vision of America as an equal and just country. Many scholars like Mitra (2004) and Jackson and Foucault (2016) argue digital technologies – specifically camera phones and social networks – provide

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opportunities for voices excluded from the public sphere to connect with other communities and create alternative counter-publics (Habermas 1989). Before camera phones and scrolling through news feeds on our cellphones, citizens relied on newspapers and television news coverage to gain access to information about societal happenings. The development of camera phones and social networks in the early 2000s revolutionized journalism with regard to whose stories were being told and who was able to tell them. Rather than news channels controlling the stories, citizens are becoming more active in the news process, hence the development of the concept of ‘citizen journalism’, where members of the public are engaging in journalistic practices such as blogging, photo and video sharing, and posting comments on circulating images, videos and news accounts. Nowadays, broadcast news networks circulate content created by citizens with their own version of news stories, thus spreading citizens’ images and comments across a wider audience base. Many scholars argue that citizen journalism has sparked a shift towards a more democratic news process (Goode 2009). Research shows that social media, especially, is related to political action because it offers an alternative platform for image and opinion sharing. In a study on social media and political action, Valenzuela (2013) found that individuals who used social media to express their opinions were more likely to be politically involved. Thus, it is likely that people engage in social networks to have a voice and share their story – much like Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who streamed her boyfriend’s last moments on Facebook. Reynolds’ video shows a first-person account of her boyfriend’s death from a first-person perspective. She handles the confrontation with the police officers calmly, with her four-year-old daughter in the backseat. Broadly, the video is a depiction of American society from an African American female perspective. This is a form of ‘recall’, a narrative framework or presentation of an argument, to paraphrase Fisher’s definition (1989). The first image in the video is Castile’s body, slumped over his white T-shirt covered in bright, red blood. His stillness confirms his death to viewers. The seatbelt still secured around his chest is proof there could have been no aggressive action on his part. Police officer Jeronimo Yanez is towering over Castile with his gun pointed down at him. The camera then pans to a clear view of Reynolds’ face. She begins to narrate the event claiming the officer shot her boyfriend four times when her boyfriend reached for his licence. According to Reynolds’, Castile was licensed to carry a gun for his work and disclosed to the officer that he had a firearm in his possession, as is procedure when one carries a weapon. Reynolds’ ability to provide background context for the situation removes the opportunity for viewers to make assumptions of criminality often associated with African Americans. Not only are the details about Castile’s civil actions (informing the officer of his possession of a weapon and reaching for his licence and registration after the officer asked for it) critical to the disruption of prevalent racial stereotypes of black

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men, but the reason the officer stopped Castile in the first place – a broken tail light – and the extreme result of his murder illustrate the helplessness of African Americans in today’s society. Similar to the King video, the footage is shaky throughout, reflecting a dispossession of control for both parties – the African American victims as well as the officer. The immediacy of the video made it possible for many of Reynolds’ Facebook friends and subsequently viewers around the world to helplessly watch Castile’s death. This created a sense of urgency to acknowledge current issues within society. Castile’s death served as evidence that mistreatment towards African Americans is not a long distant memory. Rather, in reality, in broad daylight – unlike the King video which shows a dark overcast, the footage of Castile’s murder eliminates the illusion such evil occurrences only happen at night. In the lynching videos, broad daylight in the photographs signified emotional detachment, or removal of guilt for whites who participated in the rituals. Daylight further justified racial violence because evil manifests itself at night. Reynolds’ video, conversely, sheds light on the violence African Americans experience every day, whether or not people are looking. Audiences are much closer in the Castile video and can see in intimate detail  what is taking place on the screen. The camera phone enables Reynolds to express her story in first person, and the viewer understands the story as his or her own. Anyone who views the footage will feel like they are the subjects in the car; Reynolds’ girlfriend in the passenger seat of the car watching their significant other being shot and killed by a police officer with their child watching them in the backseat. This is especially true when Reynolds exits the car and holds the camera in front of her so her face is hidden. Instead, the camera shows multiple police officers pointing guns at the camera. At this point, sympathy turns to empathy for audiences, who know the subjects are innocent victims under attack. Therefore, Reynolds’ vantage point no longer allows American audiences, white or black, to standby as onlookers. Rather, the camera screen plays the role of transporting us as viewers into her experience along with her. The familial element is the definitive connection to all audiences regardless of race and ethnicity because nearly every individual can identify with familial relationships. The three individuals in the car and their positions offer three lenses for connection. Reynolds’ narrative places the black man as the patriarchal figure in the nuclear family. This crucial element dismantles the trope of the angry, violent African American man. Her narrative characterizes the African American man as a victim of American society, a family member, an object of love surrounded by and ultimately conquered by danger disguised as protection – arguably the greatest deception. Reynolds also disproves the trope of the angry black woman with her calm tone and non-resistance. She exhibits strength, composure and loyalty, as she testifies and advocates for her boyfriend. Her daughter reflects the same qualities as

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she begs her mother not to worry because: ‘I’m right here with you’ (Bosman 2016). Her childlike voice re-emphasizes the African American family’s innocence and helplessness. Not until Reynolds and her daughter sit in the back of the police car with Reynolds’ hands handcuffed behind her back does she finally show evidence of her emotions. She screams from shock and pain as she repeats to herself ‘They really killed my boyfriend’ as if just realizing what happened. Her screams are also evidence of frustration; she squirms and tells her Facebook audience she can do nothing because they have her in handcuffs – a direct parallel to the powerless African American woman who can do nothing to help her family escape the racism that constrains their lives.

Conclusion African Americans are using handheld devices to combat the common misperception that American culture is post-racial. Past narratives, often produced by whites, reinforced the belief that racial hierarchies and acts that reinforce racial structures are justified on premises of skin colour, morality and religion. Even when dominant narratives began to lose traction during the Civil Rights Movement, for example, those narratives continue to prevail because they are often excluded from American history discourse including presidential rhetoric, educational curriculums and popular media. Further, constant celebrations of American ideals promote American nationalism in some Americans – particularly those who feel included in American history discourse, not others. Nonetheless, digital technologies have awakened a new era of citizen journalism, an offering of new hope for groups normally excluded from the public conversation. Given a chance to tell their side of the story, African Americans are showing they are prepared to expose certain aspects of the constitution not reflected in the enactment of American values of equality and freedom. These black voices have been muffled too long and are finally showing, rather than telling, a vision of a different America, a country that only protects its colonizers. This study contains implications for future research in promoting new knowledge about how emerging technologies can interpolate superior groups into inferior positions in society to understand what it means to be black in the United States. For instance, how can technologies like video games and virtual reality be used to strategically demolish discrimination especially in American institutions? Reynolds’ video footage of Philando Castile’s death by police shooting provides a way to explore these possibilities. Nonetheless, these stories are not productive if they stay within the counter-public. These stories must enter the public sphere and reach a wider mainstream audience for them to be effective. It is important to recognize that counter-publics

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must continue to take advantages of digital tools to tell their story and reach larger networks to effect change. In other words, African Americans must push for a digital renaissance to create a dominant narrative of the African American experience to show an authentic America.

Notes 1 The images, consisting of postcards and photographs, can be viewed on the Without Sanctuary website at https://withoutsanctuary.org/ and have not been reproduced here due to copyright restrictions. Numbers in parentheses correspond to the location of the image in the photo gallery. 2 Wood (2005) adopts a similar stance in her discussion of audio recordings of lynches, consisting mostly of crowds cheering and chanting racial slurs. The silence of the victim and the noise from the crowd are held in stark contrast; the noise portrays lynches as a festive event, an occasion to be celebrated, further distancing victim and protagonist.

References Allen, J. and Littlefield, J. (2018), ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’. Available online: http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html (accessed 13 December 2016). Benson-Allott, C. (2016), ‘Learning from Horror’, Film Quarterly, 70 (2): 58–62. https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ. 2016.70.2.58 Bosman, J. (7 July 2016), ‘After Poised Live-Streaming, Tears and Fury Find Diamond Reynolds’, The New York Times. Available online: http://www. nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/after-poised-live-streaming-tears and-furyfinddiamond-reynolds.html (accessed 6 September 2019) Bud, T.K. (2016), ‘The Rise and Risks of Police Body-Worn Cameras in Canada’, Surveillance & Society, 14 (1): 117–21. Ehrenhaus, P. and Owen, A.S. (2004), ‘Race Lynching and Christian Evangelicalism: Performances of Faith’, Text & Performance Quarterly, 24 (3/4): 276–301. Finnegan, C.A. (2010), ‘A Review of: “Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940”’, Southern Communication Journal, 75 (5): 527–30. Fisher, W.R. (1989), ‘Clarifying the Narrative Paradigm’, Communication Monographs, 56 (1): 55–8. Florini, S. (2014), ‘Recontextualizing the Racial Present: Intertextuality and the Politics of Online Remembering’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31 (4): 314–26. Gerland, O. (1994), ‘Brecht and the Courtroom: Alienating Evidence in the “Rodney King” Trials’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 14 (4): 305–18.

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Goode, L. (2009). Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy. New Media and Society, 11 (8): 1287–305. Hill, K.K. (2016), Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hoecker, R. (2014), ‘Visual Narrative and Trauma Recovery’, Narrative Inquiry, 24 (2): 259–80. Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, S. J. and Foucault, W. (2016), ‘#Ferguson Is Everywhere: Initiators in Emerging Counterpublic Networks’, Information, Communication and Society, 19 (3): 397–418. Lewis, W.F. (1987), ‘Telling America’s Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73 (3): 280–302. Maurantonio, N. (2014), ‘Remembering Rodney King: Myth, Racial Reconciliation, and Civil Rights History’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 91 (4). 740–55. Mitra, A. (2004), ‘Voices of the Marginalized on the Internet: Examples from a Website for Women of South Asia’, Journal of Communication, 54 (3): 492–510. Mutibwa, D.H. (2016), ‘Memory, Storytelling and the Digital Archive: Revitalizing Community and Regional Identities in the Virtual Age’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 12 (1): 7–26. Ohl, J.J. and Potter, J.E. (2013), ‘United We Lynch: Post-Racism and the (Re) Membering of Racial Violence in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’, Southern Communication Journal, 78 (3): 185–201. Rodney King Beating Video Full length footage SCREENER - YouTube. (n.d.). Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ (accessed 6 December 2016). Taylor, E. (2016), ‘Lights, Camera, Redaction … Police Body-Worn Cameras: Autonomy, Discretion and Accountability’, Surveillance and Society, 14 (1): 128–32. Valenzuela, S. (2013), ‘Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism’, American Behavioral Scientist, 57 (7): 920–42. Watts, E.K. (2012), Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Wood, A.L. (2005), ‘Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of WhiteSupremacy’, American Nineteenth Century History, 6 (3): 373–99.

18 Responsibility without Sovereignty: Inaugurating a Maternal Contract to Find the Mexican ‘Disappeared’ through Protest and Social Media Elva F. Orozco Mendoza

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on contemporary Mexican mothers’ collectives formed around the enforced disappearance of their children and their take-up of social media to expand and develop their activities. Drawing on the social contract tradition in political philosophy, this chapter reformulates the mothers’ creation of a national movement to find the disappeared as a maternal contract which aims to defend their rights. Like the original proponents of the social contract suggest, the maternal contract is not an actual historical fact but a tacit commitment to revert the differential character of sovereignty that makes enforced disappearance possible in Mexico. The maternal contract, enabled through the agency of social media, represents a civilian challenge to sovereignty’s attempt to unilaterally declare its right to remove individuals deemed criminals from the polity. By emphasizing the mothers’ undeterred commitment to finding the disappeared, this chapter contributes to existing debates on maternal activism by showing its neglected kinship to, and dialogue with, the social contract tradition in political philosophy.

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New developments in political protest and agency around the ‘disappeared’ – Colectivo Solecito: Light in the Dark Mother’s Day is celebrated every 10 May in Mexico. On this day, it is customary for families to celebrate the love and care that mothers provide to all members of the family. For some Mexican mothers, however, Mother’s Day is not a day of joyful celebration, but a sad reminder that a beloved son or daughter is missing in a country where the number of disappeared surpasses the 30,000 count as of 2018 (McCormick 2018). Mother’s Day has become an occasion for hundreds of mothers and relatives of missing persons, friends, NGOs, activist groups and sympathizers to take to the streets to demand the return of the disappeared. One of these groups is Colectivo Solecito, a collective created by Lucia de los Ángeles Díaz in the state of Veracruz after her son Luis Guillermo Lagunes went missing.1 Díaz formed this collective in 2014 because professional investigations to locate her offspring were lacking. Desperate to find answers, Díaz turned to social media. As she explained, joining a WhatsApp chat is the only alternative that hundreds of families have to search for their missing relatives as this chat constitutes the first step to forming a collective (Serapaz 2016). The collectives give the mothers a space to organize and support each other through their shared experiences. For Díaz, the creation of Solecito collective began when she opened a WhatsApp chat inviting those with a missing relative to join her. The chat showed the image of the sun2 in the background because she wanted to bring light to those families whose lives turned into darkness as a result of having a missing relative (Raphael 2017). Initially, only eight women responded to Díaz’s call. With them, she formed her group, which people identified as ‘Las Solecito’. Eventually, the name of the organization became Colectivo Solecito de Veracruz (Little Sun Collective from Veracruz). Today, the organization has the collaboration of nearly 100 members, 90 per cent of whom are the mothers of a missing person (Serapaz 2016). Global media has also enabled the communication and dissemination of a plethora of searching strategies. An example of this is the disappearance of forty-three students from the Rural Teachers School in Ayotzinapa. In September 2014, the students were stopped and attacked by the municipal police. In this confrontation, forty-three of them were detained and loaded into official police trucks, which delivered them to a criminal cartel called Guerreros Unidos (Paley 2015). What happened to the students next is still unknown. The federal government concluded that they were killed and burnt to ashes by members of Guerreros Unidos. Yet the families, human rights organizations and experts dispute this version, claiming that the state’s explanation did not hold and that it was fabricated to close the case and avoid conducting any investigation. After months

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of petitioning the federal government to find the students, the families, groups of community police and NGOs started their own searches. While their efforts to locate the missing students failed, the group did uncover a series of clandestine graves filled with dozens of recently buried corpses (Paley 2015). Lucia de los Angeles Díaz, from Solecito Collective, followed the plight of the Ayotzinapa students with particular interest. As she declared in an interview, ‘seeing the searches on TV made me think that we had to do the same in Veracruz’ (Aristegui 2017). What happened next is that the mothers began selling food, used clothes and raffle tickets to collect money to conduct their own searches. Additionally, they sought forensic training and began gathering necessary digging tools to bring to the field. Their efforts paid off as the group announced in March 2017 they had discovered human remains corresponding to nearly three hundred corpses from a clandestine grave in a place called Colinas de Santa Fe. The events leading to the discovery of the ‘largest’ mass grave in Mexico took place in 2016 as the mothers were getting ready to stage their traditional May 10 protest. That day, two men, who looked like criminals according to Díaz, gave them a map (Aristegui 2017; Hope 2017; Raphael 2017). As Díaz explained, ‘when I saw the map, I knew exactly what it was … Inside Colinas de Santa Fe, we found numerous marks of clandestine graves’ (Díaz as quoted in Raphael 2017). The mothers’ discovery was not a surprise but a confirmation of numerous rumours that human corpses were dumped at Colinas de Santa Fe (Villegas 2017a).3 With this information, the mothers began combing the area every day for countless hours until they mapped out all the graves, dug the earth and identified a plethora of bodies. The federal police collaborated with the mothers, but authorities from the state of Veracruz refused to help, arguing that the administration lacked the budget to assist the mothers (Aristegui 2017). The story of Solecito collective illustrates new developments in political protest around the phenomenon of enforced disappearance in Mexico. Two elements stand out. First, protesters’ use of social media to organize, document and keep records of those murdered and forcibly disappeared in Mexico. Social media – WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter – has been an important organizational tool for the victims’ families to form collectives dedicated to finding their missing relatives. In that sense, media, as Judith Butler notes, is not just an instrument to report a specific event. Rather, ‘media has entered into the very definition of the people. It does not simply assist that definition, or make it possible; it is the stuff of self-constitution, the site of the hegemonic struggle over who “we” are’ (Butler 2015: 18). Second, the mothers’ act of coming together in a larger collective body with higher capacity of representation and manoeuvre resembles, following the social contract tradition, a subaltern maternal contract created to defend the rights of the disappeared and to denounce the ongoing violence inflicted on their bodies.

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Continuity and change in maternal politics: From silent protesters to forensic experts Any critical examination of maternal politics in the present is forced to look back in time and to ask what has remained the same and what has changed when it comes to this repertoire of protest. This, of course, is not an insignificant question as it points at the legacies and lessons of maternal movements in Latin America. Thus, while political protest around enforced disappeared is not new, the Mexican case is important not only because enforced disappearances have increased considerably under two civilian governments but also because the mothers’ collectives have been forced to become their ‘own detectives’ given the ignorance that state institutions cultivate to remain unaccountable to the victims (Anzaldúa & Keating 2015: 2). Borrowing from critical approaches to the social contract tradition, this section reinterprets the mothers’ efforts to find the disappeared as a maternal contract that the mothers make with their missing offspring to never give up searching for them. This maternal contract, I argue, is a powerful civil contrast to the social pact that inaugurated sovereignty’s right to punish. Mothers have since long engaged in widespread protests to demand the return of the disappeared. Perhaps, the most vivid example in Latin America is the Argentinean mothers who gathered every Thursday at La Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires on behalf of those taken by state officials during the Dirty War. Adopting a maternal identity during the protests was not a random decision. To be sure, the Argentinian mothers mobilized this public recognition towards mothers as leverage to launch a struggle on behalf of the disappeared. Dressed in ‘dowdy’, old-fashioned maternal clothing, white shawls and caps, the mothers marched together at three in the afternoon, disputing the government’s version that the disappeared were in Europe ‘having fun’ rather than in secret concentration camps (Feitlowitz 2011: 23). Despite the immense risk in challenging a military government that treated dissenting voices as ‘subversives’, the mothers’ marches gave a face, a name and a voice to their missing relatives (Feitlowitz 2011: 23). The Argentinean mothers became an inspiration for women in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and countless places where enforced disappearance became a widespread practice that states and their paramilitary affiliates used to crush civilian opposition (Bargu 2014: 40). How are contemporary mothers’ groups in Mexico different from their Latin American counterparts? How does social media impact the mothers’ activism? Finally, what is the significance of reinterpreting the mothers’ protests as a maternal contract? It will be false to assert that there is a

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radical break between old and new maternal strategies. To be sure, one of the distinct tactics adopted by the Argentinean mothers was the weekly silent marches carrying pictures of their missing sons and daughters (Bargu 2014; Rivera 2017). However, contemporary groups have rightly understood the importance of social media in helping organize and coordinate mass mobilizations. This indicates that social media is indispensable to produce a sense of collective struggle to know what happened to the disappeared. As such, social media is part and parcel of the struggle that calls into question the state’s manipulation of the truth. Contemporary mothers continue to organize public marches as an essential repertoire of protest. However, in addition to staging massive protests to demand donde estan? and vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! (where are they? They were taken alive. We want them back alive!), mothers, like those who joined Colectivo Solecito, have been forced to perform the role of ‘professional detectives’ given that state institutions do not do the searches. Joining a collective has become the only alternative for the mothers to have a voice, a support system and stronger representation. Lucia de los Angeles Díaz explained in an interview with the online TV channel Rompeviento how having a disappeared relative is a traumatic experience that very often isolates those individuals going through this situation. For this reason, it becomes crucial to accompany one another and to share tips, strategies and personal experiences with those who face a similar situation and can understand what each other is going through. Importantly, the path towards forming a mothers’ collective and a national movement for the rights of the disappeared began, according to Díaz, when the mothers created a WhatsApp chat and realized that they were not alone. Coming together in a collective enabled the mothers to pressure state officials who remain passive about their ordeal (Díaz as quoted in Serapaz; Ahmed 2017). Social media is also a key tool to show citizens how the Mexican mothers are forced to ‘comb the earth’, as Irma Leticia Hidalgo Rea, from Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos de Nuevo Leon (FUNDEL), explained, looking for the motives and mechanics of violence due to state negligence. As she put it, ‘the state condemned us to dig the earth with our fingernails in order to search for our disappeared’ (Hidalgo Rea 2018).4 Guillermina Gonzales, a co-founder of the now-disbanded Voces Sin Eco, explained a few years ago that while the families hoped to find their relative alive, in the case of the disappeared women of Ciudad Juarez, the strategy had changed given that in most instances the families could only recuperate dead bodies. As a result, they adopted a searching technique called rastreos consisting in organized searches for evidence linked to the crimes of feminicidio and enforced disappearance (Gonzales as quoted in Bonilla 2009; Schmidt Camacho 2006: 17).

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Differential sovereignty For scholars and activist alike, impunity from the law and enforced disappearance go hand in hand (Cleary & McCormick 2018; Herrera 2015; McCormick 2018; Paley 2014). While there are significant differences on how these authors define impunity, the overwhelming consensus is that corruption and impunity at the highest levels of government are why ‘kidnapping and killing can happen on a massive scale and almost always go unpunished’ (Paley 2017). Impunity is ‘the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the perpetrators of human rights violations to account whether in criminal, civil, administrative, or disciplinary proceedings since they are not subject to any inquiry that might lead to them being accused, arrested, tried and, if found guilty, convicted’ (Joinet as quoted in Penrose 1999: 276). Essentiality, the existing authorities fail to act appropriately in response to human rights violations. Down Paley contends that impunity is not the result of a weak and deficient state, but an active asset provided to armed groups who commit violence (Paley 2014). Political scientist Yuri Herrera describes impunity as an omission. Yet he raises the important point that for some people the justice system seems to be working optimally whereas for others justice is unattainable (Herrera 2015). Such a distinct relation to justice, the fact that justice does exist for some while it does not work for others, is an indication that the notion of differential sovereignty, rather than impunity, explains the omissions of the state around forced disappearance. Traditionally, sovereignty has meant ‘the protection of subjects’. However, this is applied selectively as ‘struggle[s] for sovereignty could signify freedom for one group and obliteration for another’ (Cocks 2014: 23, 29). As Joan Cocks explains, the differential character of sovereignty is more evident in the numerous ethnonational conflicts that caught the world’s attention in the twentieth century. Another important critic of differential sovereignty is the cultural theorist and artist Ariella Azoulay (2015; 2017), who has coined the term ‘the differential sovereignty regime’ to signal structures and apparatuses of power that manipulate the body politic for political control (Azoulay 2015). In Azoulay’s words, ‘sovereignty is performed as the continued project of partition of populations into distinct, differentiated groups, whereby violence among the two groups is both the pretext and the effect’ (Azoulay 2015: 8). This approach to governing civilians by dividing them, creating distinct political classes and assigning them strict differentiated roles that fit their position in the political space, is what Azoulay terms the differential sovereignty regime. While a philosophical construct, differential sovereignty can be grasped empirically through various mechanisms that governments employ to divide the governed body into several categories of valued individuals versus

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disposable subjects. In contemporary Mexico, arguments in favour of a differential approach to sovereignty fill official speeches and documents that legitimize the War on Drugs launched in 2007 by Felipe Calderón and continued throughout the current administration of Enrique Peña Nieto. As this section shows, the very real threat of violence produced through the drug trade has been used to justify a punitive state called upon to wage war against already vulnerable sectors of the population. As Leticia Hidalgo Rea noted recently in a brief exchange with Margarita Zavala, Calderón’s wife, instead of protecting, the military commits massive executions and enforced disappearances in Mexico. In her words: We are more than three hundred collectives in Mexico, which were created to search for the disappeared. We have formed civil organizations… My son Roy disappeared on January 11, 2011, after your husband [Felipe Calderón] sent the army to the streets of Mexico and left us in the middle of a [civil] war. Roy was a student in the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon. Police officers detained him … It is not by sending more police officers to the streets that you will bring peace to Mexico … The army will not bring us justice; the police will not bring us justice … In fact, they are killing us … They are destroying our lives.5 Hidalgo Rea’s words are direct. State institutions act like the aggressors rather than protectors. She denounces Calderón’s war claiming that the real casualties are ordinary civilians like Roy. Mrs Hidalgo Rea also maintains how state officials ‘don’t look at the victims’ (Hidalgo Rea 2018). These words are significant because they manifest how the might of the state is mobilized in favour of private interests regardless of the human cost. Two key documents further confirm the differential approach to sovereignty in Mexico. The first is Calderón’s inaugural speech upon becoming president. The second is an interview offered to the New York Times staff five years into Calderón’s presidency. Together, these documents illustrate three features of differential sovereignty: dividing the political body into law-abiding citizens and criminals, the attempt to sever the ties and responsibilities that exist between the two groups, and justifying the deployment of total violence against those deemed criminals.

Fragmenting society Felipe Calderón became president of Mexico in 2006 amid widespread rumours of electoral fraud. In his inaugural speech, he recognized numerous challenges but claimed that none was more important than the crisis of insecurity. Thus, Calderón proposed to fight organized crime and drug

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trafficking through a military strategy. This became the War on Drugs. Calderón’s basis for defending this approach revolved around presenting a view of the country in which criminality threatens the state and society. ‘Public security’, he noted, ‘is the main problem in states, cities and entire territories. Therefore, one of the main priorities of my administration is legality and public security’ (Calderón 2006).6 Calderón’s War on Drugs strategy was thus imposed by dividing the political body between innocent, law-abiding citizens, who respect social norms, and state authorities and the powerful criminals, who want to destroy the state as they procure profits through the drug trade (Calderón 2006). Calderón further contended that if unchecked the criminals would dominate the state’s institutions. According to Calderón (2006) criminals posed a risk to our lives, the lives of their families and their property. These dangerous criminals represent the antithesis of good families, honest people, and dedicated citizens who stand on the side of the state as it seeks to guarantee security for them. By presenting a divided society in this way, Calderón seeks to enlist the support of entrepreneur folks so that their economic interests are protected. Thus, he explains to them that because organized crime has become militarized and wants to take control of our territory, the state has to use all its force so that the rule of law is followed and criminals do not take what belongs to us (Calderón 2006). The only way to enjoy public space for our children, no territory for delinquency, no impunity, no abuse from the powerful and justice for all is through a strong state (Calderón 2006). Accordingly, Calderón instructs the military to approach security as the most important priority in the country. In turn, he assures citizens that this fight is necessary and that militarization constitutes the only effective strategy because delinquents threaten our lives and the lives of our families with their abuses and perverse actions (Calderón 2006).

Severing the ties among the population Calderón’s classification, between good citizens and dangerous criminals, attempts to severe the ties and responsibilities that exist between all members of the civic body. He does this by pitting citizens against one another. Violence, he notes, ‘angers us. We are tired of it and of those who cause it. Every innocent person who dies at the hands of the criminals gives us a powerful reason to fight them to the end and to ban them from our country’ (Calderón 2011, author’s translation). In this statement, Calderón seeks to determine what violence is and who is responsible for it. In other words, the acts and procedures of the state are not to be mistaken with violence. Only the criminals use violence. By presenting alleged criminals in this way, Calderón produced them as the enemy of the state and claimed

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that the rest of society wants them eradicated. Put differently, citizens are not interested in understanding, let alone, finding a solution to criminality but demand its elimination, which makes them co-responsible for the state’s attempt to eradicate criminality from the polity. In fact, one important aspect of Calderón’s security strategy was its ‘cleansing’ component (Limpiemos Mexico, Zona en Recuperacion). The operation to ‘cleanse’ Mexico sought to wrestle public spaces away from criminals (Calderón 2007). In practice, this strategy literally meant removing men and women from existence. As Calderón put it, we fight so that our families, our children, women and, in general, all Mexicans can transit through the streets, roads, towns and cities of Mexico without fear (Calderón 2007). Stated differently, citizens’ free mobility depended on the elimination, eradication and removal of delinquents. With this plan, Calderón opened the door for enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions to be approached as a state policy. By appealing to metaphors of sickness and contamination, Calderón was able to build a case for the cleansing of the political body through the eviction (disappearance) of the enemy.

Deploying total violence Calderón’s partition of the political body into innocent, law-abiding citizens and criminals as well as his attempt to cut the ties that exist between one group and the other paved the way to justify the deployment of total violence against the alleged enemy. The central aspect of this process revolves around the state’s appeal to war and force as a response to perceived threats to the state’s existence. Thus, because violence is seen as having a unitary origin – criminals – and the expansion of criminal activity – the logical response for Calderón is to eradicate and defeat them (Calderón 2007). In other words, the assessment of the criminal situation in Mexico does not call for due process, fair and impartial justice, let alone an expedite trial. Instead, the emphasis is on force without restraint. Time and again, Calderón maintained that the state’s fight against organized crime will be long and difficult. It will require much time, money and, regrettably, human lives (Calderón 2007). Answering whether he thought that the violence caused by the War on Drugs was deplorable, he expressed an impassioned ‘no!’ because the government has to defend its citizens. ‘We are not weak as the saying goes. We have [military] power with great discipline and great capacity … We have to fight criminals with everything that we have at hand. That is the state’s duty’ (Calderón 2011). Calderón’s statements show how the tactics of war, force and cleansing are mobilized against those sectors of the civilian population constructed as criminals. It is against these presumed criminals that total violence is reserved

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so that the rights of innocent and law-abiding individuals, entrepreneurs and good families are respected. In the fight against criminals, all tactics are legitimate according to the federal government, even if the cost is human lives. In fact, towards the end of his interview with the New York Times Calderón notes, ‘we had to cleanse Mexico, and the job was given to me’ (Calderón 2011: n.p.).

The maternal contract It is commonly said about Roberto Bolaño, the author of 2666 ([2004, 2009] 2013) and Savage Detectives (1998), that he ‘would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more so than a writer’ (Bolaño et al., 2009: 9). In Bolaño’s view, the detective personality was tremendously appealing because s/he ‘could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime and not being afraid of ghosts looking for the motives and mechanics of violence’ (Bolaño et al. 2009: 10). Unlike Bolaño, the mothers of the disappeared would not want to have to play this role. On the contrary, as Leticia Hidalgo Rea reminded Margarita Zavala, Calderón’s wife, ‘the state condemned us to dig the earth with our fingernails to search for our disappeared’ (Hidalgo Rea 2018). Guadalupe Acuña, from Agrupacion de Mujeres Organizadas por los Ejecutados, Secuestrados y Desaparecidos, AMORES, agrees, noting that ‘we believed that our government protected us, but it left us alone. We continue not knowing where they [the disappeared] are’ (Acuña as quoted in Aristegui noticias 2018). The mothers’ demands to know what happened to the disappeared who vanished in the middle of the war have gone largely ignored, buried under an abundance of statements that defend the war as the only way to defeat criminals and reduce the levels of violence by defeating and eradicating them (Calderón 2011). However, as Acuña’s statement suggests, the protective power of the state does not apply to the victims. The mothers’ course of action in the face of the state’s neglect has been twofold. On the one hand, they began using social media as an organization tool to launch a united front to coordinate their searches. On the other, they made a pact with their missing children and among themselves to never give up searching. Social media outlets such as WhatsApp and Facebook are used to create virtual groups, share news and updates about forced disappearance cases, and to keep virtual archives about the victims. In the same way, social media has facilitated the dissemination of information outside the group. This involves sharing records about their missing relatives, reporting findings to the general public or denouncing threats and attacks to members of the group. By helping the mothers to keep a virtual archive of missing persons, social media has become a clashing point between the authorities and the mothers who contest the narrative of criminality adopted by top leaders.

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As Guadalupe Aguilar, from Familias Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos, claims, ‘we have criminal institutions’ (Aguilar 2018). Social media has been used to shame public officials for ignoring the mothers. As I write these words, Lucia Díaz circulated a message on the internet denouncing how the current candidates to the governorship of Veracruz have not shown any interest in the struggle of the mothers’ collectives and continue neglecting the rights of the disappeared. In this message Díaz faulted the governor of Veracruz for being indifferent to the families’ demands, adding that his only concern is to amass more power. In Díaz’s words, ‘they are at the top whereas we remain down below’ (Díaz as quoted in Aristegui noticias 2018). This indicates that social media is a space where the mothers offer a subaltern truth. For example, the mothers of Colectivo Solecito recently denounced the general prosecutor for the state of Veracruz, Jorge Winkler Ortiz, for attributing to the state authorities the discovery of human remains inside Colinas de Santa Fe (Avila Perez 2017). The mother’s protest via Twitter forced Winkler Ortiz to confess that the discovery of Colinas de Santa Fe was mainly an achievement of the mothers. This shows that social media like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp are central to the mothers’ struggle against impunity and, therefore, an extension of the field of political action against the state. The mothers use these platforms to organize, share their stories, elicit support from fellow citizens and circulate a subaltern truth: the knowledge that the mothers accumulate through years of experience looking for the disappeared. This knowledge, Aguilar notes, ‘will give us the power to find the disappeared’ (Aguilar as quoted in Aristegui Noticias 2018). The second course of action the mothers followed was a commitment never to give up the search for the disappeared. This is what I call the maternal contract, a powerful counterpart to differential sovereignty as illustrated in Calderón’s militarized strategy to fighting the drugs economy. This maternal contract refuses the terms by which the state divides the political body, seeks to sever the ties and responsibilities that exist between all members of the polity, and legitimizes a differential approach to governing the population. Concretely, against sovereignty’s partitioning of the political body into innocent and law-abiding citizens and criminals, the mothers challenge the foundations of this classification by insisting that such a partition is indeed criminal since it denies individuals the basic human right to have due process, a fair trial, and, if applicable, a sentence based on constitutional guarantees (Aguilar 2018). As the mothers contend, police officers, the military and the marines carry out illegal detentions, extrajudicial killings and forced disappearance, thereby denying the victims’ basic human rights. Contrary to the argument that the violence is a product of different criminal groups fighting each other, the mothers’ investigations have revealed that state officials directly participate in spreading the violence against unarmed civilians (Aguilar 2018; Hidalgo Rea 2018).

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Against the attempt at severing the ties and responsibilities that exist among citizens, the mothers of the disappeared respond by reinforcing these ties and even making a pact – or a contract – with one another to never give up the search. This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the mothers’ protests as the mothers come together to create a larger national movement with the purpose of searching for the disappeared. The creation of this larger collective body is the result of an agreement with one another akin to the imaginary agreement depicted in philosophical versions of the social contract. Through this larger collective, the mothers assume the responsibility of defending the rights of the disappeared, a task that, in principle, falls under the obligations of sovereignty. It could be argued that the mothers carry out this task because the disappeared are their kin. However, while this is undoubtedly the case, the mothers’ search is not limited to their individual case. In fact, they understand that their struggle to find the disappeared is on behalf of all those daughters and sons who are missing. Their goal, as they express it, is to return a missing person to the family. Thus, rather than weakening the ties and responsibilities that exist between all members of the polity, the pact made by the mothers embraces their moral obligations and a political responsibility towards the victims. Finally, against the state’s differential approach to governing so-called innocent citizens and those who fall outside this category, the mothers insist on having institutions that work for all. The mothers are not unambiguous about claiming that searching for the disappeared is not their job, but an obligation of state authorities at all levels of government. As the quote by Mrs Hidalgo Rea above made clear, it is the state who condemned the mothers ‘to dig the earth with our fingernails to search for our disappeared’ (Hidalgo Rea 2018). These mothers have been forced to impersonate the detective character because the state is not doing its job of conducting professional investigations. But while some mothers have given up seeking justice, others are insisting on their right to reparations and have even brought up charges against the Mexican state for denying their rights. Such an insistence on the part of the mothers to have justice contests the state’s differential approach to governing citizens by insisting that they too have a right to know what happened to their disappeared and seek justice.

Conclusion In concluding this chapter, I want to address a controversial debate about the seeming uselessness of protest in the twenty-first century. Writing in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Indignados and Standing Rock, activist and Occupy co-founder Micah White expressed a strong

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scepticism and even despair towards contemporary protest movements because they have failed to attain their original goal (White & Westervelt 2017). In White’s view ‘protest is broken, and the people know it worldwide’ (2016: 37). The basis to assert this is that a considerable number of people protesting on the street is not guaranteed that social change will happen since ‘[t]he [government officials] don’t have to listen anymore!” (White & Westervelt 2017). Success, then, entails revolutionary change; namely ‘[t]aking control of one’s government [sovereignty], [and] changing the way power functions’ (White & Westervelt 2017). Seeing in this light, the Occupy Movement, for White, was a constructive failure; namely it taught us that ‘we don’t have to do it again’ (White 2016). Thus, while #Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of memes to spread a movement quickly, shift the terms of the political debate and train a new generation of activists, the movement terribly failed at ending the influence of money in democracy, which was its original goal (White 2016: 26). What we need instead, then, is that ‘one’s right to legal redress be recognized’ (White 2016: 65). In other words, the task for historically oppressed groups is to gain sovereignty. But is sovereignty the solution? Contrary to White’s views on protest, the members of Colectivo Solecito suggest that collective organizations constitute the only alternative to finding answers about what happened to those women and men who went missing in Mexico, even if finding their loved ones means locating their dead bodies inside a mass grave. Collective organization is also the only real alternative that they have to rescue their loved ones from oblivion and potential criminalization by the Mexican state. The first step to redressing a social injury begins with the acknowledgement that a wrong was indeed committed, which will never happen as long as the victims remain ‘disappeared’. While protesters find it increasingly harder to attain their goal of finding their relatives alive, it would be wrong to suggest that retaking sovereignty is a better solution to the ills of the world without critically scrutinizing the meaning of sovereignty. As this chapter has shown, a differential approach to governing the political body lies at the founding moment of sovereign power. Contrary to this, the mothers of the disappeared enact a different kind of contract, one that does not seek to create a higher authority with the mandate to exert punishment. Instead, the maternal contract consists of a pact/promise that the mothers make to one another to reaffirm their commitment to take responsibility for the victims of sovereign violence and to defend their rights in the face of sovereign encroachment. This contract begins from the premise that individuals are injurable. To fix this, they need love, care and nurture. The maternal contract inaugurates a demand to care, to see other people’s pain and to do what it takes to remedy it. This call to care might as well provide the guidelines to begin imagining an integral remedy to differential sovereignty.

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Notes 1 Existing records suggest that the number of disappeared persons in Veracruz is about 2,600 (Villegas 2017a). 2 In Spanish, the word ‘sun’ means ‘sol’. Solecito can be translated to the English language as ‘little sun’. 3 According to New York Times journalist Paulina Villegas, the men who approached the marching mothers identified themselves as members of the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) (Villegas 2017a). 4 Author’s translation. The exact citation in Spanish reads: ‘El estado nos ha condenado a escarbar la tierra con nuestras propias unas para encontrar a nuestros desaparecidos.’ 5 Author’s translation. Hidalgo Rea’s statement in Spanish reads: ‘Ya somos más de 300 colectivos en toda la República mexicana de familiares con personas desaparecidas. Hemos hecho organizaciones civiles; no somos daños colaterales, Margarita: nosotros les llamamos hijos. Este es Roy, Roy ha sido desaparecido desde el 11 de enero del 2011, cuando tu marido sacó a las calles al Ejercito y nos dejó en una Guerra’ (Hidalgo Rea 2018). 6 All remarks from Calderón are the author’s translation.

References Ahmed, A. (2017), ‘In Mexico, Not Dead, Not Alive. Just Gone’, The New York Times. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/americas/ mexico-drug-war-dead.html (accessed 6 September 2019) Anzaldua, G. and Keating, A. (2015), Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise), Durham: Duke University Press. Aristegui noticias (2017), ‘La Fosa más Grande de México’ Redaccion AN. 15 March. Aristegui noticias (2018), ‘Programa Completo and Instituciones delincuenciales en Mexico dificultan busqueda de mi hijo despararecido: Guadalupe Aguilar’. Available online: https://aristeguinoticias.com/1005/mexico/institucionesdelincuenciales-en-mexico-dificultan-busqueda-de-mi-hijo-desaparecidoguadalupe-aguilar/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Avila Perez, E. (2017), ‘ONG que busca desaparecidos y Fiscal de Veracruz Chocan en Twitter,’ El Universal. 14 March. Available online: http://www.eluniversal. com.mx/articulo/estados/2017/03/14/ong-que-busca-desaparecidos-y-fiscal-deveracruz-chocan-en-twitter (accessed 6 September 2019) Azoulay, A. (2015), ‘What Are Human Rights?’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35 (1): 8–20. Azoulay, A. (2017), ‘The Imperial Condition of Photography in Palestine: Archive, Looting and the Figure of the Infiltrator’, Visual Anthropology Review, 33 (1): 5–17.

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Bargu, B. (2014), ‘Sovereignty as Erasure: Rethinking Enforced Disappearances,’ Qui Parle, 23 (1) (Fall/Winter 2014): 35–75. Bolaño, R. and Wimmer, N. ([2004, 2009] 2013), 2666. A Novel, New York City, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bonilla, R. and Pedroza, J.R. (2009), La carta, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. Available online: http://www.cultureunplugged.com/ documentary/watch-online/filmedia/play/2859/La-Carta (accessed 6 September 2019) Butler, J. (2015), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calderón, F. (2006), ‘Presidente Calderón: Discurso completo en el auditorio’, El Universal Newspaper. Available online: http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/ notas/391513.html (accessed 6 September 2019) Calderón, F. (2007), ‘Presidencia de la Republica’. Available online: http://calderon. presidencia.gob.mx/2006/12/anuncio-sobre-la-operacion-conjunta-michoacan/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Calderón, F. (2011), ‘The Complete Interview with President Felipe Calderón in Spanish (La Entrevista Completa en Espanol),’ The New York Times. 17 October. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/world/ americas/Calderón-transcript-in-spanish.html (accessed 6 September 2019) Cocks, J. (2014), On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions, New York City, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Feitlowitz, M. (2011), A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Herrera, Y. (2015), ‘El sentido de la omisión. Sobre la impunidad en el México contemporáneo’, Politica Comun. Volume 7. Available online: https://quod. lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0007.005?view=text;rgn=main (accessed 6 September 2019) Hidalgo Rea, I.L. (2018), ‘Tu esposo nos destrozó la vida y no moviste ni una uña’, le dicen a Margarita Zavala. La Opinion. Available online: https://laopinion. com/2018/04/18/tu-esposo-nos-destrozo-la-vida-y-no-moviste-ni-una-una-ledicen-a-margarita-zavala/ (accessed 6 September 2019) Hope, A. (2017), ‘Lo que Dicen las Fosas Clandestinas,’ Diario El Universal. 20 March. Available online: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/entrada-de-opinion/ columna/alejandro-hope/nacion/2017/03/20/lo-que-dicen-las-fosas-clandestinas (accessed 6 September 2019) McCormick (2018), ‘The Act of Disappearing in Mexico,’ The Mexico Institute. 5 May, Wilson Center. Paley, D. (2014), Drug War Capitalism, Chico, US: AK Press. Paley, D. (2015), ‘Ayotzinapa, Paradigm of the War on Drugs in Mexico’, Chico, USA: AK Press. Paley, D. (2017), ‘Grassroots Action Confronts Impunity Three Years after Ayotzinapa’, NECLA. September. Available online: https://nacla.org/ news/2017/09/26/grassroots-action-confronts-impunity-three-years-afterayotzinapa (accessed 6 September 2019) Penrose, M.M. (1999), Impunity: Inertia, Inaction, and Invalidity; a Literature Review, Boston University International Law Journal, 17 (2): 269–309.

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19 On the Concept of Progress Olivia Guntarik

Those who are alive at any given time see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites those who are departed to the table. Benjamin 1983–84: 31. The reformation of consciousness lies solely in our waking the world … from its dream about itself. Benjamin ‘N’ 1983–84: 1, quoting Marx in a letter to Ruge Kreuzenach, September 1843.

I It is five o’clock in the morning here in Melbourne as I write and no longer raining outside. I write in the near-darkness in my living room while everyone sleeps. You must bear with me my harried conceptual sketches of another kind of future. For I do not believe in abstracts the way they must present a summary of the whole or presuppose a solution that must pass muster with servitude to endless references. The paper here might have been called ‘theses on the philosophy of revolution’ or perhaps more simply ‘why I fight’ or even ‘are we there yet?’ Written in the spirit of montage, it is sensitive to the literary and grounded through the work of philosopher Walter Benjamin and his treatment on the failures of Marxism and that eternal curiosity we love to call ‘history’.

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Reading this again so many months after first penning it, I realize I have broken more writing conventions, expressed ideas and time more obliquely through haiku, relied too heavily on other people’s judgement, and, when the novelty of judgement has exhausted me, have shamelessly resorted like a keen ventriloquist to my children’s wicked insights. These unapologetically inflect the pages (though my kids should not be held responsible for my occasional lapses into nostalgia and prophesy, my efforts to formulate a way to rethink a different kind of ‘progress’). All the while I have collapsed history into the everyday with no fixed address, no point of fixed connection. This is how my understanding of progress has come to arrive in the guise that it has – crossing lives and events across time and distance, mine and Walter’s, friends’ and family, and wider connections, near and far and closer to home. I explore questions about the political conscience and what it means to stand as allies in solidarity. I describe a part of me that is no longer and a future context into which we might travel in our dreams.

II Here I sit in the open plan office that is my shared workspace. It is almost five in the afternoon and I am waiting for the rain to ease. Would you have known, Walter, that it always rains in Melbourne? You once said that every city is beautiful, that no period is in decline, that language helps us see this (Benjamin 1983–84: 2 [N1, 6]). The weather can turn us into ourselves. More and more, it means that the shared office space becomes a time of shared commitments, charging politically the everyday, making way for a different kind of promise, a new Remembrance Day. I live in a part of the world where violent memories lead us to disremember, where Aboriginal elders talk about shared country, sharing stories, a shared vision (Sonn et al. 2014; Wierenga 1999). And that this history to share is complex, ‘deserves great attention then to be consumed in the generalist approach that always portrays us as innocent victims who had no control over our destiny … I caution you to take care and responsibility in engaging in representing our culture and history’ (Briggs 2019). And so it is that elder of the Boon wurrung people N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs brings the past into the present in ways that invite us to act on history symbolically, politically, relationally. For culture and history is never one thing – it changes and can in turn alter who we are, who we become – and I know this to be true just as I know how elusive life can be as I write this on slippery ground, as more universities begin to eliminate office space, at the same time allowing space for open plan working – all for the sake of generating ‘productivity’ and interdisciplinary alignment. We talk of ‘strategy’, ‘industry engagement’ and ‘impact’. It is a vernacular we are increasingly forced to employ to mark our difference

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along the lofty rungs of the career ladder for professional distinction. Along with this, there is a focus on ‘vocation’, of producing ‘work ready’ graduates. Along with this, there is an erosion of the humanities, a critical engagement with its value in education. Time collapses beneath us. Progress occurs and yet the debris accumulates at our feet. Walter, I get it when you whisper we need to feel the caress of the past, its ‘secret index’, its visceral heat, and of course there is a secret agreement between past and present generations, yet the past looms up with only silent promises. All this is a first world problem after all. All this vernacular may as well be ruins!

III A (major) point: Everything about this environment necessitates resistance. I wrote that on a day I can’t remember (I think I was shopping for ideas, hoping to shore up a revolutionary childhood). Because of how cold it was outside this particular day, we were driven indoors, forced to play board games and paint pictures instead. My daughter drew an image depicting my activities in what appeared to be me at the height of fashion. She called it ‘Mummy, on a shopping spree’. A (minor) method: Here, I present excerpts borrowing from the Masters of Method (Benjamin 2003; Eliot 1943; Marx 1850), to highlight some ideas I have been toying with around Praxis. This could be understood as a philosophical and spatial view of the revolutionary commitment and imagination. Time as present. Time as future. Time to see how history might be engaged with, as Method, in order to move beyond viewing time as linear: time/past that is irredeemable; or time /future that is yet unattainable. Each excerpt offers a little light on how the thorny horns of a revolutionary impulse connect and interlock; how time can be thought of simultaneously as part of a contemporary moment and as part of Deep Time

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(Occupy, Indignados, Arab Spring, Protests of 1968, the workers’ struggle and their visions for an afterlife, a better life, Napoleonic Wars, the Third Empire, French Revolution, Indigenous Australian sovereignty, indigenous struggles worldwide, the Malaysian uprising, #MeToo). Neither argument nor explanation of human suffering, you could read this in tandem with Benjamin’s essay ‘On the concept of history’, for each numeric mimics the essay’s form and acts as a set of reflections on this text, my playful rumination on the concept of progress. In another time and place, this might be read as recorded field notes from a small notebook I once owned documenting the progress of classes or how to stand with the underclass.

IV The summer folds into autumn, the flowers in my garden die away, the leaves rain down on us as the trees turn gold and yellow, and my thoughts turn to the idea of a Shared History once again and the notion of Revolutionary Time. What I mean to talk about is race relations in a global context when racial politics is under siege again. Strange how that sounds but it’s a familiar narrative to me because I’ve lived across two continents: in the beautiful Oceanic sub-region known as Australasia, and on a tiny parcel of wilderness that forms part of the complex tapestry that is my ancestral genealogy and that constitutes the massive land mass of Asia. Across these two homelands racial politics dominates the physical and political space so thoroughly it’s hard to escape. This is why Malaysia continues to haunt my response to racial issues; acts as a site of enduring contestation. The year 1969 was a pivotal year and, even though I was not there to tell you ‘how it was’, at some stage down the track I read about the riots in the papers and recognized my calling. The day the riots erupted was the day a part of the world stood still, a day that blood soaked the streets and ambushed the innocence of the people. Yet even if I was a part of that history, I know I would not have been looking at the growing death-stains on the ground, I would have envisioned an Armageddon sky. I might have come to imagine that sky as part of a story that would be drained of its life force, eclipsing the kinds of narrative cinematographies that high-tech multisensory theatres would never be able to evoke. I don’t know that I can ever say that I would have been one of the protesters to take to the streets that day and survived to tell the tale. I might have been one of the bodies bleeding to death on the street. I was not born in 1969 but years later in the seventies. By then, the riots had well and truly infiltrated the collective conscience of Malaysian society, coding the ways in which the country would come to know race relations

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into the future and creeping secretly through people’s everyday lives like a terrorist. Inconspicuous, malevolent and full of rage. I was not born in the Capital. I was born in a small village in Malaysia’s eastern states of Borneo, a two-hour flight over the South China Sea, another five-hour journey through dusty tracks across a dishevelled wilderness interior to a road that peters out to a sleepy tropical backwater that I can rightfully claim as my birthplace. The oldest jungle/ people with nothing but dreams/ The river people.

V We live in a time of chaos, and if there was an Angel of History to tell us how it was, that angel would tell us that what we see today is really no different to what has gone before. To say this another way: chaos has no origin, for this moment is part of repercussive time, stretching back through history, and repeated. This constitutes our current State of Emergency. Only in danger/ with the forces of the dead, do we recognize. This truth of history. This is the danger: that celebration outweighs, fails the departed. We do not hear them/ the calling of remembrance/ forgotten battles.

VI The above revelation is not my own. I am indebted to Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), which he penned in a time of crisis, pursued by the Gestapo, fleeing across the Pyrenees to avoid capture by the border police. The same year he ‘committed suicide’, some accounts conclude in a flurry of dramatic plot twists. But I refuse this/ such words contain and restrict/ and offer little. We learn he had secured an American visa and was hoping to join Adorno and Horkheimer who had re-established the Frankfurt School in New York.

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We know Benjamin never made the border crossing. His last night was spent in a hotel in Spain. He may have been murdered. This we do not know. All for the sake of a better future we change the past. The same way we use the past merely to create Heroes for the Living.

VII Let’s smash to pieces this continuum of history so that our memories can become a place of encounter through language, where we pose many more questions than we are able to seek answers for. From where we make connections that may sometimes reflect the bizarre, fleeting or irrelevant features of everyday life. From where my own experiences carry me and from where I must follow the narrative threads. So for now, my experience takes me back to a place where the past matters in my mind. This is a room I share with others (Woolf 1957). A room that is my own – and from where I write to engage and make connections.

VIII How to write a history you’ve never been a part of, how to do it justice? If you see that a history is wrong, what can you do to right it? (Hurston 1942).

IX Progress is nothing but an illusion.

X A sense that there is no escape from this impoverished servitude, that we are always on the other side of winning, the working class are expected to revolt. But Walter reminds us that history is in the making and re-making, and of course, in the re-reading and re-telling (Benjamin 2015). How is it that the history of the oppressed gets lost? How is it that the past must take imagistic form for us to remember? Vintage images, both reckoning and wrestling, with a future time. Students punching the air, fists clenched, teeth gritted. Is this another time? A ‘historic moment’ again? But, of course, I am suspicious. This is already a different time and place of which I am no

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longer a part. This is already a different country. I have travelled far. I am suddenly in the United States. The time of the Civil Rights Movement and, of course, the pre–social media days when stories travelled differently. What inspired those protests? What inspired people’s racial hatred then? Did they stage sit-ins and freedom rides in those days? Did the protesters perform ‘wade-ins’ into segregated swimming pools like they had in North America during the sixties? Did they enact ‘pray-ins’ in segregated churches like they had in white-only churches or ‘sit-ins’ at all-white lunch counters as they did in North Carolina during the push for civil rights? Would I have been so defiant had I not been born too late? Would I have been part of the body count? Would I have waded into the pool?

XI The tropical heat, the steam rising, everything had to be boiled. It is sometime in the late nineties. A bright day. A penetrating sun. I was marching through the city without direction. There she is that girl that could be me and is no longer. She had spent long hours wading in the pool on the rooftop of the Renaissance Hotel, gazing longingly into the shimmering optical illusion of Kuala Lumpur’s smoggy skyline. She was back in Malaysia hunting for work, having arrived as a new graduate from Australia. She would sneak into any number of the rooftop pools in those days having evaded the security guard who would be on the lookout for suspicious interlopers masquerading as hotel guests. As a new graduate and returning after a long stint of almost twenty years away, she was trying to find her own set of feet, her calling. Living in Malaysia at a time when the country was rapidly industrializing was a baffling time for a wide-eyed, if somewhat curious, twenty-something stumbling like a blind Bambi into this teeming concrete jungle, splaying its tentacles of progress like a crazy octopus. Increasingly, life in the Capital looked suspiciously like a racial vortex of bodies marking themselves out and being marked themselves. The first body she almost collapsed over was tiny and child-like propelling himself with a flimsy skateboard across an urban chaos that was unbending it in its skyward evolution. His near-naked body had been either charred by the sun or tarnished by the city’s tar, gallons of which would spew onto the streets to claim new walkways, new roads, new futures. In this whirlpool of development and relentless progress, skyscrapers grew and grew. The sky bleached by a constant hovering presence as smoke-haze from the forest fires in Indonesia flooded the air and crept undetected into the ventilation systems of the Central District. This smoke screen created an ongoing rift between two countries living and always tussling with one another, side by side. The old quarters of the Capital were quickly dismantled to be replaced by a new

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cityscape mirage. Someone would get distracted by a new land purchase; the tussle would stop and start again, the conveyor belt kept moving. Moving saved her in those days as she wandered through the urban sprawl. It was easier to pound the pathways or to disappear down unused back alleys than to squeeze onto a sweltering overcrowded bus only to risk getting stuck in a traffic jam after a tropical deluge. If there was a downpour she could easily shelter in a passageway to escape the furious commotion of honking cars, buses and motorcycles, the unremitting road rage that would stockpile on the streets. She worked close to the Twin skyscrapers, which was growing like a giant wooden Lego Land. From time to time, she would circle this monstrosity, marvelling at its towering height and dominance as it grew taller and taller. One day, looking up, it struck her that she could no longer see its corkscrew peak. Under its shadow, the pillars’ spiralling presence dwarfed her, the sky erased of all its edges.

XII The beggar. A body she almost stumbled over on the street was neither an illusion nor beautiful. He was pushing his way towards her now, on a makeshift skateboard, along the uneven ground pockmarked with endless gaping holes. His legs were shrunken black knobs gripping the board’s edges like he was a part of his own freight. Her body was shaken to the core with culture shock and homesickness. The pool sneak-ins kept these feelings at bay, though could not be too regular as a security guard would grow suspect and use his uniform as a way to wage a power trip. If she was taken for a trespasser, she’d be promptly frog marched to the exit as the guard served her a good whip lashing of words about her missing name on the System. She was too gutless to make a stand but saw herself growing hysterical, staggering to the door dripping and practically naked. But the pool’s empty! At which point, her protests fell on deaf ears and she would be shoved into some nondescript marble foyer only to be stared down by wealthy hotel guests sniggering at her as the water pooled around her feet.

XIII Who was it that said that every culture carries its own form of violence? (Geertz 2000). To undo this: each violation for the oppressed underclass

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is seen from their eyes. From this vantage point we envision regression its twinned redemption Voices intervene an archival history lifting time.1

XIV Back in Melbourne after a long time away, it is still raining. There is a lot of talk about history, ongoing debates about how young people develop a sense of political consciousness. There are more echoes of a distant place where we might glimpse a vision of the future. And so, I am obliged to return to the subject at hand, that cinematic moment of discovery and resistance, which is also for me about race relations in Aboriginal Australia where I live. I’d been living a Malaysian mirage, I return to an open office space, a room that is my own, and this room contains a vantage point from which I can peek outside through an open window to which no-one else has access. This is my voice and position, narrated from the standpoint of a political perspective that is coloured by my natal and adopted homelands. Two points on my moral compass upon which I have grafted my dreams.

XV On this day I speak. On this day, I attend the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival, held at the Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square in CBD Melbourne. How to represent yourself as true ally? It could be any day. The sun beats through the clouds. Oh! How this city is full of contradictions! The panel theme is Where to from #MeToo. I am joined by other women. The discussion criss-crosses multiple enquiry lines; some share their experiences of working with disenfranchised and disadvantaged youth. We talk about what it means to identify as marginalized, transgendered, queer, a person of colour, and the ways in which our identities clash, overlap and frisson with multicultural identities, Indigenous identities, political, new and emerging identities. What is this … for those who have no literacy or place/position/perspective from which to speak? What is this … to consider how safe is space, for no space is ever really safe? How far will we go? Why do we stop dreaming? How to uplift the voices of others without taking over, moulding the will or becoming the same voice? There has to be a willingness to engage with the voices of others across our differences, even if it means to disagree. Connecting with our points of difference allows us to talk through those differences and move

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forward, our sights set on common goals. This comes close to what I would call a shared purpose in difference or a sense of togetherness apart.

XVI On this day I see. Walter, a sharp image of you emerges. Your words meant something to the People. Your Theses, read by refugees in Lisbon awaiting the boat that would guarantee their safe passage out of Nazi occupation, held a captive audience (Beiner 1984: 431). They read your words aloud. I imagine their faces, their sense of trepidation, can hear their voice in yours. What are they thinking? How is it that we came to be here? How is it that these words can change who we are? How words themselves can change the world? This is an image that overlaps with the present. At the #MeToo film festival, I hear a woman in the audience with the same probing questions. ‘How do I get to where you are if I want to be a human rights campaigner? What sort of working history do you need to have to get to where you are right now?’ I want to barge in at that point and holler: ‘Simple is the best. Start with the immediate. Your local issues’, from the top of my imagined mountain, full of clenched fists and gritted teeth, but realized the question was not for me. The response from another panellist was delivered with unflinching gravitas about the politics of being a refugee, on reciprocity and giving back to a community that means something to you. In that instance, I saw my thoughts swimming with words impossible to capture on the page or through my voice. I stayed silent, plunging into my own memory pool. We can be speaking the same truths, from the same page, from different vantage points, the same room. We know at this point in history that the #MeToo movement contains a backstory. One that began with the work of Tarana Burke’s grassroots movement, having created an organization to support the victims of sexual assault long before anyone knew what a hashtag was. Long before some chump Hollywood actress hijacked that same hashtag and made it glamorous. Seemingly. At this point in history, Indigenous voices are calling out racial intolerance, speaking up and back in claiming the right to assert a position on country whose sovereignty was never ceded (Foley 2014). The assertions are unrelenting. ‘Warm to the justice of our plea’, poet-activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1970) urges in her poem ‘An Appeal’. William Cooper’s 1937 petition and personal letter to King George V implores: ‘We do plead for one controlling authority, the Commonwealth and request that all aboriginal interests be absolutely federalised. This will enable a continuous common policy of uplift’ (in Markus 1983: 54). And in Australia’s Parliament House, the Barunga Statement has been on permanent exhibition since 1991, to act

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as an ongoing reminder of the responsibilities of Australians to Indigenous land and social justice rights, despite an unfulfilled promised treaty. Galarrwuy Yunupingu (1988), who presented the statement to then Prime Minister the late Bob Hawke in 1988, drew attention to the importance of standing together and of what it means to do so as part of a shared and ongoing commitment: ‘the notice that we will present to the Prime Minister now will remind, not only Bob Hawke, but the next one after him and the next one after him and we can count that for another twenty to a hundred years. And after and more after and forever.’

XVII On this day I wait, realizing there is no time but seeing we’ve come to a standstill. It’s impossible to move. You must wait in order to move forward. Time rushes past! There they stand waiting, the automaton working in overdrive, their gathering thoughts. I see an opening in the crossfire and rush forward. I’m not waiting around for the privileged to make their mark; for they will never arrive, too busy as they are with their own sense of progress. The time has come, and there’s no time to pay attention to or to educate well-meaning, but misguided, allies. People won’t understand what exclusion is until they’ve been excluded. So long as there is a bourgeoisie there is an underclass. So who to fight for and how? In this panorama of the dead, with so many mediatized spaces of death and dying? My friend, a poet philosopher, comes to the rescue: ‘No-one champions the unmarked body’ (Tata 2008). And I’m with him. He was referring to the beggar skating past me with all the unbridled entitlement of a cripple who knew his narrative payday was up and whose own body had reduced him to the lowest ranks of the social strata. This is a body that helps us mark out our difference. In his presence, time becomes a history that cannot be compressed or allowed to repeat itself.

XVIII On this day I write. It is a day like any other. I am at my workspace. People are milling around, a constant flow, my colleagues, students, speakers, teachers, visitors and others, coming and going, stopping to talk. It is at these times that I realize that human connections matter. But today, the flow of movement of people and conversation suddenly stops. Today, as quickly as the crowd appears it disappears. Now there’s not a soul to be seen and my whole floor acquires a silence, thinking time. Time again to slow down.

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Reflect. My thoughts percolate and bubble over like a cauldron. I fire up the hotplate, brew a potion of magic and cast a spell, wait for the vessel to flood with water. Not all memories are retrievable. Not all histories can be silenced. I sense again how we are rarely drawn to memories where the struggles are the most acute where the grievances are least likely to draw the attention of the masses. Human fallibility, as Ricœur (1986) sees it, is a practical-historical problem. We do not spend our time long enough listening or learn from our own mistakes. There’s too much to talk and fight about. If only we would listen fully! How to do so with the whole body and mind without being compelled with questions, in order that we act with purpose, reason, the full presence of mind. To listen with the whole bearing of a story carrying the weight of history on her heels, feeling the aural narrative grit between our toes, holding and withholding knowledge in forms that deliver the urgency of the demand. This is a balancing trick, testimony and silent witnessing; one where ignorance and wisdom are held to scrutiny in the light; we wait for the wisest words to arrive (Agamben 2004). We accept the words, may not arrive at all soon enough. Progress is a struggle without end. Questions remain. All the while … still … the sense of loss is disempowering. The changing relationship I have with my first homeland feels like a loss, a shedding of skin. This is a place which continues to exert a powerful hold, despite having left so long ago. I wonder: How can one belong to a place, to a homeland that can all at once own and dispossess you? ~

A: The bridge Time is not our friend/ You can be called to speak up/ Where are you standing? The sense of displacement leads us to new questions about where our sense of place is in all of this. I don’t know that there can be any half-baked excuses about shirking who you are and what space is yours or mine. I can’t explain how people’s backgrounds shape the individuals they become, how history teaches you how to think, how to be, how to act, how to learn to begin again. I don’t know that I ever really understood what it meant to ‘walk together’ with thousands of other marchers as a twenty-something in the Reconciliation March. Another time, another place. The turn of the

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Millennium. We crossed the bridge. Over the Yarra River, one that I now know as Birrarung Marr, the river of mists. The land where the bridge stands is known to the connected country of Wirundjeri and Boon wurrung traditional owners as an ever-flow and meeting place, whose course changed direction over time. This change now symbolizes something for me which is reimagined through the symbol of the bridge. A symbolism/ the full import of meaning/ river, meeting ground. On this day I walk while acknowledging it takes a lot to listen when you’re on the bridge. We become overburdened by oppression, complacencies, indifference. We remind ourselves we need to stay connected to the people whom we love. This comes close to what Marx, alongside Engels (1845), called a Permanent Revolution – the working classes, on their onward leading march, overcome and win. ‘The forces spirituelles (Benjamin’s own translation into French) of the current struggle “rayonnent” [shine forth] into the distant past, into “la nuit des temps” [the mists – literally, the night – of time]. The past is lit by the light of today’s battles, by the sun rising in the firmament of history’ (Löwy & Turner 2005: 99). And as the sun rises, it helps that there are Allies who are prepared to push with us. This sustains us even as we watch other people come and go, for we are not lovingly gazing towards some idealized perfect future, but mobilizing a provocation in the now based on the need for a counter-revolution in Reformation. We need these moments of recognition, for the bridge to collapse, to know to rebuild, restore, recover and Dream.

B: The beach This is a dream that does not end. This is a summer that seems endless. Long hot days endure and already I long for sleep, a lush garden, a new wardrobe. I’ve grown sick of my hair always pulled back tight, the flip-flops on my feet. The mercury has swelled well above 40°C and the pool is bulging with too many moving bodies getting in the way. My daughters and I head for the beach. Such a short trip, yet their incessant question the same, drives me nuts and pushes every button known to God. The mother, her measured breath skipping a beat, is here supposed to hold it together but she breaks. Are we there yet? The children beg. And yes, finally, we are! Finally! And we arrive to a great drama unfolding at Half Moon Bay. A group of teens had swum out to a sunken shipwreck and are hysterical, their screams as they cling to the highest posts of the ship protruding like rickety sticks echo over the water. A lifeguard reveals someone had spotted a shark. ‘A rare

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sighting’, he claims, adding a cautionary note, ‘Watch your kids in the water, the sudden drops are deep.’ But I’m not looking at the water, I’m thinking: That shark was sure a lucky sucker. We have a clear view of the sky from our vantage point atop the hill. By the time we reach the foothill, we notice the edge of the path cutting into coastal growth. Old Man is waiting for us at the bottom, his feet planted firmly on the ground. He emerges from the water, drying off, waiting. I note the thick rolling Rs of his accent. ‘I left some water for you,’ and he gestures widely to the sea. We share a laugh. I chase my daughters to the water’s edge where we paddle in the shallows, our movements restricted by our fear of lurking sharks. The expansive bay/ tinged with red, reflects the sky/ a floating mirror.

Acknowledgements I thank my friends and colleagues Aramiha Harwood, Keran Sandhu, John Postill, Brigid Magner and Stayci Taylor for comments which helped to shape this work. I acknowledge my mentors and friends who continue to guide my thinking, especially Victoria Grieve-Williams and N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs. My gratitude to Mick Taussig, Michael Angelo Tata, Vicki Couzens and my father Steve Campbell, and in memory of my mother Molly Guntarik – all who have nurtured my interest in homeland politics.

Notes 1 Benjamin sees Revolutionary Time as the point in which the process of historical evolution is interrupted, leading to imminent and inevitable catastrophe (Löwy & Turner 2005: 32). Salvage culture offers a critical departure point that can inform political practice and function to reclaim what has been lost in an environment where even language has suffered a catastrophe. Benjamin describes: ‘an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows

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toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm’ (Benjamin 2003: 392). What we call progress is a one-sided story, which is why in One Way Street Benjamin (2016 [1928]: 49) warns that s/he ‘who cannot take sides, should keep silent’. Silence is necessary, allows space for pause and reflection; let’s hope it’s only momentary. For in silence we/may begin to act with and/progress with purpose.

References Agamben, G. (2004), The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beiner, R. (1984), ‘Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History’, Political Theory, 12 (3): 423–34. Benjamin, W. (1983--84), N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress], The Philosophical Forum, 15 (1–2): 1–39. Benjamin, W. (2003), ‘On the Concept of History’, in H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings Volume 4 (1938–40), trans. E. Jephcott et al., 389–400, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (2015), On Photography, E. Leslie (ed), Glasgow: Bell and Bain. Benjamin, W. (2016 [1928]), One-Way Street, M.W. Jennings (ed), trans. E. Jephcott, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Briggs, C. (N’Arweet) (2019), ‘Yuiendj Boon Wurrung (Boon Wurrung knowledge): A Journey of Old Knowledge and Innovative Forms for Assisting Indigenous Youth to Engage with Contemporary Indigenous Cultures and Knowledge’, PhD diss., RMIT University School of Media and Communication, Melbourne. Eliot, T.S. (1943), Four Quartets, San Diego: Harcourt. Engels, F. (1845), ‘Critical Battle against the French Revolution Chapter VI, part 3’, in trans. R. Dixon and C. Dutts (1956), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, Frankfurt am Main: Lowenthal. Foley, Gary with response by Tony Birch (2014), Tangled Up in Black: A Journey through Education and History (first edition), Melbourne: Flinders Lane, Victoria Surplus Pty Ltd. in cooperation with the University of Melbourne. Geertz, C. (2000), ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in L. Crothers and C. Lockhart (eds), Culture and Politics, 175–201, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hurston, Z.N. (1942), Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, New York: HarperCollins. Löwy, M. and Turner, C. (2005), Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, London & New York: Verso. Markus, A. (1983), ‘William Cooper and the 1937 Petition to the King’, Aboriginal History, 7 (1): 46–60. Marx, K. (1850), with F. Engels, ‘Address to the Central Committee to the Communist League, London’. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm (accessed 5 April 2019).

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Noonuccal, O. (1970), My People: A Kath Walker Collection, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. Ricœur, P. (1986), Fallible Man, revised trans. C.A. Kelbley, New York: Fordham University Press. Sonn, C.C., Quayle, A.F., Mackenzie, C. and Law, S.F. (2014), ‘Negotiating Belonging in Australia through Storytelling and Encounter’, Identities, 21 (5): 551–69, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2014.902376. Tata, M.A. (2008), ‘Shopping, Dropping, Never Stopping: One Shopping Memoir’, in T.E. Tunc and A.A. Babic (eds), The Globetrotting Shopaholic: Consumer Spaces, Products, and Their Cultural Places, 167–80, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Wierenga, A. (1999), ‘Imagined Trajectories: Local Culture and Social Identity’, in R. White (ed), Australian Youth Subcultures: On the Margins and in the Mainstream, 189–99, Hobart: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies. Woolf, V. (1957), ‘A Room of One’s Own’, 1929. Selected Works of Virginia Woolf, 557–630, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Yunupingu, G. (1988), ‘The Barunga Statement’, AIATSIS. Available online: https:// aiatsis.gov.au/barunga-statement (accessed 16 July 2019).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jose Luis Benavides is a queer Latinx artist, film-maker and educator. He held his first solo show at Terremoto in Mexico City. He has presented in various galleries and venues in Chicago, including Threewalls, Comfort Station, American Studies Association conference, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Block Party and the Chicago Archives + Artists Festival. His work has also shown at The Overlook Place, The Nightingale and Links Hall as part of festivals, including 2nd Floor Rear Festival and S2F2: Scored Silent Film Festival. He has performed under the moniker luigi and as himself at 65GRAND, Elastic Arts, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and Terrain Biennial. He received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, United States, in 2017. Wesley R. Bishop is Assistant Professor of American History at Marian University in Indianapolis, United States. His research interests focus on social movements, labour history and the impact of protest on popular thought and culture. He is currently working on a book about Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact populist protest had on American politics. Esther Figueroa is a Jamaican independent film-maker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty-five years of media productions, including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her films give voice to those outside of mainstream media, focus on the environment, social injustice, community empowerment and perpetuating indigenous cultures. They include Jamaica for Sale (2009), the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her latest documentary Fly Me to the Moon (2019) is about the role of aluminium in the modern world and the centrality of the Caribbean to that modernity. Her environmental novel Limbo (2014) was finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards for multicultural fiction. Adjunct Professor at RMIT University Victoria Grieve Williams is an Aboriginal person, Warraimaay from the mid-north coast of New South Wales in Australia. She is an historian engaged in intersectionality, who also works in interdisciplinary ways to progress critical Indigenous theory.

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She has established Aboriginal philosophy as the baseline for Indigenous knowledge production in her highly accessed and cited book Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal philosophy – the Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing (2009). A recipient of three Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous grants, she has published extensively, including on race and gender in Australian, Aboriginal and transnational histories, environmental humanities, media studies and Aboriginal peoples’ relationship to the Australian state. Pallavi Guha is Assistant Professor of journalism and new media at Towson University, United States. She researches on anti-rape and sexual harassment activism on mass media and social media platforms; the role of gender in electoral campaign and media; and politics and social media. Guha has a PhD in journalism from the University of Maryland, and her academic background lies in the intersection of political science, international relations, communication, journalism and women’s studies. She has worked internationally for leading media organizations including BBC News and television, London; and the Times of India in the United Kingdom, India and the United States. Olivia Guntarik writes experimental ficto-criticism, engaging the relationship between people and place through literary techniques. She is editor of Narratives of Community: Museums and Ethnicity (MuseumsEtc) and co-editor with Michael Angelo Tata of ‘Convoluting the Dialectical Image’ on the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin (New Writing journal, Routledge). She is Associate Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches cultural studies, popular culture and new media. Nicholas M. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico Tech, United States. His primary research work centres on depictions of computer hackers in cultural texts and the intersections between digital media, software and culture. He is also a software developer for, and co-founder of, The Program Project, a digital humanities initiative at the University of Iowa working to chart the aesthetic and institutional influence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop by combining University of Iowa archival records and Workshop authors’ writing with data visualization tools and computerassisted literary analysis methods. Erica R. Meiners, a member of Chicago’s anti-PIC Teaching Collective, Critical Resistance and Teachers Against Militarized Education, is Professor of Education and Gender and Women’s Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, United States. Mina Momeni is a sessional lecturer at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Department of

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Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber, Canada. She is a PhD candidate in the Communication and Culture Program at Ryerson and York University. Her research focuses on digital media, visual culture, philosophy of technology and political activism. She is also an interdisciplinary artist, and her artwork explores the relationship between ancient culture, symbology, monuments and memories. Elva F. Orozco Mendoza is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Christian University. Her research interests include gender violence, protest politics and critical approaches to state sovereignty. Her recent publications include: ‘Feminicide and the Funeralization of the City: On Thing Agency and Protest Politics,’ in Theory and Event and ‘Las Madres de Chihuahua: Maternal Activism, Public Disclosure and the Politics of Visibility,’ in New Political Science. Sarah Padilla received her MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently lives in Arkansas, United States. Therese Quinn is Director of Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she explores education, the arts and cultural institutions as sites of justice-work in books, including Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons (with Lisa Hochtritt and John Ploof) and articles with QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, the Journal of Museum Education, the Abolitionist: A Publication of Critical Resistance, the Monthly Review, Curriculum Inquiry and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Annette M. Rodríguez is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina in the Department of American Studies, United States. Her research focuses on performative violence, white supremacy and the USMexico borderlands. She earned the Catherine Prelinger Award from the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the American Studies Association Committee on Gender and Sexuality selected Rodríguez for the annual Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award. Her publications include ‘Antigone’s Refusal: Mexican Women’s Reponses to Lynching in the Southwest’, The Journal of South Texas, spring 2018; and ‘Unbelonging: A History of Bodies’, in Reshaping Women’s History: Voices of Nontraditional Historians (University of Illinois Press). Marco Romagna is Researcher for the Centre of Expertise Cyber Security, and lecturer in ‘Legal and criminological aspects of cyber security’ at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. He is an external PhD candidate at Leiden University with a project on ‘Hacktivism: Honorable Cause and/or Serious Threat?’ Marco holds an LLM in Laws (Trento

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University) and an MA in Global Criminology (Utrecht University). Besides hacktivism and cybersecurity, he has a research interest in cybercrime, criminology and related criminal law. Marco follows new developments in technology, especially those linked with legal challenges. Ana Stevenson is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research about women’s movements in the United States, Australia and South Africa appears in journals such as Cultural & Social History, Safundi, Women’s History Review, Camera Obscura and the Pacific Historical Review. Ana co-founded The Suffrage Postcard Project, a digital humanities initiative dedicated to woman suffrage postcards from the United States and Britain, with Kristin Allukian. Catherine Strong is Senior Lecturer in the Music Industry program at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Among her publications are Grunge: Music and Memory (2011), Death and the Rock Star (2015, edited with Barbara Lebrun) and The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018, edited with Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon). Her research deals with various aspects of memory, nostalgia and gender in rock music, popular culture and the media. She is currently Chair of IASPM-ANZ (International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Australia/New Zealand) and co-editor of Popular Music History journal. Karoline Summerville is a doctoral student in the Organizational Science program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States. Before pursuing her doctorate, Karoline received her MA in Communication from Wake Forest University. She completed her BA in Communication with a concentration in Journalism and Creative Writing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of intercultural relationships, technology and conflict in the society and the workplace. Specifically, Karoline’s research aims to examine how technology shifts or reinforces existing power dynamics, especially in situations involving cross-cultural conflict. Grace Taylor received her MA in Communication from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and is a media and communications professional in the higher education sector. Verity Trott is Lecturer in digital media research at Monash University. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, in which she examined the organizational practices of feminist activism in the digital age. Her published works focus on indigenous women’s use of social media, everyday

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political talk online and rape culture in popular media. Her current projects explore digital feminist action, online harassment and toxic masculinity, and feminism in popular culture. Her teaching and research practices involve developing and implementing a range of computational methods for analysing the political, cultural and social dimensions of digital media technologies. Matthew Yasuoka, a multiple-year Hawai’i State Champion in debate and extemporaneous speaking, completed an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies in 2017 with a thesis titled ‘Hawaii/Hawai’i: Space, Alterity and the Settler Imaginary’. A native Hawaiian, Matthew began law studies at Loyola University School (United States) in fall 2017, and plans to provide legal advocacy for indigenous struggles.

INDEX

Aboriginal actors 101 Aboriginal and Islander Message (AIM) 24 Aboriginal deaths in custody 2–4, 16 n.5 Aboriginal media activism colonization 20 contemporary social media 28–32 historical legacy 21–2 music and Black Power 24–8 resilience and resistance 20 in Tent Embassy era 23–4 Aboriginal protests 1, 6 Aborigines Advancement League (AAL) 23 activism. see also Aboriginal media activism alt-right 189–200 art and artefacts 9–10 campaign 8 data 239 digital 60, 242 diversity 7 evolution 8 feminist (see feminist activism) histories and inequalities 8 online (see online activism) platforms for 182 refugee 88 social justice and 177 and social media 163 unconventional forms of 153 n.3 women’s forms 142 acts of transfer 224, 228 Addams, Jane 43 affordances, theory 175–6 African Americans Castile, death of 255–8

contributions 52, 55 King, death of 253–5 lynching (United States) 249–50 public memory 247 socialization 27 suffrage 54 visual narratives 248–9 women’s print culture 56, 58 afterlife of slavery 233 Agha-Soltan, Neda 179–80 Allen, James 249 Allhands, James Lewellyn 89 n.4 alt-right activist group 189 alternative media 191–2 defining 190–1 research focus 193–200 rhetoric of fear 192–3 Amazon’s Snowmobile program 239 American equality 13 American Indian Movement (AIM) 27 American Railway Union (ARU) 44 Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman) 39 Anderson, Michael Ghillar 22 Anderson, Paul 196 Anonymous and LulzSec Hector Monsegur 65 Anthony, Susan B. 54 anti-Japanese propaganda 85 anti-Mexican violence 82–3, 85, 87 Arab Spring 72, 206, 280 new media (see Gulf and Arab Spring, new media) post–Arab Spring (see post–Arab Spring Bahrain) Assman, Aleida 223 Athanasiou, Athena 240 Atwood, Margaret 136

INDEX

The Australian 23 Australian Aboriginal Fellowship (AAF) 23 Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA) 23 Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) 212–13 Azoulay, Ariella 266 Bagley, Sarah 53 Baird, Alby 100 Barlow, John Perry 130 Beaumont, Peter 137 n.7 Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (Gilbert) 27 Bellear, Sol 27 Bendigo Action Coalition 190, 193 demonstrations 193, 195 Benjamin, Walter 13, 277–8, 290 n.1, 291 n.1 Theses on the Philosophy of History 281 Bennett, W. L. 203, 205, 209 Bhabha, Homi 154 n.5 Bilge, Sirma 60 Birch, Tony 2 Bishop, Wesley R. 37 Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 59 Black Arm Band 2 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins) 16 n.7 Black Lives Matter movement 136, 247 Black News Service 24 Black onlookers 250 Black Panther movement 26 Black Panther Party (BPP) 107 Black Power 24–8 movement 105–7 Blackwell, Henry B. 55 Blanc, Julien 204 Blankenship, L. 129–31 Bloomer, Amelia 53 Bolaño, Roberto 270 Boler, M. 206 Boney, Lloyd 1 Bourke, Stephanie 220, 229 n.1

299

Bourne, Randolph 46–7 Briggs, Carolyn 278, 290 Briggs, Jamie 209 Brim, Ivan 104 Brim, Toby 96 Brim, Willie 7, 9, 15, 25, 95, 101 Aboriginal music and dance 101–2 Black Power movement 105–7 and Buluwai people 97, 105 Bush Doctor 100 bushwhacking 103 Christian lifestyle 95 contemporaries 97 cultural and community programs 107 cultural custodian 102, 110 frontier violence 103 impact of reggae 98 Mantaka, band 96, 98, 100 Mona Mona mission 104–5 as poet-a-rhymer 99 reggae songs 98–9, 110–11 rock and roll artists 98 series of short videos 103 sons 109 stewardship 100 traditional life 104 visiting Jamaicans 109 Zennith, band 109 Briseno, Theodore 253 Brocklesby, Sara 211 Brown, Roosevelt 26 Brunner, John 133 Buchanan, Cheryl 24 Buendia, Jose Arcadia 148 The Bulletin 23 Burroughs, William S. 131, 153 n.1 Bush Doctor 100 Butler, Judith 233, 240, 263 Calderón, Felipe 267–8, 274 n.6 good citizens and dangerous criminals 268 security 268–9 War on Drugs 268 Calhoun, Craig 38 Cammaerts, B. 177 Carlson, Bronwyn 28

300

INDEX

Carr, C. T. 176 Cash, Wilbur 252 Castile, Philando 247 death of 255–8 cattle country 103 4Chan 135–6, 137 n.5 8Chan 9 Chandler, Elizabeth 52 Chappelle, Mattie 54 Child, Lydia Maria 53 Childs, Kevin 195–6 Chowdhury, A. 181 citizen journalism 256 Citizenfour (Poitras) 134 Civil Rights Movement 43, 56, 136, 258, 283 Claflin, Tennessee 55 Clarke, Allan 30 Cline, Ira 86 C.M.G. 53 Coal Miner’s Daughter (Lynn) 98 Cockpit Country (Jamaica) 113, 125 n.1 aluminium process 115–16 boundaries 119 campaign to save 124–5 CCSG and documentary production 116–19 environmental, historical and cultural legacy 114–15 forests 114 media and petitioning 122–4 media campaign and peaceful protest 119–21 waterways 114 Cockpit Country – Voices from Jamaica’s Heart 117, 119 Cockpit Country Is Our Home 118–19 Cockpit Country Protected Area (CCPA) 123 Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group (CCSG) 116, 122 Cocks, Joan 266 Colectivo Solecito 262–3, 265, 271, 273 Coleman, Ashley 98 Coleman, Gabriella 127 Collins, Patricia Hill 7, 14–15, 16 n.7, 60

Colquitt Act 82 The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (Sauter) 127 communication Aboriginals 22, 24 allusion and 131–3 criticism 41 digital 39, 128, 136 direct 176–8 and dissemination 262 dynamic interaction 179 feminist 59, 61 and information technology 231 modes of 57, 237 print forms 8 public and private 8 systems 177 technologies 12, 51, 142 tools 5, 10 UPF 196 Community Memory 128, 131–2 compassion fatigue, social problems 150 Connerton, Paul 224 constant visibility 237 Cook, Sam 32, 34 Cooper, Brittney 61 Cooper, William 286 corporeality 240 corruption and impunity 266 mothers’ struggle 271 Cox, Peter 195–6 Coxey, Jacob 45 Craigie, Billy 22 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams 39, 59 Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) 69 Croeser, S. 182 Crow, Jim 56 crowd-enabled connective action 205–6, 209 crowd-sourced memory 242 cultivation of the self 42 cyberactivism 68 Davis, Paulina Wright 53 de Costa, Ravi 22, 24

INDEX

de Magnón, Leonor Villegas 84, 89 n.6, 90 n.7, 90 n.8 Deaths in Custody Reporting Act 232 Debs, Eugene V. 43–4 democratization 12 Denman, Robert 100 Denning, D. E. 72 The Design of Everyday Things (Norman) 175 Dewey, John 46–7 dharna 168, 171 n.4 Díaz, Lucia de los Ángeles 262–3, 265, 271 digital age 51 digital divide 160, 170 n.1 digital literacy 9, 160, 170 n.1 direct communication 176–8 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks 132 Doctorow, Cory 133–4 domestic violence 2 Dominguez, Ricardo 69 Doomadgee, Mulrunji 2 Duffin, Alvin 98 Duniway, Abigail Scott 54–5 dynamic interaction 179–81 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson) 175 Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 69 Elster, J. 190 Ely, Richard T. 45 Epic Win for Anonymous (Stryker) 128, 130 Evans, Sara M. 56 Evolución (Idár) 79 face-to-face environments 167 Facebook 164–6, 169, 174, 270 Aboriginal involvement 28, 30 activists protest 162 direct communication 178 dynamic interaction 181 hashtags 180 Mir Hossein Mousavi 176–8 Morris post 225 posting 166

301

properties 179 Reynolds’ 256–7 as social networking tool 169, 177 technologies 40 Zendegi-e Sagi 182 Zendegi-e Sagi, page 182 The Fall of Public Man (Sennett) 42 Fanon, Franz 27 far-right activists 200 Farrell, Amy Erdman 51 Feather, Bill 90 n.9 Federal Council of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs (FCAATSI) 23–4, 27 Feinberg, Ashely 137 n.5 Feminazi 207 feminism archival turn 223–5 in India 168–9 networked (see networked feminism) print culture 56 feminist activism balance online and offline spaces 164 challenges of anti-rape 167–9 connective 203 digital 52, 162, 167, 206 face-to-face environments 167 Indian 160 LISTEN 228 in Melbourne 220 music-related 224–5 music scenes 224 and rape laws in India 160 and social media 162–3 feminist campaigns 77 feminist crowd 203 organizational structure 204–5 Figueroa, Esther 9, 113 Fisher, Walter 247, 256 Fleming, Andy 199–200 FloodNet 69–70 Fogarty, Lionel 24 Foley, Gary 21, 27, 286 Fotopoulou, Aristea 51 Foucault, Michel 236, 255 Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs 24 Frazer, Nancy 38

302

INDEX

Frazer, R. 28 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 234, 236, 239 Freedom’s Journal (Williams) 52 Freeman, Jo 203, 206, 208, 210 Freire, Paulo 240 Friedans, Betty 57 Fryer, Lucy 249 functional and storage memory 223–4 García Márquez, Gabriel 142–4, 147–8, 152 Garrison, William Lloyd 52 Gbla, K. 15 n.3 Genius of Universal Emancipation (Lundy) 52 Gerbaudo, Paolo 210–11 Gibson, Emily F. 57 Gibson, James Jerome 175 Gibson, Paddy 6, iv Gibson, William 131, 134 Gilbert, Kevin 27 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 233 Gleason, B. 175–6 Golestani, Amir 182 Gómez, Antonio 78–9 The Chicago Defender 78 lynching 78, 81, 88 Gompers, Samuel 45 Gonzales, Guillermina 265 Green Movement 173–5 affordances 184 dynamic interaction 179–81 international reaction 182 Iranian regime 183 mobilizing 176 protesters 182 social media 174 Twitter Revolution 174 Greenwald, Glen 134–5 Grieve-Williams, Victoria 1, 7, 9, 19, 95 Griggs, Sutton E. 251 Gringo Builders (Allhands) 89 n.4 The Guardian Australia 16 n.5, 29 Guerra, M. 79 Guerreros Unidos 262 Gun Violence Archive 240 Gundy, David 1

Guntarik, Molly 290 Guntarik, Olivia 1, 9, 13, 141, 277 Habermas, Jürgen 38 Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Coleman) 127 The Hacker Manifesto 128–9 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy) 128, 131 hackers on steroids 75 n.3 hacktivism collective identity/action and hacking 66–8 consolidation and anonymous 71–2 and cultural sphere 137 hackers to hacktivists 68–9 hacking component 65 hacktivist dimension, find 69–71 and online activism 136 post anonymous and present 73–4 hacktivist cultural archive allusion and communication 131–3 appropriation and identity 128–31 de facto 127 political uses 128 projects 128 textual and technical inspiration 133–5 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 136 Harrison, Ricky 25–6 Hartman, Saidiya 233 Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer 53–4 Hashemi-Shahrudi, Ayatollah Mahmud 184 n.3 Hayes, R. A. 176 Herrera, Yuri 266 H.E.S. 53 Heyer, Heather 135 Hickey, Thomas 2 Hidalgo Rea, Leticia 267, 270, 274 n.5 Higginson, T.W. 55 Highfield, T. 182 Hollaback! group 209–10 Holpuch, Amanda 137 n.7 Homes, Anna 60 Hoskin, Julie 198

INDEX

How Societies Remember (Connerton) 224 human fallibility 288 Idár, Jovita 8, 15, 77, 89 n.6 early feminist activist 83–5 as educator, journalist and activist 80–3 proto-feminism 88 Idár, Narciso 78–9, 89 n.6 Illinois Deaths in Custody Project (IDCP) 231 carceral state 232–4 FOIAs 234 future 242–3 hybrid tactics 236–7 incarceration 235 online activism 232 online organizing 235 postal mail system 236 silent violence 235 suicide 235 team works 232 tragic public mourning 235 IndigenousX 29–30 internet access for households 183 anti-filter software 174 contemporary 22 Díaz mesage 271 digital media and 203 EDT 70 hate machine 75 n.3 IDCP 232 Jamaicans, access 122 The Onion Router 134 in prison 12 sense of empowerment 72 social activism 40 and social media 162 use in Iran 174–5 Web development 66 intersectionality 159 and selective outrage 169–70 Isbell, Fran 89 n.4 Jackson, S. J. 255 Jacksonian Democrats’ 41

303

Jefferson, Andrew 196 Joan of Arc 85 Johnson, Lyndon 243 n.3 Jones, Jane Elizabeth 54 Jones, Tom 90 n.9 Jordan, T. 68, 75 n.2 journalistic resistance, campaign 79 Jowett, Matt 212–13 Juarez, Ciudad 265 Karatzogianni, A. 71 Karroubi, Mehdi 174, 184 n.2 Kelly, Nicholas M. 9, 127 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 183–4 Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump (Nagle) 135 King, Rodney 247 death of 253–5 Kline, Patsy 98 Knight, Peter 120–1 Koenig, Susan 117 Koorie, Tony 22 Koorier 24 Kosovo conflict 71 Kramarae, Cheris 51 Kun, J. 15 n.3 La Crónica 78–81, 89 n.6 La Cruz Blanca 84, 90 n.7 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (Idár) 80–1, 83, 89 Langton, Marcia 24 Laredo Kindergarten 90 n.8 lateral invisibility 237 Latimore, Jack 30 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 37 Lego project 175 Levinas, Emmanuel 241 Levy, Steven 128, 131–2 Lewis, W. F. 247 Li, Jennifer 204, 209, 213 Liberator (Garrison) 52 Liddle, Celeste 28–30 Lilla, Mark 42–3 Lily (Bloomer) 53 Limon, José E. 79 Lin, J. 15 n.2

304

Lin, Y. H. 179 Lippmann, Walter 46–7, 184 LISTEN 225–7 Little Brother (Doctorow) 133 Littlefield, John 249 longue durée approach 51 Lothian, Kathy 26 Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) 75 n.4, 132 Lowell Offering 53 Lui, Nakkiah 30–1 Lundy, Benjamin 52 lynching (United States) Christianity and 252 crowd 252 performative act of faith 252 photographs 250–1, 259 n.1 postcards 249–50, 259 n.1 religious aspects 253 sense of authority 251 Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America (Wood) 251 Lynn, Loretta 98 Mac, Kirsty 207–11, 213 MacAskill, Ewan 134–5 Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) group 209–10 magical realism 153 n.1 Maiden, Samantha 209 mainstream media 189–90 Mamamia 15 n.2 Mansouri, S. 175 Maram, Marti 57 Marley, Bob 97–8, 100, 109 Martin, Raymond Jose 84 Martinez, Monica Muñoz 82 Marx, Karl 16 n.6 The Marx-Engels Reader (Tucker) 16 n.6 Maslow, Abraham 42 mass mobilizations 14 materiality 241 communication 237 IDCP 237 memory and 13 political and 237 social media 176

INDEX

maternal contract 261, 270–2 pact/promise 273 sharing records 270 social media 270 maternal politics 264–5 Mayers, Naomi 24 Maza, Bob 26–7 McCaulay, Diana 116, 123 McGuinness, Bruce 24, 26 McGuire, Amy 29 McLuhan, Marshall 39 McWilliams, Carey 82 Meagher, Jill 3–4, 210 media activism 192 new (see new media) social (see social media) traditional forms 8 users and consumers 9 Meiners, Erica R. 231 Meléndez, A. Gabriel 89 n.1 Melton, James Van Horn 38 Melucci, A. 67 Mendoza, Elva Fabiola Orozco 13 message and medium 39–41 #MeToo movement 286 Mettenbrink, Brian 132 Mexican Revolution 85–8, 90 n.8 Mexicans and Mexican Americans Gómez and La Crónica’s campaign 78–9 Idár, Jovita (see Idár, Jovita) La Cruz Blanca and assistance 85–8 Milan, S. 66–8 Milw0rm 70 Mitra, A. 255 Momeni, Mina 173 Moore, Alan 137 n.1 Morales Wood, Carlos 86–7 Morozov, Evgeny 10 Morris, Evelyn 225–7 Morris, Robert Tappan, Jr. 133 Moss, John 243 n.3 Mottahedeh, N. 181–2 Mousavi, Mir Hossein 174, 177–8, 182, 184 n.1 multiculturalism 189, 200 Murray, Eddie 1

INDEX

Nagle, Angela 135 Nation and Narration (Bhabha) 154 n.5 National Anti-Slavery Standard (Child) 53 nationalism 154 n.5 The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Morozov) 10 network-horizontal approach 67 networked feminism 51 digital feminist 58 digital networked capitalism 61 digital vitality 59 Everyday Feminism 59 hashtag feminism 59 mainstream media 58 new media 59 non-mainstream media 58 online feminism 59–60 publications 59 transformed feminism 60 New Matilda 29 new media Gulf and Arab Spring (see Gulf and Arab Spring, new media) New Northwest (Duniway) 54–5 Newfong, John 23–4 Nitsou, C. 206 Niyogi, Subhro 170 Norman, Donald 175, 179 North from México: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States 82 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) 32 Nourizad, Mohammad 178 Ohl, J. J. 251 Olney, Richard 44 Olson, Parmy 128 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez) 142 One People of Australia League (OPAL) 23 The Onion Router 134 online activism 12, 136, 177, 190, 192, 232 online political activism 181 Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal 286 OPEN Government Data Act 239 Operation Sundevil 130

305

OpISIS 73 OpIsrael 73 oppression and resistance 14 interlocking systems 15 Orozco Mendoza, Elva F. 261 Owl Squad 74 Padilla, Sarah 231 Pal, Sampat 164 Paley, Down 266 Pantsdown, Pauline 213 Parsa, M. 183 Payton, Mari 90 n.9 Paz, Octavio 149 Pearson, Luke 29 perceived affordances 175, 179 Perkins, Charles 28 Permanent Revolution 289 Pestana, Natalie 211 phone phreaking 137 n.3 Pieer, Pawntia 180 Poitras, Laura 134–5 political crisis, Thailand 141 political participation 153 n.3 political protest 144, 264 agency around disappeared 262–3 Green Movement 173 social media 175 political reservation 170 n.2 post-identity liberalism 43 post–Arab Spring Bahrain new media (see new media) Postman, Neil 39–40 Potter, J. E. 251 Powell, Laurence 253 premature death 233 print 8 print culture 8, 38–9, 52 growth 40 robust 43 women’s liberation 56–8 prison 243 n.2 death in 235 Illinois 237 and immigration 233 internet in 12 libraries 233 Mousavi 178 political 178

306

INDEX

the problem of the color line 4 professional protester 208 progress, concept 277–90, 291 n.1 Project Chanology 127, 132, 136 protests Aboriginal 1, 6 Bastion Point 26 Bendigo 190, 193, 196 brutality 162 Cockpit Country 119–21 culture 12 Land Rights and 107 maternal identity 264 MFW 209 National Day of Action (2015) 6 nature 4 older and newer forms 5 political 144, 173, 262–3 Project Chanology 136 as raging 197 sexual harassment case 165 social change 12–15 songs 150 Strano Network 69 Sydney 6 #TakeDownJulienBlanc 203–8 Tent Embassy 23 visual media 5–6 proto-hacktivism 131 public memory 248–9 public mourning 233–4 public sphere 38 historically shifting sphere 44–7 modern 48 myth of declining 39 self-identification 41–3

Revolution 54 of 1850s 52 sisterhood of reforms 52 Rahnavard, Zahra 177–8 rastreos 265 Real Social Dynamics (RSD) 204–5, 209, 214 Reclaim the Night movement 210–11, 215 n.2 Reconstruction Amendments 54 Red Shirts 145 Redfern riot 2 Republic.com (Sunstein) 39 Revolution (Stanton & Anthony) 54 revolutionary commitment 279 Revolutionary Time 280, 290 n.1 Reynolds, Diamond 256 Ricoeur, P. 288 Ridley, Florida R. 55 Riis, Jacob 43 Riley, Irwin 98, 101 Roberson, H.L. 87 Robinson, Kim Stanley 134 rock and roll artists 98 Rock’n’Roll High School (RNRHS) 220–2 bands 221 and LISTEN 226–7 Melbourne music scene 229 n.3 operation 220–1 storage memory 225, 227 stories and histories 222 Rodríguez, Annette M. 8, 77 Romagna, Marco 65 Rouhani, Hassan 184 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre 55 Russo, Ann 51

Quinn, Therese 231 Race Matters, 25th Anniversary (West) 16 n.4 radical women’s press 51 African American women 52 coalitions 56 gendered working-class identity 53 particular rhetorical problems 53 Reconstruction Amendments 54 reform ideals 52

Salvage culture 290 n.1 Samuel, A. W. 75 n.2 The San Antonio Daily Express 89 n.3 Sauter, Molly 127 Savage Detectives (Bolaño) 270 Schwartz, Michael 117–18 Scott, Ridley 132 searchability 181–3 Segerberg, A. 203, 205, 209 Sennett, Richard 42

INDEX

sexual harassment 160–2, 164–6, 168, 170 sexual violence 159–60 Facebook 164 survivors 166 The Shockwave Rider (Brunner) 133 Sibyl (Hasbrouck) 53 silent protesters to forensic experts 264–5 Skynet Central 73–4 slacktivism/clicktivism 12 Smith, B. 174 Smith, Patrick 233 Snowden, Edward 134–5 social activism 19, 128 contemporary social media 28–32 demands 39 social media 3, 8, 10–11, 14, 28, 153 n.2, 256, 265 affordances 175, 184 and digital media 13 direct communication 176–8 dynamic interaction 179–81 Facebook (see Facebook) feminist activism and 162–3 Green Movement (see Green Movement) materialities 176 maternal contract 261 networking techniques 154 n.4 political activism 173 protesters’ use 263 research 11 revolutionary change 11 selective outrage 170 shame public officials 28 sharing records 270 significance 169 strengths and limitations 32 Twitter (see Twitter) usefulness 165 social movements 5, 190 society, fragmenting 267–8 sociomuseology 240 Sohrabi-Haghighat, M. H. 175 solitude and solidarity absolute 143 art adrift 148–50

conceptual textures 143 corpse magic 143 fearful 144 illusory qualities 146 Latin America 142 of madness 145 material determinism 148 modes of shared experiences 147 peer endorsement 146 poetization of space 144 protests 151 Red Shirts 145 Thai crisis 151–2 Yingluck’s leadership 146–7 sovereignty, differential 266–7, 273 Spear-Williams, Brooke 56 Spencer, Richard B. 191 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 54 Steinem, Gloria 57 Steiner, Linda 54 Stephan, Bijan 136 Stephenson, Neal 134 Sterling, Bruce 131 Stevenson, Ana 51 Stone, Lucy 55 Stow, Simon 235 Strano Network 69 Strong, Catherine 12, 219 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas) 38 structurelessness 203, 208 Stryker, Cole 128 Suh, Krista 137 n.6 Summerville, Karoline 247 Sunstein, Cass 39–40 The Sydney Morning-Herald 23 Sykes, Roberta 24 #TakeDownJulienBlanc protest 203, 214 n.1 activist stars 206–8 feminist connective action 205–6 feminist crowd 204–5 groups and digital vanguards 208–11 lone wolves 211–13 The Tall Man 2 Taskel, Rebecca 56

307

308

Taussig, Michael 143, 150, 156, 290 Taylor, Grace 189 Taylor, P. 68, 75 n.2 techno-rationality 243 n.4 Tejano, leaders 80–3, 89 n.3 terra nullius 20–2, 25, 34 Texas 81–2 lynching 79 Mexican inhabitants 80–1 migrations 82 Rangers 87–8 transition 89 n.4 Tjapukai Dance Theatre 102 Tosh, Peter 97, 100, 109 tragic public mourning 235 Train, George Francis 54 transmitters of culture 15 Trott, Verity 9, 141, 203 Tucker, R. C. 16 n.6 Turkish Hacker Team 74 Twitter 162, 165–7, 169 Aboriginal involvement 28, 30 affordances 176 in Australia 29 #BlackLivesMatter movement 247 dynamic interaction 179, 181 hashtag feminism 59 Khamenei’s account 183 mother’s protest 271 #NedaAghaSoltan 180 and Occupy Wall Street movement 175–6 properties 179 revolutions 174 searchability 181–3 as social networking tool 169, 177 subscribers report 181 2666 (Bolaño) 270 Una (Davis) 53 United Patriots Front (UPF) 190, 192 campaign 201 crowds 197 and Hoskin 198 opposition 199 Reclaim 201 n.1 rehabilitating 200 use of communications 196

INDEX

user-to-content interaction 179 user-to-user interaction 179 Valenti, Jessica 61 Valenzuela, S. 256 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 55 Vaughn, Mary C. 53 Verdi, Giuseppe 85 Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League (VAAL) 23 Villegas, Paulina 274 n.3 violence 236, 268, 271 anti-Mexican 82–3, 85 criminals 268 deploying total 269–70 domestic 212 genocidal 105 gun 240 physical 44 racial 20, 249, 253, 257 sexual violence 159–60, 164, 166 War on Drugs 269 Virtual Private Network (VPN) 174 Walkaway (Doctorow) 134 Walker, Alice 57 Walker, Denis 27, 107 Walker, Rebecca 59 WANK Worm 128, 133 Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) 29 Washington, Booker T. 78 Washington, Jesse 249–50 Watson, Sam 27, 107 We Are Anonymous (Olson) 128 Wells, Ida B. 43 West, Cornel 16 n.4 WhatsApp 124, 166–7, 262, 265, 270 White, Micah 272–3 White Australia policy 27 Whitlam, Gough 26 Whitman, Walt 37 Wildeboer, Robert 232–3 Williams, Bertie 22 Williams, Peter, Jr. 52 Willoughby, Bart 25–6 Wind, Timothy 253 Wohn, D. Y. 176

INDEX

Wojcieszak, M. 174 Woman’s Era (Ruffin & Ridley) 55 women’s liberation 56–8 Conditions 58 consciousness-raising 57 deradicalization 57 examples 56 feminist and 58 No More Fun and Games, issue 57 women’s movement (India) 160 Wood, Amy 251, 259 n.2 Woodhull, Victoria 55

309

worm against nuclear killer (WANK) 68 Wright, Tyshan 121 Yallow, Marcus 133–4 Yanez, Jeronimo 256 Yasuoka, Matthew 231 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy 287 Zapatista movement 70 Zappavigna, M. 181 Zelizer, B. 180 Zhang, C. B. 179 Zweiman, Jayna 137 n.6

310