Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements [1 ed.] 1032138092, 9781032138091

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‘In a time of continual anxiety over climate change, political unrest, and an ongoing global health crisis, this well-considered collection reminds us of the power of political action through public art and the importance of socially engaged practice to challenge societal differences and discords. Through historical perspectives, case studies, and engaging critical analysis, this anthology serves as both a site of reflection and an inspiration of future activist art actions.’ — Professor Cameron Cartiere, Emily Carr University, Canada ‘Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill’s Politics as Public Art makes a valuable contribution to the emerging literature on socially engaged art. It is notable for establishing a productive linkage between the concept of a “choreopolitics,” developed by André Lepecki, and the aesthetics of engaged art practice and social movements more broadly. Equally importantly, the contributors outline a series of key dialogical interfaces, between the disciplines of art history, performance studies, and social movement studies, which will do much to enrich ongoing debates in the field. Crucially, the essays foreground the essential role played by the performative and the somatic in engaged art practices which seek to understand the body as both a “signifying agent” and a matrix of social and political resistance.’ — Professor Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego, US ‘This is a terrific set of analyses probing the aesthetics and politics of contemporary protests. Drawing on voices from diverse locations and perspectives, including artists, curators, and scholars, this anthology lends new weight to the argument that confronting injustice requires people to choreograph multiple creative practices of synergetic collaboration.’ — Distinguished Professor Susan Leigh Foster, University of California, Los Angeles, US ‘This book is a pleasure. It makes new global claims about activism and public space. It shows the reader how life and freedom are made and destroyed by the capacities of bodies. This collective enacts how politics regulates bodies and how bodies perform alterity through radical art making. Every contribution honors public art in the service of public interest and reminds us that to do so is our birthright.’ — Professor Emeritus D. Soyini Madison, Northwestern University, US

POLITICS AS PUBLIC ART

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through—and working toward—championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical refection and action. Martin Zebracki is Associate Professor of Critical Human Geography, University of Leeds, UK, and has published widely across public art, sexuality, digital culture, and social inclusivity. Zebracki is editor of the Routledge anthologies Public Art Encounters (with Joni M. Palmer; 2017) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Cameron Cartiere; 2016) and editorial board member of Public Art Dialogue. Z. Zane McNeill is an independent scholar-activist who has written on queer and trans feminisms in contemporary performance, queer of color critique, and quare studies and politichoreography. They are currently an advisory board member for the University Press of Kentucky Book Series Appalachian Futures: Black, Native & Queer Voices.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Entangled Performance Histories New Approaches to Theater Historiography Erika Fischer-Lichte, Małgorzata Sugiera,Torsten Jost and Holger Hartung with Omid Soltani Rechoreographing Learning Dance As a Way to Bridge the Mind-Body Divide in Education Sandra Cerny Minton Politics as Public Art The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill Lessons for Today from Shakespeare’s Classroom The Learning Benefts of Drama and Rhetoric in Schools Robin Lithgow Notelets of Filth An Emilia Companion Reader Laura Kressly,Aida Patient, and Kimberly A.Williams Transcultural Theater Günther Heeg For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

POLITICS AS PUBLIC ART The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements

Edited by Martin Zebracki Z. Zane McNeill

Cover Credit: Zebracki, Martin [@martinzebracki]. (2016, June 14). Dancing at #HomoMonument, Amsterdam – Dance Where You Are, monthly (silent disco) dance event: “dance where you are, who you are, wherever you are, which age you have, what shape you’re in” – Carving out #LGBT belonging in intercorporeal movement, making space for my/your body - #publicart making par excellence [Instagram photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram. com/p/BGo0ni-PDT9/ Photograph by Kris Vannevel and Martin Zebracki (participant), 3 April 2016. Location: Homomonument (by Karin Daan, 1987), Westermarkt, Amsterdam First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zebracki, Martin, 1984- editor. | McNeill, Z. Zane, editor. Title: Politics as public art : the aesthetics of political organizing and social movements / Martin Zebracki, Z. Zane McNeill. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2022036828 (print) | LCCN 2022036829 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032138091 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032138558 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003231141 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Political aspects. | Public art. | Art and social action. Classifcation: LCC N72.P6 P65223 2023 (print) | LCC N72.P6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23/eng/20220926 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036828 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036829 ISBN: 9781032138091 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032138558 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003231141 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

An intervention dedicated to Politics as Public Art:The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements Moving bodies bodies in movement crafting your story more-than-human lobbies making our mystery Control in our hands organizing agency that stands until the force of occupied lands is thwarting our plans Drawing out your voice unvoicing the relict that has inficted on our choice Finding your artillery unearthing a burst of noise Martin Zebracki, 20 July 2022

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments List of Contributors Preamble 1 Politics as Public Art: Bodies, Power, Inclusive Change Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill

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PART I

The Art of Political Movements: A Theoretical Genealogy 2 Introduction: Emotions, Materiality, and World-Building Joanna Krakowska 3 A Beautiful Disruption: Extinction Rebellion’s Red [Rebel] Brigade and a Theory of Emotional Representation in Protest Janet O’Shea 4 Refections on Umunthu as the Life Politics of Ozhopé Massa Lemu

19 21

26 43

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Contents

5 Art-Making and World-Building: Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher

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PART II

Bodies in Space: The Aesthetic Politics of Protest

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6 Introduction: Political Praxis, Ideology, and the Deliberately Aesthetic Body Gregory J. Langner

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7 Bloodied Beaches, Copper Flowers: A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade Fen Kennedy

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8 “Racism Lives Here”: Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes

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9 Exploring the Role of the Disabled Body as a Vehicle and Art Form within Anti-Austerity Protest Angharad Butler-Rees and Bree Hadley

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Epilogue

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10 Entanglement and Choreopolitical Thought Thomas F. DeFrantz

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements is the outcome of a collaborative journey propelled by a mutual interest in this topic and sustained energies that made this concerted work happen. We, therefore, owe a debt of gratitude to our team of contributors for delivering their thought-provoking analyses that are simultaneously rooted in critical theory and empirically grounded in critical social practice. Moreover, we are thankful to the editors and production team of Routledge for their trust in our project and for shepherding us throughout the process. Also, we would like to thank the copyeditor Matthew Sparks for sparing a fresh pair of eyes. We, moreover, would like to specifcally thank Izabel Galliera, Kyra Smith, and Blu Buchanan for imagining new ways of framing socially engaged futures and choreopolitical frameworks with them which inspired many of the questions that this collection puts forth. This anthology combines invited accounts with chapters ensuing from a call for contributions that we issued in mid-2019. We appreciate that the challenging realities of the pandemic since early 2020 have implicated the juggling of professional and personal responsibilities (in ways that many of us might not have encountered in our lives before). Ongoing patience was key on all sides, and we are grateful to the contributors and publisher for that. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to our supporters—including those not referred to in the above—as well as our close ones for undergirding our endeavors for this volume with moral spirits. Please enjoy the journey that this collection unfolds. We hope that it is moving thought and action.

CONTRIBUTORS

Kelcea Barnes  is an independent scholar and served as Chief of Staf, Missouri

Student Association, involving activist roles during the 2015 antiracist student protests at the University of Missouri, US. Kelcea continues to advocate as the Senior Strategist, Content Design at Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness, and specializes in creating inclusive, equitable, and accessible content on digital platforms and worlds. Ashley Biser is Associate Professor of Politics and Government at Ohio Wesleyan University, US. Her research centers on contemporary political theory, including the work of Hannah Arendt. Her past publications have explored Arendt’s concept of judgment and her complex critique of science and technology. Angharad Butler-Rees  is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at

the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests include disability rights, activism, accessibility, and social inclusion. Thomas F. DeFrantz  is Professor at Northwestern University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. Erin Fletcher  is Director and lead curator of the Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University, US. Her curatorial projects focus on socially engaged art practices and the overlap between art and organizing.

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Contributors

Bree Hadley  is Associate Professor in Performance Studies at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Hadley is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media (with Donna McDonald; 2019), author of Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship (Palgrave 2014), and articles on disability arts for journals including Disability & Society, Performance Research, and Australasian Drama Studies. Fen Kennedy  is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Alabama, US. Their research, theoretical and practical, explores how dance articulates the values and norms of our society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Joanna Krakowska is Professor in the Theatre Department of the Institute of Art

of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and the Deputy Editor of the monthly journal Dialog. Krakowska’s recent publications include the books Demokracja. Przedstawienia [Democracy. Performances] (2019) and Odmieńcza rewolucja [Queer Revolution] (2020). Gregory J. Langner  is faculty with the Department of Communication Studies, Antelope Valley College, US. Langner’s work focuses on public and digital discourse and critical, creative, and ethnographic methods. Greg has been involved in community organizing, arts advocacy, campaign politics, and public performance. Massa Lemu is a Malawian artist and writer and is teaching sculpture at Virginia

Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, US. A.F. Lewis  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology with a graduate minor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri, US, studying inequalities, culture, identities, and media. Their dissertation concerns a discourse analysis of white supremacist activity and student protest in the context of a neoliberal college campus. Z. Zane McNeill is an independent scholar-activist who has written on queer and trans feminisms in contemporary performance, queer of color critique, and quare studies and politichoreography. They are currently an advisory board member for the University Press of Kentucky Book Series Appalachian Futures: Black, Native & Queer Voices. Janet O’Shea  is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University

of California, LA, US. O’Shea is the author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training (2018), At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage (2007), and the forthcoming book Bodies on the Line: Physicality, Sentiment, and Social Justice.

Contributors xv

Martin Zebracki  is Associate Professor of Critical Human Geography, Univer-

sity of Leeds, UK, and has published widely across public art, sexuality, digital culture, and social inclusivity. Zebracki is editor of the Routledge anthologies Public Art Encounters (with Joni M. Palmer; 2017) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Cameron Cartiere; 2016) and editorial board member of Public Art Dialogue.

Preamble

1 POLITICS AS PUBLIC ART Bodies, Power, Inclusive Change Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill

Rationale Interdisciplinary and international in its scope, Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements presents an invited collection and concerted journey seeking to develop novel, and updated, epistemological and empirical frameworks for understanding socially engaged public art practices. It is the frst of its kind to pursue this matter in critical dialogue with choreopolitical protest movements. Although it is neither possible nor our aim to provide an exhaustive defnitional treatise of this collection’s underpinning key terms socially engaged public art and choreopolitics, we see the former as encompassing artistically informed practices that come about in everyday public spaces where social relations and interactions are adopted as the primordial remit of the artwork (cf. Cartiere and Zebracki 2016). This type of public art emphasizes process over product and critical social change over continuity of the norms, institutions, governmentalities, etc., that dominate the contemporary social condition (cf. Zebracki 2020). The subject of socially engaged public art practice has seen a growing scholarly interest over the last decades (e.g. Lacy 1995; Kester 2004; Kwon 2004; Helguera 2011; Jackson 2011; Bishop 2012; Hawkins 2013; Rancière 2013 [2004]; Olsen 2019; Thompson 2012). We yet recognize a timely theoretical niche, as well as empirical potential, for fathoming and rethinking the choreopolitics of public art practice. Performance scholar André Lepecki (2006, 2013) coined choreopolitics as the embodied “politics of movement,” calling for a choreographic review of the ontology—and fuidities—of the body, its crucial position in society and space, and its political situation and potential (cf. Martin 1998; Longhurst 2001; DeFrantz 2007; Rogers 2020). In particular, this collection is committed to a critical, intersectional rethinking of dominant and hierarchical identity markers DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-2

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and privileges as situated in the complex relationships between the body, space/ territory, identity, and belonging (cf. Gerecke 2019). Thereby, this work engages theories and practices targeted at decolonizing Euro-American-centrist knowledges and prevalent assumptions of the disciplined and abled body, orchestrated movements, and choreographed social space (cf. Lepecki 2006; Rogers 2020). This anthology, hence, aims to examine the nexus of socially engaged public art practices and politico-corporeal participation. That is, the politics of artivist mobilizations that react against intensifying, institutionally choreographed forms of (biopolitical) control and surveillance, which precisely put limits on social action and movement (cf. Lepecki 2013; Gerecke 2019; Rogers 2020). This collection asks how politics can be understood as a form of public art that is grounded in the public interest. Also, and specifcally, it aims to push understandings of how politics can inherently operate as a radical socio-aesthetic activist movement working for and through the public interest to efect inclusive social change. Such activist practice happens in co-creation with, or from within, the “publics”—or rather counter-publics, understood as the plurality of the sometimes antagonistic and conficting forces that enact and mobilize political resistances (cf. Warner 2002; Zebracki 2013, 2020). Overall, we promote radical interdisciplinary approaches to socially engaged public art that put justice at the heart of theory and practice. Prominently, we can observe this in queer tenets and approaches that the contributors to this book largely ascribe to. A critical politics of public art would imbue the art object, or process, with the potential to “mediat[e], and [pursue a project of ] queering, the privileged vis-à-vis marginalised positionalities of artist, viewer, and the depicted/viewed subject” (Zebracki 2020, 139). Thus, a choreopolitical approach to socially engaged public art would render it as an experiential medium that navigates, negotiates, and de-orchestrates, or re-orchestrates, social norms, and systemic controls. This allows the revealing of a critical dialogue across social diference that simultaneously forms a fundamental part of the publicness of the artwork and an embodied site of activism through art (cf. Zebracki 2020). This collection features original contributions from a combination of activist-scholar and artist-scholar perspectives, derived from established and emerging thinkers and doers who are generously involved in this project. Their thoughtprovoking arguments around socially engaged public art critically locate the power of the body, and its abilities and disabilities—where the body holds the potential to disrupt the structures that uphold social normativities, including predominant white cisheteropatriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, (neo-)colonialism, extractive globalization, and environmental degradation. The contributions draw from frsthand interdisciplinary strands of scholarship and activism, including case study insights from variegated and contrasting political as well as grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. Utilizing theories from the felds of (in no particular order) performance studies, critical geographies, political sociology, art history, and cognate (sub)disciplines, the contributors question, and reimagine, not only how public art practice

Politics as public art: bodies, power, inclusive change 5

can be integral to politics. They also probe into how political participation in everyday public spaces itself can be construed as a form of artmaking in a world (cf. Bishop 2006), while encountering various restrictions to political participation, forms of critical surveillance, and control of movement, both in physical and mental senses (cf. Lepecki 2013). As such, the contributions stem from real-world conditions and dialectical methods that do not solely ofer rich situated knowledges but also concrete approaches. These could be utilized as socio-political tools for impact that translate theory into practice, and vice versa—ultimately in an attempt to deconstruct, and also (and importantly) decolonize, hegemonic knowledges and practices of public art. Politics as Public Art is structured into two parts. The chapters under the frst part on “The Art of Political Movements: A Theoretical Genealogy” serve as a collective efort to build theory-focused structures for understanding socially engaged public art practices through choreopolitics. The second part on “Bodies in Space: The Aesthetic Politics of Protest” builds on these structures to hone in, more empirically, and more corporeally, on specifc antagonistic actions and movements. The latter include critical examinations of artistically driven forms of environmental and antiracist activism that is on the rise in the contemporary complex amalgamation of ecological, social and political crises. We proceed with a discussion of the central concerns of this collection that revolve around bodies, power, and inclusive social change. This is followed by a more detailed synthesis of the two parts and the respective contributions they endeavor to make.

The Body as a Political Pivot The process of creating political interference calls forth a perceptive and responsive physicality that, everywhere along the way, deciphers the social and then choreographs an imagined alternative. As they fathom injustice, organize to protest, craft a tactics, and engage in action, these bodies read what is happening and articulate their imaginative rebuttal. In so doing they demonstrate to themselves and all those watching that something can be done. Could this be why they are called political “movements?” Susan Leigh Foster (2003, 412) The political potential through bodily movement and protest as relayed by choreographer Susan Leigh Foster (2003) in the above epigraph resonates with the below encounter of one of the authors, McNeill, who were marching in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic for Breonna Taylor—a twenty-six-year-old Black woman who was murdered by police in her bed in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13, 2020: Dozens of masked activists hold space in the streets of Baltimore. It is a chilly day in August 2020, but the skies are blue, and the cicadas are

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still screaming. A police helicopter follows above the procession and the police funnel us forward. We chant “say her name: Breonna Taylor.” Some marchers put their arms up and say “don’t shoot” as we face the Baltimore police regulating the protest. This call, and repeat, is a component of what dance scholar Anusha Kedhar (2014, NP) called the “choreographed tactics” of protest. When exploring the use of the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture and choreography in the 2014 Ferguson uprising as part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Kedhar (2014) asserted that in the (literal) act of embodied protest, activists create a counter-discourse through performative politics that interprets the body, here the Black body in particular, “as a force of power and resistance” (Kedhar, NP). Similarly, in 2020, activists that manifested themselves in Baltimore for the march for Breonna Taylor centered the body in public space as a tool of resistance, power, and aesthetics. Performance scholar D. Soyini Madison (2014) explained that such centering of the body as a site of protest is precisely important to Black performance theory, as the body “becomes an oppositional move within a matrix of disciplining powers reigning over the Black body” (Madison, vii) The reframing of the body as choreopolitical tool is signifcant because the body is, then, understood as being central in contentious struggles—seeing that it can be used to subvert and challenge normative power structures. The use of the body as a tool for social change is a common tactic. Marginalized people often do not have access to the same economic, social, and cultural power that oppressors do. Therefore, the power of the people has historically been the people’s bodies themselves. Questions at the crossroads of why and how people organize themselves have been at the heart of inquiry of political sociology and social movement studies (SMS). Notably, we can ask here: what drives agents to organize, how do they organize themselves, and what impact do social movements have on societal structures? (cf. Della Porta and Diani 2015) While scholars in this interdisciplinary research area often share such questions, a theoretical emphasis is laid on diferent aspects of protest and mobilization. For example, Jay O’Shea, author of this collection’s chapter “A Beautiful Disruption: Extinction Rebellion’s Red [Rebel] Brigade and a Theory of Emotional Representation in Protest,” is interested in how activists weaponize afective dimensions and, accordingly, elicit emotions in their political audience. Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher, the authors of “Art-Making and World-Building: Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices,” are curious about how relational, conversational, and collaborative practices can impact, and (re)create, communities. The study by A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes on “‘Racism Lives Here’: Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism,” is invested in how collective groups of individuals move—and transform—controlled, policed, and regulated spaces. The analyses in this anthology focus on diferent aspects of social change and “direct-action” tactics. They, nonetheless, do not merely conceptualize acts of

Politics as public art: bodies, power, inclusive change 7

critical advocacy as instances of spontaneous and emotive eruptions of political participation—or as collective rational, deliberative decision-making that has previously been the core focus of SMS. Also, they construe such acts as performance of politics. As Foster (2003, 396) contended, explanatory frameworks of social movements have dismissed the body as a signifying agent and its movements and negotiations in space. They have largely overlooked how protest as an instance in and of itself matters—not just what it may or may not have accomplished in terms of transformative political agendas. The interest in a performance of politics is also diferent from simply utilizing political public art forms and performance strategies as a component of protest. This is strikingly exemplifed in Kedhar’s (2014) engagement with uses of gesture and choreography among activists in the Ferguson movements. This theorizes a performance of politics in which, (i) on an ontological level, political movements are aesthetic movements and, (ii) on an epistemological level, bodies are put central in conceptualizing and constructing situated knowledges of antagonistic encounters in, and movements through, public space, using relational and dialogic approaches (cf. also Bishop 2004; Moufe 2007). Thereby, social mobilizations intrinsically have choreopolitical and aesthetic components that have traditionally been overlooked in social movement research. Diverse performance study scholars, including Rodney Diverlus (2018), Susanne Foellmer (2016), Susan Leigh Foster (2003), and André Lepecki (2013), postulated epistemological perspectives that recognize the profound importance of the body and its movements through forms of protest. Like Kester’s (2004) dialogic art, Foellmer’s (2016, 61) understanding of the choreopolitical lies in recognizing the signifcance of the communicative. It locates protest and the exchange of its critical meaning within an aesthetic medium that comprises the body, its mobility and immobility, and its relationship with public space. Foellmer (2016, 64), hence, underscored the pertinence of political mobilization as a “performative manifestation of space,” wherein mobilization is interpreted as the aesthetic medium: a practice embodied within bodily forms and movements. Thus, the choreopolitical, in Foellmer’s (2016, 65) conceptualization, is not dependent on the agent’s conscious decision to compose choreography. Instead, it allows the participatory nature of political mobilization to connect movement and politics while it translates the political into the aesthetic—and, in a sense, a nonrepresentational form of public art (cf. Zebracki 2019).

Power (and) Play The relations, communications, and embodied movements between the (oftantagonistic) agents in protest spaces have produced a crucial dialogue. In the celebrated article “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dance,” Lepecki (2013, 15) marked such dialogue as a struggle for the “freedom of movement.” Lepecki (2013, 16) argued that contentious movements erupt because there is a struggle for kinetic freedom that is bound by modes of surveillance,

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carcerality, obedience, and a choreographed, persistent, and oft-violent police presence. Blockades, funneling tactics, and containment strategies, and so on, control where, and how, bodies can move through space. Lepecki (2013), inspired by Rancière (2010), expressed that: The purpose of choreopolicing, then, is to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political. Choreopoliced movement can thus be defned as any movement incapable of breaking the endless reproduction of an imposed circulation of consensual subjectivity, where to be is to ft a prechoreographed pattern of circulation, corporeality, and belonging. (Lepecki 2013, 20) If police deployment to political demonstrations can be understood as choreopolice, Lepecki (2013) asked how the choreopolice and the protestors interact and relate to one another; how the encounter between these agents prompts moves and counter-moves; and how control and obedience are implemented and struggled against. It is the above type of critical questions around control, repression, coercion, obedience, and other forms of authoritarian power (as eforts to evoke conformity) that makes epistemologies of choreopolitics and socially engaged, relational public art practices so powerful for transitional SMS. So, it becomes apparent that reconceptualizing social mobilization through perspectives of performance studies, critical dance studies, and socially engaged art is a useful and timely exercise. For example, McNeill and Buchanan (2020) applied a choreopolitical approach to analyzing the 2017 Black Pride 4 action in the context of the BLM movement. They relayed the following about how Black trans organizers physically stopped a Pride parade in Columbus, Ohio, to draw attention to violence against trans Black women: [The Black Pride 4 activists’] use of Black queer and trans bodies as a tool of resistance was a meditated decision built on years of Black liberatory direct action. The importance of the Black trans body in protest cannot be overstated […] Further expanding on Black feminist critiques of science, choreopolitics facilitates fnding epistemological, knowledge-making, value in Black queer and trans action and embodiment. By understanding the Ferguson unrest as calculated and performed choreographies, instead of “the Ferguson protesters as mobs of Black bodies, which are unruly, lawless, and unpredictable,” as Kedhar [2014, cited by the authors] writes, choreopolitics disrupts the white supremacist conception of the Black body itself. (McNeill and Buchanan 2020, NP) If direct action is understood as a dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressor, choreopolitical tactics are used to establish an intervening (s)pace to playfully

Politics as public art: bodies, power, inclusive change

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imagine new ways of being and world-building—one that sits outside of the normative institutions and structures that oppress marginalized bodies. Antagonism and confrontation through play are central to such choreopolitical mo(ve) ments. They subvert, challenge, and dismantle everyday functions of power that are expressed by carceral institutions, policing, and (a lack or loss of ) control that everyday agents experience in public space (cf. Lepecki 2013; McNeill and Buchanan 2020). Marginalized people are, as such, potentially able to disrupt and reverse such normative power relations by using their bodies as playful tools of protest. In revisiting the Black Pride 4 action, McNeill and Buchanan (2020) argued that: Black and trans bodies are not allowed the personhood to provide consent under cis white supremacy. Reversing this, exposing an audience (particularly one whose autonomy is often recognized) to involuntary participation achieves a reversal of power relations in the performance […] By demonstrating how vulnerable their bodies were to white violence, they underscored both the intra- and extra-communal violence Black and Brown bodies face every day. (McNeill and Buchanan 2020, NP) The BLM movement, and equally other movements for social justice, are not only able to be framed and conceptualized as choreopolitical, performative, and dialogic but must be in order to accurately articulate social movements, uprisings, and contentious actions. That is, power and protest are inherently and concurrently spatial, social, and choreographed dialogic entities. As Lepecki (2006) explained: “the body [is] not a self-contained and closed entity but [an] open and dynamic system of exchange, constantly producing modes of subjection and control, as well as of resistance and becomings” (5). If power is enacted through surveillance and control and embodied within institutions, as well as agents (both individuals and groups), protests including performances are staged to challenge control over the subjectivity of agents. Therefore, as Lepecki (2006) conveyed: a “political reframing of the body,” (5) its movements, its encounters, and its relations is necessary. Considering the interdisciplinary scope of this matter, we would argue that this is not just imperative for SMS, performance studies, and art history alone, but for critical geographies, political sociology, cultural anthropology, and cognate (sub)disciplines, too.

Social Relational Art Choreopolitical theories that are concerned with locating power in/through the body and bodily movement share much common ground with socially engaged (public) art epistemologies of participatory and dialogic processes (Kester 2004), relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002), and relational antagonism (Bishop 2004). Without rehearsing literature on the theoretical diferences between these

10 Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill

notions, we would like to stress their similarities in basically attaching particular importance to the relations between people—the encounter between agents. They form an epistemological ground that, following Bourriaud (2002), exhibits the potential to unleash a “radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art” (2022, 14). Kester (2004) posited that analyzing socially engaged art practices requires the art historian to shift their understanding of what constitutes “art” away from the physicality of the object toward a broader social outlook. The latter quintessentially recognizes the exchanges between institutions, individuals, and communities as an aesthetic form. The consequent manifestations of dialogic art are composed of communicative exchanges and negotiations between agents. Similarly, Bishop’s (2004) conceptualization of the “relationally antagonistic” constructs an aesthetic framework in which confrontation and disruption may embrace the aesthetic requirement of socially engaged art practices. This turns the attention toward afect and its immaterial social dimensions (see also non-representational theory in Thrift 2008). Such social relational art, in the words of Miller (2016), seeks to “expand the defnitional limits of art beyond the material object to include the set of human relations occasioned by the production and reception of art” (167). The above resonates with Lacy’s (1995) idea of “new genre public art,” which situates socially engaged art practices beyond the remit of commissioning parties and the spaces that are governed by institutions. New genre public art emphasizes corporeal community engagement, directed toward achieving social change and (ideally) justice through the medium of art. It is then the social relational process—rather than a material or visual end product—that comprises the public artwork, thereby often underlining its critical potential to question the political and subvert the status quo. Indeed, after Zebracki’s (2020) notion of “public artivism,” art becomes socially engaged through a simultaneous intention and reception that commit to a politicization of the spaces of everyday public life. This process might empower publics to challenge and destabilize sociopolitical hegemonies—both in contemplation and in practice—for the cause of futures that are more embracing of “others.” Zebracki (2020) renders such public artivism as a “project of becoming” (149), one that is devoted to “address[ing]/ redress[ing] social marginalisation through galvanising critical thought and promoting inclusive change” (Zebracki 2020, 133). As we will outline below, this collection pushes earlier explorations around socially engaged art, SMS, and performance and critical dance studies including choreopolitics. For anecdotal and conceptual context, Joanna Krakowska (2021) analyzed the art of choreopolitics in the purview of the 2019 “Banana Protest” targeted against government censorship in Poland. After the removal of a video artwork showing a banana-eating woman, protestors reacted by eating bananas in front of the National Museum of Warsaw. Krakowska’s (2021) treatise integrated Bishop’s (2012) notion of participatory art and theories around disidentifcatory politics (Muñoz 1999) and politichoreography (Diverlus 2018)—which McNeill and Smith (2021) then extrapolated to their understanding of the Black Pride 4

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action. Likewise, our collection represents an interface with, and builds further on, thought that underpins relevant prior scholarship by asking, amongst others, how relational aesthetics can be seen as a form of both socially and politically engaged public art. Also, if “art is a state of encounter” (Bourriaud 2002, 18), how can then protest be grasped as a state of the antagonistic public art encounter, one that is mediated by the choreopolitical relations between agents as well as the choreopolitics embodied within and through agents?

Outline Part I: The Art of Political Movements: A Theoretical Genealogy The three chapters that make up the frst part of this volume feature original contributions from, respectively, dance studies scholar Janet O’Shea, Malawian visual artist Massa Lemu, and political science scholar Ashley Biser in collaboration with Erin Fletcher, the Director of Ohio Wesleyan University’s Ross Art Museum. Part I opens with “Emotions, Materiality, and World-Building,” an invited introductory refection by theater scholar Joanna Krakowska on the relationship between public art and political practices. Specifcally, Krakowska (2023) attends to three analytical approaches to these practices: theory of emotional representation, performative production of materiality, and worldbuilding capacity. The subsequent chapters of Part I critically consider how traditional discussions on the political, and sometimes disruptive, potential of public art practices can be extended into a discussion on the aesthetic potential of social mobilization. To accomplish this, this part engages socially engaged public art practice through epistemological vistas of biopolitical collectivism, political and world-building capacities, and the performative and embodied politics that are part and parcel of choreopolitics. In the chapter “A Beautiful Disruption: Extinction Rebellion’s Red [Rebel] Brigade and a Theory of Emotional Representation in Protest,” Janet O’Shea analyzes the adversarial actions of the Red Rebel Brigade, an Extinction Rebellion subgroup, as forms of embodied disruptions of public space and the dominant social order. O’Shea (2023) conceives of these disruptions as devices to elicit grief in its audience and as constructive forces to mobilize action in the face of climate catastrophe. O’Shea constructs a theory of representation that draws from afective social movement theory, performance studies, and critical dance studies. The author puts forward that the Red Brigade’s organization of space, mobilization of bodies, and the antagonistic relationship with its audiences are integral to the representation of its protest tactics. The analysis shows that understanding the Red Brigade’s reliance on performance, emotion, and physicality through choreopolitical lenses is paramount to understanding and evaluating the motivations of this activist collective and its critical maneuvers. Massa Lemu’s chapter, “Refections on Umunthu as the Life Politics of Ozhopé,” ofers an autoethnographic examination of the collaborative process

12 Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill

behind the art project Row that is led by the Malawian collective Ozhopé. This group consists of the visual artists Ella Banda and Massa Lemu, writer Emmanuel Ngwira, and photographers Tavwana Chirwa and Augustine Magolowondo, who question the political issues that structure tensions between Malawi and Tanzania around burning issues of extractivist capitalism (cf. Ferguson 2006). Lemu (2023) illustrates how site, dialogue, communication, action, collectivism, and performance function as active political as well as aesthetic apparatuses that challenge capitalist power and gesture—while considering alternatives beyond capitalist domination and exploitation. This contribution introduces the term umunthu, “life politics,” to describes the site-specifc, collectivist art practices, and political dispositions adopted by the Ozhopé art collective. Umunthu is an attitude, outlook, and ideal shared by the peoples of Southeastern Africa, also called ubuntu in South Africa. Lemu proposes umunthu as an aesthetics of resistance that incorporates a political ethics and aesthetics wherein, and through which, to challenge neoliberalism—including the reliance of globalization processes on commodifcation, privatization, and dispossession. In Part I’s closing chapter, “Art-Making and World-Building: Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices,” Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher mull over what constitutes the aesthetic, how the aesthetic and the political intertwine, and what the impact of this relationship is on the construction of space and social relations within the multifacetedness of that space. Biser and Fletcher (2023) are apparently not concerned with the antagonistic relationships between agents as much as in the other analyses of this collection. Rather, they focus on the potential of socially engaged public art practices to construct new communities and modes of being. Using an Arendtian schema of world-building practices, Biser and Fletcher examine a collaborative community art project coordinated by the artist Brett Cook in Delaware, Ohio, in 2018. While a component of Cook’s project did include objects, namely, the creation of murals, the public art process was equally (or perhaps more) concerned with critical dialogue, social relationships, and collaboration.

Part II: Bodies in Space: The Aesthetic Politics of Protest The second part of this anthology segues into more empirically focused contributions from dance studies scholar Fen Kennedy, feminist sociologists A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes, and (dis)ability performance studies scholars Angharad Butler-Rees and Bree Hadley. This part opens with “Political Praxis, Ideology, and the Deliberately Aesthetic Body” by performance scholar Gregory J. Langner (2023), which provides an invited introductory refection on choreopolitical praxis as analyzed across the three chapters in Part II. These chapters scrutinize specifc contentious moments, movements, and activist organizations. Respectively, they revisit protest actions of the Extinction Rebellion’s subgroup Red Rebel Brigade; put student-led antiracism campaigns in the limelight; and critically draw attention to how disabled agents organize and perform protest

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in contemporary neoliberal contexts. Part II reimagines such political manifestations by utilizing conceptual tools engaged in the frst part. In so doing, this second part illustrates the impact of reconceptualizing instances of tension through a combination of choreopolitical and socially engaged public art frameworks. In Part II’s frst chapter, “Bloodied Beaches, Copper Flowers: A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade,” Fen Kennedy examines what can be precisely gained by a re-consideration of the Red Rebel Brigade protests as performance in the realm of actual experience. As the argument’s main thrust, Kennedy (2023) argues that critical performances of climate justice are choreographed to evoke responses, engagements, and contemplations from its audience to invite “all humans to enter into a horizontalist relationship to their environment and each other” (88). Here, Kennedy builds on O’Shea’s theoretical explorations of the interconnections between the afective and the choreopolitical to empirically investigate the merit of social movement as aesthetic performance. The subsequent chapter by A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes, “‘Racism Lives Here’: Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism,” utilizes Lepecki’s (2013) theory of the choreopolice/ choreopolicing to “que(e)ry” the 2015 student protests against racial inequality on the campus of the University of Missouri. Lewis and Barnes (2023) argue that predominantly white higher education institutions, including the University of Missouri (and many alike), are “maintained, protected, and upheld through choreopolicing” (100). This signposts their driving imperative for analyzing the protests by Black student organizers through the concept of choreopolitics. The authors impart that the “Black student activists’ strategic use of collective bodies in public space” (105) can be aligned with a critical form of street dancing that, in the words of Kedhar (2014, NP), “can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defant, bold, and empowered [—] a space in which they have the ability to move freely” (cited in Lewis and Barnes 2013, 105). With their chapter “Exploring the Role of the Disabled Body as a Vehicle and Art Form within Anti-Austerity Protest,” Angharad Butler-Rees and Bree Hadley conclude Part II with an examination of the importance of the physical presence of the disabled body in protest mobilizations for attaining social justice. The analysis by Butler-Rees and Hadley (2023) draws on new insights from disability protests carried out in everyday public spaces as critical reactions to neoliberal austerity faced across UK and Australian urban contexts. They call on the reader to critically refect on why and how the deployment of the disabled body in activist movements, along with the exposure of vulnerabilities, is elemental in building and visibilizing diverse disabled communities, or so-called “crip armies” (cf. McRuer 2018)—and, as this collection argues more widely, in developing intersectional solidarity.

14 Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill

Coda All in all, it is the hope of this anthology to provide an interdisciplinary range of scholars with a valuable and accessible reference to a wide gamut of epistemological and practice-based perspectives of the critical roles that art practices play, or can play, in protest movements in everyday public spaces. This is the frst collection of its sort that targets the critical interconnections of public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches—a concatenation that Thomas F. DeFrantz (2023) refects upon in the anthology’s epilogue “Entanglement and Choreopolitical Thought.” This collection emerges from a space of activist scholarship and the concomitant ethical dedication to raising the voices of historically and traditionally marginalized people and identities through artistic experimentation. The contributions, each from their own unique theoretical and empirical vantage points, analyze public artivist movements through critiques of social norms and political hegemonies. Moreover, they explore the political potentialities opened up for articulating and mediating social diference, navigating social struggles, and imagining, and implementing, alternative trajectories for (more) just societies. Such collective eforts might enable publics to (re-)claim everyday spaces, to subvert hegemonic systems (that precisely restrict the voicing of the marginalized and their potential for social and political mobilizations), and to co-create social change. In conclusion, this collection serves as an invitation to advocate for scholaractivist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through—and working toward—championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. Our concerted work attempts to provide a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism that seek conceptual as well as empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical refection and action.

References Biser, Ashley, and Erin Fletcher. 2023. “Art-Making and World-Building: Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 57–74. New York, NY: Routledge. Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (October): 51–79. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810. ———, ed. 2006. Participation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2012. Artifcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Butler-Rees, Angharad, and Bree Hadley. 2023. “Exploring the Role of the Disabled Body as a Vehicle and Art Form within Anti-Austerity Protest.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 116–132. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Le presses du réel. Cartiere, Cameron, and Martin Zebracki, eds. 2016. The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion. New York, NY: Routledge. DeFrantz, Thomas. 2007. “Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (Review).” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 3: 189–91. DeFrantz, Thomas. 2023. “Entanglement and Choreopolitical Thought.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 135–136. New York, NY: Routledge. Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani, eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diverlus, Rodney. 2018. “Black Lives Matter Toronto: Urgency as Choreographic Necessity.” Canadian Theatre Review 176 (Fall): 62–68. https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.176.011. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foellmer, Susanne. 2016. “Choreography as a Medium of Protest.” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 3 (December): 58–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767716000395. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (October): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2003.0111. Gerecke, Alana. 2019. “A Choreopolitics of Topography: Feeling for Lower Ground in Karen Jamieson’s The River.” Performance Matters 5, no. 1: 26–45. Hawkins, Harriet. 2013. “Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body and Practice.” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1: 52–71. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0309132512442865. Helguera, Pablo. 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art. New York, NY: Jorge Pinto Books. Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York, NY: Routledge. Kedhar, Anusha. 2014. “‘Hands up! Don’t Shoot!’: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Ferguson.” The Feminist Wire, October 6. https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/ protest-in-ferguson/. Kennedy, Fen. 2023. “Bloodied Beaches, Copper Flowers: A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 82–95. New York, NY: Routledge. Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kwon, Miwon. 2004. One Place after Another: Site-Specifc Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Krakowska, Joanna. 2021. “Eating Bananas Outside the National Museum: Unlimited Semiosis.” TDR: The Drama Review 65, no. 4: 131–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1054204321000587. Krakowska, Joanna. 2023. “Part I Introduction: Emotions, Materiality, and World-Building.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 21–25. New York, NY: Routledge. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Langner, Gregory J. 2023. “Part II Introduction: Political Praxis, Ideology, and the Deliberately Aesthetic Body.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 77–81. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Lemu, Massa. 2023. “Refections on Umunthu as the Life Politics of Ozhopé.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 43–56. New York, NY: Routledge. Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2013. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR/ The Drama Review 57, no. 4: 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00300. Lewis, A.F., and Kelcea Barnes. 2023. “‘Racism Lives Here’: Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 96–115. New York, NY: Routledge. Longhurst, Robyn. 2001. Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge. Madison, D. Soyini. 2014. “Foreword”. In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, vii–ix. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McNeill, Zane, and Blu Buchanan. 2020. “Tracing the Color of Queer Choreopolitics.” The Activist History Review, January 13. https://activisthistory.com/2020/01/13/ tracing-the-color-of-queer-choreopolitics/. McNeill, Zane, and Kyra Smith. 2021. “Whose Pride is this Anyway? The Quare Performance of the #BlackPride4.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance, edited by Tiina Rosenberg, Sandra D’Urso, and Anna Renée Winget, 203–22. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McRuer, Robert. 2018. Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. New York, NY: New York University Press. Miller, Jason. 2016. “Activism vs. Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond.” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism 3 (Winter): 165–83. Moufe, Chantal. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Context and Methods 1, no. 2. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ moufe.html. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifcations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Olsen, Cecilie Sachs. 2019. Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City. London: Routledge. O’Shea, Janet. 2023. “A Beautiful Disruption: Extinction Rebellion’s Red [Rebel] Brigade and a Theory of Emotional Representation in Protest.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 26–42. New York, NY: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steve Corcoran. New York, NY: Continuum. ———. 2013 [2004]. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rogers, Amanda. 2020. “Transforming the National Body: Choreopolitics and Disability in Contemporary Cambodian Dance.” Cultural Geographies 27, no. 4: 527–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019892000. Thompson, Nato, ed. 2012. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Afect. London: Routledge.

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Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and counterpublics.” Public Culture 14, no. 1, 49–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49. Zebracki, Martin. 2013. “Beyond Public Artopia: Public Art as Perceived by Its Publics.” GeoJournal 78, no. 2: 303–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-011-9440-8. ———. 2019. “Queerly Feeling Art in Public: The Gay Liberation Mo(nu)ment.” In Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts, edited by Candice Boyd and Christian Edwardes, 85–100. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. “Public Artivism: Queering Geographies of Migration and Social Inclusivity.” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 2: 131–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2019 .1706447.

PART I

The Art of Political Movements A Theoretical Genealogy

Intervention: an illustrative response to The Art of Political Movements: A Theoretical Genealogy, by Martin Zebracki 2022 DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-3

2 INTRODUCTION Emotions, Materiality, and World-Building Joanna Krakowska

A magnifcent beach, golden sand, blue sky, turquoise sea, heat, and not so many sunbathers in the distance. In the foreground, a middle-aged couple is sitting on beach chairs, bare legs stretched out in front of them, sideways to the viewer. They look great; they are ft. They sunbathe and read. A dozen or so meters behind, on the same axis, a giant fgure sits on the sand, a male fgure in a life jacket, wearing a winter coat and beanie. One might guess that the fgure is created from the same material as the boats, used by human trafckers to cross the Mediterranean. He seats with his legs pulled up, hugging them like in a very tight boat. He stares of into a distance in the opposite direction than the white couple in front. This is the photo on the cover of the book The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism (2021), edited by Alain Bieber and Francesca Gavin, and comes from the project Infatable Refugee by Belgian visual artists collective Schellekens and Peleman.1 Visual composition, choreography of bodies, gigantic sculpture or puppet, public space, people on the beach participating in this performance—are they performers or spectators, witnesses or perpetrators, recipients or senders? And is it politics or art? How far we have come and how well the discourse, both academic and popular, on the relationship between art and politics has developed in recent years is best demonstrated by the fexibility of the phraseological expressions: politics as public art/the art of political movements/the art of protest/politics of performance. The distinct opposition between art and politics no longer exists because we have broadened our understanding of both of these concepts, we have internalized the idea that aesthetics is political, and we observe political events (as well as almost all our public and private performances) in terms ofered by performance studies (e.g. Schechner 2002; Carlson 2004; Butler 2018 and others). It seems almost impossible now to write about art—no matter ancient, modern,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-4

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Joanna Krakowska

or postmodern—without addressing its entanglements in the relations of power and in social tensions. This is all-important, but the main reasons for regarding art as a form of politics and for tracking the artistic dimensions of political actions are elsewhere. They result from historical premises, like a refection on the experience of artists; entanglement in totalitarianism; from a philosophical background—the development of critical theory, which cracked down illusions of apolitical neutrality; from the loss of innocence in non-engagement; from the visibility of emancipation movements and emancipation strategies. And, most importantly, from the ultimate rejection of the naive thesis from a few decades ago about the end of history and the end of ideology; the thesis is double verifed by the new, brutal version of the culture war on many fronts and in many regions of the globe. The profound ideological and political polarization we are dealing with today favors all possible means of persuasion with artistic strategies on the front line. Global conficts, humanitarian catastrophes, the alarming state of the Planet, and at the same time the empowerment of many people and groups previously deprived of a voice results in a multitude of artistic activities and works of engaged or engaging art (cf. Mościcki 2008), directly expressing political positions, challenging the centers of power, articulating aspirations of the powerless, revealing social conficts, and ofering political alternatives. Two obvious tendencies favor this phenomenon: the democratization of art and the slackening of its disciplines, the emergence of artistic phenomena in previously unprecedented heterogeneous, hybrid forms that are difcult to assign to genres. The democratization of art and its tools consists, inter alia, in questioning the hierarchy established through elite contracts and capitalist exchange, which became possible with the crossing of geographical borders thanks to new technologies and the breaking down of social boundaries thanks to both technologies and activist praxis. Blurring the boundaries of disciplines by the multi-medial and multi-material character of contemporary art blows up the walls of galleries and theaters and takes art to the street, beyond exclusive spaces and audiences. All these tropes and tendencies are being refected in this volume, specifcally in the frst part that delineates the theoretical framework for refection on the aesthetics of political movements. Extinction Rebellion’s Red Brigade direct actions combine choreography, visual art, performance, and political activism in the name of saving the Planet. The Ozhopé collective in the process of social integration, building relationships, and creating resistance networks produced installations, sculptures, and performances on the shores of Lake Malawi challenging “neocolonization, privatization, exploitation of the lake as an ecosystem, and the dispossession of bodies.” The collaboration also lies at the heart of the Delaware Mural Project, in which “the stories, living theater performances, and photographic documentation created by participants […] become the substance of the work” even more than the fnal paintings. The artistic activities described in all three chapters in this part of the book share the agenda of political organizing; their creative process was democratized, communitarian, and sometimes

Introduction: emotions, materiality, and world-building 23

even bore the features of a social movement. The activities themselves are multi-material and take place in public space. At the same time, each of these artistic practices stands out and puts emphasis on a specifc aspect of action, and in this specifc aspect it is analyzed and problematized. Janet O’Shea discusses the evocation of emotions as a protest tactic, a complex relationship between emotion and representation in efective environmental activism as she examines Extinction Rebellion’s Red Brigade actions. In the past, the category of emotion was raised primarily in relation to art serving the interests of those in power and fortifying the whole system against any sabotage. Thus, the conversation used to be mainly about the manipulative quality of the politics of emotions in art. The theory of emotional representation O’Shea writes about, however, refers to the visceral character of emotions being a central point of artistic intervention and to the activist practice of emotional sharing, multiplying afects, and infecting with feelings. Exploring the afective dimensions of activist cultures and uncovering emotions like anxiety, grief, despair that in times of crisis lead people to activism originated in the queer approach to trauma (Cvetkovich 2003). In the art of political movements, the archives of feelings can be treated as resources of premises for action, as storage of operational tools, and as a registry of the possible efects of direct actions. Emotions are a key element of political art, while a theory of emotional representation is part of the methodological framework for its research. Massa Lemu employs the term umunthu life-politics to describe site-specifc, collectivist, and life-afrming aesthetics based on the ideal of “sharing and caring,” which challenges neoliberal ethics and biocapitalist economy. It involves a new materialist approach to art objects that accumulate materials, shapes, and textures of the traditional and the modern in sculptures and installations to encompass the narratives of both marginalization and resistance. Re-used familiar materials ofer re-existence to both non-human and human subjects confronting neoliberal do-gooderism and exploitation with decolonial sustainability and a philosophy of sharing. Erika Fischer-Lichte would describe the whole process of work on this project as performative production of materiality (Fischer-Lichte 2004), which in regard to its fnal result could be paraphrased into material acts of performativity. Challenging the system of power through emotions and everyday objects/ materials are two strategies that require re-thinking of the idea of protest in political art as disruptive, destructive, discomforting, and antagonistic. Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher argue that bringing together community members and creating new opportunities for interaction may give a foundation for constructive moments of world-building. It sounds like a cliché that for any protest to become efective, it depends on a community that generates, supports, and furthers it (Rogger, Voegeli, and Widmer 2018). The Delaware Mural Project, however, serves here as an example that the community itself contains political potential which exceeds its critical capacity. The examples of community art in this part of the book prove Biser’s and Fletcher’s point and are situated far from artifcial

24 Joanna Krakowska

hells of participation by courtesy of the authorities (cf. Bishop 2012). All three aspects of political art—afective persuasion, material aesthetics of resistance, and world-building capacity—constitute a strategic framework for present and future choreopolitical actions. Theorizing the art of protest and discussing its disruptive/creative potential can be done from three perspectives: Images and Signs (aesthetics), Voices and Tongues (politics), Bodies and Spaces (the media), as was proposed in the anthology Protest. The Aesthetics of Resistance. When focusing on its aesthetic dimension, it is impossible to overlook that a protest always becomes a symbolic play of demarcation, appropriation, and revaluation, so it needs to continually reinvent the language of resistance (Rogger, Voegeli, and Widmer 2018, 39–40). From a political perspective, the art of protest is always the exploration of the possibilities of articulating disagreement, which can take many forms: “a spontaneously expressed discontent or outrage, a confrontational opposition, a radical conception of a counter-society, or an imagined exterior of a completely diferent world” (Ibidem, 40). The medial dimension that involves individual and collective bodies in a variety of spaces is in fact quite close to the domain of performance studies and succumbs to their tools. Performance theory in all varieties, even beyond the way it was used by Janet O’Shea in her essay, ofers a broad spectrum of possible approaches to politics as public art, channels, or modes of communication and performative strategies in both politics and art viewed either together or separately. There is also another toolbox and a manual available for practitioners and theoreticians of political art/art of political movement—Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Politics, edited by steirischer herbst and Florian Malzacher (2014) and written by those who invented and/or practice these strategies all over the world. The book is mapping the broad feld of engaged art and artistic activism today and is proposing nine categories which organize most individual and communitarian actions aimed at, as Malzacher put it, “Putting the Urinal Back in the Restroom.” Listing these categories in one column results in either a poem or an incomplete Decalogue with one missing commandment to be added by anyone practicing their own artistic strategy. These categories are: • • • • • • • • •

Self-Empowering Being Many Reality Bending Reclaiming Spaces Documenting and Leaking (Counter)agitating Playing the Law Taking Care Interrupting the Economy

Introduction: emotions, materiality, and world-building 25

Some of the strategies labeled by or assigned to these categories cherish confict and praise antagonism, some celebrate identities, some fantasize about utopias, and others tell truth to power. Each and every one of them requires their particular methodological approach and theoretical framework which, hopefully, takes into consideration three aspects of politics as art: emotions, materiality, and world-building.

Note 1 See Zebracki (2020) for an analysis on the inclusive potentials of this artwork as a form of “public artivism” and for a selection of artwork photography by the collective, including a photo depicting the Infatable Refugee on the beach of Ostend, Belgium, which also features on the cover of The Art of Protest.

References Bieber, Alain, and Francesca Gavin, eds. 2021. The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism. Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artifcial Hells. London, New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carlson, Marvin. 2004. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. herbst, steirischer, and Florian Malzacher, eds. 2014. Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics. London: Sternberg Press. Mościcki, Paweł. 2008. Polityka teatru. Eseje o sztuce angażującej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Rogger, Basil, Jonas Voegeli, and Ruedi Widmer, eds. 2018. Protest. The Aesthetics of Resistance. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London, New York: Routledge. Zebracki, Martin. 2020. “Public Artivism: Queering Geographies of Migration and Social Inclusivity.” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 2: 131–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/13 621025.2019.1706447.

3 A BEAUTIFUL DISRUPTION Extinction Rebellion’s Red [Rebel] Brigade and a Theory of Emotional Representation in Protest Janet O’Shea

Introduction: A Beautiful Disruption1 They stand in a tight group of about twenty, clad in robes with fowing veils that resemble a crimson version of widow’s weeds. Red lips and heavily lined eyes and eyebrows further this gothic impression but continue rather than ofset its seriousness. Bright white face pancake obscures the usual markers of identity: gender, race, and age are blurred. Ghostly yet vibrant, their attire suggests sorrow, despair, and rage while also conjuring excess. Their movements are slow and closely coordinated. In near perfect unison, they adopt simple, representational gestures: two raised fngers, invoking the peace symbol; cupped hands, slightly extended, suggesting a plea; the raised fsts of struggle. They walk in formation, their movement universally sustained. Nothing—not police presence, onlookers shooting photographs, gawkers, hecklers, or other protestors—interrupts this steady, continuous fow. In contrast to the carnivalesque atmosphere of some protests, this contingent is silent. They do not speak, chant, sing, or play instruments. They do not hold signs, rendering their silence metaphorical as well as literal.2 These actions, of the subset of Extinction Rebellion (XR) known as Red Brigade, blend direct action and symbolic protest.3 Like XR demonstrations more generally, their goal is to disrupt business as usual in the face of environmental breakdown, creating a crisis that the government, corporations, other institutions, and the general public cannot ignore. XR has embraced the civil rights movement’s aim of flling the jails, and thus events are often oriented toward tactically breaking laws as well as generating disruption in public spaces.4 Protestors blockade sites that are central to climate destruction: they unfurl banners across highways, block entrances to private airports, protest at oil rigs, and fll the squares in front of governmental buildings. At the same time, their intention DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-5

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is to transmit the message of climate urgency. The hope is that corporations and public institutions will feel the strain of these interventions and that ordinary citizens will be inspired by them toward further action. Red Brigade events accompany larger XR protests but are not identical to them. Indeed, they serve a diferent function and evince a distinct tone. XR events are often raucous and both paradoxically and intentionally celebratory.5 Red Brigade’s somber quality contrasts with the boisterousness of XR protests; silence with XR’s sound; slow, sustained movement with marching and sitting locked in place. In some instances, the Red Brigade faces the police, creating a line of silence, focus, and calm between adversaries.6 Unlike larger XR protests, Red Brigade processions lack a specifc semiotic referent. Their representational gestures suggest a literal meaning but the disjuncture of one gesture from the next disrupts narrative causality. Their clothing evokes the red of rage and of blood, both of the circulating ilk that sustains life and that which is spilled in violence.7 Their absence of other symbolic cues, such as chants or placards, implies a meaning that escapes full expression. There is the sense, in these actions, that they attend to something that cannot quite be expressed. This lack of specifcity, its ability to create a state or mood that is abstract and difuse, I suggest, gives Red Brigade events their power in the face of a crisis that is both dispersed and catastrophic. Red Brigade events are designed to “emanate” emotion (Brooks 2019) rather than to depict specifc sentiments.8 While larger XR events are highly literal, the Red Brigade is simultaneously abstract and poignant. Sometimes Red Rebels, as they are known, pantomime their facial expressions, grimacing in anguish, gurning in fear, or staring purposefully into the distance. Others, however, keep their expressions intentionally neutral. Although participants name love, hope, and sadness as states their movement invokes (ibid.), Red Brigade founder Doug Francisco describes their intervention in more conceptual terms: “We just want it to be emotive and to have a message without having to explain it; the idea was that you would almost empathically feel and understand the situation” (quoted in Benjamin 2019). The Red Brigade’s actions invoke something and that something points in a general direction—sorrow—but at the same time, its meaning is enigmatic. It is ambiguous whether this overall sense of grief represents the emotions of the protestors; whether it speaks for the feelings of others, such as the majority of XR, for instance, or of those who are not present and are perhaps more adversely afected by climate breakdown; or whether it is intended to generate such emotion primarily in spectators who might drive social change. Or maybe the actions are intended to function in all these ways at once. This simultaneous cultivation of mood, its difuse referents, and its ambivalent efect are rooted in the structure and shape of the event and, thus, are central to it. In this chapter, I examine this intentionally generalized evocation of sentiment as a protest tactic, specifcally as a response to the climate crisis, whose threat is widely dispersed, unevenly felt, and, yet, devastating. This is part of a larger claim that the purposeful invocation of emotion through physical efort is

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central to political mobilization9; I suggest further that this conjuring of sentiment occurs through physical efort, corporeal experience, and the organization of space. Emotion, therefore, is not only a motivator for or a result of activist efort but, in some cases, it is also the central point of an intervention. In such instances, this experience of emotion operates as intrinsically valuable at the same time that it points toward the goal of social change. Moreover, emotion in justice eforts is manufactured through specifc representation decisions at the same time that it is felt as viscerally real. In order to account for this complex relationship between emotion and representation in activism, I place theorizations of protest within sociology and in dance/performance studies in conversation. Afective social movement theory (SMT) attends to emotion as experienced by individual participants while dance/ performance studies examine the structure of protest and its efects. SMT tends to focus on individual participations and how they are changed through justice eforts, while dance/performance studies address the physical organization of space as it relates to protest’s symbolic meaning. Blending these approaches allows me to investigate the mechanisms through which justice interventions evince emotion in the interest of social change. In order to consider how protest events cultivate emotion that may or may not occasion shifts in thinking and in action on the part of individual participants and spectators, I put SMT and dance/performance studies’ theorizations of protest in conversation, extending them by attending to an analytical system focused on the cultivation of emotion in the absence of psychological identifcation and thus refecting on concepts drawn from Sanskrit aesthetic theory: transient and durable states. The climate emergency requires diferent kinds of advocacy from other forms of justice actions since, as George Monbiot (2006) points out, it requires a move toward less consumed, more equally distributed, rather than more for all. This remains true even as climate action could usher in a more just and equitable world. In addition, the environmental crisis produces a range of emotional responses such as climate denial, climate grief, climate anxiety, and climate doom. These emotional reactions do not correspond easily to action; indeed, some of them are, on their own, counter-productive to mobilization. Consciousness raising, in this instance, is not only insufcient, it can also be damaging in the absence of serious attention to alternatives. If we stop with a recognition of the severity of the climate crisis, we fall into climate despair, and we can end up abandoning efective action, not pursuing it. Moreover, the climate crisis is simultaneously an existential danger and a condition that barely registers in quotidian life, evoking responses that many of us feel as a background threat that we have been conditioned to ignore. Because climate grief is so hard to keep in mind, we cannot rely on our own feelings to drive action. As such, addressing the climate crisis requires protest tactics that extend beyond those of other justice interventions where emotional responses are already front and center. The difuse, nebulous, and yet utterly urgent nature of the climate emergency requires forms of protest that do not rest so much on raising

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awareness, as true climate denial becomes increasingly rare, but rather that allow participants, spectators, and those in power to keep environmental catastrophe present in their minds. Efective environmental activism needs to strike a balance between sparking climate grief intentionally and avoiding its accompanying risk of climate doom. This requires protest that constructs emotion, allows its experience as viscerally real, and maintains it while also managing its expression. It requires an ability to tap into emotions that many of us feel but consciously avoid or sublimate. As such, protest focused on climate catastrophe does not only express existing emotions, it also strives to cultivate new sentiments and activate suppressed ones. These sentiments may or may not be rooted in identifcation with the worst efects of the crisis. The cultivation and management of emotions, of which some are abstract, distant, or felt as a mere twinge in consciousness, are thus central to environmental action. Through this analysis I suggest that our current situation requires a nuanced understanding of emotion, performance, and physicality in protest action. As a step toward producing this understanding, I proceed by situating Red Brigade events in a larger history of grief actions in protest, contextualizing them and signaling how their advocacy difers from other forms of activism that center mourning and loss. I then examine potential frames for analyzing Red Brigade’s actions through existing theories of protest as put forward in sociology and in dance/performance studies, moving on to propose the applicability of Sanskrit aesthetic theory’s key concepts of transient and durable states to justice actions. This chapter concludes with a refection on the challenges faced by protest eforts that attend to difuse harm in the context of a crisis that is simultaneously ubiquitous, relational, and personal.

Red Brigade Events as Grief Action Red Brigade processions emerge from a history of grief actions in protest, such as ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Black Lives Matters’ dieins.10 In this sense, Red Brigade actions comprise a family of activist eforts that render systemic violence visible by illustrating its efects in order to signal its severity. Grief actions take the reality of systemic violence as background and draw them into the foreground.11 They create an experiential reality that evokes mourning in order to shift public discourse around under-recognized structural violence. Grief, as Judith Butler (2004, 20) argues, is political. Representing a life as “grievable” instantiates the value of that life. A “grievable” life was a livable life. Grieving includes an insistence that a life had a value (Butler 2004, 34). To grieve publicly, then, is to suggest that such a life could have continued to be livable in the absence of the violence that destroyed it. To grieve a potential or projected loss is also to instantiate the value of those who face continual threat. Grief actions, then, call attention to the systemic violence that both eradicates lives and erases their worth.

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These actions take multiple forms. Die-ins, where protestors lie prone in public space, thereby simulating their own potential death or representing the death of another have appeared, for instance, in ACT-UP’s call for an acceleration of AIDS research and treatment and the de-stigmatization of homosexuality. Cycling advocates regularly use die-ins to call attention to road violence, both the targeting of individual cyclists by aggressive motorists and the systematic investment in the rights of motorists over other road users.12 Black Lives Matter protestors have used die-ins to call attention to the prevalence of police violence and statesanctioned killings in African American communities. Environmental interventions, such as XR and Fridays for the Future, use die-ins to evoke the mass deaths that will accompany environmental breakdown. Die-ins call attention to the systemic violence that takes individuals prematurely from the public sphere. Like die-ins, mock funerals and staged “mournings” make private sorrow publicly visible, externalizing activists’ grief over systemic violence or institutional non-action in the face of death or devastation. They sometimes concretize a concept as the entity mourned—such as justice—while other times referring to the loss of an individual or group of individuals.13 Or they commemorate the loss of an unidentifed individual, referencing not only grief but also a mourning process forestalled by a lack of closure (DeLeon 2015).14 Red Brigade events, as part of a larger category of grief actions, shift grief out of the private spaces in which it tends to be hidden. It counters the “invisibilization” of loss that allows systemic violence to continue. As such, they abstract individual experience into a general critique of a damaging system. And, yet, it’s hard to tell if the Red Rebels are the mourners, the dead, the dying, or the harbingers of destruction. If they are mourners, they seem nearly numb to their pain; their neutral faces and steady movement suggest an inurement to devastation. If they are the dead, they are not immobile corpses but meandering specters, the ghosts of the past, current, or future dead.15 As such, they make explicit what is implicit in other grief actions: that the loss being commemorated pertains to the current moment but also to the future. It is projected forward as a certainty in the absence of systemic change, suggesting that it is not death but what we may live through that should frighten us. Such actions encourage participants and spectators to ruminate on a threat even if it is one that they are likely to escape, including but extending beyond the identifcation of one individual with another.

Emotion and/as Action in Social Movements In order to better understand the signifcance of actions such as Red Brigade’s, I propose a theory of representation that rests upon and extends from existing examinations of protest in afective SMT and in critical dance studies/performance studies. Afective SMT scholars and dance scholars both respond to the denigration of their area of attention in earlier forms of scholarship. That is, afective SMT authors react to theories of social action that assumed that protest

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is pathological and/or that emotion undercuts the goals of political organizing, which were (paradoxically) assumed to be wholly rational ( Jasper 2018, xi). Afective SMT scholars have responded by signaling how emotion in yields shifts in consciousness, through what Alison Jaggar (1989) refers to as the role of emotion in the construction of knowledge and what James Jasper (2018) identifes as feeling-thinking processes. Likewise, dance and performance scholars respond to assumptions that physicality, confated with spontaneity and impulse, is largely disruptive to activism, illustrating, instead, how activists train their bodies, organize physical space, and convey the messages of protest through movement and gesture. Authors in these subfelds, then, attend to the intellectual implications of afect and movement, respectively. While such inquiries lay the groundwork for understanding what drives protest participation and facilitates its operation, it leaves open the questions of how, specifcally, activist eforts produce experiential states. Afective SMT undertakes a phenomenological analysis that links emotion and thinking while dance/ performance studies highlight symbolic meaning, constructed through physical decision-making. SMT attends to the typologies of emotion experienced by individuals in a social context and less to the protest event itself. Conversely, dance/performance studies analyses of protest examine the structure of events in lieu of the individual and collective experience of them. Placing these approaches in conversation has the potential to generate a theory of protest that signals not only that emotion in activism constitutes political thought but also how, in particular, it does so. Because justice actions are designed to extend beyond the autonomous individual, they require an analytical frame that decenters identifcation and that opens out from individual experience to broader considerations. Likewise, because protest cultivates emotion so that it is felt as viscerally as real at the same time that it does so through specifc, organizational decisions, it requires a theory that treats emotion in performance as simultaneously proximate and distant, authentically felt and intentionally created. Afective SMT provides analyses that illustrate the integral role that emotion plays in ushering in social change. Social scientists have examined the role of emotion in social movements, refecting on the diferent functions sentiment serves in prompting and maintaining political involvement. Allison Jaggar (1989) insists upon the social nature of emotion and links sentiment to the development of new forms of political consciousness when she proposes the idea of “outlaw emotions… [that] enable us to perceive the world diferently” ( Jaggar 1989, 167). James Jasper continues this tradition of exploring sentiment in activism, identifying “typologies of emotion” (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Jasper 2006; Jasper 2018) that inform political mobilization, distinguishing, for example, refex emotions, which arise from immediate circumstances from afective feelings of attachment or loyalty from moral emotions, the sense of approval or disapproval ( Jasper 2011, 287). Within Jasper’s framework, protests operate less as events per se and more as forms of strategic action (2018, 2); his aim, therefore, is not to examine the mechanism of protest events but rather to propose a theory

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of action (ibid.). The goal of Jasper et al., then, is to produce an understanding of why people act as they do rather than of how protest operates. Phenomenologist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed (2010) refects on the political possibilities produced by the “afect alien,” that is, someone who, by virtue of their political consciousness, rejects normative notions of happiness. Referring to such afect outsiders as “killjoys,” Ahmed ruminates on how these individuals trouble ostensibly determinative patterns of living by calling attention to the unhappiness within the presumed unity of the family structure, the nation, or the organized political group. Emotion both maintains the status quo and signals that something is wrong with the strictures of normative living.16 While emotion drives social justice eforts and maintains a commitment to the same, there are key structural and qualitative diferences in the feelings that motivate activism, are felt in justice actions, and are produced by them. Anguish over climate inaction, for instance, may motivate participation in a Red Brigade event; the planning and preparation can generate a sense of apprehension, while the action itself might induce a state of excitement, even as the intention is to tap into the unacknowledged despair of onlookers who might, then, be motivated to participate themselves. If all works to plan, dismay can develop into a sense of empowerment and enthusiasm at the thought of joining a burgeoning social movement. Social scientists are, of course, aware of these diferences, contrasting, for instance, “the pleasure of accomplishing an impact with a continued sense of fear, anger, and threat that demands continued action” ( Jasper 2011, 291). They likewise note the diference between the “collective efervescence” (Collins 1975 quoted in Jasper 2011: 257) that can be felt in the midst of a protest with the anguish that drives further justice eforts. Both Jaggar and Jasper also acknowledge that the term “emotion” covers a wide range of felt phenomena, which include substantial experiential diferences. Indeed, the “typologies” of emotion that Jasper outlines (2011, 2018) distinguish themselves through these diferences. In providing such analyses, however, social scientists privilege contrasts in the function of emotion over how they are cultivated.17 Social science theories do not, for instance, explore how sentiment as a motivating force, as experience, and as desired response are produced through specifc, structural, and organizational elements of a protest event.18 While social scientists and philosophers recognize the relationship of emotion to changes in intellectual understandings (and worldview) and how these emotions emerge from and infuence social movements, they attend less to how these changes are intentionally brought into being by organizers’ and participants’ decisions: what components of protest foster outlaw emotions? How do new afect aliens come into being? How do afect aliens communicate their discontent with others? In other words, these theories do not examine the mechanisms through which these distinctions appear or how their divergence and convergence create the overall efect of a protest event. To truly grasp these diferences requires a performance analysis.

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Performance studies and dance studies scholars address how protest organizes itself, treating activist eforts as dramaturgy (Kershaw 1997), choreography (Foster 2003; Giersdorf 2003; Browning 2004; Kedhar 2014), and technique (Goldman 2007). These projects focus on the spatial and technical organization of protest as well as its semiotics; motivating and expressed sentiments are incorporated into specifc, intentional, and prepared actions that carry the message of protest. Foster (2003), for instance, examines the management of emotion through the rehearsal of techniques of non-violence in the civil rights movement contrasting this to the intentional channeling of grief and anger into ACT-UP die-ins. Foster argues that the choreographic tactics that accompanied civil rights mobilization, ACT-UP eforts, and the Seattle anti-globalization protests each produced a contrasting message related to the intended outcome of the action and the social and political position of the participants. Jens Giersdorf argues that staged performance and protest mutually inform one another, such that justice actions contribute to the set of possibilities articulated in performance (2003, 415). Danielle Goldman attends to the training undertaken by civil rights activists that enabled them to make “calm, confdent choices even in situations of duress” (2007, 62). Anusha Kedhar (2014) in her analysis of Black Lives Matter mobilizations illustrates the multiple and simultaneous meanings that the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” gesture carries in protest, operating as, in her terms, a habitus, failed sign, a gesture of innocence, a choreographic tactic, and a choreopolitics of freedom. By demonstrating protest’s choreographic nature, Foster, Giersdorf, Goldman, and Kedhar lay the groundwork for a recognition that the emotion that sparks, drives, results from, and maintains protest appear through specifc mechanisms of particular events. By introducing the metaphors of choreography, technique, and performance for understanding activist eforts, they create a theoretical frame for analyzing the varied ways in which protest organizers cultivate the typologies of emotion that social scientifc theories of protest have identifed. Although dance studies and performance studies scholars who have analyzed protest do not focus primarily on sentiment, their approaches signal the complex and intentional ways through which emotion articulates itself through protest. In order to examine events such as Red Brigade, where emotion is both central and ambiguous, I build on such theorizations of protest, extending from them to explicitly accommodate emotion as part of the structure of justice actions. The approach I propose here bridges gaps between existing analyses by treating emotion as part of the experiential reality of justice actions and as a result of decisions made by protest organizers. In suggesting that emotion in protest can be felt as real without necessarily preceding action, that it can be immediately and viscerally perceived at the same time that participants and viewers recognize the codes through which it is created, and that it can extend outward from individual experience to generality, I turn to performance analysis outside Western theatrical tradition’s attention to psychological identifcation, specifcally to Sanskrit aesthetic theory’s focus on durable emotional states. I do so not to suggest that

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Sanskrit theory is universally applicable or to repeat its local hegemonic status but rather to suggest that emotion can be abstracted and yet deeply efecting. Such an attention to the conjunction between abstraction and sentiment may be useful for understanding how justice eforts achieve their desired impact. I argue, then, that a distinction between emotional afect and symbolic meaning is crucial to understanding how protest operates, especially in a moment characterized by multiple, difuse, and interconnected crises.

Sanskrit Aesthetic Theory as Representational Frame Rooted in a literary tradition that focuses on technical knowledge production, Sanskrit aesthetic theory texts are simultaneously pragmatic, descriptive, prescriptive, and analytical.19 South Asia’s earliest known aesthetic theory works, such as Bharata Muni’s canonical Natyasastra (ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE), ofer instruction on how to create a play (which includes dance and music) that captures the imagination of the viewer.20 Central to this is a theorization of how a playwright translates emotion into the codifed actions of the actors whose cultivation of transient emotional states (vyabhicaribhavas) produces a durable psychological state (sthayibhava) that sets an overall tone for the work. This tone or mood, in turn, produces an emotional response in a knowledgeable spectator, which translates into an aesthetic experience (rasa). Sanskrit aesthetic theory is built around an analysis of the specifc mechanisms through which actions generate emotional reactions and how that response is translatable. This emotional response emerges not through plot, narrative causality, or identifcation with a character. Rather, the evocation of transient and durable states (vyabhicaribhavas and sthayibhavas) hinges upon the exploration of the emotional nuances of specifc dramatic moments not the events that connect them. By focusing on the poetic invocation of mood, through the exploration of moments in narrative time, rather than attending to “decisive events” (Higgins 2007, 44) that alter the trajectory of a character’s experience, Sanskrit aesthetic theory illustrates the close relationship between thought, memory, and emotion. It does so through conventional codes of representation; the aesthetic experience is thus both analytical—rooted in an ability to decipher and appreciate codes and conventions of performance—and transformative, in its ability to produce sparks of immersive understanding and delight. Using gustatory metaphors (Higgins 2007, 45; Sundarajan and Raina 2016, 789), Sanskrit aesthetic theorists refect on how a knowledgeable and appreciative spectator savors the performer’s nuanced evocation of states and sentiments through recognizable actions, images, and tropes. Like a gourmet, an experienced spectator retains critical ability—the capacity to discern component parts and how they form a whole—even as they immerse themselves in sensory and emotional experience. The knowledgeable spectator, or sahrdaya,21 appreciates the playwright/composer/performer’s eforts and accomplishment through their analytical understanding. The actor, like the spectator, maintains an interpretive

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distance from the character’s experience even as they evince it with care; this evocation occurs through organized and codifed movement of the limbs, hands, and trunk as well as through more obviously emotive facial expressions. The point of the aesthetic experience is to supersede the ego and transcend the idiosyncratic; it is not “concerned with the personality-dependent response” (Sundarajan and Raina 2016, 789). As such, its goal is not identifcation but access to “a world of self-nothing and […] Universal being” (Misra 1987: 55, quoted in Sundarajan and Raina 2016: 789). Transient psychological states (vyabhicaribhavas) include conditions identifable as emotion—love, grief, anger, etc.—but they also comprise experiences that exist outside of the frame of sentiment per se, such as weakness, dreaming, or intoxication. Indeed, the term bhava includes diverse connotations such as mental state, feeling, emotion, psychological state, and even existence (Higgins 2007, 44–45), suggesting that the concept of the durable state extends to physical and mental experiences. Although characters exhibit physical symptoms associated with emotions, their sentiments emerge out of their thought process and their recollections as well as from corporeal experience. Texts such as the Natyasastra and the Abhinaya Darpana outline movements and gestures as they constitute the characterization and the expression of emotion (Bose 1991). By emphasizing codifcation and training, such analyses acknowledge the interdependencies between physicality and emotion while also treating sentiment as constructed rather than as spontaneously arising from the body. Recognized within this framework are complex relationships between thought, emotion, bodily sensation, and physical action; they are not split but nor are they reducible to one another. The aesthetic experience, in this understanding, also hinges upon abstraction. The playwright and the performer rely on a network of highly codifed tropes and conventions, the interpretation of which determines artistry. For the spectator, a pleasurable aesthetic experience emerges as much from the recognition of conventional tropes and their skillful interpretation as from an immersion in the sentiments conveyed by the work. Rasa, the main term used to describe aesthetic absorption, carries multiple meanings, such as essence, favor, or even juice, reinforcing the idea that rasa’s most distinguishing feature is its abstraction. The goal of performance is the reduction of specifcity to its essential qualities, the transposition of the individual to the general. Crucially, the aesthetic experience, in this understanding, does not hinge upon identifcation. The performer does not subsume themselves within the character, as they would in, for instance, method acting. Like the spectator, the performer retains an analytical distance from the performance event. Their depiction is codifed and thus based in typologies of behavior and action at the same time that it is rooted in the exercise of the imagination. Likewise, the audience member does not identify with the character but rather appreciates the complexity and the emotional nuance of their situation. Such a treatment of the aesthetic experience distinguishes between emotion as felt by the playwright, which drives the creation of the work, as experienced by the character in a particular dramatic

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situation, as evoked by the performer through movement and gesture, as perceived by the audience, and as resulting in a state of absorption that emerges from a successful connection between all of these points in the performance process. There is also space, in this framework, for sattvika abhinaya, or “authentic emotion.” Commentators carefully distinguish the actor’s internal state from that of the character, identifying the highly technical, codifed, and tightly organized actions through which the performer evokes transient and durable states and the spark of understanding and absorption that the knowledgeable spectator undergoes. At the same time, they recognize that true or authentic expression that can erupt in and temporarily intercept performance. Sattvika abhinaya appears in performance as an uncontained force when, for instance, a performer reacts with sincere emotion to the condition of the character.22 Sattvika abhinaya operates as an exception to the rule of critical distance between character and performer while illustrating that abstract representation can nonetheless produce an overwhelming emotional response. I want to suggest, then, that such an analytical frame is useful for understanding how protest actions can evince emotional responses. Sentiments conveyed in protest emerge from the worldview of the organizers but are not identical to what activists feel at a given moment. Nor is the emotion cultivated by protest limited to what participants actually feel at the moment of expression. Protest seeks sympathetic spectators although it sometimes fails to fnd them. Through intentional efort that is usually physical in nature (Foster 2003), justice eforts produce transient and durable states, which are both emotionally afecting and abstracted from the interior life of protest organizers and participants. Transient states may difer from the overall tone of the event, which nonetheless remains central to the experience of protest. I suggest that these concepts—transient and durable states, the receptive spectator, and the distinction between intentionally cultivated and authentically felt emotion—are potentially useful to understanding the mechanisms of justice actions. In order to demand the interventions that could right societal wrongs, justice actions translate the experience of oppression and violence into critique. In order to do so, they transpose individual emotional realities into generalizable states. Such justice eforts can hinge upon identifcation but they don’t always do so. Since the durable state (sthayibhava) emerges from specifc, intentionally crafted action and is deliberately abstracted and translated from individual experience, it is arguably more explanatory of the inherently social nature of protest than representational theories rooted in idiosyncrasy, narrative causality, and identifcation. Similarly, because transient and durable states emerge from physical action—gesture, movement, and efort—the spatial organization of protest that dance scholars have attended to operates in conjunction with protest’s ability to access and cultivate sentiment. Likewise, they can evoke feelings of anger, grief, dismay, alongside joy and celebration, but they also rely upon and produce more amorphous states such as care and imagination. My argument, then, is that justice actions cultivate emotion, organizing space and producing meaning through movement, gesture, and imagery and

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that they do so through the creation of transient and durable states that emerge from but are not identical to the interiority of protest organizers and participants. Although the aim of protest is, on one level, clearly discursive—to reach those in power with a specifc message and a demand for particular forms of change—protest also often raises awareness of forms of systemic violence that are so sweeping that they cannot be undone through a single policy action. In these instances, protest is oriented toward the creation of an overarching mood or tone as much as it is positioned toward the delivery of a specifc message. The concept of the durable state is particularly useful for analyzing experiences of grief and despair that are difuse by virtue of their location in systemic causes but also in conditions that are global and ubiquitous in their reach, such as the climate crisis.

Conclusion: Diffuse Crises, the Climate Emergency, and Neoliberalism This moment of environmental crisis is unlike others; in contrast to the Industrial Revolution, for example, most of us do not see the evidence of pollution on our city walls; we do not feel it on our skin. On most days, in much of the world, the sun is still shining, the air is clean enough to breathe, and the temperature remains livable. Heat increases incrementally even as its move is undeniable, rendering uncomfortably and even dangerously hot days part of a new “normal.” Artic sea ice feels far away and, for most of us, it is. Rising oceans can seem like an abstraction until we encounter a superstorm. Wildfres turn the sky an apocalyptic orange, destroying homes, towns, and forests. Eventually they are contained. Once terror fades, normalcy resumes. We return to business as usual because there seems to be no other option. Indeed, the restoration of normalcy is central to the healing of individuals and communities. And, yet, this return to the normal lulls us out of awareness of the urgency of the crisis. The climate crisis has no one culprit, not one individual or even one institution. We can point to the one hundred corporations that cause 71% of environmental damage but the problem is our way of life as much as it is the entrenchment of a political and economic system. Such is the paradox of environmental catastrophe: we are its victims, we are its perpetrators, its mourners; and we are those who are (or will be) lost. We need to acknowledge this complexity even as the situation requires a swift and unifed response. Red Brigade events capture this paradox. My argument here has been that they accomplish this through their representational strategies. By conjuring sentiment as a performative strategy that has the potential to spark realization and understanding, Red Brigade events signal the political importance of emotion as something spontaneously and authentically felt and as something that must be consciously cultivated if we are to respond to this crisis and, hence, to survive. We have the right to grieve and to demand action that will ofset further harm even as we recognize our culpability.

38 Janet O’Shea

Commentators such as Sailesh Rao (2011) and Margaret Klein Salamon (2020) have suggested that environmental breakdown is a crisis of individual psychology and of community relationships. Capitalism and neoliberalism demand never-ending competition, creating a continual sense of urgency but providing minimal likelihood of success and little support for failure (Rao 2011), fueling the seemingly endless consumption that also drives environmental breakdown. Salamon (2020) points out that climate emergency has left many of us with the feeling that something is desperately wrong at the very same time that we continually deny it. She argues that capitalism has left us feeling empty, powerless, and hopeless, so much so that we can’t seem to take action even as the planet burns. This paralyzing inaction emerges, in part, from the size and scale of the crisis. It also hinges on perceived helplessness: we are told that incremental changes should be enough and, if they are not, it is our fault for not applying those small actions with enough diligence; at the same time, we hear that only massive, sudden, and systemic change will avert disaster. If we focus on individual action, we face ever-expanding requirements to reduce our consumption, upcycle, and minimize demand for environmentally damaging products. If we urge systemic change, then we must wait for someone else—governments, corporations, large non-profts, and other institutions—to fx the problem. In the process, we are up against industries that are amorphous and wide-ranging and that unduly infuence public opinion, individual and collective desires, as well as the state structures that are supposed to protect us. In other words, to tackle the climate crisis, we must pit ourselves against neoliberalism itself. This creates a massive sense of disempowerment in the wake of the largest threat we’ve ever seen. It is, perhaps, at the crux of our inability to take action on the climate crisis. Red Brigade events capture this difuse dismay by eschewing literal, narrative meaning while cultivating a range of sentiments. They encapsulate this slowly enfolding horror and epitomize simultaneous guilt and anger. By folding these transient states into a durable state of climate sorrow, Red Brigade captures this emotional black hole. But Red Brigade events, in themselves, are insufcient. Often, they fail to induce emotional recognition, with spectators heckling, laughing at the spectacle, or retreating from its disturbing tone. Like XR protests more generally, they also do not address the rooting of the environmental crisis in other forms of systemic oppression. They do not make any demands. They do not provide a blueprint for change. They merely try to capture and address a crisis that is both unlike others that have preceded it and extends from longer histories of ecocide. They acknowledge that it is a travesty that ordinary citizens are expected to fx what governments, corporations, and other institutions neglect. They signal the raw unfairness of regular people having to solve problems of an economic, political, and technical nature that large-scale entities have brought into being. They point to the cruelty of having to do so as time runs out. We need to move beyond an exploration of the emotion that accompanies climate realism. We need to engage in systemic critique; we need actions driven

Extinction rebellion’s red [rebel] brigade 39

by individuals and small groups, forward planning, and problem solving alongside major transformations in our political, economic, and social systems. But we cannot undertake these tasks without facing the emotional realities of our moment. Individualizing this grief may be a stepping stone but it is unlikely to motivate large-scale action. Narrativizing this grief has its limitations. If we try to express it via the Western dramatic tradition, it is too easy to incorporate it into a heroic narrative, a story in which we, singly, or as a generation, emerge as the heroes of the story. We avert the apocalypse, perhaps. Or Armageddon comes and we emerge as the survivors and build a New Eden. There are, of course, alternate stories, ones in which we work together and in which we reject ideas of endless growth and mindless consumption. But we need to be able to express, acknowledge, and experience a grief that is unusual by virtue of its distance, its dispersion, and its abstraction before we can reimagine what our social, political, and economic spheres might look like in the face of the societal change that could avert crisis. Climate sorrow isn’t going to accomplish all this. But recognizing it is a place to start.

Notes 1 I have drawn this phrase from Red Brigade’s website: http://redrebelbrigade.com/. 2 This is a generic description based largely on videos of Red Brigade actions. Red Brigade events are similar enough that such an overarching description is possible. My initial plan for this chapter was to conduct primary feld research by performing as a member of the Red Brigade of Extinction Rebellion Los Angeles (XRLA). The COVID-19 pandemic has limited XRLA actions, including Red Brigade events, and in-person trainings, rendering extensive feldwork impossible. 3 While I agree with Susan Foster’s (2003) critique of Gene Sharp’s (1973) delineation of physical intervention as separate from other justice actions and her assertion that the vast majority of protest action is physical, I nonetheless fnd useful the distinction that Sharp draws between eforts whose primary intention is communication with the public or with those in power and those that directly disrupt the workings of the agents of injustice. L.A. Kaufman, who provides a comprehensive history of post-1960s progressive activism, describes direct action as characterized by eforts “outside the established mechanism of government” and includes marches, boycotts, strikes, picket lines, sitins, and human blockades within the umbrella term (2017, x). Kaufman likewise refers to direct action’s “disruptive” qualities (ibid.). Here, I use the term direct action to refer to eforts that intervene into and interrupt the quotidian operations of the entity being protested, contrasting it with symbolic protest, such as a rally in a designated area or a march along an agreed-upon route, which appeals to those in power for change. The latter has clear, physical components, of course. 4 The intentional courting of arrest is one of the most problematic elements of XR. Its organizers have tended to represent law enforcement and the judicial system as relatively benign forces, a move that, as multiple commentators have pointed out, “smacks of race and class privilege” (Cowan 2019). In addition, seeking arrest as a dominant tactic also contains an element of gender privilege by de facto excluding those with caretaking responsibilities, whose labor is feminized and therefore underacknowledged and under-resourced. Likewise, it ignores the privatization of the prison system and the diferential efects that a food of imprisoned protestors might have on a privatized versus public prison system. This blind spot is signifcant

40 Janet O’Shea

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

given that the privatization of the prison system exemplifes the entanglement of government and corporations that constitutes the neoliberal economic system and thus that drives environmental destruction. XR activists tend to represent their eforts as though they are starting from “square one,” ignoring decades of struggle on the part of climate justice activists and frontline communities (ibid.). I base this analysis on my participation in Extinction Rebellion America (XRA) and Extinction Rebellion United States (XRUS) trainings, in which organizers discussed methods for winning the public over rather than antagonizing them. Journalist Peter Brooks (2019) comments on the ability of the Red Brigade to calm, de-escalate, and humanize. In light of the critique above, it is important to recognize that such an efect does not fow automatically from sustained and silent action; the reception of Red Brigaders as peaceful emerges as much from the demographics of XR as largely white and middle class as from their actions. Brooks (2019) and the Red Brigade website also suggest that red evokes the blood shared among species. One highly edited XR video (Extinction Rebellion UK 2019) intercuts the words “pain” and “rage” over Red Brigade’s procession but most events and the footage that accompanies them allow the performance to speak for itself. This video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z7DbR9VY9E. As such, this chapter is part of a larger project that focuses on physicality and emotion in disparate justice eforts, including utility cycling, border solidarity, and farmed animal rescue. L.A. Kaufman points to the importance of loss, death, and, hence, grief, as linking late 20th-century and early 21st-century activism through ACT-UP and Black Lives Matter (2017, 108). I draw this consideration of the foreground and background as politicized perceptions from Sara Ahmed (2006). For example, journalist Anna Russell (2019) reports on the National Funeral for the Unknown Cyclist, in London, UK, which included both a mock funeral and a die-in. For example, on May 18 of every year, cyclists all over the world gather and process through the streets in a slow, silent procession to commemorate the lives lost to or irrevocably changed by road violence. Known as the Ride of Silence, this event organizes cyclists as if they were a funeral procession, often placing “ghost cycles” at sites of fatal road violence. On National Animal Rights Day, activists worldwide stage mourning rituals for the animal lives lost at human hands. Sometimes carrying the dead bodies of actual animals and other times holding visual images, individual activists express their grief over the sufering that accompanies the human exploitation of animals. Activists stage an 80-mile annual Migrant Trail Walk through the Sonoran Desert to protest the militarization of US border policy at the expense of Central and South American lives. However, mock funerals, more than die-ins, are often sarcastic in tone; they bury an ideal in the interest of critiquing a policy that betrays agreed-upon values. Such ironic or sarcastic elements appear in general XR events but are largely absent in Red Brigade protests. Journalist Patrick Benjamin (2019) describes the Red Brigade as “like spirits coming back from beyond the grave, here to warn the living of the grave errors they’re making; a beautiful, bloody mob of nightmarish bodies, pleading with us not to destroy ourselves.” I draw this summary from Ahmed (2010) as well as from Richard Twine (2014) who mobilizes an Ahmedian analysis. Jasper acknowledges the “rhetorical and performative work that organizers do to construct sensibilities and generate moral shocks that draw people into participation” (2011, 289) but attending to the specifcs of such work is beyond the scope of his study.

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18 This is not to say, of course, that the emotional investment of activists is inauthentic. It is merely to note the diference between the qualitative experience of despair, in the face of the climate crisis versus the mobilization of that despair in the interest of environmental organizing and the cultivation of that same state during a justice action. 19 I base this analysis of the Sanskrit aesthetic theory tradition on my brief experience translating limited passages of Bharata Muni’s Natyasastra and on commentaries such as those by Mandakranta Bose (1991), Kapila Vatsyayan (1996), Kathleen Higgins (2007), Sheldon Pollack (2016), and Louise Sundarajan and Maharaj K. Raina (2016). 20 Subsequent works have focused on dance (Abhinaya Darpana) and music (Sangitaratnakarana). 21 Sundarajan and Raina translate sahrdaya as “one with a kindred heart” (2016, 791). 22 Thanks to Anurima Banerji for pointing this out.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2010a. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs 35(3): 571–94. Benjamin, Patrick. 2019. “The Meaning behind Extinction Rebellion’s Red-Robed Protestors.” Dazed, April 26. https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/44238/1/ meaning-behind-extinction-rebellions-red-robed-protesters-london-climatechange. Bose, Mandakranta. 1991. Movement and Mimesis: The Idea of Dance in the Sanskrit Tradition. Dordrecht, Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Brooks, Peter. 2019. “A Week on the Streets with XR’s Red Rebel Brigade.” Huck, October 18. https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/reportage-2/a-day-on-the-streetswith-xrs-red-rebel-brigade/. Browning, Barbara. 2004. “Choreographing Postcoloniality: Refections on the Passing of Edward Said.” Dance Research Journal 35, no. 2 and 36, no. 2: 164–69. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, New York, NY: Verso. Collins, Randall. 1975. Confict Sociology. New York: Academic. Cowan, Leah. 2019. “Are Extinction Rebellion Whitewashing Climate Justice?” GalDem, April 18. https://gal-dem.com/extinction-rebellion-risk-trampling-climatejustice-movement/. DeLeón, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Extinction Rebellion UK. 2019. “The Sea is Rising and So Are We.” Youtube Video, 2, no. 8, August 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z7DbR9VY9E. Foster, Susan. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3: 395–412. Giersdorf, Jens Richard. 2003. “Border Crossings and Intra-National Trespasses: East German Bodies in Sasha Waltz’s and Jo Fabian’s Choreographies.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3: 413–32. Goldman, Danielle. 2007. “Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest.” Dance Research Journal 39, no. 1: 60–74. Goodwin, Jef, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Higgins, Kathleen Marie. 2007. “An Alchemy of Emotion: Rasa and Aesthetic Breakthroughs.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1: 43–54. Jaggar, Alison. 1989. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” Inquiry 32, no. 2: 151–76. Jasper, James. 2011. “Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 285–301. ———. 2018. The Emotions of Protest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kaufman, L.A. 2017. Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. London, New York, NY: Verso. Kedhar, Anusha. 2014. “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot! Gesture, Protest, and Choreography in Ferguson.” The Feminist Wire, October 6. Kershaw, Baz. 1997. “Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968– 1989.” New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 51: 255–76. Misra, Vidya Niwas. 1987. Sahrdaya [The appreciative critic]. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Monbiot, George [with research assistance from Matthew Prescott]. 2006. Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. London: Allen Lane. Pollack, Sheldon, ed. 2016. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Rao, Sailesh. 2011. Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterfies. A Climate Healers Publication, n.p. https://climatehealers.org/carbon-dharma/book-cover/ Russell, Anna. 2019. “Cycling for Climate Justice.” New Yorker, September 10. https:// www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/cycling-for-climate-justice. Salamon, Margaret Klein. 2020. Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers. Sharp, Gene. 1973. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishing. Sundarajan, Louise, and Maharaj K. Raina. 2016. “Mind and Creativity: Insights from Rasa Theory with Special Focus on Sahrdaya (the Appreciative Critic).” Theory and Psychology 26, no. 6: 788–809. Twine, Richard. 2014. “Vegan Killjoys at the Table: Contesting Happiness and Negotiating Relationships with Food Practices.” Societies 4: 623–39. Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1996. Bharata, the Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

4 REFLECTIONS ON UMUNTHU AS THE LIFE POLITICS OF OZHOPÉ Massa Lemu

Row Aesthetics Ozhopé (or wosopé which means all in Yao) comprises the visual artists Ella Banda and this author, video, and photographers Tavwana Chirwa and Augustine Magolowondo, and a writer Emmanuel Ngwira. Inspired by the radical practices of Laboratoire Agit Art of Senegal, Mowoso of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gugulective of South Africa, and also by Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s popular theater experiment of the 1970s in Kenya, we ventured out in 2017 to artistically transform and document the dugout canoe in its contexts.1 For us, the dugout canoe is a sculpture loaded with aesthetic and poetic meanings which merits serious artistic research. However, particularly set in the context of the dispute for lake ownership between Malawi and Tanzania fueled by oil prospects ongoing at the time, our engagement with the dugout canoe opened vistas for exploring broader political issues of extractivism, and the lake as a threatened ecosystem. Lake Malawi is a 350-mile-long freshwater body with about a 1,000 species of fsh, some unique to this habitat. There are fears that oil drilling would permanently destroy this ecosystem (Chirwa 2017). Set in this socio-political context, our project—titled Row to comment on the international dispute— became a form of artistic intervention done in collaboration with members of the fshing communities. The more we worked on the shores, the more the process of artistic production—site, dialogue, collaboration, action, food, conversations— became crucial to the project than the fnal ephemeral sculptural product. The frst part of the project was conducted in 2017 at Machemba village in Mangochi District, in the southern part of Lake Malawi. Paul Chimbwanya, a former member of the collective who lives near the lake, traveled to diferent villages on the lake shore to locate disused canoes. When the dugouts were found, Paul contacted community leaders to request permission to work in their area. DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-6

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Massa Lemu

Work began with these introductions, dialogue, and negotiations. Some locals became our contacts and helped us source the canoes to work with. Our contacts also became the mediators between us and the canoe owners, and the onlookers who were invited to participate in production. While we had to buy most of the canoes, some were given to us by their owners. A lot of unemployed young men hang out on the shore, spending most of the day playing board games, gambling, running errands for the senior fshers, and taking an occasional dip in the lake. Most of our assistants and mediators were from this group. It needs mentioning that since fshing is a predominantly male trade, men dominate at the shores. However, women and children also come to the shore to wash, to sell food and other merchandise, and to buy fsh. These women and children contributed signifcantly to the art making processes as viewers and participants. The women also prepared our food for the entire times we spent in their villages. Collaboration was integral to the work. Upon arrival on the shore, we would be formally welcomed in the village by the leaders. When our objectives were understood, the fshers joined in the creativity, making suggestions to enhance the work in moments of inspiration. The fshers also recommended where we could fnd material ingredients for sculptural installations. The fshers also participated in performances as actors, costume dressers, and camera operators. They were also helpful in generously providing information regarding the canoes, such as how they were made or where they were sourced. The fshers invited us to watch the intricate processes of repairing the canoes. They also translated some of the statements painted on the canoes. The men assisted in hauling the heavy dugout canoes, and in drilling, and cutting them in the sculpture making process. They also helped in painting and decorating the sculptures. Except where they could not be sourced locally, the tools and materials used in the production processes were acquired in the villages near the shore. Local carpenters were very important in these processes. Thus, in their roles in relation to the larger project, the fsher communities can be regarded as what Pablo Helguera would call “creative participants” who worked within a structure established by us the artists. But regarding individual pieces, the fshers moved freely from being creative participants to “collaborative participants” who shared “responsibility for developing the structure and content of the work in collaboration and direct dialogue with the artists” (Helguera 2011, 15). Besides collaboration, site specifcity also defned the creative process. Most of the decisions regarding where to perform, where to install a sculpture, or even to drill, cut, paint, or place the canoe depended on the nature of the canoe, and the specifc conditions of the site. For us, to borrow from Nikos Papastergiadis’ thoughts on the modalities of socially engaged art practice, “critical engagement with the specifcity of place involve[d] more than using it as a stage for new ideas” (Papastergiadis 2008, 378). In installation pieces such as “The four horses,” bodies of fshers moving in and around temporary sculptures, sand, wind, and water constitute what I would call the “ontological totality”2 of the work (to borrow from Cedric Robinson), contributing to its aesthetic, spiritual, and political

Reflections on Umunthu as the Life-Politics of Ozhopé  45

significance (Robinson 1983).3 It needs mentioning that while contemporary art might be alien among the fishers, creative expression is not. The ingredients of our work such as performance inspired by the Gule Wamkulu mask, and the dugout canoe, rooted the work in its social contexts and made it familiar to the fishers (Figure 4.1). This familiarity and social embeddedness were crucial for meaningful participation and conversations. Rather than merely staging readymade work on the lake shore we sought to be responsive to and aesthetically engage its material and social fabric (Lacy 1995). For instance, the dugout canoes that had been repaired with a lot of metal and plastic were more attractive to us aesthetically but were harder to cut or drill than those that were still largely wooden and had less repair. For us, the dugouts with extra material provided more textural as well as textual fodder, but they also tended to be fragile and easily disintegrated in our hands due to advanced decomposition (I discuss these aspects of the dugout further in the section on “the dugout as texxt” below). The presence of inorganic materials on the body determined where and where not to cut. These structural qualities significantly shaped the nature of the sculptural installations that we created. It needs no mentioning, however, that in places where there were more disused canoes, we had more freedom for spontaneity and experimentation than where there were less. Humor and play, important aesthetic devices for Ozhopé, were binding forces between the artists and the fishers in the art making processes. These elements attracted the amused and the curious who would later join us as participants. The fishers are used to various activists and researchers who work on the shore. However, the element of play differentiated us and arguably cemented our relationships with the subaltern of the populations. For instance, women’s laughter

FIGURE 4.1 Ozhopé,

“Palasu/Apa pana kul,” 2018. Photograph by Ledelle Moe. Image courtesy of Ozhopé.

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fueled our performances. The children freely joined in and accompanied us in all the production processes and featured in a number of pieces. Moreover, the elements of play and humor seeped into, shaped, and manifested in works such as “Catch,” “Row 1,” “Buoy,” and “Palasu” in which we poke fun at a bumbling and blundering national elite whom we call the patois bourgeoisie, whose corruption, greed, and rapacity threaten the lake and the country at large.4 The Gule Wamkulu mask is pervasive among the Chewa peoples of Salima where we conducted our second iteration of the project. Work such as “Palasu” incorporates Gule Wamkulu humor through the grimacing red mask called Simoni which satirizes the white colonialist. In this work, play fuses dance with paddling in what André Lepecki, informed by Hannah Arendt’s concept of politics, calls a choreopolitical aesthetics of movement, resistance, and freedom, i.e. “the experience and practice of movement as freedom” (choreographed non-conformity) (Lepecki 2013). With grimacing Simoni, Ozhopé’s symbolically taps from a heritage of resistance going as far back as the colonial times. The work thus asks questions such as where socially engaged art increasingly tends toward the functional and the ethical, what is the role of the poetic and the symbolic in politics? In his seminal essay titled “The production of social space as artwork: protocols of community in the work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes,” Okwui Enwezor offers a glimpse into the specific social-political context of crisis within which socially engaged modern and contemporary African art collectives operate and argues for the redemptive potential of these collectives. On top of the lasting damage caused by slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism on African societies, the macroeconomic Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank of the early 1980s and 1990s weakened the postcolonial African state and wreaked havoc on African economies. As Enwezor notes in reference to these neoliberal SAPs, “rather than reform as was promised, the shock of the experiment at liberalization produced stagnation, structural atrophy, collapsed economies, deep poverty, failed institutions, and loss of state autonomy from donor institutions and markets” (Enwezor 2007, 234). However, for Enwezor, art has something to contribute to the politics of empowerment and recovery. It is in this context of social breakdown inflicted by regimes of “accumulation by dispossession” that Ozhopé finds itself among others working to empower the self and other subjectivities in crisis (Harvey 2005, 159).5 However, by mixing play and work, the sacred and the profane, and by operating between the aesthetic and the ethical, Ozhopé distinguishes itself from social work and is ambivalent toward assuming the custodial role relinquished by the weakened postcolonial state.6 Regarding performance, it cannot be overemphasized how the presence of participants shaped the work in terms of form. “Catch” (Figure 4.2) features six young boys (Karim Yusuf, Pemphero Msumba, Raheem Dinala, Shabil Mhango, Juma Mhango, and Precious Chipiliro) wearing vintage Russian military gas masks playing with a dugout canoe in the muddy lake.7 The children scream, fight, and hussle and tussle around the canoe. For us, the children add

Reflections on Umunthu as the Life-Politics of Ozhopé  47

FIGURE 4.2 

Ozhopé, “Catch,” 2018.  Image courtesy of Ozhopé.

a surreal playfulness to the performance. Their shrieks and scuffles beautifully animate the work while also infusing it with the absurd. Another piece, “Palasu/ Second Coming,” is a short performance of a besuited man wearing a Gule Wamkulu mask simply paddling a dugout canoe affixed with gourds.8 The performer is Mr Juma Nkhwaila, a carpenter and fisherman of Senga Bay, who effortlessly glides the dugout on the calm waters. The issue of the political significance of performing bodies in public spaces has been abundantly argued by numerous scholars.9 Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize the potential of performance art in Malawian societies where performance and performativity constitute a dominant mode of creative expression that permeates and decorates all aspects of life—from daily personal interaction to rituals and ceremonies such as at initiation, vendors, and touts at the market, at weddings, and at funerals. Through performance, the Row project taps from this pervasive creative energy for a performative politics of the possible—a form of choreopolitics.

Umunthu Life Politics: A Framework In Chichewa, munthu means person, and umunthu stands for “basic values of human life, or that which gives human life meaning” (Sindima 1991). I use the term umunthu life politics to describe Ozhopé’s site-specific, collectivist, and subject-centered aesthetics and ethics. Umunthu encapsulates an ideal, philosophy, and quality of being and becoming in most southern African societies. Umunthu is a subjecthood that recognizes intersubjectivity and the mutuality of being between human beings and the object-world, the human and the nonhuman. It

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is characterized by generosity, love, kindness, and respect for the other and care for the environment.10 Umunthu is a pre-capitalist communitarian ideal which has survived the social transformations brought about by Western modernity. As an ethos that counters greed and selfshness, umunthu has endured the colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal onslaught. Umunthu counters privatization and individualism through a collectivist and ecologically conscious ethos. Seen in this light umunthu can thus be read as a life politics that has bound the fshing communities and the broader ecosystem for millennia.11 Sharing, in contrast to selfshness and the spirit of hoarding, is a central value of umunthu. As Harvey Sindima (1991, 15) notes: Generosity is the foundation upon which rests the notion of sharing, a key idea in the concept of community. Sharing is one way of expressing bondedness, selfessness and unselfsh behaviour. Generosity as a virtue promotes unselfshness which allows people to stand together in want or plenty. Readiness to share is a complete surrender of individualism in favour of communal life. It is in the spirit of umunthu that Chief Machemba of Mangochi invited us to have lunch with him at his house each day that we worked in his village. For Ozhopé, umunthu is thus a philosophy of sharing and caring driving our aesthetics and ethics of re-existence.12 In Adolfo Albán’s (quoted in Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 18) terms, re-existence is defned as: The mechanisms that human groups implement as a strategy of questioning and making visible the practices of racialization, exclusion and marginalization, procuring the redefning and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity and self-determination, while at the same time confronting the bio-politic that controls, dominates, and commodifes subjects and nature. Where biocapitalism, in its exploitation and destruction of ecosystems, threatens the entirety of life, we need an ethics of umunthu to save us from regimes of proft and death. Ozhopé is driven by this communal praxis by fshers in the threatened ecosystem of Lake Malawi. Environmental destruction remains a threat since oil drilling in Lake Malawi has not formally started. Nevertheless, intensifed privatization of the shore is tremendously altering the patterns of life for communities who have depended on the lake as a common for ages. For instance, in a political environment where governmental regulation and control have been weakened by corruption, the wealthy are increasingly buying up land along the shore and building luxurious hotels, lodges, and private cottages which are fenced of and thereby cut the fshers’ access to the lake.13 If this privatization and privation continues unchecked it could worsen the marginalization of the fshing villages. Compounded by environmental crises which are rendering parts of the region unhabitable, this land grabbing and hoarding is dangerous in an area that is being

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exposed to the winds of extremism blowing from Mozambique across the lake (Karrim 2019). As more and more young men are cut of from the fshing that supported their households and are rendered unemployed, they become prey to forms of extremist radicalization. I argue that this radicalization would be an irreversible stage in the relentless process of dispossession and dehumanization. Appealing for umunthu in the radicalized youth at that point would be too late.

Dugout as “Texxt” The dugout canoe is a central material object in Ozhopé’s subject-empowering umunthu life politics. Traditionally, the Malawian dugout canoe is made completely out of wood. But on a walk on the shores of Lake Malawi, one also encounters the dugout made of a single tree trunk, but which has in time accumulated plastic, tin, felt, metal, tar, and paint on its body. This is a dugout canoe that speaks of Malawi as a dynamic place with a past, but which has also transformed in time. It speaks of a place shaped by the traditional and the modern, and of cultural hybrid mixtures of the local and the global. This dugout is sculpture of a sophisticated, organic, poetic beauty. Its variegated surface (in terms of materials, color, and texture) reveals how even the remotest shore of Lake Malawi has been deeply touched by globalization. Made by hollowing a tree trunk and streamlining the bow and stern using the adze, the dugout canoe has been used for fshing and transportation on Lake Malawi for ages. Certain species of soft wood and buoyant trees (such as Nsangu) are used to make the canoe which can last between seven and thirty years (Chirwa, Kanjo, and Munthali 1966, 59).The rotting dugout is repaired by patching with plastic and tin recycled from empty tin and jelly-cans. The resultant complex patchwork is functional, but it also transforms the canoe aesthetically adding onto its surface a rich quilt of colors and textures. The patches are also material traces of care for the dugout as an object that helps to sustain livelihoods. As commodity products, the jelly-cans contain labels and are therefore text that can be read literally. In addition, the fshers write their names, proverbs, and other statements on their canoes with paint (such as the proverb “the canoe does not eat,” which speaks to the dugout as a valuable investment). This adds another form of text on the body of the canoe, marking the fsher’s complex relationship with the canoe as property, prestige, and investment. Altogether, the patchwork and the writing make the canoe texturally and textually layered, turning it into a document. Renu Bora’s concept of “texxture,” which is contrasted to “texture” in the ordinary sense in that it speaks of how an object historically and materially came into being, is important for reading the dugout canoe (Sedgwick 2003). Taking into account an object’s temporality and narrative, texxture captures the complex histories of the materials sedimented on surfaces of the dugouts, i.e. in its faking paint, cracking tar, frayed felt, and warped plastic. Therefore, for Ozhopé, texxture combined with literal text, whether pasted or inscribed on the surface of

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the canoe, makes the dugout a “texxt” loaded with poetic and political meaning. Regarding the dugout as texxt thus opens up ways of thinking about the canoe as an object in social, political, economic, or cultural “con/texts”—an object that enhances subjecthood in the capitalist zones of non-being.14 Thinking about the dugout as texxt is a critical materialist reading that, to borrow from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, pays close attention to global and local “economies whose workings have such immense consequences for the survival and opportunities of ordinary but manifestly unequal people” (Coole and Frost 2010, 29).

Challenging Neoliberal Do-Gooderism One disused canoe we found on the shore had been patched using flattened USAID oil tin cans (Figure 4.3). The cans contained edible vegetable oil distributed among refugees to supplement their diets. The oil is smuggled out of the camps and sold on the open market. The empty tins are then reused for potted plants, beer drinking, and mending canoes. Labeled “Not to be sold or exchanged,” the life of a USAID oil tin can in Malawi exceeds the limited channels of its intended official purpose, therefore challenging the strict conditionalities of humanitarian aid. The term “neoliberal do-gooderism” links humanitarianism with the complex machinery of contemporary capitalism.15 Multinational oil corporations have been haunting Lake Malawi for some time, thirsting for its oil deposits. According to environmentalists, a single oil spillage would permanently damage

FIGURE 4.3 USAID

tin can patchwork on dugout canoe, 2017.  Image courtesy of Ozhopé.

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this fragile ecosystem which supports millions of livelihoods.16 As per tradition in Africa, after irreparable damage, humanitarianism which is the other arm of neoliberal globalization, rushes in to “save lives” it has itself ruined, thus perpetrating oppression. An ensemble of tactics and technologies is deployed in this project of domination. In this light, humanitarianism manipulates the poor and thus mystifes and facilitates oppression (Freire 2018, 152). I quote at length cultural theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019, 514) who, through the politics of visibility and invisibility (of victims and perpetrators), eloquently describes how humanitarianism mystifes and perpetrates domination: The focus on “visible victims” in human rights discourse—that is, the language of national and international institutions and NGOs alike—serves to stabilize the separation between victims (usually the photographed persons), perpetrators (usually invisible in human rights discourse even when photographed), and spectators (usually situated elsewhere). When the perpetrators are removed from sight, the victims are made into part of the “problem” that justifes further Western interventions. Through and within felds of expertise such as photography, this separation between victims and perpetrators is reinforced, in a way that worlds destroyed by perpetrators are transformed into distinct signs of the victims’ state, “their” worldlessness. Even when their plight is recorded, the violence from which they sufer is detached from the world in which it originated and from those who exercise it: the perpetrators. In the context of Malawi, seen through the optics of domination, Western intervention and humanitarianism mask the efects of decades of oppression that have devastated the country and rendered the people vulnerable and incapacitated against natural and man-made disasters. Ozhopé seeks to mine these tactics by foregrounding the dugout as text of empowerment.

“Under-Globalization” as Resistance from Below The smuggling of commodities such as shoes, cigarettes, cooking oil, and textiles from and into refugee camps, or across the border, exemplifes resistance by a people on the fringes who have been marginalized by the regimes of accumulation by dispossession. As a vessel which is also used in smuggling ventures across the lake, the dugout can therefore be read as texxt which documents this resistance. Writing about the diverse ways people cope with the devastation wrought by neoliberalism on their economies, David Harvey (2005, 171) observes that: Stripped of the protective cover of lively democratic institutions and threatened with all manner of social dislocations, a disposable workforce inevitably turns to other institutional forms through which to construct social solidarities and express a collective will. Everything from gangs and

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criminal cartels, narco-trafcking networks, mini-mafas and favela bosses, through community, grassroots and non-governmental organizations, to secular cults and religious sects proliferate. These are the alternative social forms that fll the void left behind as state powers, political parties, and other institutional forms are actively dismantled or simply wither away as centers of collective endeavour and of social bonding. As noted above, activism and organized social work constitute some of the forms people take to save themselves where welfare is broken. However, the lumpen activities that others resort to need to be taken into account. In crisis, those cornered and desperate can lose their umunthu. While cross-border smuggling adversely afects the national economy, its efects cannot compare, in magnitude and impact, to the massive corruption and plunder of national wealth by transnational corporations in alliance with local elites.17 In fact, the smugglers are enacting what I would call their own “under-globalization” operating under the radar of governmental regulation and control.18 In capitalist marginalization and neglect, the people devise their own technologies of survival.19 The 20-liter jellycans which contained vegetable oil or parafn smuggled out of the camps, or from Mozambique, fnd their way onto the surface of the dugout canoe, sealing and decorating it, but also inscribing narratives of marginalization and resistance which Ozhopé highlights with sculptures and installations. The tar made from burnt rubber tires is used to glue the plastic onto the wooden canoe. Reused felt from Chiperoni blankets is used to fll in and seal the gaps between wood and plastic. The blankets, made by a colonial Italian blanket maker in the southeastern district of Thyolo, point to neocolonialism, asymmetrical globalization, and the politics of make-do deployed to survive the capitalist onslaught. How colonial estate owners continue to lord over and marginalize locals in some parts of the country is a topic for another chapter. Nevertheless, one story that relates to the topic of colonization and privatization of the lake discussed above needs to be told. While we were conducting research on the shores of Senga Bay, in Salima district in 2018, we learned of a German expatriate who owns a lodge that sits on one of the beautiful woody hills overlooking the bay. The expat has been harassing a group of locals who sell curios to tourists on the periphery of his property, accusing them of trespassing and demolishing their stalls and destroying their merchandise. This violence echoes that of William Jervis Livingstone, a colonial estate manager who harassed the people of Chiradzulu district in the late 1800s. Livingstone (a distant relation of the explorer David Livingstone) was one of the straws that led one of the earliest anti-colonial uprising in Malawi led by Reverend John Chilembwe in 1915 (Shepperson and Price 2000).

Conclusion Site specifcity, collaboration, play, and humor feature centrally in Ozhopé’s aesthetics driven by a life politics of umunthu. In this aesthetics and ethics, temporary

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sculptures, installations, and performances produced and presented on the shores of Lake Malawi in collaboration with local participants challenge the neocolonization, privatization, and exploitation of the lake as an ecosystem, and the dispossession of bodies. However, this chapter has sought to demonstrate that the critical valency of the work lies in the entirety of the processes of artistic production which include the kinds of relationships and networks that are fomented. In a society with a rich heritage of resistance, the deployment of familiar materials and strategies of creative expression such as the dugout canoe, the Gule Wamkulu mask, performance, play, etc., is crucial for revitalizing an aesthetic of resistance against regimes of privation and dispossession. Recognizing that a dehumanized people will lose umunthu, to have umunthu is to be responsible for and respectful of one another and the environment. In the context of aid, umunthu humanism critiques the self-serving politics of humanitarianism. Thus, Umunthu as a human quality shapes our life-afrming praxis that gestures toward other possibilities. This is not to say that material objects are completely eschewed in processes of absolute dematerialization, as the dugout canoe is one major element of subject empowerment. In this contribution, I read it as texxt about the histories of resistance and re-existence by the societies in question.

Notes 1 For further analysis of the dugout canoe made in the context of the art of Ozhopé collective see Lemu and Ngwira (2018, 39–54). 2 I borrow the term from Cedric J. Robinson who uses it to describe an expanded understanding of blackness as collective being. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3 See Ozhopé (2018a). 4 See https://vimeo.com/user15010370. On the patois bourgeoisie see Lemu (2018). 5 Among the various mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession David Harvey lists the commodifcation and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations…the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodifcation of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry) and usury, the national debt, and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. See Harvey (2005) 6 Art theorists such as Claire Bishop recognize the power of the symbolic in socially engaged art that seeks to distinguish itself from social work flling the vacuum left by the neoliberal state. Rather than ofering a band-aid solution to social problems caused by systemic inequalities, this art deploys the aesthetic and the symbolic for political critique, See Bishop (2012). 7 See Ozhopé (2018c). 8 See Ozhopé (2018b).

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9 See, for example, Butler and Athanasiou (2013). 10 Contrasting with dominant Western philosophies of being, Achille Mbembe writes, In ancient African traditions, for example, the point of departure for the questioning of human existence is not the question of being but that of relation, of mutual implication, that is to say of the discovery and the recognition of a different fesh from mine. It is the question of knowing how to transport myself to faraway places that are at once diferent from mine and implicated in it. From this perspective, identity is a matter not of substance but of plasticity. It is a matter of co-composition, of opening onto the over-there of another fesh, of reciprocity between multiple feshes and their multiple names and places. Mbembe (2019, 28) 11 Variably called umuntu or ubuntu among the Bantu of central and southern Africa, umunthu is recognized as a powerful life-afrming force against the evil that threatens Africa’s futures (see Sarr 2019, 85). 12 Re-existence is a decolonial term which Walter Mignolo defnes as “the sustained efort to reorient our human communal praxis of living.” Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 106). 13 See Mweninguwe (2020). 14 Ways of reading the canoe as an everyday object textually and texturally loaded with cultural, economic, or political meanings is inspired by late Senegalese artist Issa Samb’s refections on material objects in Antje Majewski (2010). 15 Hardt and Negri link humanitarianism with domination in the global biopolitical context as the ethical and moral arm of empire that polices and dominates life through pacifcation. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 35–37, 312–14). 16 See Timveni TV (2016). 17 Malawi government authorities have expressed concern about how smuggling negatively afects the economy in Kandiero (2016). 18 The term “under-globalization,” which I would like to diferentiate from alterglobalization which proposes alternatives to ofcial neoliberal globalization, is inspired by Fred Moten’s conceptualization of subterranean anti-capitalist forms of collective production “the undercommons.” See Harney and Moten (2013). 19 For a discussion on how neoliberal extractivist capitalism leaps over and excludes large swathes of the African continent see Ferguson (2006).

References Azoulay, Ariella A. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artifcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chirwa, Danwood. 2017. “Oil discovery and expectation.” The Nation, April 21. https:// mwnation.com/oil-discovery-and-expectations/ (accessed 1st March 2020). Chirwa, G., C. Kanjo, and M. A. Munthali. 1966. “The Dugout Canoes of Lake Chilwa.” The Society of Malawi Journal 19, no. 2: 59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29778142 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Enwezor, Okwui. 2007. “The Production of Social Space as Artwork: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes.” In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, 223–252. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. https://muse. jhu.edu/book/31713

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Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freire, Paolo. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York, NY: Autonomedia. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helguera, Pablo. 2011. Education for Socially Engage Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York, NY: Jorge Pinto Books. Kandiero, Caroline. 2016. “Smuggling and How It Denies Malawian Revenue and Jobs.” The Times, February 10. https://www.times.mw/smuggling-and-how-it-deniesmalawians-revenue-and-jobs/ (accessed 20th May 2020). Karrim, Azarrah. 2019. “Growing Terrorism in Mozambique, with Suspected Links to ISIS, Wreaking Havoc with No End in Sight.” News 24, December 19. https://www.news24. com/SouthAfrica/News/growing-terrorism-in-mozambique-with-suspectedlinks-to-isis-wreaking-havoc-with-no-end-in-sight-20191219 (accessed 28th February 2020). Lacy, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Lemu, Massa. 2018. “Laughing at the Patois Bourgeoisie.” Autonomous Agency, http:// autonomousagency.us/laughing-at-the-patois-bourgeoisie/ (accessed 12th May 2020). Lemu, Massa, and Emmanuel Ngwira. 2018. “Row: A Thinkivist Art Intervention.” Nordia Geographical Yearbook 47, no. 5: 39–54. https://nordia.journal.f/issue/view/ yearbook2018. Lepecki, André. 2013. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR/The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (220): 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/ DRAM_a_00300 (accessed 29th August 2020). Majewski, Antje. 2010. “The Shell: Conversation between Issa Samb and Antje Majewski.” Vimeo Video 58: 24. https://vimeo.com/41850322 (accessed 20th May 2020). Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke University Press. Mweninguwe, Raphael. 2020. “Fishermen against Hotel Owners.” Development and Cooperation, August 26, 2019. https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/fshermen-malawicannot-go-fshing-because-hotels-shoreline (accessed 28th February 2020). Ozhopé, 2018a. “The four horses.” Vimeo Video, 1: 09. https://vimeo.com/251959408 (accessed 26th May 2020). ———. 2018b. “Palasu.” Vimeo Video, 0: 25. https://vimeo.com/251891916 (accessed 29th February 2020). ———. 2018c. “Catch.” Vimeo Video, 0: 41. https://vimeo.com/253124864 (accessed 29th February 2020). Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2008. “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, edited by Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, and Terry Smith, 363–382. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780822389330/ html#contents Robinson, Cedric, J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press.

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Sarr, Felwine. 2019. Afrotopia, translated by D.S. Burke and S. Jones-Boardsman. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Sedgwick, Eve. K. 2003. Touching Feeling: Afect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. 2000. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915. Blantyre: Christian Literature Association in Malawi. Sindima, Harvey J. 1991. “Bondedness, Moyo and Umunthu as the Elements of aChewa Spirituality: Organizing Logic and Principle of Life.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 14, no. 1: 5–20. https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.14.1.5 (accessed 29th February 2020). Timveni TV. 2016. “Oil Exploration in Lake Malawi: What Does It Mean for Malawi?” Vimeo Video 40: 01, July 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rswa4SLo77M (accessed 20th May 2020).

5 ART-MAKING AND WORLD-BUILDING Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher

Introduction What has become revolutionary for me is the notion of transformative change, of a more humane way of being in the world … my practice aspires [to] embody skillful actions and speech in community [as part of an] efort [of ] engaging citizens in the world. (Brett Cook 2019)1 The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difcult to bear is … the fact that the world between [people] has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. (Arendt 1998, 52–53) In this chapter, we explore the political potential of socially engaged art through a case study of Brett Cook’s Art for Everyone: The Delaware Mural Project. We argue that, in order to fully appreciate socially engaged practices, it is necessary to draw upon political theoretical frameworks that profer new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and politics, in addition to the familiar aesthetic frameworks that recognize the value of dialogue and relationship-building (like relational aesthetics and dialogical art). Whereas critical theorists often locate art’s political potential in its ability to disrupt systems of power, we attend to the constructive moments inherent in Cook’s practice—the work’s ability to bring participants together and to create new opportunities for interaction. In so doing, we argue that Cook’s practice exemplifes what Hannah Arendt might term the “world-building” capacity of art—a concept we believe ofers new possibilities for thinking about the political potential of aesthetic practices. Based on our own DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-7

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experiences of Cook’s project, as well as those shared by other participants, we suggest that Cook’s work helps to create a common world that makes possible future political interaction.2 Our roles in this project are important to note: as Director and Curator of the Ross Art Museum, Erin Fletcher was the primary organizer; Ashley Biser, a professor of politics at Ohio Wesleyan University, was a critical observer; and both of us participated in the community workshops facilitated by Cook. We are both part of and remain separate from the communities with which Cook’s project engaged, and we each approach the project from diferent disciplinary perspectives and theoretical traditions. We share an interest in socially engaged practices like those outlined in other chapters in the collection (cf. Lemu 2023; Zebracki and McNeill, 2023) and a concern for issues of representation (cf. Kennedy 2023; Lewis and Barnes 2023); however, our analysis does not focus on practices that are performative in nature or that function as protest (cf. Butler-Rees and Hadley 2023; Kennedy 2023; Krakowska 2023; Lewis and Barnes 2020). We acknowledge the antagonistic framework that traces its lineage to Rancière and Moufe (cf. Zebracki and McNeill 2023); however, we draw on Arendt’s concept of world to focus on the constructive capacity of Cook’s practice and its ability to draw together disparate participants. This turn to Arendt is echoed in recent eforts to articulate a theory of choreopolitics, whereby collective action is understood as a repeated and practiced performance (Lepecki 2013). In André Lepecki’s seminal essay on choreopolitics, he argues that we need to learn to “move politically” lest freedom and politics itself vanish from the world (2013, 13). Highlighting Arendt’s identifcation of politics with the exercise of freedom, Lepecki argues that “[the political] is less predicated on a subject than on a movement (bewegung), defned by intersubjective action, that, moreover must be learned, rehearsed, nurtured, and above all experimented with, practiced, and experienced” (2013, 14). While we share Lepecki’s concern that politics requires learning, nurturing, experimentation, coordination, and practice, we emphasize the conditions that make possible such choreography. Rather than look to Arendt’s work on freedom, we emphasize art’s role in constructing a common world in which coordinated movement can take place. Although Arendt rarely theorizes art explicitly, her work is imbued with an aesthetic sensibility, (Flynn 1991; Curtis 1999; Sjöholm 2015). As Sjöholm points out, this lack of attention to the visual arts is especially striking given the time and place in which Arendt was writing—in the center of both modernist and avantgarde intellectual circles in Europe and the United States. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to lay out an Arendtian aesthetics (a task Sjöholm accomplishes far better than we can) or to trace her complex relationship to the other theorists with whom we engage.3 However, we turn to Arendt’s work because it shares certain theoretical commitments with those who utilize the framework of choreopolitics and those who defend socially engaged art against its critics. Arendt’s complex understanding of the world as an in-between space, both material and

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immaterial, that gathers human beings together while making room for a plurality of experiences, seems crucial to us in thinking about the constructive capacity of artistic practices that center dialogue, relationships, and collaboration. And Arendt’s thinking—which highlights both the tangible and intangible products of human action—seems particularly suited to practices like Cook’s, which combine dialogical techniques with the production of artistic objects.4 Unlike thinkers who posit a strict distinction between aesthetics and politics, Arendt theorizes politics itself as aesthetic: it requires a public space in which human beings can disclose their unique selves through political action. Some interpreters argue that the ability to take pleasure in sensory experience is a central feature of Arendt’s work (Curtis 1999; Sjöholm 2015). The aesthetic nature of politics is also central to Arendt’s famous reappropriation of Kant on aesthetic judgment. While some critics have decried Arendt’s aestheticism, equating her refusal to theorize universal principles against which to judge our actions with a form of decisionism or “antirationalism” (Curtis 1999; Kateb 1984), we fnd promise in Arendt’s understanding of the work of art as a contribution to a shared world—something about and through which human beings can relate to one another. Although she would likely take issue with the “social” aspect of socially engaged practices, we argue that practices like Cook’s contribute to the human artifce in ways that Arendt would deeply appreciate.5

Art and Social Engagement We use the term “socially engaged art” in the pages to come, but art historians and critics employ many diferent terms to refer to an intersecting and overlapping set of artistic practices that include relational art, dialogical art, communitybased art, and more. In Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, he traces the political genealogy of socially engaged art (which he terms socially cooperative) to the civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States (2013). In Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004), art historian Grant Kester outlines an aesthetic genealogy of dialogue-based practices that includes conceptual art, happenings, feminist performance, community arts, and new genre public art.6 Although they rarely mention his work explicitly, both Finkelpearl and Kester are indebted to the concept of relational aesthetics developed by Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s (2009). Like Kester’s emphasis on the transformative potential of dialogue, which he grounds in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Bourriaud, too, emphasizes the intersubjectivity of what he terms relational art. For Bourriaud, this new art form was focused on the sphere of “inter-human relations” and the invention of “models of sociability” (Bourriaud 2009, 28). For him, “art is a state of encounter” (Bourriaud 2009, 18). “Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of shared relationships with the world” (Bourriaud 2009, 22). Bourriaud conceives of relational art as intersubjective human experience, which is not just

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the environment for the reception of art, but the essence of artistic practice itself (Bourriaud 2009, 22). In what follows, we adopt educator and artist Pablo Helguera’s more general use of the term socially engaged art to refer to a set of practices in which “it is the process itself—the fabrication of the work—that is social” (2011). In this section, we lay out the key dimensions of socially engaged art in order to situate Cook’s work within the terrain of contemporary practice. Brett Cook is an internationally recognized artist and educator with a multifaceted practice that includes both community engagement and the production of objects.7 In this chapter, we analyze a project that began in 2018 as a socially engaged work for Delaware, OH, a small Midwestern city in the United States. Rhetorically framed as a public mural project in order to facilitate collaboration with the city, the organizers proposed two to three murals on buildings in the historic downtown center. However, these murals were not the epicenter of Cook’s project. Over the course of almost two years, Cook visited the city and spoke extensively with its residents to build the constituency that was at the core of this collaborative work. This process culminated in a series of workshops in which participants engaged in art-making exercises to generate refection and insight on their experiences of Delaware, as well as to build new relationships with one another. The fnal murals depict images and words from this process. Like most of Cook’s projects, this one centered dialogue, relationship-building, and collaboration, in addition to the physical production of the mural. These elements are key to the aesthetic value of socially engaged practices.

Dialogue and Relationships In his discussion of “dialogical art,” Grant Kester argues that conversation, instead of an object, becomes the subject of an artist’s work. “In these projects…conversation … is reframed as an active generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fxed identities, ofcial discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political confict” (Kester 2004, 8). Helguera echoes this concern, explaining that, in order to be an efective facilitator of a discussion, artists must be sensitive to context and understand “how conditions will be negotiated with the participants or audience in question” (Helguera 2011, 30). Cook’s own skill in navigating a complex environment was clearly on display in his work with Delaware, a predominantly white, historically conservative, and deeply segregated US city. As an artist of color with a nuanced understanding of how to engage diverse communities, Cook was well-suited to create work in this environment; however, in an unpublished interview that we conducted via email in December 2019, he also acknowledges that “the fraught national climate [of the United States under Trump] was so clearly refected [in Delaware]” in ways that made the collaboration particularly challenging. In the months leading up to his facilitation of the workshops at the center of his practice, Cook took extensive time to understand the city’s history and

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social dynamics—adjusting his schedule and approach and setting up a process in which participants from across the city felt welcomed to the table. For instance, the initial public information session, which was held at the university museum, attracted a narrow audience—primarily business owners and non-proft directors. Recognizing this group was not representative of the town as a whole, Cook returned to conduct additional sessions in other locations throughout the city. According to Kester, this responsiveness and willingness to change direction is key to dialogical practices, which require that artists approach conversations with a desire to listen, to identify with others (connected knowing), and to be empathetic so these conversations do not become simple opportunities to debate or make a point (Kester 2004). To be efective, artworks that center dialogue must also have a clear objective or plan—be it to arrive at a common understanding on a given subject or to collaborate toward a fnal product (Helguera 2011, 22). For instance, at one of Cook’s workshops, each group was given a camera and tasked with building a “community alphabet” (Figure 5.1). To build this alphabet, groups had to identify twenty-six words, each corresponding with a letter, that represented their community and then pair that word with an image that they photographed. To complete the task, members of the group had to share ideas, negotiate their course of action, and decide how to present as a team. Thus, this activity provided a structure that promoted dialogue and built relationships between residents who may otherwise have never gathered in one place together. The specifc role that dialogue plays in socially engaged works varies greatly between practices. In Kester’s book, he makes repeated reference to Wochenklausur’s Shelter for Drug-Addicted Women—a socially engaged intervention that took place in Zurich in 1994/1995. In this project, which culminated in the opening of a shelter for marginalized women, multiple private discussions were staged on a boat between public ofcials, experts, and the women themselves— with the goal of solving a specifc social problem. In other projects, dialogue is less structured, taking place in interviews between the artist and the subjects. Take, for example, the work of Pepón Osorio, whose practice provides a generative point of comparison with Cook’s.8 His 1995 work, Badge of Honor, explored the relationship of teenage boys to incarcerated fathers. This installation grew out of conversations between the artist and a particular family from a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New Jersey. These interviews not only inspired Osorio’s work, which recreates the son’s bedroom alongside the father’s prison cell, they are also captured in video throughout the installation—efectively bringing the voices of the interviewees into the exhibit itself. Like Osorio, Cook’s practice combines social and dialogical elements with the production of objects—most frequently large-scale fgurative painting. Although Kester’s book is specifcally focused on art practices which have no object-based component, he acknowledges that the framework of dialogical art can be applied more broadly to socially engaged practices which combine dialogical elements with collaboratively produced objects (2004, 12–13). In Bourriaud’s conception,

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FIGURE 5.1 

Discussing community alphabets. Photograph by Brett Cook.

too, “these [relational] works in no way celebrate immateriality” (2009, 25). His definition of art in Relational Aesthetics is an activity that produces “relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions, and objects” (Bourriaud 2009, 107). In his own work, Cook refers to his paintings as artifacts or “debris” left over from the collaboration—a nod to the primacy of the relational aspect of his practice. However, his paintings preserve the moment of collaboration, which can be accessed later by people who were not part of that original dialogue. In this way, his work contains an element of durability that allows objectbased artworks to transcend a specific time—a concept to which we will return in the section on Arendt.

Collaboration Regardless of whether practices include a material component, the heart of socially engaged works lies in collaboration. For this reason, we draw more heavily on Kester’s work than Bourriaud’s in the sections below. Despite his emphasis on relationality, Bourriaud is interested in intersubjective experience only insofar as it is driven by the artist; Kester focuses more extensively on artistic practices that involve collaboration and co-authorship. In this type of collaboration, participants become co-creators. In Cook’s work, the stories, living theater performances, and photographic documentation created by participants in his workshops become the substance of the work. Cook considers his facilitation of these workshops

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as the core of his practice—even more so than the paintings he eventually produced. This decentering of the artist worries some critical theorists; however, Cook and his peers understand it as central in an efort to complicate the hierarchical relationship between artist and audience. In our interview, Cook explains how his understanding around collaboration has developed over time: [w]hen I was younger, I used to think collaboration meant that I have an idea, you can help me do it, and we’ll call it collaboration. At this point, I think of collaboration as a practice that participants, including myself, contribute to in reciprocal ways in both the conceptual process and product. In collaboration we all have expertise that we share in the manifestation of collective action, and the results—when done skillfully—refect more than I could do or create by myself. Cook relies on a curriculum to guide participants of his workshops through specifc collaborative projects. However, other socially engaged artists utilize more iterative methods to encourage collaboration. For instance, in Osorio’s 2014 reForm, the artist met with students from the closed Fairhill elementary on a weekly basis over the course of the project’s development, discussing what had been lost in the school closure and what they could construct to address this loss. The transformative power of this type of collaboration is easily visible in participant engagement and feedback. For instance, Cook repeatedly asks participants how the project afected their understanding of collaboration in evaluations conducted after his workshops. Feedback on these evaluations was overwhelmingly positive. Some participants expressed appreciation for the dialogue: “I really liked how everyone listened to each other and supported each other without judgement.” Other commenters found value in the collaboration: “I liked what Brett said—‘I will take what you did and use it to help me create but you are contributing to what I use, take away, etc.’” Still others found peace and solace in the activity of coming together for a shared purpose: “It gave me more hope for our community than I sometimes have.”

Critiques of Socially Engaged Art Many of socially engaged art’s most prominent critics are deeply skeptical of practices that, like Cook’s, engender feelings of goodwill and, at least on the surface, pose little threat to the artistic and political establishment.9 These critics worry that “art practices that seek to create a harmonious space of intersubjective encounter—i.e., those that ‘feel good’—risk neutralizing the capacity of critical refection” ( Jackson 2011, 47). And those that “seek to correct social ills—i.e., those that ‘do good’—risk becoming over instrumentalized, banalizing the formal complexities and interrogative possibilities of art” ( Jackson 2011, 47). In the words of Claire Bishop (2006), whose article raising critiques of the “social turn” sparked an ongoing debate about the aesthetic value of these practices, “[socially

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engaged art] constitutes a rejection of any art that might ofend or trouble its audience.” Deeply critical of collaborative practices, which she believes “renounce” the role of the artist as author, Bishop believes that art’s value is found in its critical capacity and its “resistance to intelligibility” ( Jackson 2011, 47). Via Bishop’s interpretation, the close partnerships with political and legal authorities required to produce socially engaged works leaves little space for art to disrupt the established political order. And what she calls the “predictable formulas of workshops, discussions, meals, flm screenings, and walks” is too simplistic to prompt critical refection about either art or politics (Bishop 2006). Bishop also worries that theorists of socially engaged art privilege ethical criteria (such as representativeness or reciprocity) over aesthetic criteria in their evaluation of the work (Bishop 2004, 2006). Although Bishop has become somewhat more sympathetic to social practice in recent years, she nonetheless laments the lack of “friction” inherent in many contemporary artistic endeavors and insists that some form of “antagonism” is essential to any art that purports to be more than “pleasantly innocuous” (Bishop 2006). For Bishop, art’s disruptive capacity is central to its aesthetic value. Art’s disruptive capacity is also frequently cited as a key element of its political potential. For instance, in a speech on “Art and Democracy,” Chantal Moufe praises “critical art”—“art that foments dissent; that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate” (Moufe 2008, 7). Although skeptical of “critical art” because it posits too direct a relationship between aesthetic experience and political mobilization, Jacques Rancière, too, emphasizes the disruptive capacity of art; indeed, Rancière argues that “aesthetic experience has a political efect to the extent that [the sensory experience it creates] disturbs the way in which bodies ft their functions and destinations” (Rancière 2008, 11).10 While less concerned with art’s political impact than its aesthetic value, Bishop draws on both Moufe and Rancière to develop her understanding of aesthetic antagonism.11 In doing so, she ofers a critique of socially engaged practices as lacking a transformative and critical edge. In the next section of the chapter, we argue that critics like Bishop wrongly confate antagonism with criticality and therefore overlook some of the political and aesthetic potential of socially engaged practices like Cook’s. We argue that Cook’s project was both disruptive and critical—without ever being motivated by attempts to produce discomfort.

Whose Center/Whose Power: The Disruptive and Critical Impact of Cook’s Project Critics like Bishop tend to valorize projects that provoke discomfort and use combative language ( Jackson 2011, 55–56). Cook’s project contained little shock value: there were no protests associated with the work; workshops were centered on ideas of celebrating community, rather than a discussion of Delaware’s history of erasure and exclusion; and the project itself was supported by key ofcials like

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the mayor and city manager. Rather than inciting discomfort, Cook speaks of his desire to create “loving community that has collective insight and [the] capacity to make things easy and natural that can be difcult to do on our own.” Despite this lack of overt confict, Cook’s proposed project nonetheless prompted critical refection on whether Delaware’s proclaimed “center” felt welcoming to all residents. Moreover, Cook’s eforts to celebrate Delaware’s diversity and share decision-making power with his collaborators were disruptive to the expectations of those in power. Rather than arising from the artist’s actions or the subject matter of his workshops, however, this disruption emerged from the intersection between the content of Cook’s proposed project and the context in which the work was to be located. The intention for much of the project’s planning phase was to represent residents from across the city in its claimed “center.” The original site for the mural was the Strand Theatre, a historic cinema and arts center in the historic “downtown” area. Throughout the process, however, it became clear that the downtown was not equally embraced as a center by residents from various parts of the city. One resident of the East Side made a point of noting that the East Side held the “original” downtown. Residents in the South Side—which many still refer to as the Second Ward—shared that the area used to have its own “Black main street” so residents did not have to go “downtown.” These residents spoke of vibrant hubs, histories, and communities in neighborhoods outside of the downtown area. Cook’s process exposed that the identity of the town was located in many diferent centers. Because downtown Delaware has been controlled by a small number of wealthy residents and building owners who exercise considerable authority over the historic area, Cook’s proposal to create portraits of current (unknown) citizens in these spaces was met with ongoing suspicion and concern. Cook’s project encountered unexpected resistance as ofcials began to realize that the murals would not depict famous historical fgures (in keeping with the town’s ofcial narrative). The discomfort exhibited by prominent citizens serves as a potent reminder that the willingness of artists to depict everyday people working together continues to be a radical proposition—and one that can have a powerful impact on those who have never seen themselves represented in public spaces. This impact was clearly visible in the talkback after the murals’ installation. Here, Cook told the following story: We’ve been installing the last two nights at the Second Ward (Figure 5.2) and two women come up in a car. One woman is like “I’ve lived here for four generations, I went to that elementary school, I taught at that elementary school, I taught Melissa [the subject of the painting]. It is incredible for me to see these images here.” And then her friend is in tears because she is like “I could just never imagine that this could be in Delaware. That I could see someone that looks like me that would be in this place.” (video C0058, ends at 5:34)

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Another attendee echoed these sentiments: I was driving down the street on Friday…and I saw the big word “Community”…I had to turn around and come back… it was very inspiring because it is “with unity”, [repeats] “with unity”…that’s where Delaware city needs to get, and stop the segregation…this side that side this side that side, and come together as one. Focused on building relationships among current residents, Cook created spaces for participants to recognize their commonalities while still acknowledging the different experiences of the city that each resident brought to the project. As the project progressed, it ultimately became clear that the downtown location was not the appropriate site for the final painting. Representing many of the most prominent members of the community—building and business owners, a judge, CEO of a bank, representatives of the city—the Board of the Strand Theater became increasingly uncomfortable with the contingency inherent in Cook’s process and the equal partnership he proposed. The project came to an impasse when the artist and organizer would not give board members power to determine the content of the murals, which portrayed words and images from the workshops. In July 2019—only two months before installation—they rejected the final concepts and the organizers were forced to find a new project site. Instead of a mural on the Strand, organizers located the murals at the same

FIGURE 5.2 Brett

Cook’s mural at the Second Ward Community Center (now Unity Community Center). Photograph by Brett Cook.

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sites where the workshops had taken place—community organizations in the town’s multiple centers. While some might see this change in location as a defeat, Cook recalls this shift in the following way: It was…remarkable to see the many new supporters, allies, and accomplices and additional permanent installation sites that flled and expanded the project as a result of the cancellation. In retrospect [this] is especially notable considering the conservatism of the context. Cook’s emphasis on the possibilities that emerged from the change in location is instructive; it points to the constructive capacity of his work—rather than simply its disruptive ability. In the remainder of the chapter, we explore these constructive moments in greater detail.

World-Building in the Thought of Hannah Arendt Despite the challenges that Cook’s practice posed to downtown and the critical refection on place that it engendered, it would be overly simplistic to posit a direct relationship between Cook’s work and specifc political change in the city of Delaware. The “naive belief that all social conficts can be resolved through the utopian power of free and open exchange” is what Kester terms “dialogical determinism.” Kester acknowledges that socially engaged art cannot—on its own—“radically transform social relations”; this is particularly the case for practices that attempt to address complex issues like race and class (Kester 2004, 182). However, we argue in the next section that socially engaged practices nonetheless contain political potential insofar as they create the conditions that make political interaction possible. This claim is diferent from (although not in confict with) that profered by critical theorists. While we acknowledge that socially engaged art can be disruptive (as detailed above), we also argue in this section that its political potential exceeds its critical capacity. To make this claim, we turn to the work of Hannah Arendt. In what follows, we briefy lay out Arendt’s idiosyncratic understanding of “world” in order to argue that art constitutes a form of world-building that is vital to the construction of a public space. We then return to Cook’s project to explore how his specifc practice exemplifes this idea of world-building.

Arendt on World Arendt uses the term “world” in a highly specifc manner. For her, the “world” is synonymous with the human artifce—encompassing both the physical, built-world comprising tangible objects and the “web of human relationships” that is “overgrown” on top of it (1998, 183). Hannah Pitkin (1998) defnes the world as “the material culture of humanly made or altered objects and the

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nonmaterial culture of humanly sustained relationships, institutions, customs, mores, concepts, and civilization in general.” For Arendt, the world functions as an in-between—“as a table is located between those who sit around it”—that both gathers people together and separates them at the same time (1998, 52). The “durability” of the world plays a key role in Arendt’s thinking by providing stability and predictability to the realm of human afairs. Although its component parts are never secure from either nature’s destructive power or the impact of human action, the world in its entirety is intended to outlast an individual’s lifespan. In addition to its durability, the world is also characterized by plurality and commonality (Zuckerwise 2016). Because no two persons can occupy the same location at the same time, the world presents itself diferently to every single human being—even those who have certain qualities (like race, gender, class, etc.) in common. It is this inability to see exactly what others see that gives rise, Arendt argues, to the condition of plurality, i.e. the fact that “we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (1998, 8). The “objective” quality of the world, for Arendt, both makes possible subjective experience and allows us to work together in spite of it. In this sense, plurality is an efect of and condition for the world. However, the world we share in common also provides us with what Ella Myers (2013) has termed “worldly things” or “matters of concern” around which we can relate; thus, the world is critical to overcoming our subjective diferences. In the words of one interpreter, be they buildings or cities that situate individual citizens or linguistic lexicons and turns of phrase that enable comprehension of one another’s meanings, things of the world provide context for humans to come together by placing them amongst shared material to which they can relate. (Zuckerwise 2016, 487) The world pulls humans out of their subjective experience and makes our words and deeds (at least somewhat) legible to each other.

Arendt on Art Although all objects help construct a common world, the work of art occupies a curious space in Arendt’s conceptual schema.12 Insofar as it involves fabrication, art-making is a form of work, but it also is a means by which an artist reveals their unique identity—a quality it shares with action. Arendt argues that the work of art is distinct because it is a “thought-thing”—a product of thinking—not a product of instrumental rationality. Socially engaged practices clearly demonstrate how art blurs the line between the instrumentality associated with work and the creativity associated with action; before facilitating a workshop or painting a mural, Cook has a rough idea of what will be achieved; yet

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the actual content of the art is produced within what Arendt terms the “web of human relationships”—where his ideas become subject to “innumerable, conficting wills and intentions” (Arendt 1998, 184) and are hence transformed. Thus, the work of art, for Arendt, exists in between work’s instrumentality and action’s boundless potential.13 In the coming section, we explore Arendt’s defnition of the work of art, focusing on its durability, its public/common nature, and its relationship to human plurality. Throughout the section, we use examples from Cook’s work to show how Arendt’s defnition is complicated by (and yet still consistent with) socially engaged practices. In The Human Condition, Arendt praises the work of art for its contribution to the world, calling it the “worldliest” of objects: “Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else, therefore, does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings” (Arendt 1998, 168). Art’s durability, for Arendt, arises directly out of its “uselessness” (1998, 167). As she argues in “The Crisis in Culture,” the durability of a cultural object “is the very opposite of functionality” (Arendt 1993, 208). The interactions Cook facilitated and the murals he created (which, in combination, comprise his “work”) were indeed “useless” in this sense; they served no functional purpose and Cook created nothing that could be bought or sold. But it is precisely this “purposelessness” that Arendt values in cultural objects: neither objects of exchange nor objects of use, works of art are “removed from the processes of consumption and usage and isolated against the sphere of human necessities” (1993, 206).14 The socially engaged portion of Cook’s practice may initially seem to resist this concept of durability, as the interactions between participants in the workshops are ephemeral. But, as Helguera argues, the durability of such work depends on the lasting quality of the relationships it instigates. Cook’s creation of a “platform or a network for the participation of others, [ensures] that the efects of the project may outlast its ephemeral presentation” (Helguera 2011, 12). Unlike some socially engaged artists, however, Cook also produces material objects. He alternately characterizes the objects created in his practice as “memories,” “echoes,” and “documents.” In this way, the murals are representations of the conversations, relationships, and understandings that developed when residents came together in the workshops. This is especially clear in the visual format of the mural on the Andrew’s House, a community services center, which depicts participants waiting in a loose line to write down their defnitions of community and collaboration. This image captures individuals in the process of creating shared defnitions. As objects, the murals will endure beyond the ephemeral interactions they depict. However, they are also visual reminders of those interactions. In addition to its durability, the work of art contains an element of commonality. All artistic objects are created to be seen: “[t]o shine and be seen, to sound and be heard, to speak and be read” is essential to art’s character (Arendt 1998, 168). However, this quality is most evident in public art, like Cook’s, which is deliberately placed in spaces available to a broad audience. As such, artworks

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provide, like all elements of the world, material about and through which human beings can relate. Cook’s work created a medium through which residents could relate. He explains that the “workshops ofer points of commonality for discussion. This allows people to start to build relationships that are a foundation on which they can relate about the place they live” (video C0057, ends 1:52). Importantly, Cook’s practice brought together residents who would never fnd themselves in the same spaces. For example, a talkback held at the university after the installation of the frst two murals included residents from the East Side, South Side, and Northwest neighborhoods, alongside the city manager, a former city planner, university professors, the university president, and a high school art teacher. Looking out over the audience, Cook stated: “Look who is in this room, how often does this room look like this? [laughter]. I don’t know but I bet almost never…that doesn’t happen unless you have engines like this that bring people together” (C0058, ends 6:51). The power of Cook’s work of art to bring together these people and give them something to talk about is key to the world-building capacity of his practice. In providing a common context within which to relate, works of art also help create spaces in which we can recognize human plurality. As discussed above, the residents who participated in Cook’s project each came to the workshops with diferent experiences of the city. Rather than cover over these diferences, Cook facilitated working across them. His murals document and commemorate the beauty of this process, even when it was difcult. In discussing the community alphabets created in one workshop, Cook explained: …[I]n the process of taking those pictures, people’s understanding of community changed, because they were challenged to try and defne that twenty-six times in a group. So it’s not just the product, it’s like, how does this process [work] so that when I’m done there is actually this really deep learning that has happened…[T]he objects make that learning visible… [and] reproduce that in public ways. (video C0057, 4:45-5:23) Like many socially engaged works, Cook’s practice contains a deep respect for human plurality, as evidenced in the process itself. This respect is also manifested in the visual representation contained in the murals, which never pretend to represent “Delaware” as a whole. Instead, they document specifc, unique individuals trying to make something together. The murals also contain words and ideas generated by the participants in the workshop—giving voice to the people they represent. Cook explains that this inclusion of words is a way of addressing the fact that in “the history of Western Art, the model never has a voice.” He states “this is about magnifying people’s voices” and depicting people “of this place.” Socially engaged art like Cook’s both respects human plurality and helps to construct common spaces in which to engage it. This is what sets it apart from the more traditional art objects Arendt discusses. Cook’s project created a

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framework where participants and stakeholders could come together for a common purpose—whether they were joining a workshop, negotiating the location of the murals, or discussing the impact of the art. His practice not only documented the collaborations that took place but also helped create new relationships. Francine Butler, a local high school teacher, echoed this point in the talkback when she stated: I enjoyed reconnecting with people in the community and former students that I would see around the high school but never really did anything with because they weren’t in my classroom…this was helpful for breaking down some of those barriers that keep people apart. You have to have a framework [for doing that]. (video C0059, ends 1:04) Butler’s comments speak to the importance of spaces and things that allow human beings to relate—what Arendt terms the world. For Arendt, world-building is essential to politics. In creating a public sphere in which people and things can appear, socially engaged art helps create a space that allows for potential future collaborations and sets the stage for political action. In the absence of this shared world, political action would be impossible.

Conclusion Arendt provides theoretical resources for understanding the political potential of Cook’s practice as a mode of world-building. Rather than occasioning direct political change, Cook created spaces in which people with diferent understandings of the world (plurality) could come together around shared objectives (commonality) and documented this interaction in the murals (durability). Cook fostered new relationships that made possible new ways of thinking about the shared life of the town. Rarely has this need for common spaces and understandings been so evident. As the chapters in this anthology show, the collective struggle to confront hegemonic systems of oppression requires creative forms of collaboration and movement building. In addition to antagonistic artistic practices that expose systems of control and command, we argue that socially engaged practices that provide opportunities for citizens to build relationships can serve an important political function. As Kester says, “We are all too familiar with the way communication can fail…what we urgently need are models for how it can succeed” (2004, 8–9). While ephemeral, Cook’s workshops left participants more hopeful, wanting to be connected in town, and to listen more carefully to others—an experience that many had not felt was possible in the context of Delaware, OH. Although Cook’s project in Delaware is the subject of this case study, we suggest that an Arendtian framework could be constructively applied to many socially engaged artworks to illuminate a diferent political potential than is captured by

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antagonistic analyses. We hope that multiple frameworks will expand possibilities for understanding socially engaged work going forward. Despite her appreciation for a shared world, Arendt nonetheless cautions that commonality cannot come at the expense of plurality. It is critical to note that Cook created spaces in which individuals were able to “shine forth” in their particularity while working together toward a common purpose. The beauty of Cook’s practice, and socially engaged art from an Arendtian perspective, is that it provides us with something to talk about, an objective reality around which we can gather. In Lepecki’s work on choreopolitics, he suggests that “in the dancer’s activation of freedom within the choroeographic plan of composition, the political comes into the world as an enduring movement of obstinate joy” (Lepecki 2013, 26). What we suggest in this chapter, following Arendt, is that politics requires not only the activation of freedom but also a shared world.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Cook are taken from this interview, which was conducted by the authors via email in December 2019 and remains unpublished. 2 Our roles in this project are important to note: as Director of the Ross Art Museum, Erin Fletcher was the primary organizer of the project; Ashley Biser, a professor of politics at Ohio Wesleyan, was a critical observer; and both of us participated in the community workshops facilitated by Cook. 3 For instance, Habermas, whose work informs Kester’s on dialogical art, shares much in common with Arendt and she is often cited as one of his intellectual ancestors. 4 Although Arendt is attentive to non-material forms of art, such as theater, her discussion of visual art remains grounded in a modernist conception of art as object. We draw on Arendt’s understanding that the human artifce can be immaterial, to stretch that defnition to socially engaged practices in this chapter. However, practices that contain both relational aspects and traditional forms of objecthood are helpful for grappling with an Arendtian view of world. 5 There is, of course, no little irony in our attempt to understand socially engaged art through an Arendtian lens. Her concern about the transformation of the political into the social and the substitution of “housekeeping” for political action is well-known (cf. Pitkin 1998). Indeed, Arendt herself would be quite critical of those practices that veer toward the provision of social services. We believe that Cook’s practice avoids this criticism, although there are some socially engaged practices that would not. (See Helguera [2011] on the ways in which some practices blur the line between art and social work.) 6 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully explore the lineage of socially engaged practices, though it is important to note that both aesthetic and political movements have contributed to its formation. 7 In our interview with the artist, he describes his practice in the following manner: On one end, I follow a more traditional defnition of an artist, where I make things by myself, whatever the variety of materials. On the other end, I’m oftentimes working with people or communities, and at the far extremes of that spectrum, I may not make anything, yet through facilitation or development of some protocol or curriculum other people will make objects, ideas, and new ways of being. 8 These two artists jointly appeared on a panel at the “Imagining the Social in Artistic and Museum Practices” symposium at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in June

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2018 (Pepón Osorio on Process as Artistic Practice 2018). Osorio is a socially engaged artist who also works with large-scale, multimedia installations to advance discussions of community experience. 9 See Shannon Jackson (2011) for a succinct overview of the primary aesthetic debates around socially engaged art. 10 For Rancière (2008), aesthetic experiences create “a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between bodies, the world where they live and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ for ftting it” (11)—this reframing is itself political. Rancière explicitly diferentiates his interpretation of art’s political potential from the “paradigm of ‘critical art,’” arguing that there is no reason why the sensory strangeness produced by the clash of heterogeneous elements should bring about the understanding of the state of the world, no reason why the comprehension of the state of the world should bring about the decision to change it. (Rancière 2008, 12)

11 12

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Cook’s project might ft Rancière’s description of art’s political potential quite well. However, Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics, unlike Arendt’s, has already received a great deal of critical attention. See Miller (2016) for a discussion of Bishop’s use (and abuse) of Moufe. In Arendt’s conceptual framework, labor, in which human beings comport themselves as animal laborans, is the activity of self-sustenance. The product of labor is simply biological existence. Work, on the other hand, is the purview of homo faber and involves the production of material objects. In Arendt’s triad, work serves the function of building the world into which each new generation is born; this creation provides (at least relative) stability to the realm of human afairs. See Patchen Markell’s work on the architecture of the Human Condition, where he theorizes more explicitly the connective function that the work of art plays between her sections on work and action. Bourriaud and Kester, too, share this concern for the intrusion of market forces into aesthetic realms.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York, NY: Penguin Books. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (October): 51–79. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810. ———. 2006. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” Artforum 44, no. 6: 178–83 Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2009. Relational Aesthetics. Nachdr. Documents Sur l’art. Dijon: Presses du réel. Butler-Rees, Angharad, and Bree Hadley. 2023. “Exploring the Role of the Disabled Body as a Vehicle and Art Form within Anti-Austerity Protest.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 116–132. New York, NY: Routledge. Cook, Brett. 2019. Email interview by Ashley Biser and Erin Fletcher. December 2019. Curtis, Kimberley. 1999. Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Finkelpearl, Tom. 2013. What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Flynn, Bernard. 1991. “The Places of the Work of Art in Arendt’s Philosophy.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 17, no. 3: 217–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/019145379101700303. Helguera, Pablo. 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York, NY: Pinto. Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. 1st ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203852897. Kateb, George. 1984. Hannah Arendt, Politics, Conscience, Evil. Philosophy and Society. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld. Kennedy, Fen. 2023. “Bloodied Beaches, Copper Flowers: A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 82–95. New York, NY: Routledge. Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Krakowska, Joanna. 2023. “Introduction: Emotions, Materiality, and World-Building.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 21–25. New York, NY: Routledge. Lepecki, André. 2013. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR/The Drama Review 57, no. 4: 13–27. Lemu, Massa. 2023. “Refections on Umunthu as the Life-politics of Ozhopé.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 43–56. New York, NY: Routledge. Lewis, A.F., and Kelcea Barnes. 2023. “‘Racism Lives Here’: Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 96–115. New York, NY: Routledge. Miller, Jason. 2016. “Activism vs. Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond.” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, no. 3 (Winter), 165–183. http://feld-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FIELD-03-MillerActivismVsAntagonism.pdf Moufe, Chantal. 2008. “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space.” In Art as a Public Issue. Rotterdam, Amsterdam: NAI Publishers. www. onlineopen.org/art-and-democracy. Myers, Ella. 2013. Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1998. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2008. “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art.” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts, and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer). https://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/pdfs/ranciere.pdf. Sjöholm, Cecilia. 2015. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things. Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Zebracki, Martin, and Z. Zane McNeill, eds. 2023. “Politics as Public Art: Bodies, Power, Inclusive Change.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 3–17. New York, NY: Routledge. Zuckerwise, Lena. 2016. “Vita Mundi: Democratic Politics and the Concept of World.” Social Theory and Practice 42, no. 3: 474–500. https://doi.org/10.5840/ soctheorpract201642313.

PART II

Bodies in Space The Aesthetic Politics of Protest

Intervention: an illustrative response to Bodies in Space: The Aesthetic Politics of Protest, by Martin Zebracki 2022

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-8

6 INTRODUCTION Political Praxis, Ideology, and the Deliberately Aesthetic Body Gregory J. Langner

Dance, the presentation of the deliberately aesthetic body, has always been political in nature and practice. Few forms of expression could more appropriately communicate and contextualize the body’s burdens and freedoms. The deliberately aesthetic body is, more so, materially and richly present across the spectrum of human experience, from codifed artistic disciplines to the choreographed gestures and physical forms of protest made conversely to disrupt rigid, predictable, culturally codifed norms and enforced expectations. Close readings and critical analyses of deliberately aesthetic bodies in pointedly political contexts reveal in the following chapters distinct and impactful ways people embody and are burdened with embodying ideologies; ways we move and are moved through public spaces and social institutions. Co-authors Angharad Butler-Rees and Bree Hadley, co-authors A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes, and author Fen Kennedy correspondingly emphasize how both destructive and restorative ideologies are channeled through politically informed circumstances and bodies. Specifcally resonating through each piece is the sentiment and observation that bodies are not binaries of capable or incapable, productive or unproductive, useful or wasteful, but are invariably viewed and accordingly treated as such. Ideology then coerces bodies marked for diference to bear greater labor of movement within tighter restrictions of space, conversely reinforcing norms and policies privileging fewer others to enjoy greater ease of movement with demonstrably greater spatial freedom. The simple fact that, as Lewis and Barnes remind us, white bodies can traverse public spaces with a pervading sense of innocence expressly denied to Black people and communities underscores the stark inequity inevitably produced within such a binary. The authors efectively and sometimes directly communicate with one another in ways that provide rich, dynamic, and carefully organized analyses

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-9

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of contemporary choreopolitical praxis. Accordingly, what I modestly ofer is the introductory framework of a grateful reader and Communication and Performance Studies scholar invested in embodied practices that interrogate and disrupt rigid and plainly uneven worldviews, and the destructive behaviors that follow them. In this part, we shift between isolated analyses of dance as an act of strategic, privileged protest (Kennedy), discourses on the impact of austerity politics on disabled persons’ lives and well-being, and the vulnerability-forward artistic responses that followed (Butler-Rees and Hadley), and close critiques of cultural institutions upholding and instigating the movement of persons and ideas through public and private space (Lewis and Barnes). Butler-Rees and Hadley examine, for example, how disability welfare recipients must demonstrate how systems developed by and consequently for non-disabled people and groups inhibit access for those who are disabled. In other words, one must understand the rules and norms regulating bodies’ mobility through space well enough to explain them back to those who directly beneft from and thereby have little reason to question them; one must also endure and surmount an aggressively embedded ideological emphasis on preserving and producing maximum capital at all other material and moral costs. The preservation of systems of capital is treated as preserving and privileging material well-being, itself. Preserving capital then becomes functionally one and the same with preserving institutions of oppression wherein bodies are selectively marked for deviations from the productive/unproductive binary, then expected and coerced to move through life and space without casting disruption; hence, without diference. Made worse, these educational, economic, judicial, legislative, familial, communal, and colonial institutions go largely and frequently unquestioned because they are presumed and promoted to, counterfactually, fairly ft all people within the productive end of the binary. That is, our culture systematically circulates a narrative problematically prioritizing everyone’s “potential for production” while advancing an obfuscated concept of authentically equal opportunity. The critically attentive authors who lead this part resound at times with José Esteban Muñoz’s work exploring performances of “disidentifcation…a survival strategy that works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously” (1999, 5). Muñoz examines the work of queer artists of color who access in their own cultural experiences the tools for transforming and reimagining those very cultures. This part directs considerable attention to the experiences and resistive practices of “subjects whose identities are formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny” (Muñoz 1999, 5), asking that we consider, like each author, how our own resistive or compliant practices support institutions and ideologies constricting the spatial and dialogic freedom of others. Academic, political, and popular media discourses centered on themes of inequity and outright oppression evolve and shift over the decades as themes of triumph and struggle continually emerge. Yet, these themes fail to narrate how one essentially “overcomes adversity” only insofar as the socially sanctioned

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withholding of resources can, at times, fail to withhold them. Institutions uphold ideologies of inequity by treating perceived adversity as the fault of those afected, and not the consequence of institutions failing to inclusively reform themselves. Moral motivations for reforming institutions contend constantly with feigned intellectual debates around topics like personal integrity and religious liberty. That is, selectively restricting people from participating in any form of public life on prejudicially religious or other doctrinal grounds (Butler-Rees and Hadley) can unnervingly resonate with autocratic arguments for the mass removal or elimination of entire populations (Uzonyi et al. 2021). White bodies are privileged for the cultural and colonial norms that originate with white supremacy. Carved into our institutions of higher education, for instance, these same sustained privileges enshrine white sensibilities in curricular materials, thereby classroom conversations and conventions, thereby all of campus culture. By critically diferentiating between universities’ agenda and image, Lewis and Barnes direct our attention to Education’s distinct role in reinforcing the choreographic compositions that mobilize ideology and culture. Higher education performs the role a “dance captain” might in a staged ensemble production with a rotating cast—leading rehearsals and relaying instructions, as learned from the set choreography, so new performers will move as they have been predetermined to move, and ongoing performers will continue refning the sequences and phrases their bodies have now been conditioned for. Neither the dance captain nor the cast are expected to change the routine. As a community college professor with a high-impact teaching load working with hundreds of public speaking students annually, I attest that the impulse in the classroom as a whole is quite often, and quite learned, to avoid contentious conversations and potentially upsetting topics altogether, something which feels expressly antithetical to the college experience. US institutions of higher education are quite arguably one of the most important stages on which we can openly challenge presumptions and afrmations of whiteness, not least of all for colleges’ and universities’ substantial and ongoing histories of perpetuating racist policies and practices while presuming and proclaiming racial diversity (Arday and Mirza 2018; McGee 2020). Entire curricula obscure or, worse, overattribute the role of whiteness and white actors in the formation of academic disciplines and the principles they promote. How do dialogues of diference move, gesture, breathe, or let alone fully phrase across college campuses through the bodies, experiences, and voices of students and faculty most materially disbarred from shaping the shared higher learning experience, and how does the immobilizing of discourse suppress movement across other parts of life? Lewis and Barnes elevate these sentiments sharply in their close reading of protests following the murder of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri. The declaration, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” notably took multiple symbolic forms—textual graphics and hashtags, vocalized chants and rallying cries of protest, and visually embodied in reenactments of the gesture itself, hands up, repeated over and over in context after context. The protest

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efectively writes into our cultural choreography a newly disruptive gesture made to redirect the movement of discourse altogether; and made to memorialize publicly the empirical and lived reality of state violence against Black men and communities (Love 2016; Hill 2018; Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019). We can only actively and collectively respond to questions of inequity and oppression as robustly as those questions circulate our cultural institutions; keeping them at bay requires further institutionalizing the material oppressions that spur them in the frst place, compounding the pressures compelling eventual and bluntly anti-institutional responses from anyone denied or stripped of basic and equitable space on a social stage that very much determines our access to means of survival. Dance has always been about resistance, whether seemingly simply resisting boredom on a disco dance foor, or resisting popular-media-perpetuated social aesthetics diminishing and disregarding Black queer lives and experiences. Note, for example, the breadth of scrutiny and visceral backlash against artist Lil Nas X for the music videos accompanying his 2021 singles, “MONTERO (Call Me by Your Name),” and “Industry Baby,” wherein he performs a pre-murderous lap dance for a de facto Satan, and a sexualized sequence of naked ensemble routines while escaping a fctional prison, respectively. These same artistic artifacts and others also underscore how the disruptive presentation of deliberately aesthetic bodies is performed at once individually and culturally. As a choreographer might relay a newly formed phrase or sequence to another dance artist, so too does culture compose our bodies in public space. The movements and movers who embody and risk their marked diferences most brazenly, in doing so, outline the fourishes of physicality and discourse proven most potent and disruptive at times when the institutions upholding inequitable ideologies most clearly demand disrupting. Culture choreographs and choreography corporealizes culture. Kennedy frames tensions between choreopolitical empowerment and disempowerment by emphasizing how discourses of privilege and allyship are not at all immune from white supremacist afnities for appropriating, minimizing, and composing them, and as if on behalf of others. André Lepecki reminds us that “modernity is the colonized, fattened, bulldozed terrain where the fantasy of endless and self-sufcient motility takes place” (2006, 14), reminding in turn that not only the practice, but the narrative of freedom is unevenly and destructively and comfortingly enjoyed among the most privileged. But Lepecki also examines how, “In reenacting we turn back, and in this return we fnd in past dances a will to keep inventing” (2006, 46). We can retrace our own culture’s choreography—its choreopolitical interventions selectively directing the movement and positioning of bodies in space—as if to revisit phrase by phrase the signposts of social punishment that condition and compel us into formation. We can pause and reassess our environment, observe more critically and expansively the “colonized, fattened, bulldozed terrain” (Lepecki 2006) on which we have been taught and told to move; we can account for our place in the composition of culture in order

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to reevaluate our role in the politically organized and ideologically motivated composition of inequity.

References Arday, Jason, and Heidi Safa Mirza, eds. 2018. Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. Cham: Palgrave. Edwards, Frank, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. 2019. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 34: 16793–98. Hill, Marc Lamont. 2018. “Thank you, Black Twitter”: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance.” Urban Education 53, no. 2: 286–302. Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York, NY: Routledge. Love, Bettina L. 2016. “Anti-Black State Violence, Classroom Edition: The Spirit Murdering of Black Children.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13, no. 1: 22–25. McGee, Ebony Omotola. 2020. “Interrogating Structural Racism in STEM Higher Education.” Educational Researcher 49, no. 9: 633–44. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifcations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Vol. 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Uzonyi, Gary, Nam Kyu Kim, Nakissa Jahanbani, and Victor Asal. 2021. “Genocide, Politicide, and the Prospects of Democratization since 1900.” Journal of Confict Resolution 65, no. 9: 1521–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027211000445.

7 BLOODIED BEACHES, COPPER FLOWERS A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade Fen Kennedy

Introduction We hear history calling to us from the future. We catch glimpses of a new world of love, respect and regeneration, where we have restored the intricate web of all life. It’s a future that’s inside us all—located in the ferce love we carry for our children, in our urge to help a stranger in distress, in our wish to forgive, even when that seems too much to ask. And so we rebel for this, calling in joy, creativity and beauty. We rise in the name of truth and withdraw our consent for ecocide, oppression and patriarchy. We rise up for a world where power is shared for regeneration, repair and reconciliation. We rise for love in its ultimate wisdom. Our vision stretches beyond our own lifespan, to a horizon dedicated to future generations and the restoration of our planet’s integrity. Extinction Rebellion. “About Us: Our Vision” (n.d.[a.]) As of June 2021, the world as we know it is heading for a catastrophic ecological breakdown as the result of human-induced climate change. In 2020 wildfres the size of the state of Maryland rampaged across Australia, the smoke from those fres making a complete circuit of the globe without dissipating, returning to hang like a shroud over the ashes of animals, plants, and people. At the colder ends of the planet, Arctic ice coverage is shrinking at a rate of 9–12% every decade. In the United States, the government response to these dire warning signs has been one of deliberate disinformation, skepticism, and delay. No country is addressing climate change fast enough to stave of the tipping point into irreversibility, nor proposing the kinds of radical systemic change that would have meaningful impact on the human infuences on this process.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-10

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Climate change activists around the world have escalated their tactics and volume in recent years in a desperate plea for a more pro-active, evidence-based, and compassionate response to climate change. I make no claims of impartiality here: the data supporting the rapid decline of ecosystems across the planet and the clear human causes of this decline is so vast and well supported as to need no debate. The questions I want to address in this chapter are ones of afect, impact, and method: what messages are being shared in the performative protests of climate change activists, and how do these messages function in support of the broader messages of an activist project? My focus is on the global network of climate change activists Extinction Rebellion (XR), and more specifcally the performance arm of this group, the Red Rebel Brigade. While dance theorists and practitioners alike have made deep connections to the work of environmental justice, seeking equity in the pursuit of that justice is vital to ensure a truly livable future for humanity and the planet. The Red Rebel Brigade (sometimes called the Red Brigade) is a performative group contribution to the work of XR devised by Doug Francisco. Francisco’s background includes time as a ringmaster and a clown for UK-based Invisible Circus, and as an art-maker creating assemblages of found objects, sea plastics, and resin. Francisco claims to have been inspired by “Bhutto Dance from Japan [sic]” (Francisco 2019b) in the development of the Red Rebel archetype, but the inspiration appears to be superfcial/aesthetic rather than based on a study of the dance or its history. The Rebels dress in a red base layer, topped by pseudoGrecian wrappings of red velour/velvet; their faces are painted white, with black eyeliner and red lips in a stereotypically feminine confguration, and over the whole costume performers wear a veiled red headdress, with locks of red velvet hanging down to frame their faces. While later protests have started to dress the Rebels in diferent colors of velvet, the goal of the costume is to facilitate uniformity within a singular protest, and a recognizably shared aesthetic across global protest movements. Despite the necessary message of XR, and the afective power of the Red Rebels, multiple critiques have been leveled at their work, from mainstream media on many sides of the political spectrum, but also from other climate activist groups, and especially those groups working in solidarity with marginalized communities. In this chapter I unpack those concerns from a choreopolitical perspective, focusing on the performative protests of the Red Rebels, to try and understand their purpose, the manifestations of their intentions, and why their performances are so frequently read as counterproductive. I fnd that while the stated aim of Red Rebellion is to try and achieve a space of equality and relationship between humans and the environment, the symbolic and theoretical approaches to creating this space that they have adopted carry powerful connotations of privilege and exclusion. These connotations read particularly loudly because of the hierarchical practices and racial privilege performed by XR as a whole. I propose that a choreopolitical analysis of the protests is a useful tool of

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determining what, actually, XR is doing, how its actions of protest do, or do not do, the work they claim, and how its work could bring more intersectional justice to the world of climate activism.

Performances of Justice A choreopolitical analysis of the Red Rebels lets us understand the diferent layers of their work as independently and collectively meaningful. By considering their protests as a performance, it is possible to understand how Doug Francisco and the performers’ choices about how they dress, how they move, how they organize themselves, and how their protests re-organize the world around them contribute complex and sometimes contradictory information to how the group—and their message—should be understood as a whole. Climate activist and feminist scholar Rebecca Solnit suggests that art and performances that address the environment or the landscape are stereotyped as a kind of “mental picnic”—an invitation for the urban brain to relax into cool contemplation of nature’s beauty (Solnit 2001, 78). Given the urgency of the current climate crisis, it is urgent to push back against this trend and actively interrogate performances of environmental justice. Choreopolitical analysis ofers a way to move past the aesthetic beauty of Red Rebellion’s performances and examine those performances with the urgency they deserve. The foundations of choreopolitical analysis were established by dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster in a 2003 essay wherein she explored the social, performative, and afective choices of lunch-counter sit-in protestors during the 1960s, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) die-ins during the 1980s, and the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting protests in Seattle (Foster 2003, 395–412). In this essay, Foster draws attention to the informal training experienced by lunch-counter protestors, often inspired by work with CORE (Committee on Racial Equality)—a training that emphasized physical non-aggression, a presence that was physical, attentive, but not passive in the face of resistance and aggression (Foster 2003, 399). Physically training the body in this manner implies a choreographic process in which trained and deliberate movements alter space and afect those who come into contact with performers. Similarly, ACT-UP protestors asserted a “passive non-compliance,” making it difcult for police to lift or remove their bodies (Foster 2003, 404). In Foster’s conception of “choreographies of protest” the physical choices made by protesting bodies efectively highlight and re-choreograph the responses of the world around them. Foster uses the framework of choreography to ask dance-like questions about the function of protests such as, “What kind of signifcance and impact does the collection of bodies make in the midst of its social surround? How does the choreography theorize corporeal, individual, and social identity?” (Foster 2003, 397). Performances of climate justice ofer a human voice to environmental phenomena that would otherwise occur in silence. The Red Rebels also protest in

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silence, requiring their audience to engage, contemplate, and speculate as to the meaning of their processions and tableaux. While this strategy provokes a strong afective response and in-depth contemplation of environmental issues, it also leaves space for disengagement, misunderstanding, and a dismissal of the protests as purely aesthetic. Through choreopolitical analysis, while it is impossible to determine one “correct” interpretation of the Rebels’ work, I hope that I can model productive and empathetic modes of engagement with the environmental issues that provoke this performative response.

Choreopolitics and Protest—Reading the Rebels XR as a whole, and specifcally the performative XR group known as the Red Rebels, uses a broad range of known tactics including obstruction, exhibition, die-ins, etc. One common mindset shared by both the Rebels and XR more broadly is a commitment to horizontality, originally horizontalidad,1 a theory that arose from radical movements in Argentina, and which envisions the toppling of vertical power structures in which one group or idea is set above another. Horizontality places groups and ideas on a level plane in which they can interact, fow, and develop new ways of being in relationship (Sitrin 2007; Mason 2012). XR, as indicated by their stated values—“We welcome everyone and every part of everyone [and] Breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation” (Extinction Rebellion n.d.[b.])—create a horizontalist relationship amongst humanity; their protests also advocate for a world in which the hierarchical relationship between humans and other forms of life, and planetary nonlife, are also broken down. These explicitly stated and conceptual goals can be used to unpack the work of XR, and to explore some of the rhetorical strengths, weaknesses, and excesses of their chosen tactics, beginning with specifc models of protest and ending with an analysis of horizontality as a whole. There are several similarities between the actions of the Red Rebellion and Foster’s studies of protest discussed above. XR and the Red Rebellion have staged “die-ins” at various climate-relevant locations, with the Rebels sometimes dying themselves, and sometimes present as archetypical mourners for more pedestrian corpses. The visibility of the Red Rebels in a crowd of protestors means that they often garner police attention, and they meet this attention with tactics of physical, attentive, voiceless presence. Like the disabled activists described by Butler-Rees and Hadley (this volume), the Red Rebel Brigade place themselves strategically to protect more vulnerable protestors, their training in passive resistance and voiceless compliance creating a statement that police are not tactically trained to deal with. Aerial footage from London, taken during the global climate strike of September 2019, shows a line of six Rebels standing still, face to face with a cordon of ten police ofcers (Figure 7.1)—the luminous yellow of the latter’s jackets pulling more attention to the tableau within a crowd of swirling, un-policed protestors (London alone saw 100,000 gathered for the strike) (Channel Four News 2017).

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FIGURE 7.1 XR

protest, London, 2019. Photograph by Kārlis Dambrāns CC BY 2.0  [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0] via flickr.com.

Close-up footage from a similar line-up of Red Rebels and police officers in Whitehall shows all the Rebels standing in the same pose as the Rebel third from the right in the above photo—arms outstretched, palms turned upward in supplication (Extinction Rebellion 2019c). The police in that shot are visibly discomforted; they try to avoid meeting the calm gaze of the Rebels, talk to each other in undertones, angle their bodies and faces away, and bow their heads as if in shame. Through their shared adoption of choreographic tactics, the Red Rebels succeed in unsettling or destabilizing the choreography of the social setting, providing an oppositional force that the police seem threatened by, yet unable to control. As they respond to the threat, they unintentionally pull focus to and even unwillingly take part in the very choreography they purport to oppose.

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Another theorist who has explored choreography as protest is ethnographer Aimee Meredith Cox, who used choreography as a lens to articulate the social “shapeshifting” of Black girls in social settings, as they attempted to change their positionality in relationship to the systems of injustice surrounding them. Cox describes choreography as “embodied meaning making, physical storytelling, afective physicality, and an intellectualized response to the question of how movement might narrate texts that are not otherwise legible” (2015, 28). The Red Rebel Brigade is especially concerned with the last two functions of this list, attempting to produce a profoundly afective aesthetic, and through this afect to share narratives of grief, rage, and love for the current state of the environment. Red Rebels share deep breathing exercises before the start of a protest in order to facilitate an environment of calm tranquility, and the goal of this—in combination with other aesthetic and physical choices described below—is to mesmerize audiences, to slow down the world and bring it to a halt simply by slowing down as a collective, in other words, a deliberate re-choreographing of social relationships. This slowed world is designed to ofer audiences space to process their feelings about climate change and to envision a new, horizontalist relationship to the world around them—one in which the needs and desires of the environment, and other living creatures have the same weight as human needs and desires. Horizontality is a broad term, and as such multiple interdisciplinary scholars have used it as a framework for expressing their ideas around social justice. In the work of the Red Rebellion, I see a confict between two models of horizontalism: Liz Lerman’s “social” horizontality and André Lepecki’s “smooth” horizontality. Choreographer Liz Lerman describes her horizontality as drawing freely from many artistic sources, and thinking through them based on their afect, rather than the systems of value associated with them. For Lerman horizontality is a way of visualizing artistic and social hierarchies such as the art/craft divide, and metaphorically laying them down sideways so that all points have equal weight and can be traversed rather than being hierarchically stacked on top of each other (Lerman 2011, xv). In a documentary about her 1996 Shipyard project, Lerman explains: “I can be next to that person or in the same room with that person and we can be doing the same dance, be with and had the same music and dancing together and it will create a bond that wasn’t there before” (Lerman 2010, 35:14– 35:26). Creating bonds between groups with diferent kinds of social power and fnding ways for people to communicate with each other across a broad spectrum of opinions is one of the benefts Lerman perceives to working with horizontality, and thus for Lerman horizontality is always socially grounded. In contrast to this model, dance scholar André Lepecki (who coined the term “choreopolitics”) also looks to the dance studio as a site of horizontalist investigation, but unlike Lerman, Lepecki conceptualizes the horizontalist studio as a non-place: a theoretically smooth, black surface, “irrecoverably detached” from social terrain, a “virgin” territory where new modes of being and representation can be discovered and broken down (Lepecki 2006, 68–69). Thus, while for

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Lerman horizontality is always in response to existing verticalist structures, Lepecki’s “smooth” horizontality is better understood as a space to act and interact as if social norms, histories, and hierarchies do not exist (although I do not contend that Lepecki believes this imagined erasure of hierarchies to be achievable in practice). Both of these spaces have conceptual and practical benefts but understanding XR to be following this smooth mode of horizontality may explain some of the diversity-based critiques leveled at the organization as described above. Theoretically, therefore, the actions of the Red Rebels create an invitation for all humans to enter into a horizontalist relationship to their environment and each other. But because the invitation does not take into account the diferent social pressures acting on marginalized members of society, for example, those who cannot simply “slow down” because they are trapped in a subsistence level of the economy, many people are ignoring or refusing the invitation. To carry the analogy further, the apparent privilege of the Red Rebellion, and the adoption of high-class, elite mannerisms in their performances, renders the invitational space unpalatable to those who would stereotypically be culturally marginalized in those spaces.

Rebellion from Multiple Sides—History, Bias, and Critique XR began as a movement of ninety-four UK-based academics, who signed an open letter published in May 2018: We the undersigned represent diverse academic disciplines, and the views expressed here are those of the signatories and not their organizations. While our academic perspectives and expertise may difer, we are united on one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis (Guardian 2018) From this announcement of their intentions, a call to action was issued, and on October 31, 2018, between 1,000 and 1,500 activists assembled in Parliament Square, London, where they announced a declaration of rebellion against the British government (Extinction Rebellion n.d.[c.]). Since 2018 these activists, and the many who have joined them, have engaged in a variety of non-violent actions of civil disobedience, and the movement has spread around the globe. In October 2019 the movement coordinated two weeks of “International Rebellions,” prompting actions in over sixty cities worldwide. While XR claims to be a decentralized and non-hierarchical movement, claims of exclusion and hierarchy have trailed behind the organization since its beginning. XR’s own website claims to address these issues, but does not engage with their validity or substance. For example, one “Frequently Asked Question”

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asks: “Aren’t you just a group of middle class left-wing activists?” The answer reads: Extinction Rebellion is made up of people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the world. From under 18 to over 80 year olds—there are thousands of people willing to put their liberty on the line… We don’t align with any political party and welcome people who vote for all political parties and none. We are working to improve diversity in our movement (Extinction Rebellion n.d.[d.]) While potentially accurate, this answer also fails to address the academic roots of the movement, the educational privilege of its founders, and the movement’s general alignment with left-wing ideals. Exploring other critical responses, however, does provide a solid case for critiquing the purported equality of XR. Many activists and social justice movements claim that XR are doing harm to the individuals most vulnerable to climate change, or that they are ignoring the needs of marginalized identity groups in the choreography of their protests. Climate justice activist Suzanne Dhaliwal summarized the issue for The Metro—a free London evening paper: when XR formed they were urged to consult with existing environmental justice groups, notably Platform London, No Tar Sands, Climate Camp, and Bank Track who have prioritized solidarity with indigenous and marginalized groups, and intersectional action (Dhaliwal 2019). Unfortunately, Dhaliwal continues, XR did not engage with these groups, and even ignored majority votes from its own members on what kinds of action it should pursue. This ignored vote led to a disastrous protest at Canning Town station during which an XR activist was dragged from the top of a carriage by an irate crowd, some of whom were shouting “I need to get to work! I have to feed my kids!” (Hinsclif 2019). A consensus has started to form that XR does not care about the impact its protests have on vulnerable peoples. One reason for this perceived disregard is the racial and economic disparity among XR protestors (the majority of whom are white and middle class) and their attitude to their interactions with the police. XR openly courts, and in fact actively seeks arrest, a strategy that is simply unsustainable for people of color. Metropolitan police statistics show that nine in ten of the 1,100 activists arrested in the group’s April 2019 protests in London were white—in a city in which four in ten residents are not (Gayle 2019). Brighton-based climate activist Susuana Amoah explained: “The way they [XR] conceptualize the police and the state, and being arrested, alienates a lot of people of color, a lot of migrant people… They have so much faith in the system to be on their side and not send them to prison, or not send them to prison for long” (quoted in Joho 2019). In May 2019 Guppi Bola, an activist with Wretched of the Earth,2 and others from the same group drafted an open letter to XR, asking them to acknowledge systemic police violence and shift strategies accordingly (“Wretched of the Earth” 2019). Bola recalls that the response from XR’s twitter read: “…people of color are more

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harshly impacted by a police society and the judicial system and so it is the role of white people to stand up for them and take the lead” (Gayle 2019), an attitude that reads as a dangerous dismissal of those already sufering disproportionately from climate change, and from police violence. While I compared the strategic use of Red Rebels with Butler-Rees and Hadley’s description of the placement of wheelchair users on the front line of protests, the latter discomfort the police because of their perceived powerlessness. The Red Rebels, by contrast, can challenge the police because of their privilege. These critiques, and the many others like them ranging along a broad scope of intersectional axis, show that there is much to improve in the work of this wellfunded and highly publicized climate activist movement.

Red Representations The movement of the Red Rebel Brigade is based on statue posing and tableaux, mime, and an improvisational device called “focking,” whereby a group follows the actions of a leader in front. These devices can be seen clearly in the “Victory Parade” from London’s Parliament Square to Marble Arch in May 2019—protestors slowly move into, and out of gestural movement as they progress toward a group tableau, veiling and unveiling, raising their hands in surrender, holding a victory torch high. At least some of the gestures have shared meanings within the group including the raised frst of victory, and the raised and lifted palms that send out love and joy to those watching (Francisco 2019a[2]). Through this Francisco hopes that the Red Rebels will expose their own “inner archetype, your own gods or goddesses” (Francisco 2019b) in a brave, vulnerable, and heroic way. The key dynamic feature of the Red Rebellion, and one that Francisco has requested that every protest featuring the group follows, is that movements be slow and controlled. Even blinking is supposed to be done at a measured pace. As Francisco explains: “The goosebumps on your skin, as you look from this world into another realm, this magic, this freedom is what we ofer the viewer, to escape from this world for some moments, and see another world possible, another world in action, meditation in action” (Francisco 2019b). Like the green-suited activists described by Osnes and Fahmy (this volume), the Red Rebels purport to inspire a “perceptual and philosophical shift,” to be “hopeful agent[s] of change, capable of inspiring shifts in approaches and perception, which may ultimately result in reunifcation from the fction of our human diferentiation from the environment and the natural world.” This potentially speaks to a common thread in contemporary climate activism—because the issue of environmental destruction is so global, we lack terrestrial models for widespread sustainable ecological change. Climate activists must inspire collective visions of a future that we can only imagine, not see with our own eyes. One striking example of the Red Rebels in action took place on a Cornish beach in August 2019. In a documentary video titled “The Sea Is Rising and so Are We,” the Rebels, accompanied by the Penitents, 3 form a tableau on the

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dunes before slowly progressing down to the beach, across the sands, and into the sea. Protected from the worst of the waves by a rocky outcropping they stand waist deep in the water, some holding each other, some raising the victory salute, as Penitents and onlookers watch from the shore (Extinction Rebellion 2019a). The action carries a powerful symbolic message of the consequences of climate change, and the fragility of the human race in the face of the natural forces we are denying. These symbolic choices are aesthetically potent, but also contribute to Red Rebel Brigade’s aura of privilege and exclusivity. An XR member known only as “Cindi,” speaking in an XR-made video, explains that the Red Rebels represent the “blood that connects all of us… that connects humans, species, all of us to the Earth” (Extinction Rebellion 2019b). The Red Rebels voicelessly portray the broader emotions of humanity, and hold space for others to experience “grief, and loss, and rage, and joy, and love, and peace”—to do the emotional processing necessary to accept and thus begin to address climate change. But as dance analyst Valerie Preston Dunlop argues, there are multiple layers of signifcant meaning within any given performance, and poietic signs—those brought into a project by the intention of its creators—are just the frst (Dunlop 2014, 19). In fact, Dunlop adds that even poietic signs escape the control of a work’s creators: “Poietic signs are found in the way the piece is put together, its structuring method. They are also found in the specifc references drawn on for the piece, its images, its narrative” (Dunlop 2014, 20–21). In the structure, references, and images of the Red Rebels, the poietic material, trace signs made in performance, and aesthetic interpretations of the audience add layers of meaning, and readings of privilege and exclusivity to the work of the Red Rebels. When the veils of the Red Rebellion are lifted, audiences are confronted with a sea of artifcially white faces. While aesthetically striking, this visual choice creates uncomfortable resonances with the complaints above that XR centers whiteness to the detriment of Black and Brown communities afected by climate change. As Athian Akec—a member of the UK Youth Parliament—writes: “Watching the media coverage of the school climate strikes, all I saw was white faces— defnitely not a refection of my friends, my community, or the broader diversity of British society” (Akec 2019). The Red Rebellion is one of the most mediafriendly, and the whitest arm of XR. This exaggerated whiteness is enhanced by the performers’ distaste for showing any skin at all. The headdress is designed to fall closely around the face, obscuring the ears and much of the cheeks (Francisco 2019a[1]); in his second instruction video, Francisco ties a red velvet bandanna around a performer’s neck to cover that up as well. As he does this, he turns to the camera and enunciates very clearly that “skin is sin, as we used to say” (Francisco 2019a[2]). This association of moral purity, skin covering, and artifcially amplifed whiteness is troubling in a project that exists under the aegis of unity and connection—what kind of unity are audiences being asked to believe in? Videos of the Red Rebellion frequently include close-ups of Francisco’s face—shrouded in red drapings, lined eyes staring boldly over white cheeks and

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red lipstick. The homogenous makeup of the Red Rebels requires male performers to adopt strong signifers of femininity, producing strong readings of queerness or transness that are not fully thought through or integrated into the group’s work. Perhaps the goal is to represent a planet that they conceptualize as female? But when I see the gender-bending of the Red Rebellion in the context of its other visual and performative signals, I am also reminded of Susan Manning’s theories of metaphorical minstrelsy, a popularly accepted performative norm in the leftist dance of the 1930s, wherein white performers staged the dances, culture, and social crises of Black Americans to popular acclaim. Watching Helen Tamaris’ Negro Spirituals, performed between 1928 and 1944, Manning writes: “It is as if her performance obliterates gender as a social identity or, perhaps more accurately, renders the white female body a vehicle for circulating multiple identities” (Manning 2004, 12). When the Red Rebels adopt signifers of femininity they draw from the “taboo” of gender non-conformity to catch their audiences’ eyes, but they also draw on almost one hundred years of white women taking it upon themselves to represent multi-cultural and intersectional oppression. While this use of gender may not be intentional, it parallels their comment above that “it is the role of white people to stand up for them and take the lead” (Gayle 2019) rather than making a protected space for multiple views and voices. The lack of those voices is most telling in their approach to their performances of precarity. A video for XR Western Australia Video opens with what appears to be a member of the Red Rebels standing on a small platform in the middle of a lake, raised just above the surface of the water (Hammond 2019). The Rebel stands with arms raised, staring at the camera, a red XR fag propped against their wrist. As the video progresses, however, we realize that the Rebel is a statue dressed and made up like a member of the rebellion, and that the platform is no more than 10 feet from the shore, in water that barely reaches chest height on the Rebels who have waded out to dress it. The breathtaking boldness of the opening shot is achieved purely through the manipulation of camera angles— precarity is staged, but not experienced. Judith Butler explains precarity as an understanding that bodies are vectors of power that are subject to force, which can mobilize and counter power with a power of their own, but only when supported by social systems and livable environments that are not available to all bodies equally (Butler 2018, 84). Several times in this chapter we have seen XR act without an understanding of potential co-protestors’ precarity, or even how their protests increase the pressure on populations with relatively little systemic privilege. The Red Rebels arrived at the Australian river site in bright afternoon sunshine, and left after the sun had gone down; they spent several hours flming in a body of water with no visible swimming permissions, made signifcant alterations to a local statue (including scaling it with a ladder), right next to a public footpath and a major road, without any intervention from police or local authority. Even the neo-Hellenic draping of the Rebels’ costumes and the classical roll of the dubbed-over piano indicate a comfort and security in the Rebel’s

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actions only possible through the shared assumption of race and class privilege. The perceived whiteness of XR and the Red Rebels facilitates the extravagance of their aesthetic protests, but divides them from populations whose lived experience of precarity makes participation in such protests too much of a risk to life and livelihood.

Who Are We Together With? Movements for social justice—including climate justice—demand that we respond with unison, solidarity, and a shared equality across our togetherness. The Red Rebels fock together, walk together, stand together, protest together, and (pretend to) die together, and they invite those who witness their protests to join in that togetherness with them. They gesture in unison toward a shared emotional and practical future where humans, animals, and the living planet can co-exist as equals, and, in doing so, they succeed in disrupting the race of metropolitan consumerism, and in discomforting those who hold and those who administer power. As a series of choreographic choices, the actions of the Red Brigade draw on a long history of social justice activism and combine those references with high-afect performativity, strongly communicating distress, grief, and the urgency of change. Nevertheless, the unity they create is based on a horizontality that is conceptually separated from pre-existing social hierarchies, and which deliberately performs the symbols of classicalist whiteness and white privilege. Examining the choreopolitical layerings of their work, i.e. by connecting the meaningful implications of their performance with a wider analysis of how their messages read in the context of social inequality, shows us why they have been subject to critiques of privilege and exclusion. The Red Rebel Brigade has a choice: do they continue with their actions as they are now, hoping that the ethics of their broader message ring through and eventually bring their critics with them, or do they attempt to change the intersectional implications of their work in order to move themselves together with all those they claim to represent? Despite or perhaps because of the necessity of their message, I urge XR and the Red Rebels to include more voices and visions in their future protests, and to foster a community–a world—in which multiplicity and diference are not treated practically as barriers to unity and justice.

Notes 1 Between 1998 and 2002 Argentina sufered a Great Depression, during which 50% of the population lived below the poverty line. In December 2001 popular protests escalated into extreme civil unrest, precipitating the fall of multiple government structures, including the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa. Horizontalidad emerged during this period as an organizational strategy for creating democratic spaces and meeting civilian needs at a local level. 2 An environmental group that focuses on Black, Brown, and indigenous voices.

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3 The Penitents’ demonstration is based on the medieval concept of atoning for transgressions, either religious or against the community, by walking through that community in sack-cloth and ashes. In this resurrected idea, transgressions are written on signs around the Penitents’ necks, and include “Dirty Coal,” “Fossil Fuels,” “Fracking,” “Poison Pesticides,” “Logging Waste,” etc. https://rebellion.earth/2019/07/10/ newsletter-25-uk-local-actions/

References Akec, A. 2019. “When I Look at Extinction Rebellion All I See are White Faces: That Has to Change.” The Guardian, October 19. https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2019/oct/19/extinction-rebellion-white-faces-diversity. Butler, J. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Channel Four News. 2019. “Global Climate Strike: Millions Take to the Streets to Save the World.” YouTube Video, 5: 56, September 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= jXXAkt2492c&feature=youtu.be&f bclid=IwAR2f 7JF7e9OWoMBcOVcYnAA2eu 40LjyYOk7kgSXBlAnfwIsNNoHBasNOT4c. Cox, A. M. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dhaliwal, Suzanne. 2019. “Extinction Rebellion Haven’t Thought about BAME People and It Shows.” Metro, October 17. https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/17/extinction-rebellionh avent-t houg ht-ba me -people - show s -10937741/? f bcl id=IwA R 2t M g F x lV yjbD1OYPqeJCpVOuXFkpFT4pr67SYu6AVx89QVDG3ihelK1dY. Dunlop, V. Preston. 2014. Looking at Dances: A Choreological Perspective on Choreography. London: The Noverre Press. Extinction Rebellion. n.d.(a.) “About Us: Our Vision.” https://www.rebellion.earth/ the-truth/about-us/ (accessed 1st January 2020). ———. n.d.(b.) “About Us: Our Principles and Values.” https://www.rebellion.earth/ the-truth/about-us/ (accessed 1st January 2020). ———. n.d.(c.) “About Us: Story.” https://www.rebellion.earth/the-truth/about-us/ (accessed 1st January 2020). ———. n.d.(d.) “FAQs People and Culture.” https://www.rebellion.earth/the-truth/ faqs/ (accessed 1st January 2020). ———. 2019a. “The Sea Is Rising and So Are We: Extinction Rebellion.” YouTube Video 2: 09, August 18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z7DbR9VY9E&feature= youtu.be&f bclid=IwAR3j8EOAOy67I-foEwrvQNQTS_GqxNQgzFPfeLgt4u 5fyCF_UpliDAHu6QA. ———. 2019b. “Extinction Rebellion Red Brigade Interview.” YouTube Video 2: 00, October 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7jMO1zngRg ———. 2019c. “The Red Brigade Stands At the Thin Blue Line: Extinction Rebellion.” YouTube Video 2: 34, October 20. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qNk6JPFaHUU. Foster, Susan L. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theater Journal 55, no. 3 (October): 395–412. Francisco, Doug. 2019a(1). “Red Rebel Brigade 1: Head Dress.” YouTube Video 6: 47, May 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qIfSNP2nuo. ———. 2019a(2). “Red Rebel Brigade 2: Costume and Movement.” YouTube Video 11: 08, May 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGPv0wALf Ww&feature=share&f bclid= IwAR1U7epBKIJAlCLSFlw_rqJQIbo3Tqb66oKwet1p106q6Ux0GJ4ev0C3f W0.

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———. 2019b. “The Art of Red Rebellion.” Facebook Post, September 28. https://www. facebook.com/groups/1518920178239149/permalink/1661386540659178/. Gayle, D. 2019. “Does Extinction Rebellion Have a Race Problem?” The Guardian, October 4. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/04/extinction-rebellionrace-climate-crisis-inequality. Hammond, J. 2019. “Red Rebels River Rising: The Sea is Rising and So are We.” Vimeo 2: 55, December 11, https://www.vimeo.com/378722651. Hinsclif, G. 2019 “Extinction Rebellion Has Built Up So Much Goodwill: It Mustn’t Throw That Away.” The Guardian, October 17. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/oct/17/extinction-rebellion-canning-town-well-of-people. Joho, R. 2019. “Critics Call Out Extinction Rebellion’s Race Problem.” What Causes Global Warming, October 12. https://www.whatcausesglobalwarming.net/critics-callout-extinction-rebellions-race-problem/. Lepecki, A. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York, NY: Routledge. Lerman, L. 2010. Liz Lerman: The Shipyard Dance, directed by James Gilmore and Neil Novello. Derry, NH: Chip Taylor Communications. Lerman, L. 2011. Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Manning, S. 2004. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mason, Paul. 2012. “‘Tweetin’ ‘Bout a Revolution: Paul Mason Interview. Interview by Hilary Wainwright. Red Pepper, February 6. https://www.redpepper.org.uk/ tweetin-bout-a-revolution/. Sitrin, Marina. 2007. “Ruptures in Imagination: Horizontalism, Autogestion and Afective Policies in Argentina.” Policy and Practice 5(Autumn 2007). https:// www.developmenteducationreview.com/issue/issue-5/ruptures-imaginationhorizontalism-autogestion-and-afective-politics-argentina. Solnit, R. 2001. As Eve Said to the Serpent. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Wretched of the Earth. 2019. “Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion.” Red Pepper, May 3. https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/.

8 “RACISM LIVES HERE” Queering the Neoliberal University Campus through Choreopolitical Antiracist Activism A.F. Lewis and Kelcea Barnes

Introduction 2015—As Told by Kelcea Barnes When I saw Michael Brown lying face down on my phone screen in the street, then replayed on every newscast, Instagram page, Tweet, and splayed across every magazine and newspaper, a Black body beneath a White one. One with no power, and the other with the power of life and death. That disgusting juxtaposition. My very breath froze in my lungs. I was in my second year at Mizzou, nineteen years old, and the world before me. However, Michael Brown, eighteen, was dead, left in the streets for hours, long after his soul had departed. This event, preceded by many, and followed by hundreds more (George Floyd and Breona Taylor were just last years) helped to create my need to see change not only refected in the media, across the country, and in my peers but refected in the fagship university of the state of Missouri. This change did not happen, and by the spring of 2015, things on campus were brewing; by the Fall of 2015, things had exploded, and there I was, bearing witness to it all. Student protests at the University of Missouri (MU or Mizzou) made national headlines in the fall of 2015 by asserting “Racism Lives Here,” through physical, digital social movement and public art methods to fght against racial inequality on campus. With simultaneous international Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, ongoing work by Black student activists and leaders at this historically predominately white institution (PWI), and several targeted racist events occurring on campus, a group of Black students created Concerned Students 1950 (CS1950). DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-11

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CS1950, named after the year Black students were admitted to MU,1 penned an eight-point list of demands and organized a massive social media campaign in the virtual space of “Black Mizzou Twitter,” marches, rallies, walkouts, die-ins, a demonstration at the homecoming parade, a mock tour, a hunger strike, creation of a tent city on campus, and more. CS1950 motivated a boycott by the MU football team. These protests culminated in the resignation of then university president Tim Wolfe and sparked an outpouring of solidarity and protests at campuses across the country (and world) along with a nationwide discussion of campus racial politics on social media, sports radio/TV, and the news. In this chapter, we build upon the work that brings together dance and theater with critical diversity and critical university studies through the lens of choreopolitics and choreopolicing to examine student protest in the age of the neoliberal university. We take the CS1950 movement as a case study where the data—videos, news articles, social media posts, ofcial university statements, footage from Spike Lee’s documentary “2 Fists Up,” and a frst-person embodied account of co-author Kelcea Barnes are analyzed through content analysis.2 The aim of this work is to examine how the CS1950 protests “queers” the PWI college campus through choreopolitics and how the administrative response works to form what we call “covert choreopolicing” to silence student activism while co-opting their work into part of their illusory image of inclusivity. We argue that the work of CS1950 both halts the normative movement of the corporatized campus and (re)imagines what freedom of movement could look like for marginalized students on campus. We build from Ferguson (2012, 2017) to assert that central to the contemporary crisis of the American university is the neoliberal response to inroads made by student activism that demands a change in social relations—fundamental changes to the ways universities are tied to power, nation, and capital. Ending with a discussion of the possibilities of coalitional politics in the student activist organizing, what’s happened in the six years since CS1950, and adaptations to student activism during COVID-19, we question the usefulness of the “diversity and inclusion” discourse and initiatives and look to the power of students’ embodied knowledge in the movement toward freedom.

Campus Protest and Critical University Studies PWIs were often land-grabs that coerced or forced Indigenous peoples from their land (Lee and Ahonte 2020)3 partially built and maintained using enslaved labor (Brophy 2008; Wilder 2013), excluded many marginalized groups from gaining a higher education, and privileged Western knowledge (Mohanty 2013).4 Minoritized people entering the university throughout the 20th century were met with institutionalized oppression and discrimination, and therefore began carving out a space for themselves through student organizations and demonstrations—using a range of tactics to bring about racial restructuring (Boadhurst and Velez 2019,

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8). Difering from the usual narrative of the “golden era” of student protest in the 1960s–1970s, Ferguson (2017) argues that university change occurred not simply in the numbers of women and people of color who could enter the academy, but also in the place that those minoritized people might occupy in the production of the university knowledge and the reshaping of American society. (Ferguson 2017, 9)5 The work being done to call for this change can be considered socially engaged art (footnote that defnes socially engaged art), which was emerging within the social justice movements of the time. Biser and Fletcher (2023) bring together Arendt’s theory of “politics itself as aesthetic” because it requires a public space in which people can communicate their “unique selves through political action” (1993) with Bourriaud’s concept of relational art, where “art is a state of encounter” (2002). Whether it be Yippies performing street theater,6 UC Berkeley students occupying administration buildings,7 or Black students at Kent State throwing rocks at cars,8 the encounter of the campus protests fuses radical politics and theatrical gestures in their activism/performance art (Gitlin 1993). These demonstrations involve collective aesthetic gestures, movements, and positions of the body, a political message, and bring the unwitting audience in dialogue with the piece. Student activism is about destruction; “is a micro-level response to the macro-level, super-structural manifestations of systemic inequity within higher education institutions” (Stokes and Miller 2019, 143) as well as construction of new collectives of students, political and future coalitional possibilities, and new ways of being and moving on campus. Along with pressure from student movements, the academy simultaneously faced rigorous demands from within the university and economic institutions and systems outside, calling to uphold systems of power through the makeup of university knowledge, faculty hires, student admittance, etc. (Ferguson 2017). Ferguson fnds “In this struggle over whether the vision would prevail, the same institutions that seemed to honor student requests were also the ones that rejected them (9).” What emerged under neoliberalism, a theory of economic practices that prioritizes individual “freedoms” characterized by free trade and markets and private property rights (Giroux 2007), was a university operating increasingly through market-like behaviors, with decrease in state funding, increase in tuition and student fees, centering corporate “best practices,” and evaluating “return on investment” in regard to student productivity and success, which speaks to how colleges are altered under larger societal forces (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Brown 2015; Thomas 2018; Morgan and Davis III 2019). Such changes afect every level of the organizational structure including how universities talk about and “do” diversity (Ahmed 2012; Thomas 2018). The increased use of the language of diversity within the university is a refection of the “corporatization of the university” wherein a liberal abstract conception of “diversity” has market value (Collins 2004; Ahmed 2012).

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Contemporarily, critical scholars of higher education parallel to socially engaged artists’ and critical museology scholars, which similarly critique the museum as a white, male, Western institution wherein difference is flattened, depoliticized, and strategically displayed, whether it be displaying stolen African artifacts and touting it as diversity or stealing Black art for profit in the case of Whitney Museum.9 Rachel Luft writes that today’s social denial of prejudice in institutions connects to the denial of structural and historical racism in the United States (2013). Same is the case with artwashing, the process of a corporation buying advertising space within an art gallery to make up for a negative public image. The contemporary university, like the museum, is artwashing in gentrified areas, promoting difference in a way that is flattened into individual characteristics or culture, rather than contending with unequal power relations and systems of oppression at play (Mohanty 2013). Thomas (2018) in “Diversity Regimes and Racial Inequality” studies Diversity University (DU) to examine how diversity ideology is articulated, or “the conditions and practices that forge the connection between diversity’s meanings and diversity’s practices.” Institutions “do” diversity through difference and performance of inclusiveness for image management (Thomas 2018, 150). Diversity discourse can be used to obscure material inequality while “aestheticizing equality,” to create something palatable and marketable (Ahmed 2012). In this image, inequality is obfuscated and power is maintained. Here we use the Foucaultian concept of power, a plurality of relations that is logical, with clear aims, yet seemingly in place no one having formulated them impersonal that “in the age of minority social movements becomes the new name for calculating and arranging minority difference” (Ferguson 2012). We aim to build on the body of critical diversity studies literature by examining how the contemporary administrative response of student racial protests is an act of “covert choreopolicing” that works to maintain power by creating an aesthetic of diversity while silencing student material needs.

Choreopolitics and Choreopolicing André Lepecki in Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or the Task of the Dancer (2013) developed the theory of choreopolicing and choreopolitics to bind politics, movement, and freedom to present the dancer’s movements as a pressing political act. Lepecki draws from Deleuze (1995) to consider conditions that allow the emergence of the “enactment of freedom,” in contemporary “control societies” that operate through widespread, amorphous surveillance and “constant and instant communication” (Foucault 1977; Lepecki 2013). In such control societies, people come to understand themselves through these antipolitical processes and see surveillance and control as the “new, consensual norm” (Lepecki 2013). The “choreopolitics of freedom,” then, can be used to think through ideas about the politics and possibilities of movement—moving freely, living freely, transformation of control society through movement (Lepecki 2013). Choreopolitical scholarship has been applied to social movement theory to rethink body politics in public assembly or dispersal (Kedhar 2014; Foellmer

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2016; Ruiz 2017). For Foster (2003) the control society directs movement and gathering toward consumption and online petition as preferred form of protest; therefore, “physical interference makes a crucial diference” (Foster 2003, 412). Protests are “choreographic arrangements” that “shape and reshape the social, the aesthetic, and the political” (Gerecke and Levin 2018, 5). Kedhar (2014) applies choreopolitical theory to study the strategic use of movement and gesture, that Black protestors embody in the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, after the murder of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot six times by the police ofcer Darren Wilson, and his body was left on the street for over four hours. In the days that followed, protestors stood with both hands in the air, chanting “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!,” a gesture that has since become a mainstay at BLM events across the world. Kedhar assigns political meaning to “such a codifed bodily gesture” in “choreographic tactics of gesture and resistance” (2014). The “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture is analyzed as being part of habitus for Black people in a society that criminalizes the Black body and therefore becomes a “part of the Black body’s repertoire of survival.” It is also a failed sign that is supposed to signify surrender, but it failed, and Mike Brown and many others were killed anyway. Finally, it is a gesture of Innocence as it reminds us that Mike Brown was innocent, he was kneeling with his hands up, but that wasn’t enough as the “Black body is never presumed innocent moving in white spaces” (Kedhar 2014). These white spaces are maintained, protected, and upheld through choreopolicing. Lepecki (2013) conceptualizes choreopoliced movement as “any movement incapable of breaking the endless reproduction of an imposed circulation of consensual subjectivity, where to be is to ft a pre-choreographed pattern of circulation, corporeality, and belonging” (2013). The purpose of choreopolicing is to “de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political” (Lepecki 2013, 20). Choreopolicing includes police blockages, dispersing crowds, moving bodies, arresting people, etc. When police created blockages, moved into paramilitary formations, wore riot gear, used tear gas, and other choreopolicing tactics, protestors walked toward police with the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture, and that act alone became an act of defance (Kedhar 2014). Police formation, movements, curfews, and other actions reinforce white supremacy, reifying stereotypes of Black protestors as criminals while upholding the social order by ensuring “everyone is in their permissible place” (Kedhar 2014). Black protestors defy stereotypes of protests as irrational and overly emotional by strategic choreopolitics like the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture and blocking a parade is protest art in which subjects are “defant, bold, and empowered [—] a space in which they have the ability to move freely” (Kedhar 2014). We aim to build on this literature by applying it to the context of the university, to examine student protestors’ strategic choreopolitical movement and the unique choreopolicing happening on the ground, in administrative ofces, and online.

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Case Study Concerned Student 1950 The CS1950 movement was birthed out of the 2014 BLM uprising occurring two hours away from campus in Ferguson, Missouri, following the murder of Mike Brown. There, CS1950 founding members Storm Ervin and Deshaunya Ware were on the streets, running from tear gas and rubber bullets. MU 4 Mike Brown (#MU4MikeBrown), a collective for students with the goal of translating what’s happening outside the university to what’s happening inside the university, was created by three queer Black womyn: Nayome Daughtery, Kailynd Beck, and Ashley Bland. MU 4 Mike Brown staged many events, such as carrying a cofn through campus to symbolize Black death by the state.

Winter 2015—As Told by Kelcea Barnes The day that I saw the caskets it was a mild winter day. The energy on campus was heavy. People were coming to terms with what it meant for Black and Brown bodies to exist at Mizzou. The casket that I saw was painted black. It was carried by Black students, dressed in Black, solemnly marching in rhythm towards the columns. I was on my way to the Student Center for most likely another meeting. (I was involved in a lot of unpaid diversity and inclusion labor on behalf of the University and the System). All I can remember feeling is an eerie sense of emptiness. I knew that at any moment in time that could be my brother, mother, sister, dad or friend. What struck me the heaviest is that it could be anyone on my campus, degrees aside. Looking back, Sandra Bland would be killed that next summer in July, and fellow students had been beaten by police around campus.10 The actions of CS1950, like MU 4 Mike Brown before them, halted the normative movement of campus, through demonstrations like die-ins and stopping the homecoming parade by standing in the street, and forced people to encounter: to encounter the black casket, to encounter a chain of Black students blocking the street, and be brought into the embodied public art protest while at a campus event or walking to the Student Center as Kelcea was. Events like rallies, marches, walk-outs, creating a tent city on campus, and guiding a mock tour of campus (re)directs movement by both highlighting the normative directional movement and challenging it by ofering new ways of moving on campus. In both halting and (re)directing movement, CS1950 queers campus space. Many foundational student activists prior to and in and around the

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CS1950 movement were queer Black womyn. Their work, their voice, their bodies in the space of campus challenge the history and norms and navigate gendered, racialized, and sexualized discrimination and oppression on the college campus. For Cathy Cohen, to queer is to create a new politics based on a “one’s relation to power” where “nonnormative and marginal positions” are the “basis for progressive transformational coalition work” (1997, 437). To “queer” PWI means to challenge the normative structures, ideologies, and ways of being. Black bodies have been historically constructed as aberrant and “other” (Ferguson 2004), so flling up this white corporatized space is an example of queering campus space. Indeed, student activists are not only changing the space, but they are also calling for a fundamental change in social relations. Students are reacting to the ways that the protestors who came before them demanded redistribution of power and got representation of minority people and cultures instead. This is evidenced by the third demand in the CS1950 list—“that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969.” CS1950 is responding to the institutionalization of diference and diversity over the last several decades that has not accomplished the uplift and excellence it touted, but instead held close to hegemonic ideals of power, state, and capital.

Halting Movement Die-In Susan Leigh Foster (2003) explores the choreopolitics of the “sit-in” protest art throughout the 20th century, including lunch-counter protests during the Civil Rights Movement, calling the purposeful movement tactics and strategic use of collective bodies in public space the “choreographies of protest”. Building upon the analysis, Kennedy (2020) discusses the “die-in,” where protestors lie on the ground to signify death, as part of the protests utilized by direct action climate protest artists Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the Red Rebellion. “The visibility of the Red Rebels in a crowd of protestors means that they often garner police attention, and they meet this attention with tactics of physical, attentive, voiceless presence” (Kennedy 2020). The intentional use of the lifeless, silent body in interactions with the police highlights the movements of the state against the innocent, which can result in death. Holding “die-ins” on the college campus adds another layer to imitating death in a public space, for it throws a heavy contrast to narratives of the college experience touted by the media university recruitment. CS1950 held die-ins to symbolize Mike Brown, who was murdered by the police and was left on the street for more than four hours. CS1950 founding member Storm Ervin said, “We would lay on the ground for so long

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to show how Black bodies on the ground look” (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016). This choreographic tactic subverts the stereotype that Black bodies are threatening and highlights that Mike Brown could have been any Black body.

December 12, 2014—As Told by Kelcea Barnes Laying on the cold hard foor of the Daniel Boone City building as names of those killed by police were named. People going about their day-today; paying utility bills, going to meetings, and the like could not help but notice thirty black bodies on the ground unmoving. As I lay there all I could think was, “Do they even care?” CS1950 founding member Martesha Woodhouse also noted the impossibility of ignoring a die-in, asking “how could you ignore this?” (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016). Kedhar (2014) explains that the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture of putting both hands up, a “gesture of innocence” used in Ferguson that, “as a collective gesture, compels us to take note of and publicly acknowledge the bodily proof of Michael Brown’s innocence.” Like in Ferguson, this gesture on the college campus “reminds us that the black body is never presumed innocent moving in white spaces. That space itself is white” (Kedhar 2014). While students and staf walk through the white space of the PWI, the choreopolitics of the die-in works to queer campus space by centering Black student protestors, challenges the safety of campus by imitating the danger of being Black in the United States, and calls for spectators to encounter the harsh reality of the Black death (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016). Like Butler-Rees and Hadley’s (2023) study of the deployment of how the “disabled body in public space from which it [has been] historically excluded is in itself a political gesture,” the (non)movement during the die-in in public space speaks to the “importance of emphasis or nonemphasis of the human body in pain, and in moments of trauma and vulnerability—or in other ways—as a strategy in staging protest action.”

Homecoming Demonstration Activists and protest artists have long utilized their bodies as literal blockages, to stop an oppressive force, whether it be capital greed and ecological disaster through the #NoDAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) protests, to sit in front of tanks as an anti-war initiative, or to halt parade proceedings in the name of antiracist action. McNeill and Buchanan (2020) write about Black Pride 4 (#BP4) locking arms to block the 2017 Stonewall Pride Parade. Their goal was to use their bodies as a tool of resistance to “disrupt the normalization of racism and antiblackness” in a “white space that eclipsed Black queer and trans voices.” CS1950 had similar goals after the die-ins, when members like Storm Ervin were “not going to continue to degrade ourselves by hypothetically dying so that you can see that

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there’s a problem. So our protests and our demonstrations became a little more disruptive” (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016). At the homecoming parade, a historically white space,11 MU president Tim Wolfe and his wife rode down University Ave. in a red convertible. Eleven students strode out in front of the car, locking arms, clad in black shirts with a red, green, and black power frst. With megaphones in hand, they directly addressed Wolfe. Parade participants were halted for ffteen minutes, and spectators crowded around. Some spectators cheered the protestors and a few joined the line of protestors, but a chant of “MIZ-ZOU” broke out among the crowd to drown out speeches being made through the bullhorns. Through coordinated action, the protestors use the power of their “embodied subjectivity as a tool for challenging the white supremacist state and calculated a choreography of protest that would disrupt and engage with the choreography of police, evoke a response and a dialogue from the audience, and shift normative discourse” (McNeill and Buchanan 2020). Their Black bodies in the space were seen as non-normative, as aberrant, as a threat. This is evidenced by the fact that the parade participants and crowd were majority white and white spectators chanted over protestor’s speeches about experiences of racism, and attempted to block Wolfe’s car with their own bodies. This act of performance protest art is an example of “confrontational choreopolitics” where audience members are made uncomfortable (McNeill and Buchanan 2020). Though the parade goers did not consent to this performance, they are drawn in and, in this case, became part of the piece by chanting and moving their bodies and cars. These interactions are part of the performance because the audience’s movements further highlighted the disparity in valuing Black experiences with white property, leadership, norms, and traditions. The movement of white voices and bodies, including those of the police in this space, was to protect and uphold white supremacy. The driver of President Wolfe’s car revved the engine, and the members of CS1950 and some bystanders contend he was hit with the car. Being hit by the president of the university and then escorted of the road by police is an explicit act of choreopolicing. The goal was movement—moving forward with the homecoming spectacle and the status quo of the marked university space. Of continuing on with the long-held tradition of homecoming without contending with the long-held tradition of racial oppression. Movement is again being directed, forward, on a particular path—the path of least resistance, the path of proft, the path of a good photo-op, and the path of pleasing the white majority town of Columbia, Missouri, and the hypervigilant white crowd. When Black students came and formed a physical barrier to that movement with their bodies, they must be moved so the movement forward can continue, regardless of the tears on the student protestors’ faces, screaming, jostling, and clear emotional scarring.

October 10, 2015—As Told by Kelcea Barnes You can watch the footage over and over again. You can debate what the car did or didn’t do, or what the driver’s intent was. However, you

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cannot argue the visceral reaction from the White crowd screaming, MIZ-ZOU! Two white men attempted to move the protesters, who had linked arms and began citing racism at Mizzou from 1839 till 2015. I remember thinking how can I celebrate homecoming, and also know that my very existence on campus is problematic. The physical picture of White people shrieking MIZ-ZOU brought me back to the pictures of the Little Rock Nine, walking into school as white men and a large crowd of white women screamed at the “little n*ggers” to go home. It was just another stark reminder to me that history will always fnd a way to repeat itself. These eleven student activists put their bodies on the line, in a literal line, in front of a moving car, because they felt they could not reach administration through the many other outlets they have tried. Six of the eleven protestors were Black womyn, who have been socially constructed as opposed to the innocent and helpless white women, as aggressive, loud, and always asking for it (whether that be sexual or physical assault) [Collins 2004]. Therefore, Black women in this space, even with tears streaming down their faces, are more likely to be seen as disruptive and a threat to the perceived safety and norms of the event. When a middle-aged white woman and college-age white woman put their bodies between the protestors and Wolfe’s car, it is perceived diferently. Putting their bodies to protect white property and white men in power reifes the stereotype of the “angry Black woman” as well as protestors as over-emotional, irrational actors (Foster 2003). Rather, the protestors strategically placed their Black bodies in this white space to demand the audience they were not otherwise getting, to highlight the whiteness of the space, and change the choreography of the parade in order to reckon with Mizzou’s history of racism and the experiences of current students. The back of protestors’ shirts read “1839 WAS BUILT ON MY B(L)ACK,” referring to this history. Drawing a line from 1839 to now allows us to produce what Ferguson (2012) calls a “counterarchive” to the archive of the contemporary American university, which tracks how “power worked through the ‘recognition’ of minoritized histories, cultures, and experiences and how power used that ‘recognition’ to rescue its status,” in the face of student activism. The protestors’ shirts can therefore be read as recognition of minority diference; representation of minority diference is not equal to recompense.

(Re)imagining Movement Racism Lives Here Rallies Black student activists’ strategic use of collective bodies in a public space “can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defant, bold, and empowered [—] a space in which they have the ability to move freely” (Kedhar 2014).

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2013–2018—As Told by Kelcea Barnes By claiming the simple statement “Racism Lives Here,” Black students uncover the careful dance that is performed throughout campus—step aside because some white students will not share the sidewalk, eschew Greek Town after dark, circulate their designated spaces (the “Black Hole” in the student center), duck their head in the lecture hall if their hair is “too big,” run away from Confederate Flag fying trucks. The phrase gestures toward a parallel to “Black Lives Matter,” in that it is something so obvious it should not need to be said, but must be. To bring awareness to recent racist events and the “intentional lack of administrative action,” graduate student and motherscholar Danielle Walker12 planned and led a series of “Racism Lives Here” rallies (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016). The rally began at Speaker’s Circle, the campus’ allotted “free speech” area.13 Most often, this area consists of tables, fyering, advertising, soliciting donations from Greek organizations and other student organizations, corporate banks and college housing companies, a shirtless older man who hacky sacks, and religious evangelists who sometimes preach against abortion and homosexuality. The rally queers the corporatized “free speech” area by disrupting the normative use of the space, flling it with Black students asserting that racism lives on campus. Approximately one hundred majority Black students lining the steps of Speaker’s Circle change many students’ route to class and demand attention from passersby. The audience is drawn into the socially engaged protest art demonstration by Walker’s voice through the megaphone in the center of the circle and signs that state “I am more than my skin color” and “Mizzou is racist.” The rally marched to administration directly, to nearby Jesse Hall, chanting “Racism Lives Here” followed by a call and response chant of Assata Shakur’s14 famous quote, “It is our duty to fght for freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains,” as those in the building watched from the second foor. This is a new dance—one of power, transformation, and community care. Taking up space together, chanting the song of an activist not found in the curriculum, the rally choreographs new routes through campus as a collective. For the next “Racism Lives Here” rally, Walker wanted to (re)claim space outside of the designated free speech area. Forty to ffty students participated in the event held in the Student Center. This was a big deal, because we were no longer being regulated to our safe spaces of being in the Black Cultural Center. We were going to continue to disrupt these spaces where students of color, Black students, don’t feel safe and feel comfortable. Until we feel comfortable, don’t expect to feel comfortable here, Walker said (Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints 2016).

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This protest is a choreopolitical move that queers the space of the Student Center by shaking up how the space is typically used—quiet eating, studying, chatting with friends, shopping at the Mizzou Store, going to the bank, post ofce, pharmacy desks, etc. The university has become increasingly state-like (Ferguson 2012); therefore, the rally disrupts the everyday workings of the university-state by loudly speaking about racial injustice and marching throughout the space. Moving from a designated “free speech” area into an unmarked space of campus unannounced to the public and using the space diferently to create discomfort is an example of strategic bodily movements that matches their message: being uncomfortable is normal for Black students, and the hegemonic, normative way the university runs is unethical, and needs disruption in order to change.

Covert Choreopolicing 2015—As Told by Kelcea Barnes Looking back, the administration did a lot of things to prevent change. They would schedule critical meetings during class times. Limit town hall sessions, and host them in uncomfortable places (not enough seating, bad acoustics, extreme sides of campus). They actively refused to compensate student activists for thousands of hours of advising. All while said student activists, took leave from class, lost valuable study time, and were admitted into mental health sessions on verges of breakdowns. They policed who took these “Inclusion and Diversity” roles usually bringing on minoritized professionals outside of the University. This way without institutional knowledge these professionals would eventually become overwhelmed, chastised for not taking action, and then leave never accomplishing much of anything. By doing this they had the public facing the persona of bringing change, while also hindering it. The administrative responses to CS1950 were many—there were press conferences, statements issued, tweets, photos and videos posted, town halls, listening sessions, meetings held, committees, response teams and task forces created, and changes/additions made to diversity and inclusion initiatives. The three main changes administration was committing to was hiring a Vice Chancellor of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, requiring students, faculty, and staf to take a diversity and inclusion training, and conducting a climate survey. While these eforts are often well-intentioned and can create change in an institution, there continued to be pushback from student activists, calling the administrative response “slow,” “in-name-only,” “a step in the right direction but not enough,” “misplaced,” and “band-aids” for systemic change (Butler 1993). We argue that although these actions may look like a movement toward freedom, it is in fact covert choreopolicing, where the institution strategically signals specifc language and action to appear to be transformative but those actions work to placate student activists

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while remaining unwilling to contend with structural inequalities and oppression in the contemporary higher education system. Ahmed (2012) builds from Judith Butler to propose a theory of the nonperformative or “reiterative and citational practice” by which discourse does not produce “the efects that it names” (Butler 1993, 2). In terms of diversity work, Ahmed is exploring the “structural possibilities of divergence” between the commitments stated by the university and the actions taken by the university. It is non-performative because they do not do what they name. Scholars refer to the staging diference as “the tick-box approach” (Ahmed 2017; Mayorga-Gallo 2019). Ahmed contends that even “commitment” becomes a tick-box. Ofcial statements from the Chancellor’s Ofce, press conferences, statements, and interviews with President Wolfe use the word “commitment” often. Expressing commitment is not doing the work in and of itself. Hiring a Vice Chancellor of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity does not an inclusive, diverse, and equitable campus make. Creating a campus climate survey is the absolute frst step to working toward those goals. The survey was administered in 2016, and of the sixteen action steps identifed created from the results, two are listed as “complete” and fourteen are “in progress” as of summer 2020. These are examples of non-performatives, by which the discourse of diversity, tick-box approach to compliance with entry points to racial equity, and stating a commitment is seen as completing the commitment. Power operates as a “mode of directionality” that Ahmed (2017) calls “trafc systems.” In this way, the literal and proverbial walls of the university are trafc systems—they are set up to restrict, contain, and guide certain movements of certain bodies. Students are being directed into a certain choreographed dance of the academy and the systems of power therein. When CS1950 began to improvise the dance and create choreography of their own, condensation and staging diferences were deployed to try to keep control of the dance. As the trafc system of neoliberal governmentality is embedded in the logic of diversity practices in the university, ideologies, the culture, bodies, documents, and policies create an “anesthetized equality” that obfuscates material inequalities at universities, evidenced through the tour of campus that prospective students take. To challenge the anesthetized, aesthetic tour, CS1950 hosted a “mock tour” on recruiting day. They walked through the campus, pointing out locations where racist incidents have occurred since 2010. For example, when the lawn of the Black Cultural Center was flled with cotton balls and where racial slurs were hurled at Black students. This mock tour subverted the typical campus tour which generally tracks a strategic path through the most alluring and impressive spots on campus, while spouting facts and fgures about the successes of the university and the resources and amenities ofered on campus, particularly to white students. The tour is usually directing majority white bodies in a specifc way through campus in order to achieve higher enrollment. In this strategic choreopolitical move, protestors are directing people to take notice of the history of racist, sexist, and homophobic events that occur on campus to Black students when they arrive at school. Therefore, CS1950 was

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presenting a more realistic and contextualized look at the school, and (re)claiming power as they ofer an alternative mode of directionality. The mock tour also highlights the limits of the economic narrative of restructuring higher education by taking seriously culture, social movements, and viewing the academy as “not simply an entity that socialized people into the ideologies of political economy,” but as an “institution that socializes state and capital into emergent articulations of diference” (Ferguson 2012, 9). A mock tour that (1) unearths the attempted burial of racist legacies and (2) “mocks” how traditional campus tours highlight the institutionalization of diference and diversity in search of proft.

Conclusion #StillConcerned The founding of the university, the architecture of the buildings, the administrative systems put into place, the academic disciplines, cannon, and curriculum, the sports teams, the campus traditions and culture cultivated, the institutional norms, the type of jobs and career trajectory students are being trained for—all create a normative way of being, and they direct movement of the college experience. These systems and norms are embedded in systems of power and therefore part of what Lepecki (2013) calls the “daily choreography of conformity.” Within the sociohistorical context of the university and neoliberal politics, the university’s daily choreography of conformity reinscribes the consensual norms of the state. This chapter analyzed the socially engaged public performance art of the Concerned Student movement at the University of Missouri in 2015, contending that their strategic embodied choreographed protests, demonstrations, and events queer the white space of the neoliberal PWI through deployment of Black bodies occupying various spaces of campus in unique ways, challenging the normative concept of the safe, fun, party time college experience and diverse and inclusive place of higher learning. We highlight the work done by (queer) Black womyn in the movement, as they are movement organizers and producers of knowledge on oppression on the college campus. The work of CS1950 was far-reaching, particularly because “Black Mizzou Twitter” popularized hashtags #MU4MikeBrown, #CS1950, and #BlackOnCampus. Approximately one hundred other campuses were inspired to open dialogues about racial politics on campus and engage in protests. At Claremont Mckenna College, the dean of students stepped down after protestors engaged in a hunger strike like Jonathan Butler (Lovett 2015). Through seeing the political and strategic movements of Black students at Mizzou, students around the country were able to move their bodies in resistance against the trafc systems of the university, white supremacy, and neoliberalism in similar and unique ways. We stand with students asking for more from their universities. We agree with Thomas’ (2018) call for mandated race consciousness of all members of the university, specifc language such as “racial equity” rather than the amorphous

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“diversity,” a centralized infrastructure for racial equity, and distribution of diversity work more equitably among faculty, staf, and students (Thomas 2018, 154). We also call for universities to divest from fossil fuels, companies that use prison labor, and campus police departments, as these are all connected to racialized capitalist oppression. From our analysis and lived experience, we contend that choreopolicing by universities cannot be reconceptualized, especially while it remains on stolen land, and that a movement toward freedom in higher education would be a mass movement that is student centered, coalitional, gives land back to Native peoples, and restructures epistemology and pedagogy. A critical university studies analysis of the solidarity that blossomed across space for CS1950 along with their work in conjunction with the Coalition of Graduate Workers who were fghting to unionize after losing health insurance coverage illuminates the transformative possibilities of coalitional student activist work to not only end racism on college campuses but dismantle all interconnected systems of oppression. Student activist movements need to go beyond nation and identity-based coalitional political organization to “craft alternative understanding of subjectivity, collectivity, and power” (Hong and Ferguson 2011) as it relates to education. This will mean working outside of university diversity traffc systems that have misread Black and women of color feminist critiques of the university as a form of “cultural pluralism” that has then been incorporated into a neoliberal diversity project (Hong and Ferguson 2011; Mohanty 2013). Ferguson (2017) argues when students from the 1960s to today call for institutional change, they are also calling for societal change. Their choreopolitics speak to life on campus and life under racialized capitalism in the world. Student protestors use their gestures and movements to question administrators and the state. Five years after CS1950, Mizzou students, staf, and alumni took to Twitter with the hashtags #BlackAtMizzou and #StillConcerned after an image of the CS2015 list of eight demands began being recirculated.15 Folks are sharing their experiences on campus space, in the classroom, in dorms, in conversations with professors and advisors, through experiences at parties and events, anywhere and everywhere. It is clear that the diversity and inclusion initiatives undertaken by the university since 2015 have not considerably changed the material conditions of Black students on campus, as many of the experiences are chillingly similar to those shared in the fall of 2015. In the summer and early fall of the 2020 school year, students protested (as they have previously) for the removal of the slaveowner and abuser Thomas Jeferson statue that sits on the quad. Mizzou responded by tracking down Black student protestors and placing them on academic probation and through a disciplinary process for being “disruptive” during a protest. Throughout the 2020–2021 school year, students utilized online channels as well as in-person masked protests and marches during the COVID-19 pandemic. As ofces of the university, departments, and specifc administrators are tweeting their solidarity and commitments to address concerns, students are quick with the clapback, quote tweeting to ask for specifcs, and asking for them

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now. They also marched through administrative buildings, knocking on the doors of deans and sharing their experiences outside their ofces with groups of masked students. A new cohort of students is following in the footsteps of CS1950, embodying digital avatars as well as continuing an on-the-ground presence, claiming space in movement toward freedom.

Notes 1 It took twelve years and the Supreme Court decision before the MU accepted Black students in 1950. Chen, Angela. Desegregating Mizzou (Chen 2015). 2 Positionality: A.F. Lewis began grads school at Mizzou in 2016, the year after CS1950, and has since studied the campus climate, marginalized student organizations, social movement organizing, and administrative responses. They are a young, white, queer scholar with an upper-middle-class background. Barnes was a sophomore undergraduate student during CS1950, Chief of Staf of the Missouri Student Union, and an active participant in campus organizing and protests. She can speak to the embodied, afective experience of being a queer Black womyn and activist on campus during this time using both personal and academic understanding of Black Queerness. The italicized text throughout the chapter is autoethnographic refections from Kelcea about her experience as a student leader and activist during CS1950. 3 The founding of many American universities was part of land-grabs, a colonial project carried out through the Morrill Act (1862), including the University of Missouri, which acquired all of the lands from just two Osage treaties in 1808 and 1825. Meriwether Lewis ofered the 1808 treaty to the Osage as an alternative to their extermination, while in 1825 William Clark demanded Osage land to create reservations for Eastern tribes. Granted an area more than twice the size of Chicago, by the early 20th century the University of Missouri had raised over $363,000 from land that was strongarmed from the Osage for less than $700. Today, the school still benefts from nearly 15,000 acres of unsold Morrill lands (Lee and Ahtone 2020) 4 The “Father of MU” James Rollins was a slave owner who received seed money from local slave owners for the construction of MU in 1839, and university archives show MU’s second President James Shannon was a notorious anti-abolitionist and used slave labor for campus janitorial services (Webiner 2014; Walters 2016; Lewis 2019). Today, “Rollins Street” runs through the campus, and a statue of slave holder and sexual abuser Thomas Jeferson sits in a central area of campus. 5 The Golden Age of Protest narrative typically frames universities as progressive institutions primed for students to engage in Civil Rights and Anti-War protests of the 1960s–1970s. Ferguson (2017) traces the way that student protests from the 1950s to 1970s inspired institutional change in the university—but, rather than meeting student demands, re-upped their ties to state and capital through implementing multiculturalism and diversity frameworks rather than fundamentally transforming the institution toward liberation. 6 Yippies were a countercultural group that married performance art with social protest through anti-authoritarian, countercultural “symbolic politics” (Gitlin 1993). 7 In 1964, thousands of students occupied the inside and outside of Berkley’s admin building in protest of new restrictions on student free speech, creating the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM). Violent police reactions to non-violent protestors further fueled the confict and eventually administrations granted the demands of FSM (Ferguson 2017).

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8 To protest racism experienced by Black students at Kent State and amidst the antiVietnam war protests occurring on campus, Black students threw rocks at cars. Retaliation to this event and the other protests by police forces and then the National Guard culminated in the May 4th Massacre, with four students killed and nine injured. These events directly afected Nixon’s national policy regarding free speech and protest and diversity in institutions (Ferguson 2017). 9 The Whitney Museum of Art located in New York mounted an art show titled “Untitled” without permission of the Black artist or compensation. They hastily took down the show once their actions were brought to light through protests. 10 Clayton Dwayne Crook posted a video on Facebook sharing his racist experience with Columbia Missouri police ofcers. The video depicts Cook being held to the ground by two ofcers, who are chocking and hitting him with the handcufs they are putting on his wrists. Cook was on his way to a job fair on campus. 11 Mizzou was arguably the frst to celebrate homecoming in 1911, which is one of the most notable Mizzou traditions. Marching Mizzou used to play “Dixie” at football games while a fraternity unfurled a confederate fag. Former chancellor Michael Middelton recalls his time as a student in the late 1960s, when he and a few others displayed a Black fag in protest. This was met with a campus police ofcer with a hand on his gun. Detillier, Stephanie. Reunion recalls history, yet embraces progress: Black Family Reunion helps reconnect alumni (Detillier 2011). Feeling unwelcome, the Legion of Black Collegians created “Black Homecoming” in the mid-1970s, with their own events, traditions, and Black Homecoming Kings and Queens, which continues today. 12 At time of writing, Walker is a PhD student and motherscholar in the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver studying critical whiteness, urban teacher preparedness, and Black feminism in educational justice. Walker was a graduate student at MU in the fall of 2015 and a foundational student activist during CS1950. 13 Many universities created such spaces in the 1980s in an efort to allow for discussion of topics previously deemed “controversial” or “politically incorrect” for campus space, like politics, identity politics, and systems of oppression (Thomas 2020); MU designated Speaker’s Circle in 1987 as a space to allow public speech without a permit. 14 Assata Olugbala Shakur is a former member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), convicted as an accomplice to murder during the New Jersey Turnpike shootout in 1973. Shakur was the target of the FBI’s counterintelligence program and on the most wanted list. Shakur escaped from prison in 1979. She surfaced in Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum (Shakur 1988). 15 MU senior AJ Foster follows in the footsteps of CS1950, by starting the hashtag #BlackAtMizzou. She said, People have been having conversations with (MU) since 1968. I don’t need documents and meetings. I don’t need any of that. I need you to send me your update, and I need a team of people that you pay to hold you accountable. McIlwain, Katelynn. Black in Columbia: residents share their experiences (McIlwain 2021).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC and London. Duke University Press. ———. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC and London. Duke University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books.

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Armstrong, Elizatbeth. A., and Laura. T. Hamilton. 2013. Paying for the Party. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Broadhurst, Christopher J., and Angel L. Velez. “Historical and contemporary contexts of student activism in US higher education.” In Student activism, politics, and campus climate in higher education, pp. 3–20. New York: Routledge, 2019. Biser, Ashley, and Erin Fletcher. 2023. “Art Making and World-Building: Arendt and the Political Potential of Socially Engaged Practices.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 57–74. New York, NY: Routledge. Bourriaud, Nicolas, Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York, NY. Routledge. Butler-Rees, Angharad, and Bree Hadley. 2023. “Exploring the Role of the Disabled Body as a Vehicle and Art Form within Anti-Austerity Protest.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 116–132. New York, NY: Routledge. Brophy, Alfred L. 2018. “Forum on Slavery and Universities: Introduction.” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 2: 229–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1446790. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Chen, Angela. 2015. “Desegregating Mizzou.” JSTOR Daily, November 23, 2015. Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4: 437–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Detillier, Stephanie. 2011. “Reunion Recalls History, yet Embraces Progress.” MIZZOU Magazine, Fall 2011. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/ 10355/67873/MizzouAlumniMagFall2011p35.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Diference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2017. We Demand: The University and Student Protests. Vol. 1. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Foellmer, Susanne. 2016. “Choreography as a Medium of Protest.” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 3: 58–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S014976771600039. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3: 395–412. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Michel Foucault: La Justice et la Police.” Video interview. https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i06277669/michel-foucault-la-justiceet-la-police. Gerecke, Alana, and Laura Levin. 2018. “Moving Together in an Era of Assembly.” Canadian Theatre Review 176 (Fall): 5–10. https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.176.001. Giroux, Henry. 2007. University in Chains: Confronting the Military-industrial-academic Complex. London: Routledge. Gitlin, Todd. 1993. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York, NY. Bantam Books.

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Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds. 2011. “Introduction” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kedhar, Anusha. 2014. “‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!’: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Ferguson.” The Feminist Wire, October 6, 2014. https://thefeministwire. com/2014/10/protest-in-ferguson/. Kennedy, Fen. 2023. “Bloodied Beaches, Copper Flowers: A Choreopolitical Analysis of Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade.” In Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements, edited by Martin Zebracki and Z. Zane McNeill, 82–95. New York, NY: Routledge. Lee, Robert, and Tristan Ahtone. 2020. “Land-Grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous Land is the Foundation of the Land-Grant University System.” High Country News, March 30. https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4. Lepecki, André. 2013. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR/The Drama Review 57, no. 4: 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00300. Lewis, A.F. 2019. “Still I Rise”: From the Basement to Beyond: How Marginalized Members of the College Campus Community Mark Space.” The Activist History Review, November 8. https://activisthistory.com/2019/11/08/still-i-rise-from-the-basementto-beyond-how-marginalized-members-of-the-college-campus-communitymark-space/. Lovett, Ian. 2015. “Dean at Claremont Mckenna College Resigns Amid Protests.” New York Times, November 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/us/dean-atclaremont-mckenna-college-resigns-amid-protests.html. Luft, Rachel. 2013 “Intersectionality and the Risk of Flattening Difference: Gender and Race Logics and the Strategic Use of Antiracist Singularity,” In The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, 100–17. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Mayorga-Gallo, Sarah. 2019. “The white-centering logic of diversity ideology.” American Behavioral Scientist 63, no. 13: 1789–1809. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642198426. McNeill, Zane, and Blu Buchanan. 2020. “Tracing the Color of Queer Choreopolitics.” The Activist History Review, January 13. https://activisthistory.com/2020/01/13/ tracing-the-color-of-queer-choreopolitics/. McIlwain, Katelynn. 2021. “Black in Columbia: Residents Share Their Experiences.” Vox Magazine, May 13, 2021. https://www.voxmagazine.com/city/black-incolumbia-residents-share-their-experiences/article_b369e40e-ad97-11ea-b8d997ab140df55e.html. Mohanty, Chandra. 2013. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society 38, no. 4: 967–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/669576. Morgan, Demetri L., and Charles H.F. Davis III. 2019. Student Activism, Politics, and Campus Climate in Higher Education. New York, NY: Routledge. Ruiz, Polyanna. 2017. “Performing Protest: Occupation, Antagonism and Radical Democracy.” In Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy, edited by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, 131–48. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Shakur, Assata. 1988. Assata: An Autobiography. London: Zed Books Ltd. Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints, Season 2, Episode 4, “2 Fists Up.” Directed by Spike Lee, digital release on May 31, 2016 on ESPN.

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Stokes, Sy, and Donte Miller. 2019. “Remembering the Black Bruins. A Case Study of Supporting Student Activists at UCLA.” In Student Activism, Politics, and Campus Climate in Higher Education, edited, by Demetri L. Morgan and Charles H.F. Davis III. New York, NY. Routledge. Thomas, James M. 2018. “Diversity Regimes and Racial Inequality: A Case Study of Diversity University.” Social Currents 5, no. 2: 140–56. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/2329496517725335. Walters, Stephanie. 2016. “Univ. of Missouri’s Hateful Legacy Goes Back to 1839.” The Undefeated, June 3. https://theundefeated.com/features/univ-of-missouris-hatefullegacy-goes-back-to-1839/. Webiner, Richard. 2014. “Descendant of MU Founder Atones for Family’s Slave-Owning Past.” Columbia Missourian, January 20. https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/ descendant-of-mu-founder-atones-for-family-s-slave-owning/article_bc8748b0af1b-5bb3-acd0-64607b7b9a01.html. Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.

9 EXPLORING THE ROLE OF THE DISABLED BODY AS A VEHICLE AND ART FORM WITHIN ANTI-AUSTERITY PROTEST Angharad Butler-Rees and Bree Hadley

Introduction Disabled people have been shut of, cut out, pushed aside. They’ve been labelled with pejorative terms, scroungers, lazy, a drain on the resources of our country et cetera, et cetera… as disabled people we have a right to be heard and we have a right to fght back. (Research participant cited in Butler-Rees 2020) Neoliberalism can be understood in terms of market-orientated reform policies, which favor deregulation of fnancial markets, privatization, tax increases, and government spending cuts over state welfare (Clarke and Newman 2010). The damaging impact of neoliberal political agendas, austerity, and the broader cultural climate they create is currently being felt by people with disabilities across the globe. This has led to increased scholarly interest in how people with disabilities and their allies protest such policies (Hadley 2019). Building on past work in disability studies, performance studies, and other felds (cf. Kuppers 2013), this scholarship looks at the strategies people with disabilities use to fght against “rollback” in their rights. In this chapter, we consider how people with disabilities are choreographing their protests, the strategies they are using, and the outcomes they are seeking, across two cultural contexts—the United Kingdom and Australia. Though these countries share a colonial legacy, cultural links, and trends to economic rationalism under current conservative governments, there are diferences in the way neoliberalist policy is unfolding in each context, and thus the way it is impacting on the lives of people with disabilities. What we want to explore here, then, is the way people with disabilities are choreographing their protests to address the specifcities of problematic forms of cultural change, what strategies DOI: 10.4324/9781003231141-12

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are shared, and what may be context-specifc. Bringing our respective bodies of research into dialogue ofers a unique opportunity to understand how people with disabilities are using activism, art-based activism, and combinations of live and online activism to make interventions in public sphere debates that afect their lives. Further, it allows us to look at protest strategies directed toward a non-disabled audience, at protest strategies directed to community strength and solidarity building amongst people with disabilities, and at strategies which blur the boundaries between the two. It allows us to ask questions about how important the physical presence, visible diference, and self-conscious performance of the vulnerabilities of the disabled body are to the meaning, impact, and interpretative possibilities of protest gestures. In a context where a return to an emphasis on pain, impairment, and vulnerability in the protest-based performances of people with disabilities has already been noted as a potentially defning characteristic of responses to current austerity politics (Hambrook 2015; Hadley 2019), this frst cross-cultural analysis allows us to ask questions about why this strategy is emerging, who it is impacting, and how.

Disability Rights and Austerity The disability rights movement is traced back to the 1960s, when people with disabilities in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere began to protest discrimination, inequality, and poor access (Campbell and Oliver 1996). Taking its impetus from the American Civil Rights Movement, the emergent disability rights movement expressed its demands in the language of equal rights, and pursued various forms of direct political action, such as sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, and lobbying activities (Bickenbach 1993). A key disability rights organization of the period, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), insisted it was society, built and run by non-people with disabilities, not an individual’s impairment, which prevented a disabled person from fully participating in work, social, and family life (UPIAS Founding Statement 1974). In 1978, UPIAS introduced the infuential concept of the “social model of disability,” differentiating between “impairment” as a bodily diference and “disability” as an oppression imposed by social attitudes. It was pivotal to the subsequent success of the movement, arguing for a shift in attitude toward people with disabilities, and their capacity to participate in society. It led to substantial shifts in international declarations, national legislation, inclusive practices in schools and workplaces, and other signifcant improvements (Gabel and Peters 2004). Over the past decade, disability activists have expressed concern that the austerity programs becoming central to economic policy in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are reducing people with disabilities’ rights (Garthwaite 2011; Dodd 2016). This includes legislative, welfare, and institutional advances that have brought about greater societal inclusion. In the literature, austerity policy has been linked to the collapse of the US banking sector in 2008, which brought about similar crises in European banking systems, and led governments

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to introduce debt and defcit reduction policies (Hadley 2019). In most cases, austerity is enacted through cuts to housing and welfare, and increased emphasis on individual responsibility for self-care, by conservative governments looking to sustain capitalist free market systems (Hadley 2019). Governments sell austerity as “smart, simple, intuitive, a virtue” (Dolmage 2017, 112), something that is for the “common good” (Berry 2017). For advocates, it is something we need to do in a time of scarcity. For critics, it fxes individuals—poor, unemployed, disabled individuals who have not done enough to care for themselves—instead of fxing the problem that created the crisis in banking and market systems (Dodd 2016; Berry 2017; Hadley 2019). Cultural discourses around austerity funding cuts binarize human beings into “strivers” and “scroungers” as politicians in the United Kingdom put it (Kokoli and Winter 2015, 158), or “lifters” and “leaners” as politicians in Australia put it (Lynch 2016; Hadley 2019). Research on austerity tracks a rise in negative representations of people with disabilities, and a resultant feeling of loss of citizenship (Ryan and Domokos 2017; Hadley 2019).

Disability Arts, Protest, and the Body Emerging out of disability activism in the 1970s, disability arts has been integral to the disability rights movement (Campbell and Oliver 1996; Minkler 2005). Over the decades, it has challenged discrimination, built community, and expressed disabled identity. From the outset, disability arts worked against ableist “overcoming” narratives, which depict disability as an adversity over which one must “triumph” (McRuer 2018). Artists have subverted traditional art forms, which represent them as fgures of monstrosity, pity, or inspiration, along with other historical forms such as the freakshow. They have also experimented with a range of other forms, from stand-up comedy, physical theater, and dance, to live and performance art, and guerrilla interventions in public space, drawing attention to how society projects identities onto disabled bodies (Hadley 2014). Throughout the history of the disability arts movement, the body has always been important, but how it is deployed has evolved. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the work of disabled artists typically emphasized political messages about the barriers—physical and attitudinal—preventing participation in society. The very act of making historically marginalized bodies, voices, and stories visible on stage, on screen, or in other places from which they have traditionally been excluded was a powerful political gesture for the artists involved (DeLuca 1999). The disabled body became a site for empowerment, as artists presented autopathographies, remobilizations of freakshows, interventions in public space, and other performances designed to provoke spectators with their bodies, and confront spectators with their perceptions of disability as passive, vulnerable, and defcient (Hadley 2014). In the 1990s and 2000s, many disabled artists extended this provocation through live and performance art in public spaces—schools, shopping malls,

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streets, and online social media platforms. These artists re-enacted the encounters they were subject to in these sites, often in exaggerated forms, highlighting how passers react to them, and replaying these interactions online to prompt spectators to refect on the prejudices displayed (Hadley 2014). In the early 2000s, artists explored new approaches to expressing and drawing spectators into the experience of disabled identity, pride, and culture. This again produced aesthetic innovations, and new poetics of disability performance, often with the assistance of increased funding (Hambrook 2015; Hadley 2017b, 2019). While for some disability arts remained an explicit representation of oppression and resistance (Cameron 2009), for many post-2000 it became a more subtle, yet arguably no less impactful, afrmation of being diferent in the world. What is becoming clear now, however, is that responses to the current politics in the United States, Europe, Australasia, and elsewhere may be driving another evolution in how disabled artists—and disability activists more broadly—deploy their bodies, with a return to an emphasis on pain, impairment, and vulnerability not seen in much of the recent pride-focused work (Hambrook 2015; Hadley 2019). In the United Kingdom at least, there has been an increasing desire to create work that (a) counters an increased proliferation of “pity porn” narratives in the media, (b) presents alternative representations of diferent experiences and worlds, (c) creates arts-based activism with a clear emphasis on symbolism and collectivism, calling people to move beyond individualism and join in grassroots action, and (d) exposes pain, impairment, and vulnerability (Hambrook 2015; Hadley 2019). Though not yet the subject of extensive analysis, this evolution again highlights the importance of the body in the strategy and choreography of protest. Though disability arts has long recognized that deploying the disabled body in the public spaces from which it has historically been excluded is in itself a political gesture, studies of protest more generally have been slower to acknowledge the importance of the body. What analysis of the evolving ways in which disabled artists are deploying their bodies in austerity protest can contribute to broader studies, then, is encouragement to consider the importance of emphasis or non-emphasis on the human body in pain, and in moments of trauma and vulnerability—or in other ways—as a strategy in staging protests.

Choreographing Protest in Two Cultural Contexts The term “choreopolitics” was coined by writer and curator André Lepecki (2013) and draws upon philosopher Hannah Arendt’s understanding of “true” politics as being bound to a notion of freedom. Lepecki makes a distinction between the “choreopolitical” and the “choreopolice.” He draws upon the choreographic element in Jacques Ranciere’s notion of “police” to advance the concept of “choreopolice,” which refers to performances that reveal the manipulating forces of systems of control through the tools of choreography (ibid. 2013). “Choreopolitics” can therefore be set in opposition to “choreopolice,”

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redefning “choreography” and releasing it from imperative or normative (i.e. policed) constructions of movement. “Choreopolitics” and moving politically is understood as moving freely. Such a way of moving, according to Lepecki’s (2013) understanding of Arendt, is something that needs to be (re)discovered again and again, and can only be learned through practice and repetition. Choreopolitical analyses challenge traditional social movement theories and normative understandings of protest as violent and emotional actions by a mass of irrational, senseless actors or what Foster (2003, 395) terms an “agitated irrationality, propelling individuals into the chaos of mob performance.” Choreopolitical analyses regard protests as carefully calculated and performed (Foster 2003; Lepecki 2013). Disability activists in Britain and Australia are using a range of strategies and choreopolitical techniques to protest changes in disability policy, legislation, and services. In the United Kingdom, protestors are responding to neoliberal austerity measures such as radical welfare cuts and work capability assessments (Dodd 2016), where people with disabilities must undertake face-to-face assessments to demonstrate their disability, and the barriers they face to engaging in employment and wider society. Individuals must present as visibly disabled, and emphasize their defcits, rather than how they successfully manage their impairment, to access welfare support. A large proportion of disability activism in response has thus sought to emphasize individual defcit, impairment, and vulnerabilities in order to garner public empathy and support by demonstrating “deservingness,” justifying the allocation of resources to people with disabilities. Drawing on our UK author Angharad’s doctoral study on disability activism at a time of austerity in the United Kingdom (Butler-Rees 2020), insights into protest practice come from participant observation at thirteen disability activist gatherings and events, and biographical interviews with twenty-seven disability activists engaged in a variety of diferent forms of activism, including protest, the arts, online activism, and advocacy. In Australia, protestors are responding to a slightly diferent political climate, which is economically rationalist, but—Australia not having sufered the banking collapse seen elsewhere—not based on austerity per se. In terms of disability support, activists face the paradoxes of a New National Disability Insurance Scheme, introduced under a Labour government, and designed with a social model of disability in mind, but implemented under a new conservative Liberal government, in a way many consider slow, defcit-focused, difcult to navigate, and exclusionary. Being told “left over” NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) funding is being diverted to other areas, while many struggle for basic needs and other conservative government policy initiatives simultaneously threaten the disabled community, has led to protests. Our Australian author Bree’s analyses of arts, news, and social media commentary on protests in live and online public spaces by Australian disability activists such as Samantha Connor, Carly Findlay, and Jax Jacki Brown provides insight into responses to these policy agendas.

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Disability Protest in Britain Whilst major improvements have been made to the rights and social inclusion of people with disabilities in the United Kingdom, austerity appears to have brought a number of challenges to the strides and gains of the disability rights movement, particularly in regard to independent living and social inclusion (UNCRPD 2016). Since the onset of austerity, the United Kingdom has experienced the overhaul of key disability benefts Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Incapacity Beneft, being replaced by more rigid and stringent benefts with heightened eligibility criteria—Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), whereby the state has sought to redefne its responsibility (Garthwaite 2011). The Independent Living Fund (ILF) has also been cut and substantial reductions have been made to adult social care. This has been understood as part of a radical move to save billions of pounds a year from the welfare budget, normalized via political and media discourses of necessity, urgency, unavoidability, and being “all-in-this-together” (Davies and Evans 2012; Featherstone et al. 2012; Ginn 2013). People with disabilities have been proactive in voicing their resistance to such changes. An investigation launched by the UN Committee on the Rights of Disabled Persons (CRPD) in 2012 (brought about by the campaigning of disability activists in the United Kingdom) found that “legislation related to recent welfare policies [did] not fully enforce the international human rights framework related to social protection and independent living” (UNCRPD 2016, 16). The Committee concluded that UK welfare reforms had led to “grave and systematic violations” of people with disabilities’ rights (BBC 2016; UNCRPD 2016). Changes to housing beneft and criteria for parts of the Personal Independent Payment, along with a narrowing of social care criteria and the closure of the ILF, all “hindered [people with disabilities’] rights to live independently and be included in the community” (UNCRPD 2016, 17). A number of disability protest groups have emerged in the United Kingdom as a result of disability welfare reforms, including Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Black Triangle Campaign, and We Are Spartacus. These groups have been incredibly active in campaigning around changes to disability welfare benefts, the rollback of disability rights and access to services, and have used a variety of diferent mediums—protests/direct action, online activism, and the arts—to communicate their message. Activists have used the body’s vulnerability strategically in their approach, with wheelchair users frequently commanded to the forefront of protests, due to police and enforcement ofcers often being unsure and/or uneasy about how to approach the disabled body without inficting harm. This practice of placing “vulnerable” bodies at the front and center of disability protests was observed in London on July 19, 2017. Disability activists occupied the House of Commons and created a wheelchair barricade to prevent MPs from entering the central lobby. The protest was brought about as a response to social care cuts and to demand the restoration of the ILF.

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By making their bodies a political vehicle, they symbolically appropriate ableist domination and prejudice (Sasson-Levy and Rapoport 2003). Hammani (2016), in a similar respect, has shown how women in a collection of Palestinian hamlets along the West Bank have utilized and reclaimed their bodily vulnerability to protect their male counterparts and resist military violence. Aware that Israeli soldiers are loath to breach the female body (unable to claim their normative truths of masculinist protection of the vulnerable female) and are less likely to infict violence upon them, women are often found at the front line of collective action. Such practices debunk the fgure of the impenetrable, allpowerful activist and demonstrate why individuals who naturally experience physical weakness and/or corporeal challenges in their daily lives should in fact be embraced and utilized by activist movements. The imagery of protests whereby wheelchair users are at the forefront of collective action is also tactical, designed for mass media dissemination and increased visibility, with vulnerable and taboo bodies being placed in the center of attention. Again, this is a case with activists fghting fre with fre, and utilizing the very media which seeks to disable them. Many of Angharad’s participants noted how they often played with the notion of vulnerability as part of their engagement in disability protest: That’s my tip for life. That prejudice, it causes us so much harm but if you know how to use it on a protest, it can be really helpful. Participants noted how they can challenge common perceptions of people with disabilities through their engagement in protest. Whilst people with disabilities are not inherently vulnerable, activists can actively choose to play on their perceived vulnerability for a strategic reason—that is, to challenge the government’s harsh workfare politics. Perceived vulnerability and dependency can be reappropriated by disability activists as a source of strength. Disability protests of the 1980s and 1990s were about presenting a courageous identity and of being able to take over public space despite impairment. Whilst some of this remains, there is now a greater emphasis on highlighting one’s own impairments, to remind the media and the public that beneft cuts are unjust, and that the government has a duty of care toward people with disabilities. Drawing upon the personal, corporeal, and physiological issues that people with disabilities experience has been a key strategy of disability activism in response to austerity, as a means of gaining greater public solidarity and support, with the public encouraged to feel sympathy for people with disabilities and their current situation, as one participant notes: That’s the reasonable response to it in a way, is to say look life is already tragic and terrible and you’ve just made it worse and that can be quite efective in the short term, in going we can’t make this worse can we, because people with disabilities are already in a terrible state… but it also puts us back in our little closet.

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This strategy of highlighting people with disabilities’ vulnerability and desperation has been deemed efective in gaining public empathy and support. However, it has also been seen as highly controversial, with some activists arguing that it goes against all that the disability rights movement has achieved in terms of building a positive and prideful cultural identity. Disability activists have, for example, sought to make their impairments and vulnerabilities visible through publicly recounting personal stories of pain and hardship, driven largely by the desperation and urgency of the current situation. Another means through which individuals have sought to make the challenges they face visible is through engagement in art activism. Art activist Liz Crow put together the notable artwork Bedding Out—a live interactive performance over forty-eight hours, which toured multiple UK locations between November 2012 and August 2013. During the performance, Liz laid in her bed and encouraged members of the public to join her in bedside conversations. The overall aim of the performance was to make visible the generally private features of people with disabilities’ lives along with challenging austerity and beneft cuts, and the increasingly commonplace narratives of cheats, scroungers, and skivers. Liz was keen to highlight the realities and complexity of her life as a disabled person with a hidden impairment, along with how her lived experience may difer from how she is perceived in public space. Liz sought to perform the challenges that many people with disabilities experience in isolation (Kim 2014). By doing this she was exposing and highlighting her vulnerability, in doing so, laying herself open to criticism and judgment. The performance highlighted how some people with disabilities live their lives with great public/private divides. Similarly, UK disability activist Kaliya Franklin constructed the photograph “Left Out in the Cold,” which depicted herself laid naked in the sand on a wintry beach, next to her empty wheelchair. Kaliya appeared to be reaching for her wheelchair. The photograph was intended to show how social care and support has become out of reach for many people with disabilities and how they are often left voiceless in society. Through this image, Kaliya makes visible the fragility of her disabled body and the way in which she is made vulnerable through the removal of her care and support (McRuer 2018). Notions of vulnerability and dependency, therefore, come to the forefront in both Liz’s and Kaliya’s artwork. Nowhere has this practice of sharing vulnerability become more visible than online, in the form of online presentation of artwork like Liz’s and Kaliya’s, and online disability activist blogs. Indeed, blogging as a form of creative writing can be recognized as a new art form, through which authors seek to creatively communicate a message to the reader. Social media has increasingly become used as an avenue for storytelling, with disability activists frequently using it to share stories of their own personal experiences of life as a disabled person in austerity Britain. Examples of such practice include the notable blog “Diary of a Beneft Scrounger” by Sue Marsh and online campaigns such as the “Spartacus welfare cut campaign” and “The Broken of Britain” campaign. The Spartacus campaign initiated by a small group of disability activists gained widespread publicity and

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was the frst of its kind, using personal storytelling online as a strategic tool for disability activism. It also had a role to play in building a sense of identity and belonging amongst people with disabilities in the context of an increasingly hostile media (Briant, Watson, and Philo 2013). According to Pearson and Trevisan (2015), a new era of disability activism through online platforms has emerged through blogs such as these, giving activists a useful avenue to acquire visibility and air their voices in a public arena (Chadwick 2013). Pearson and Trevisan (2015) have argued that disability activism through social media ofers a more visible profle to challenge government policy, public opinion, and negative stereotyping of people with disabilities. Obst and Stafurik (2010) argue that the internet and social media in the context of austerity have also been incredibly valuable in connecting increasingly isolated and diverse people with disabilities, building community and facilitating the development of informal support structures.1 Disability activism in response to austerity is thus arguably not only about getting a message to an external/wider public audience but also about sustaining one another, building a sense of community and belonging internally. One of the major aspects of organized political resistance is making people aware that a situation is shared. Disability cuts are not only having an adverse efect on one or two individuals, but they are structural, and therefore political. When the dominant narrative from the government and the media is individualized, that any problem of situational vulnerability is down to personal failings as a human being, structural inequalities often become overlooked.

Disability Protest in Australia The timeline for change in the rights aforded to people with disabilities in Australia is similar to that in the United States and Europe (Carling-Jennings 2007). Following the United Nations’ work on the rights of the “handicapped” in the 1950s, Australian legislation in the 1960s and 1970s expanded services beyond homes for returned soldiers and asylums, setting up schools and sheltered employment programs. Though information on the social model was fltering through, the Australian approach remained defcit-focused into the 1980s. Activism around the International Year of People with Disabilities in 1981 called for a change in legislation, approach, and attitude, and saw the introduction of a Human Rights Commission (1986), Disability Services Act (1986), respite care, accommodation support, and training and employment programs. In the 1990s, the Australian government replaced the Invalid Pension with a Disability Support Pension (1991), introduced a Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) [1992], and began the process of deinstitutionalization (Young and Ashman 2004). In 2013, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) introduced marketized disability services in Australia, via individualized health, housing, education, community, and cultural services support packages. A “strange case” (Miller and Hayward 2016) in a time of global austerity, the NDIS

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acknowledges the social model of disability. However, there is a perception that loss of support for non-individual services like advocacy, ineligibility of many individuals for plans, a funding shortfall for plans, instances of abuse, and reports of people dying waiting for support—reminiscent of issues arising under austerity in the United Kingdom—can be tied to the conservativism of the current federal government (Henriques-Gomes 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). When state governments have also seemed reluctant to confrm support for block-funded services that lost resources under the NDIS, such as advocacy groups, beyond 2020, this has led disability groups to protest via campaigns such as Stand By Me, which argued an increased need for these services under the new paradigm (Ovens 2019). Protests about funding have, over the last decade, combined with protests which fght rollback in the legislative, service, and social status of people with disabilities in Australia under the current government. Some of the arts and media workers best known for disability activism in Australia include Samantha Connor, Carly Findlay, and Jax Jacki Brown. Each is committed to protesting a range of interrelated issues, often from an intersectional perspective acknowledging that disabled communities overlap with queer and culturally diverse communities. Their work captures community sentiment across a range of issues, from the distress people feel while waiting for NDIS funding, to the abuse at the hands of poor service providers, to the threat from government proposals to endorse legislation allowing a new Religious Discrimination Bill that would allow people to argue disability is a consequence of past sins, and/or new Euthanasia Bills that would allow assisted suicide. One of the issues consistently called out in protests is the system’s lack of interest in hearing from people with disabilities, even in forums set up to hear their concerns and complaints, such as the long fought for Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of People with Disability. When the website for this Royal Commission was launched (https://disability. royalcommission.gov.au), visual artist, writer, activist, and advocate Samantha Connor was the frst to note that it was inaccessible to people with disabilities. She protested, producing an unofcial alternative with plain language, screen readable font, and other features the community could understand and use for