The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present [2 ed.] 1517906210, 9781517906214

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THE ART OF PROTEST

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THE ART OF PROTEST

Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present SECOND EDITION

T. V. REED

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

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The first edition of this book was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2005. The companion website to The Art of Protest includes audio and visual materials, bibliographies, discographies, filmographies, and links to websites for or Internet resources on historical and current social movements, as well as a supplementary chapter, “Peace Symbols: Posters in Movements against the Wars in Vietnam and Iraq.” Visit the book’s website at http://culturalpolitics.net/index/social _movements. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian,” Wicazo Sa Review 16, no. 2 (2001): 75–­96. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as “Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of ‘Agit-­Pop’: Music as (Anti)Colonial Discourse,” Cercles, no. 3 (2001): 96–­113. Portions of chapter 8 were published as “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” in Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, editors, The Environmental Justice Reader (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003); and as “Toxic Colonialism, Environmental Justice, and Native Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures of the United States 34, no. 2 (summer 2009): 25–­42. Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0622-1 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0621-4 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. 25 24 23 22 21 20 19        10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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This book is dedicated to E l l a Ba k e r, B e r n i c e J o h n s o n R e a g o n , and the millions of political-­cultural workers, past, present, and future, who march alongside them toward freedom and justice.

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In order to see where we are going, we need not only remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been. —­Ella Baker

Beauty walks a razor’s edge. —­Bob Dylan

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CONTENTS

Introduction xi 1. Singing Civil Rights: The Freedom Song Tradition 1 2. Dramatic Resistance: Theatrical Politics from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter 43 3. The Poetical Is the Political: Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women’s Rights 85 4. Revolutionary Walls: Chicano/a/x Murals, Chicano/a/x Movements 115 5. Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian Movement 143 6. “We Are [Not] the World”: Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of Rock Music 173 7. ACTing UP against AIDS: The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis 197 8. Novels of Environmental Justice: Toxic Colonialism and the Nature of Culture 239

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  9. Puppetry against Puppet Regimes: The “Battle of Seattle” and the Global Justice Movement 269 10. #Occupy All the Arts: Challenging Wall Street and Economic Inequality Worldwide 325

Conclusion: The Cultural Study of Social Movements 371 Acknowledgments 419 Notes 423 Index 479

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INTRODUCTION

My title, The Art of Protest, is meant to suggest two related things: (1) that the arts have played a significant role in social protest movements, and (2) that movements need a certain degree of strategic artfulness to be successful in the current age. It is my hope that this book will prove useful to three main types of readers who wish to better understand the role of political protest. For those new to the story of protest, I offer an introduction to social movements through the rich, kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression. For activists, I seek to offer inspiration and a tool kit of ideas about how art and culture can further movement goals. And for those who study or already know a good deal about the history of these movements, I aim to offer some new angles of vision on aspects of each movement and to raise general questions about the role of culture in social movements. These three sets of readers overlap, of course, but to the extent that they sometimes have different interests I hope that each type of reader will be patient when encountering portions of chapters that may speak more clearly to another of these audiences. Finding a style equally appropriate to all has been my goal, but no doubt I have not always succeeded. The relations between art and politics are very complex, and many books explore these complexities. Virtually every kind of art can be made to serve political ends. My specific focus here is on art that has been created inside or very close to social protest movements. My goal is to xi

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use discussions of art and culture to introduce movements and to use movement contexts to deepen understanding of the social impacts of artful expression. This book reenters the publishing world in the era of the right-­ wing Trump-­led backlash and the resistance movement that opposes it. While it remains to be seen how far the backlash will go in undermining the kind of progress represented by the movements surveyed in this book, it is important to remember that cycles of progress have been followed by conservative backlashes throughout U.S. history. The latest threat to democracy and human rights from the alt-­right is extreme, but in response the resistance from activists in both movement-­based and electoral arenas is equally if not more intense and more widespread. I hope readers find in this book inspiration from people who have struggled against this kind of backlash and much worse in the past. The cultural activists whose work this book surveys created a legacy of struggle and left a rich set of resources that others can use to continue the cause of human rights and economic justice for all. Since the previous edition of this book was published in 2005, new social movements have swept across the globe, from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Zuccotti Park in New York City to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. By some measures, there has been more social movement activity in the first two decades of the twenty-­first century than in virtually any previous era. We are living in a time of immense social upheavals, and the forces behind those upheavals are likely to become more intense in the years to come. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to reflect these new developments. Social movements—­the unauthorized, unofficial, anti-­institutional, sustained collective actions of ordinary citizens trying to change their world—­ have shaped politics, culture, and political culture as much as any other single force. It is important to study these movements because of the crucial roles they have played in making national and world history. I focus in this book on movements in the United States, but I also show how those movements have been connected to global changes. The United States was created through a social movement, the American Revolution, and social movements have helped make and remake our nation ever since. Social movements, as the term implies, have been a moving force, one of the most dynamic elements in the development of U.S. society

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and culture. I believe “progressive” social movements like the ones at the heart of this book have been crucial in taking the important but vague and still unfulfilled promises of “freedom” and “democracy” announced in the American Revolution’s best-­known manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, and giving them more reality, more substance, and wider applicability to the majority of people (women, people of color, the poor) who were initially excluded from those promises and who continue to struggle to achieve fully equal treatment. While scholars quibble about the precise definition of a social movement and may argue about borderline cases, most know a movement when they see one. And seeing one may be precisely the point. Movement historian and theorist Charles Tilly notes one essential feature of movements particularly relevant to this book: movements entail “repeated public displays” of alternative political and cultural values by collections of people acting together outside officially sanctioned channels.1 (It is because those official channels have failed some people that movements arise.) Movements, in contrast to their tamer, more insti­ tutionalized cousins (political parties, interest groups, and lobbyists), seek to bring about social change primarily through the medium of “repeated public displays,” or, as I would put it, through sustained acts of protest. I like that portion of Tilly’s definition because it plays to the prejudice of this book in focusing on some of the most dramatic movements of the past several decades. The term protest is also often applied to social movements, and I have placed that word at the heart of this book’s title, even though it is a much-­misunderstood term. Its Latin root, protestare, suggests etymological connection to publicness and witness. To engage in protest is to offer public witness. Protest occurs in many forms. But when protesting, or witnessing, becomes sustained as a strategic set of actions, you have a social movement. Common usage often stresses the oppositional side of protest, the protesting against. But protest movements, as the prefix pro-­ suggests, are also always for something: they are always proposing, putting forth positive alternatives. This book tells the stories of key social movements in the United States in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, each of which is part of a larger vision of a more open, equal, and just society. While movements can be found across the political spectrum, I limit my discussion to an interlinked set on the progressive or

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left-­liberal side of this spectrum. These movements have been dominant forces in U.S. history, despite having often been met by conservative or reactionary movements (the Tea Party, neo-­Nazi movements, and so on) that, while not dealt with separately here, are also part of the drama of social change presented in this book. There are many different kinds of social movements, not just in terms of political ideology but also in the breadth and depth of their focus, from relatively small issues that can be fairly easily resolved to broadscale movements that seek to bring about radical, even revolutionary, change. I focus on this latter kind of movement. I have chosen movements that I think have been especially important, but there are many other equally worthy ones that I have been unable to include (the book’s companion website addresses many additional movements). I make no claim to providing a comprehensive study of progressive movements since the 1950s, but I believe this book gives a good sense of major developments in a central tradition of dramatic protest, resistance, and change. I hope that it also inspires readers to delve more deeply into the movements and issues that I have been forced by constraints of space to omit or mention only briefly. The endnotes and a bibliography on the companion website provide information on many books and articles that readers can consult to broaden their knowledge. One movement very much a part of the linked movements discussed in this book, the anti–­Vietnam War movement, is treated in an additional online chapter that examines the use of poster art in that movement, comparing it with the use of posters in the movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The online chapter includes links to images of the numerous posters analyzed. While I seek to make clear that dramatic public action has been essential to social movements, such action is by no means the totality of their activity, or the sole source of their impact. I try to show that dramatic actions are themselves the products of usually rather undramatic, mundane daily acts of preparation, and that the impacts of dramatic moments are only as great as the follow-­up forms of daily organizing that accompany them. In several chapters, I try to show that important movement events often happen in less celebrated spaces, including beauty salons, community centers, union halls, classrooms, and offices, as well as in kitchens and living rooms where new ideas are discussed and debated.

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I also want to stress that movements have often been most effective when their work has been translated into the electoral arena. While movements have frequently (and rightly) been critical of the limited choices available in the U.S. two-­party system, elections have real impacts, and even small differences in positions between the two major parties can affect millions of lives for good or ill. The smartest movement actors realize that the reform–­revolution or liberal–­radical dichotomy applied to politics is often a misleading one. Movements often push for what social theorist André Gorz called “non-­reformist reforms,” reforms that push systems to the point where they reveal their limitations, reveal the need for deeper, more radical transformations. As cultural theorist Chela Sandoval notes, the most successful movements intuitively understand that elements like reformism, radicalism, and separatism—­and labels like liberal, progressive, and revolutionary—­should constitute flexible sets of strategies and tactics, not rigid ideologies.2 The particular movements I have chosen to focus on in this book have played and continue to play crucial roles in expanding freedoms and giving greater substance to the claim that the United States is a democracy of, by, and for the people. In that sense, they are the movements that have, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, made America America, a place that has not yet been but one day yet must be a free and just society.3 Each generation of new dreamers has had to fight to bring the American dream closer to reality for people forced to the margins of society. The interlinked movements surveyed here, from the late 1950s through the second decade of the twenty-­first century, built on ones that came before—­from the American Revolution to the antislavery movement, socialist and populist farmers’ movements, labor movements, the women’s suffrage movement, and a host of others—­and they built on each other as well. The movements I chronicle here begin with the great African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Not only was that movement of tremendous importance in itself, but it also created a new master framework for protest that set in play key ideas, tactics, and forms of resistance for other movements that soon followed. Indeed, many of these subsequent movements have also been, among other things, “civil rights” struggles: struggles for the right to equal and fair treatment, and for the right to equal and fair access to the economic,

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political, and cultural goods of society. The word civil means pertaining to the life we live in common, in community, and that is what these movements have both asserted the right to and attempted to practice in their own work. Many of these movements have formed strong cultures of their own, “movement cultures,” that offer alternative models of what our collective civil and civic lives might be like. Those alternative cultures within movements have supported the movements’ arguments about the ways we have continually fallen short of creating a fully just and fair society. The first edition of The Art of Protest was the first book to offer a widely comparative analysis focusing on the artistic and cultural dimensions of social movements.4 It and this new edition are part of a larger effort to give art forms and cultural issues more emphasis in the study of social movements. While things have improved since that first edition was published, many scholars of social movements continue to underplay issues of culture. At the same time, cultural studies scholars who examine the range of high and popular cultural forms have had relatively little to say about movements as sites of cultural production and reception.5 The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as the webs of significance we humans have spun around ourselves. Geertz added that given the highly complex, self-­consciously shifting nature of these structures, the analysis of culture is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Geertz’s preferred method of approaching such interpretive work was what he called “thick description,” description of the many-­layered, often self-­reflective dimensions of the experiential webs in which we live and act.6 This book relies largely on thick description in seeking to clarify the workings of culture in movements. The narrower notion of culture—­entailing works of art such as paintings, poems, puppetry performances, posters, musical compositions, murals, and memes—­is examined here both to understand the practical usefulness of such works in presenting movement ideas and values and to show the ways that they illustrate, express, and help create deeper reimaginings of how we live our lives. I use the concept of “culture” in three broad, interrelated ways in the chapters that follow. First and foremost, I look at the production of cultural texts (works of art) in and around social movements, noting

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what each particular art form can offer social change efforts. Second, I examine social movements as subcultures or countercultures to dominant cultures in the country. Third, and most broadly, I examine how the cultural texts, ideas, identities, and values generated by resistance movements have reshaped the general contours of the United States in the sense of culture as a whole way of life. The study of social movements has been carried out by several different kinds of investigators. Academics, including anthropologists, media/communication scholars, historians, political scientists, and espe­ cially sociologists, have examined movements from the perspectives of their own areas of expertise. Nonacademics, especially journalists and movement activists, have also contributed greatly to our understanding of movements. Overall, sociologists have certainly produced both the greatest volume of studies and the most systematic work. This book especially owes a great deal to the many sociologists who have studied both the particular movements I examine and the processes active in social movements overall. But as sociologists themselves have noted, until fairly recently they have neglected the specifically cultural dimensions of social movement activity. Social scientists initially concentrated primarily on the ways in which movements have been forces of institutional political change—­ changes in laws, legislation, voting patterns, government institutions, and so on. They have done a valuable service by subjecting movements to intensive and extensive study. But this work has been limited by a strong bias toward the most quantifiable elements of movements: numbers of participants, amount of money raised, laws passed in response, shaping of voting patterns, and so on. By comparison, social movements as forces of cultural change have been relatively neglected until fairly recently. One key reason for this is that culture is a messy business; it is a less easily measured object of analysis than Supreme Court rulings, congressional bills, or income patterns. But to ignore a whole terrain and its impact just because it is not easily quantifiable seems, ironically enough, highly unscientific (as well as downright strange). Movements are much more than the sum of quantifiable elements. Movements, especially the kind that are the focus of this book, are deeply transformative experiences for those who take part in them and less directly transformative for those who are later shaped by the

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ideas, feelings, styles, and behaviors they send out into the wider society. It takes nothing away from other important kinds of analysis to say that we need far more work on the cultural forms active within movements and the cultural forces that movements unleash. Cultural studies scholars, as the name of their discipline suggests, have focused strongly on questions of culture. But their prime targets have been trends in popular culture and subcultures that do not take the directly political form of social movement cultures, the cultural patterns among activist communities. Much cultural studies work has offered brilliant interpretive readings of cultural texts (movies, television shows, pop music, fashion), but this work has not always been well grounded in relation to the institutions and structural social forces that shape and move through culture. In my view, the best cultural studies work has attended to three interrelated levels of analysis: cultural production processes, the texts produced, and audience reception of those texts. In this book, I am especially interested in social movements as sites for the production and reception of cultural texts. This includes looking at movement artworks that are shared by movement participants in ways that help to create new kinds of social relationships.7 My broad claim is that texts created and enacted collectively within movements diffuse over time into the wider culture. Not only cultural texts but also the people who experience and are changed by them move out into the larger culture, bringing new ideas, identities, and relationships with them. In addition, the movements themselves form a kind of supertext, a dramatic presentation of alternative ways to think and live, with their artworks acting as one crucial means to that end. My key premise is simply that sometimes those forces labeled “cultural” have a deeper and more widespread impact on our lives than do political or economic forces. Cultural impacts generally evolve over long periods and in indirect ways, such that their connections to social movement origins are often harder to trace than, say, the impacts of new laws. Yet all of us are far more immersed in culture than we are in the comparatively narrow field of governance. My intent is not to argue for the greater importance of culture, just for its importance as inevitably entangled with political, social, and economic forces that have tradition­ ally gained more attention. These divisions—­social, economic, political, cultural—­are, after all, themselves cultural concepts, not real things

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neatly dividing the world. And giving culture a stronger footing in this list will allow us to better understand the interactions of all these interwoven forces. Even when I engage in close textual analyses here, I try to place my analyses in the context of movements as sites of reception of these texts. In other words, to the extent that I analyze the formal elements of an artwork, I do so with an eye to how particular people inside and outside a given movement were likely to interpret the work. I also try to offer informed speculation about these works in their relation to each other and as part of the larger cultural field. French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term cultural field for the social space where cultural texts exist in relation to each other and in relation to texts in other social, political, and economic fields. Because the experience of injustice does not automatically generate cultural resistance, movements are key sites for creating new interpretations of political, economic, and social realities, and works of art often play an important role in that process of reinterpretation. As Michael Denning phrases it, the possibility of works of art and culture helping bring about change “depends on the cultivation, organization, and mobilization of audiences by oppositional subcultures and social movements.”8 The kinds of art produced in and around movements vary greatly in style and purpose. Some works are very direct and functional, aimed specifically to make particular ideological points. Others can be much more complex in evoking ideas, feelings, and entire worldviews that cannot be reduced to political slogans. As cultural historian Robin Kelley notes, often “the most radical art is not protest art, but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.”9 I agree with Kelley but would phrase it differently. A work like Toni Morrison’s magnificent novel Beloved, for example, which radically “envisions a different way of seeing” and “feeling” the American past, is just as much a work of protest art as a poster made for a Black Lives Matter rally. The novel and the poster are clearly not equivalent, however, and need to be evaluated according to different criteria. It is a mistake to treat a work meant for a single occasion as equivalent to a work meant to leave a lasting mark on human history. Each should be analyzed in relation to its specific context and qualities. But both are works of aesthetic creation, two ends of a broad spectrum of art

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that has played a key role in social movements and wider currents of social change. I try in this book to give a sense of that broad spectrum of aesthetic expression as it has swirled around and become inextricably entangled in protests against the various forces that limit human potential. While I attempt to be as accurate as possible in characterizing the relations between cultural objects and the movements I explore here, I am not interested in setting up a single, systematic mode of exploring the movement–­culture dynamic. Instead, I try to represent a variety of ways in which culture matters to movements and movements matter to culture. My approach draws from an array of movement theories, but I do not seek to use any one of them systematically. Excellent case studies refining each major approach to how movements function are cited in my endnotes. And if, before reading the book, you wish to have a more systematic sense of how I think about the cultural dimension of movements, I suggest that you start with the concluding chapter, which outlines the approaches I utilize.

CHAPTER OUTLINE This book consists of a set of introductions to some of the key U.S. social movements from the 1950s through late in the second decade of the twenty-­first century. For this edition, I have changed the book’s subtitle to reflect a wider time frame, added a wholly new chapter on the Occupy Wall Street movement, added a chapter section on Black Lives Matter, made major revisions to several chapters, and updated all the others to reflect the many new movements that have arisen and the new scholarship on movements that has been written over the past decade. Each chapter is designed to serve as an introduction to a movement for those who know little about it, but also to offer some new angles of vision to those who know the movement well. While I have been a participant in many of these movements, I make no claim to be doing the detailed kind of work called “participant-­observation.” And while I have done original research on several of these movements, I make no claims to having unearthed significant amounts of new empirical information. I am acutely aware that to talk about a dozen or so movements, and as many different cultural forms, borders on hubris.

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But while my range is ambitious, my claims are modest. My main goal is to creatively reinterpret and synthesize elements from the large body of literature available on each of these movements in light of questions of art and culture. Relying on a great deal of rich secondary work by scholars and activists before me, I try to offer fresh readings and to juxtapose them in mutually illuminating ways. This means incurring more than the usual amount of debt to other authors, whom I hope I have adequately thanked in my notes and acknowledgments. In addition to these forms of recognition, however, I offer this book as a tribute to all the movement cultural workers whose texts and insights have made it possible. The movements I focus on are interrelated. I emphasize a strand of movements sometimes called the direct-­action tradition. These movements have relied heavily on such forms of direct action as civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, sit-­ins and longer-­term site occupations, and dramatic confrontations of other kinds. One key theme I stress throughout, however, is that the “mobilizing” engendered by dramatic actions is ultimately effective only when matched by the active, in-­depth, patient “organizing” of people to take control of their own lives. This distinction, which I take from the great Civil Rights activist/theorist Ella Baker, means that surrounding the drama of social change actions are the crucial, undramatic day-­to-­day activities necessary to consolidate the work of a movement’s “ritual public displays” into significant impact. As I trace the particular features of each movement, I also try to show how a growing set of influences have diffused from movement to movement, building a repertoire of ideas, tactics, strategies, cultural forms, and styles. At the same time, I try to attend to the cultural contexts specific to the particular community or communities at the center of each movement. A central lesson of this study is that building on and then shifting local cultural foundations has often been the key to movement success, as opposed to trying to build some radically new culture from scratch. The chapters are also intended to represent a range of examples of the ways in which culture has mattered to movements. The examples demonstrate how each particular art form—­music, murals, poetry, puppetry, graphic art, and so forth—­has made unique contributions, both to movement cultures and to social change. Each chapter is designed to historicize the movement on which it focuses as well as to show how

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that movement is very much alive today. The chapters cover a range of kinds of culture, including folk culture (spirituals in the Civil Rights movement), high culture (poetry in women’s movements and fiction in environmental movements), and pop culture (rock music in the anti-­ apartheid movement, Hollywood films in the American Indian movement), although these categories are not mutually exclusive, especially in movement culture contexts, where they are often radically transformed. Chapter 1 argues that music played a crucial role in virtually every dimension of the African American Civil Rights movement. It traces the rise and varied use of “freedom songs,” as activists transformed deep-­ seated black religious and secular musical traditions into a major resource for the struggle against racial injustice. Chapter 2 focuses on the Black Power phase of the African American liberation struggle, demonstrating that the Black Panther Party can be seen as engaging in a deadly serious form of political drama on the national and world stage, and ends with a look at how the Black Lives Matter movement has incorporated, critiqued, and extended some of that drama. This chapter, like most of this book, challenges easy distinctions between culture and politics, in this case between literary dramas and the “theater” of politics. Chapter 3 looks at the emergence and development of a new, radical wave of women’s movements beginning in the mid-­1960s. The focus is on the role of poetry as one site of feminist consciousness-­raising action and as a resource in the formation of a variety of contested feminist identities rooted in differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality, as they have evolved up to the present, where feminist and womanist spoken-­ word works carry on the tradition. Chapter 4 treats the Chicano/a movement, examining the ways in which the thousands of murals produced in and around the brown power movimiento embody and reflect the political and cultural changes the movement has generated in its efforts to bring justice to U.S. communities of Mexican descent. Where the first four chapters deal with cultural forms generated within movements, the next two chapters deal with relations between movements and mainstream popular culture. Chapter 5 focuses on the group calling itself the American Indian Movement (AIM), one of the key organizations in the wider Native American red power movement. This chapter examines the ways in which the movement’s story has been told through the widely circulated, if inevitably distorting, medium of

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the Hollywood film. Chapter 6 takes a look at the role played by pop and rock music in movements of the mid-­1980s, especially the student-­based anti-­apartheid movement. Student movements have long used popular culture as an organizing tool, from the 1930s through the 1960s and the 1980s and into the present. In focusing on one of these waves of student activism, this chapter shows the important potential, as well as the limits, of using pop culture as a force in the promotion of social movements. Chapter 7 analyzes the brilliant use of graphic arts (posters, T-­shirts, banners, stickers) by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the movement group at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS. The chapter focuses on how the group mobilized both the gay community and other affected populations through a direct-­action campaign illustrating how homophobia, racism, sexism, and class prejudice had created a deadly “epidemic of signification” that stalled progress in saving lives. The fully revised chapter 8 directly addresses the relationship between novels and social movements, while also looking at how the academic field of ecocriticism engages with movements. Focusing on the branch of environmentalism known as the environmental justice movement, and using Native American author and activist Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead as a prime example, the chapter examines the triangular relationship that can exist among scholars, cultural producers (novelists in this case), and social movements. It considers the evolving impact of “environmental justice ecocriticism,” a body of scholarship that has brought literature to bear on environmental issues. The chapter argues that this field needs to be refined and expanded in the service of the grassroots environmental justice movement from which it has emerged. A much-­revised chapter 9 addresses the broad coalition movement against exploitative forms of corporate “globalization.” The chapter’s focus is on radical puppetry and the carnivalesque dimension of many of the contemporary movements that played a role in the nonviolent blockade of the World Trade Organization’s convention in Seattle in 1999. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which the new medium of the Internet helped foster a global culture of resistance to the poverty, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses made worse by forms of globalization that place the rights of corporations and national elites above those of ordinary working people.

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The stories told by and about all of these movements demonstrate increasing interrelationships among them, and therefore increasing com­plexity. Each new movement learns from earlier ones and passes on new knowledge to those that follow. By the time we get to the “alter­ globalization,” or global justice, movement, questions of racism, gender inequality, labor and class inequities, the environment, and sexuality, for example, are increasingly recognized as intimately interconnected. The dynamics that lead to this multifaceted movement are also at work within each movement as I trace its story. Chapter by chapter, I try to show how, as each movement has grown and changed, it has become more and more internally aware of the need to act on interrelations among issues, even while remaining centered on its most crucial concerns. The new tenth chapter examines Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy movement that addressed growing income inequality in the United States and around the globe. To round out the book, this chapter departs from the focus on a single art form to look at how one movement put into play a whole range of art forms, including the ones covered in earlier chapters as well as new forms such as augmented-­ reality art and giant digital projections. I begin my story with the Civil Rights movement because it set in place a “master frame” for much of what followed, and I end with the movements for global economic justice, stressing the worldwide expansion of direct-­action movements. But the Civil Rights movement was already global, in terms of both its influences (anticolonial struggles in Africa, Gandhi’s ideas from India, for example) and its worldwide impacts. Thus, my ending point is not a claim that U.S. movements have been globalized, but rather the opposite: it is a recognition that global forces have always been at work within U.S. movements and that, now more than ever, movements in the United States must see themselves as only a small part of a much larger set of transnational transformations. The book’s Conclusion surveys my take on “the cultural study of social movements.” It raises more systematic questions about various relations between culture(s) and movements that are discussed and exemplified in the course of the book. Those seeking a more explicit framework of analysis through which to think about culture–­movement relations may wish to read this final chapter first. It is aimed a bit more at academic audiences than the other chapters are, but it might be useful to anyone wishing to better understand how movements work.

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While the range of movements discussed in this book is perhaps incautiously broad, I make no claim to comprehensiveness. A comprehensive study, even one limited to progressive direct-­action movements, would require thousands of pages. There are many extremely important movements that limitations of space and time do not permit me to cover. I try to acknowledge some of these movements in brief mentions or in notes. Again, my hope is that this book will inspire readers to expand their interest to encompass the wider range of social movements and to pursue in greater depth the movements covered here. Further reading as well as other relevant subsites can be found on the companion website culturalpolitics.net, which hosts a chapter comparing the movement against the Vietnam War with that of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the author of this work I make no pretense of neutrality with regard to the passion-­inspiring political issues discussed here. I believe, however, that it is vitally important for anyone, regardless of political ideology, to seek to be objective in the sense of trying to “get the facts straight.” A clearheaded assessment of the world is far more useful than an ideological fantasy, regardless of what one’s ideology may be. But, as critical social theorists have been pointing out since the invention of objectivist schools like positivism and empiricism in the nineteenth century, the process of “getting the facts straight” always includes selecting which facts are most relevant and thus can never be fully separated from political bias. This is decidedly not the same thing as saying facts don’t exist or don’t matter. In the brave new world of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” it is all the more important to recognize that the impossibility of achieving complete objectivity does not remove the obligation to seek the most reasonable approximation of the truth. Therefore, rather than attempting to hide my views behind an unjustifiable claim of absolute objectivity, I take what I believe is the more intellectually honest approach of letting my biases show amid my attempt to get the (interpreted) facts straight, so that the reader can take them into considera­ tion while evaluating my arguments. The “arc of protest” I trace in this book is part of a much longer history, one whose outcomes are far from certain. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once told us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For Dr. King, this was in part an article of faith. But his faith in no way limited his sense that the work along

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this arc must be that of ordinary people often laboring in dark times. For those of you who would join in that journey, I recommend, in the words of Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect” balanced with “optimism of the will.” That is what I think you will find in the best of the many brave and thoughtful cultural workers for justice to whom I dedicate this book, and whose deeds are directly or indirectly woven into every page.

A NOTE ON USAGE Among the many changes driven by protest movements are changes in the ways people name themselves. Since this book traces both the histories of movements and their current relevance, I try to use group self-­naming terms as they have evolved over time. The self-­naming term Chicano, for example, was a radical gesture in its 1960s origin moment, but soon women in the Chicano movement insisted on adding an a to recognize their presence. Hence, Chicano/a. More recently, the o/a solution has been seen as narrowly binary, and Chicanx is being used to express a more fluid understanding of gender. Likewise, in the period covered by this book the preferred nomenclature of persons of African descent in the United States changed from Negro to black to Afro-­ American to African American to members of the African diaspora, among others. Similar changes have occurred among Indian/Native American/ Native/First Nations/Indigenous peoples. Self-­descriptive terms have also changed for folks who engage in nondominant sexual practices or who identify as existing outside binary gender categories. Rather than adopting only the most recent of any of these categories, in the analyses that follow I try to reflect historically changing usage, and to some extent account for these changes in terminology.

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1 SINGING CIVIL RIGHTS THE FREEDOM SONG TRADITION

Then, too, there was the music. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the music of the movement. —­Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom

The year is 1960. The place is the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. It is one of the few places in the South where black people and white people gather together to talk about the emerging Civil Rights movement. Police regularly raid the school and challenge the activists. Those inside the school building know their lives are in constant danger from the police and the Ku Klux Klan. On this evening, some high school students are among those gathered. The police charge in and force the activists to sit in the dark while they harass them by searching through their possessions. In the midst of this terrifying scene, a girl begins to sing a song that is becoming the movement’s anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Huddled in the dark, she spontaneously invents a new lyric. She sings, “We are not afraid, we are not afraid today.” Of course, she is afraid in this moment. Anyone would be. But in singing, she both indirectly acknowledges and directly challenges her fear. Singing away a bit of it, she asserts the rights she and countless others are prepared to fight and die for—­the right to freedom and justice in their own land.1 “We Shall Overcome” belongs now to the world, sung by Germans at the fall of the Berlin Wall, by Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square, by Egyptian activists during the Arab Spring, but its home will 1

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always be at the center of the movement for black freedom and justice in the United States. In a sense, the African American Civil Rights movement began when the first Africans were brought as slaves to the British colonies of the “new world” in 1619. Understanding some of that long history will be necessary to understanding the story told in this chapter, but when most people use the term Civil Rights movement they are referring to a powerful force for change that emerged in the mid-­1950s and had its greatest impact in the 1960s. That movement is at the heart of this book not only because of its intrinsic importance as a key moment in the long struggle for black Americans to achieve equality and justice, but also because it was the “borning struggle,” the movement that became the model for virtually all the progressive social movements that followed it in the latter half of the twentieth century. In terms of tactics, strategies, style, vision, ideology, and overall movement culture, the black Civil Rights struggle has had a profound impact on all subsequent social movements and on U.S. culture at large. It was also the first major movement covered fully by the new electronic medium of television, a medium whose power increasingly shaped the context of movements over the decades covered by this book. The forms of culture most central to the Civil Rights movement were undoubtedly music and religion. The freedom songs whose story I tell in this chapter mobilized both. Music had long been a part of American movements, including the antislavery movement in the nineteenth century and the labor movement in the twentieth century, among others, but the Civil Rights movement brought a new level of intensity of singing and left a legacy of “freedom songs” now sung all around the world. Songs were everywhere in the movement—­at meetings, on the picket lines, at marches, at sit-­ins, in jails, everywhere. Songs, especially as embedded in a rich church culture and later in black pop music, formed the communication network of the movement, and they also expressed the “soul” of the movement, linking its spirit to centuries of resistance to slavery and oppression. The Civil Rights movement is undoubtedly the best-­known social movement in recent American history. Unfortunately, much popular knowledge about the movement consists of half-­truths and myths. Perhaps the most common and most misleading myth is that the movement was started and led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The

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Civil Rights movement is often portrayed as virtually King’s single-­ handed effort. But as a far less well-­known but equally important figure in the movement, Ella Baker, put it, King did not make the movement, the movement made King. As we will see, King was an important figure, but he was only one among thousands of activists and hundreds of leaders. While he was a great orator and a great translator of the movement’s ideas to mainstream America, he was more often a follower of the movement’s actions than a leader of them. His high public visibility served to obscure the extent to which the movement worked from a model of collective leadership and was driven by thousands of ordinary citizens struggling for change, without media coverage or even public recognition.2 Related to the exaggerated importance placed on King is a tendency to emphasize national leadership and centralized organizations. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, founded in 1909) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, founded in 1957) were important forces. In many communities, the local chapter of the NAACP was the key, if not the only, black political organization operating, serving to connect a vital network of activists on which the movement drew in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the efforts of the people working in these local NAACP chapters were often quite different from—­more innovative and more radical than—­those of the national office, which had long stressed slow Civil Rights progress through the courts. Similarly, while SCLC became the most visible Civil Rights organization under King’s leadership, the national office often found itself trying to catch up with what bolder local pastors and parishioners were doing. This pattern was intensified when the most important Civil Rights organization of the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), emerged in 1961 with its philosophy precisely based on the idea of cultivating local, group-­centered leadership rather than building a central, hierarchical national organization.3 In a sense, there were dozens of Civil Rights movements in communities throughout the South (and the North), many of which were quite independent of national leaders like King. The backbone of the struggle consisted of hundreds of grassroots organizers, local people still mostly unsung, who sought not notoriety but justice, and who toiled,

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usually amid life-­threatening danger, for many years before and after the most dramatic demonstrations, protests, marches, and speeches that are the best-­known manifestations of the movement. Important local and regional variations in the movement also need to be acknowledged, especially the differences between urban and rural contexts. Indeed, across all of the hundreds of local communities where the movement emerged, particular political, social, and cultural mixes shaped the struggle to unique contours. Another myth has the movement suddenly and spontaneously emerging out of nowhere. But the large-­scale, dramatic events that captured media attention did not arise spontaneously. They were made possible by countless hours, months, and years of work by local activists from all classes and segments of the black community. Moreover, black women did much of that local work. A focus on the (mostly male) national leaders obscures the extent to which women were the majority of movement workers and often the dominant force in many parts of the decentralized movement. Too narrow a definition of national leadership also distorts the roles played by women like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, all women with deep respect for local traditions and shared leadership who nonetheless took on responsibilities that were decidedly national in scope. It is unlikely that any figure in the movement logged more miles traveling around the nation in these years than Ella Baker, a key woman in the founding and functioning of both of the most important organizations of the movement, SCLC and SNCC.4 Similarly, homophobia has meant that the work of many gay men and women in the Civil Rights struggle has not been given its due. “Gay-­baiting” (using someone’s real or alleged homosexuality as a way to discredit or blackmail him or her) was sometimes used to stifle members of the movement, both locally and nationally. In the case of key movement strategist Bayard Rustin, both his homosexuality and charges that he was a communist (another common way of attacking folks, known as red-­baiting) were used in efforts to limit his effectiveness.5 Yet another key myth misrepresents the integrated nature of the movement, exaggerating the role of white people. There is certainly some truth in this, in terms of both the goals of the movement (which included an end to racial segregation) and the practice of the movement, in which white people sometimes played important roles and exhibited great courage in fighting for a cause that did not directly bene­fit them.

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But the Civil Rights movement was fundamentally a movement by black people themselves, many of whom remained highly skeptical about the possibilities of racial harmony even if the legal basis of segregation could be brought to an end. A focus on the role of white people is too often used to cover the continuing racism in U.S. society in the name of the fiction that if we just stop talking about race, we will suddenly be transported into a color-­blind utopia. In a particularly strange twist of political logic, blacks and other people of color are thereby blamed for racism, as if pointing to its ugly, ongoing existence actually creates it, when in fact such acknowledgment is a crucial part of the effort needed to eradicate it finally from the culture. Popular understanding of the movement also sometimes exaggerates its visionary and spiritual dimension to the detriment of its more pragmatic side. Spirituality and the black church were important forces in the movement, but even the most famous visionary moment in the history of the movement, Reverend King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was delivered at a march (the original planning of which stretched back to long before King was even an adult) for “jobs and freedom,” with jobs getting top billing. The movement often succeeded most fully when it brought direct economic and political pressure to bear on white businesspeople and white politicians. Its moral appeals were important, but they were always backed by such nonviolent direct actions as sit-­ins, boycotts, mass marches, and strikes, not to mention the threat of having to deal with still more radical blacks tomorrow if you didn’t deal with Civil Rights activists today. Nonviolence in the movement was directed at and formed as power, a power as much political and economic as moral or spiritual.6 King himself became increasingly convinced, as the 1960s wore on, that freedom without fundamental economic change would be empty. His last major organizing campaign focused on a demand for economic justice for poor people of all races in the United States. King died believing that some form of democratic socialism would probably be needed to achieve racial justice in the United States. So, if the Civil Rights movement was not quite what the mainstream media have made it out to be, what was it? It was a funda­mentally radical, grassroots, decentralized, mass-­based, often women-­led movement of thousands of black people (and some white allies) bent on forcing a deeply racist society to grant them freedom, dignity, and economic justice. The phrase “deeply racist” is meant to question another too easily

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presented myth of the movement—­that its only real opposition was from ignorant, potbellied southern sheriffs with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, racism was (and is) as deeply entrenched in the North as in the South, and racist assumptions shaped the responses of well-­meaning white moderates and liberals as much as those of the more overt kinds of bigots whom it is easy to parody. Moreover, the middle-­class, genteel racism of the businessmen of the White Citizens’ Councils was as crucial as Klan terrorism in blocking black freedom, and the councils frequently used the Klan to do their dirty work. The movement, as it was simply known to its participants, had deep roots and continues to echo today, but its heyday was from the mid-­1950s to the mid-­1960s. The Civil Rights movement’s most visible target was the system of racial apartheid in the South known as segregation. Laws separating the races shaped every aspect of southern culture. Separate and much less well-­ funded and -­ maintained facilities for blacks—­schools, restaurants, hospitals, public drinking fountains, even cemeteries—­constantly conveyed a clear insult to a people deemed inferior by white segregators. But this legally sanctioned system of racial separation backed by white terrorism was only the visible marker of a much deeper system of racial oppression that ensured blacks a politically and economically degraded status, in the North as well as in the South. The core public strategy of the movement was based on nonviolent direct actions (civil disobedience, sit-­ins, freedom rides, boycotts, building of alternative institutions, strikes, and other actions) aimed at ending the system of racial apartheid in the American South, securing the right to vote and other basic political rights for blacks, and bringing down the wider racist system of which these injustices were but a part. In regard to the first two goals, ending segregation and securing basic political rights, the movement proved a phenomenally successful, crucially important part of a long, unfinished struggle. Another, equally important contribution of the movement was its impact on black people themselves. The ultimate terror of racism lies in its ability to make members of the targeted group believe in their own inferiority. This process, often given the overly simple label “internalized racism,” manifests itself in many differing ways, some blatant, others subtle. Whether or not it was successful at achieving particular goals set at any stage of the struggle, the movement was always successful in

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challenging this vicious force. The act of signing a voter registration form for the first time, or of appearing as a witness against a white person in court, or even the bravery it sometimes took just to talk to an organizer—­ the movement was made up of thousands of actions, both small and grand, that chipped away or sometimes dramatically swept away generations of oppression as it had shaped the self-­images of black people. Historians and social scientists have few tools for measuring such supposedly “subjective” changes, but they are at the core of the Civil Rights story.

PRECONDITIONS: WHY THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT HAPPENED WHEN IT DID Five main sets of large-­scale changes provided opportunities that the black community seized to form the new movement: (1) population shifts and economic changes, (2) racial pride and resentment in the wake of World War II, (3) new federal policies stemming in part from Cold War realities, (4) the example provided by anticolonial struggles in the Third World, and (5) new political strategies and tactics culled from the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. First, a series of population shifts and economic changes repositioned black Americans both geographically and occupationally. The Great Migration to the North that began after slavery continued well into the twentieth century, creating important centers of relative freedom in the North. These centers, such as New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, provided comparatively safe spaces in which models of black freedom were forged and from which campaigns could be launched into the segregated South to join an organizing tradition already at work there. The declining importance and increasing mechanization of agriculture in the South, paralleled by a rise in the number of industrial jobs available in the region, created larger urban black communities, which gave rise to a sense of collective power not felt as easily in rural isolation. Industrialization also brought a certain amount of unionization. While the South was and remains today a very inhospitable place for organizing labor unions, courageous and successful unions were created there, and blacks joined in significant numbers, mostly in segregated unions, occasionally in integrated ones. Labor unions became in effect training

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Singing Civil Rights

centers where future leaders of the Civil Rights movement picked up valuable organizing skills and learned social movement tactics and strate­ gies. It is no coincidence that the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which began in the 1930s with a focus mostly on labor organizing, became a key Civil Rights training center in the 1950s.7 Nor is it simply fortuitous that the most famous song of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” was first adapted as a labor song before it was transformed into the movement’s anthem. Many connections existed between the labor movement and the Civil Rights movement.8 To these regional shifts in demographics and economics must be added a more national shift. In its role as one of the world’s two superpowers after World War II, the United States began the largest and most sustained period of economic growth in world history. Because the economic pie was widely and accurately perceived to be growing for all Americans, many white Americans became less resistant to modest gains by African Americans and other so-­called racial minorities. Economic conditions varied, of course, from state to state and from county to county in the South (as well as in the North), and one can trace with some precision the degree of resistance to Civil Rights work based on the extent of economic stakes held by whites. It is no accident, for example, that some of the most difficult Civil Rights organizing took place in isolated rural counties where the economic boom had not penetrated, and where whites felt they had the most to lose economically from black competitors. A second set of movement-­precipitating factors revolved around the impact of World War II. Many African Americans fought courageously for freedom in that war. Most often they did so in racially segre­ gated units, but under pressure from forces led by A. Philip Randolph, the great black union leader who later led the 1963 March on Washington, the federal government was forced to institute fairer labor practices for black women and men in the defense industries as the war began, and to desegregate the military during the war. These efforts provided a model for other desegregation efforts after the war, while at the same time pointing up the irony that blacks were fighting Nazi racism in the name of a freedom they did not possess at home. For many African Americans, particularly those from the South, the war provided the first glimpse of wider worlds where black oppression was not so absolute.

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Returning home from the war, often as decorated heroes, black soldiers expected and at times demanded respect from the white community, only to be met with renewed racist hostility. A postwar wave of lynchings of blacks in the South attests to the resistance such pride encountered from whites. Many of the key Civil Rights organizers of the 1940s and 1950s who built the foundation for the wider movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s were black veterans. The returning soldiers’ sentiments also found their way directly into a freedom song: “I’m an American fighting man / I’ll defend this country as long as I can / And if I can defend it overseas / Why don’t you set my people free!”9 A third set of factors involved some small but important shifts at the level of the federal government. The wartime desegregation efforts culminated in the integration of the federal government itself, a controversial act in the borderline southern city of Washington, D.C. Following World War II, the Cold War against the Soviet Union brought new pressures to bear. How would national politicians in the leading nation of what they were calling “the free world” deal with the obvious lack of freedom for African American citizens? Southern apartheid became an international embarrassment to the U.S. government, and incrementally pieces of Civil Rights legislation began to appear during the presidential administrations of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. This atmosphere also contributed to the far more significant action taken by the U.S. Supreme Court. After almost a half century of court cases and organizing efforts spearheaded by the NAACP, in 1954, in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the nation’s highest court declared certain types of school segregation illegal. This decision offered a huge improvement in what scholars of movements call the political opportunity structure, the more or less favorable climate provided by a particular sociopolitical context. While the ruling was limited and would be enforced only very slowly by the executive branch, it proved immensely psychologically important to black Americans generally and to an emerging core of Civil Rights activists in particular. It also provided a key legal precedent for local activists seeking to chip away at the myriad forms of segregation, not only of schools but also of other public facilities and private businesses. As it turned out, the federal government had to be pulled kicking and screaming into support of the movement, even in the somewhat more liberal years of the

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John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, but Brown v. Board of Education initially held out great promise that the national government might aid in the battle against segregation and other systematic forms of racism enforced at the state and local levels. In the terminology of social movement scholars, this landmark Supreme Court case indicated a shift in the political opportunity structure available to activists. Its suggestion of “movement” in the federal structures further fueled “movements” at the grassroots level.10 The fourth factor, the rise of anticolonial struggles in the 1950s and early 1960s in the Third World, especially in Africa, provided inspiring examples for African Americans. The example of black people rising up to throw off white European colonial governments in African countries like Chad, the Congo, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Upper Volta, and Zaire was a potent stimulus. The contrast between these newly liberated homelands and American apartheid was stark, and many African Americans began to conceptualize their segregated communities as internal colonies within the United States. A particularly strong wave of successful independence struggles in a dozen African countries in 1960–­61 coincided with and inspired the student-­led sit-­in movement at segregated lunch counters and other U.S. sites in those same years. Black novelist James Baldwin drew the direct connection in a single, colorful sentence: “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”11 The fifth key factor was the development of a new set of political ideologies, strategies, and tactics. The anticolonial struggle in India, culminating in that nation’s independence from Britain in 1948, not only provided inspiration, like the African struggles, but also, more concretely, gave the movement a successful contemporary model of nonviolent revolution. The movement drew upon the knowledge of longtime activists, particularly labor union organizers and former members of the key progressive organization of the 1930s, the Communist Party USA. In the wake of revelations of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian betrayal of the Russian Revolution, thousands left the party, and many found in the emerging Civil Rights movement a place to continue their work on issues of economic and racial inequality. The movement also adapted and adopted numerous philosophical, strategic, and tactical elements from the anticolonial movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, who himself had drawn upon a long American tradition of civil disobedience. Stretching

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from seventeenth-­century Quakers to nineteenth-­century abolitionists to early twentieth-­century women’s rights activists, and given philosophical form by Henry David Thoreau, this rich tradition provided a wealth of ideas and examples. Civil Rights activists gradually merged these ideas and tactics with traditional forms of black activism and black Christianity. The key movement group that developed these nonviolent philosophies, strategies, and tactics was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Founded in 1942, CORE was an offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a radical pacifist Quaker organization. In the 1940s and early 1950s, through boycotts and sit-­ins in the slightly less daunting atmosphere of the North, the members of CORE and like-­minded groups honed the techniques that would become widespread a few years later in the South. Key activists in this tradition, such as James Lawson, Glenn Smiley, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer, provided philosophical guidance and practical training in nonviolent protest to those already forging a new phase of struggle across the South. These were also the people largely responsible for educating Martin Luther King Jr. in the tradition he so effectively popularized.12

ROOTS OF THE MOVEMENT All of the factors described above combined to create ripe conditions for a new movement, but none of the opportunities that arose would have been seized if people had not been ready and schooled to act on them. Part of the myth of the Civil Rights movement is that it appeared suddenly, even miraculously, and spontaneously. Perhaps that is the way it looked to some white people who had the luxury of not paying much attention to black lives. But when these five structural factors made the time right for change, the movement of the 1950s and 1960s formed itself around deeply rooted, long-­standing cultural and political institutions based in many generations of black struggle. Across those many generations, the most important institution of the black community was the black church. The church had its origins in slavery, where, as in the Civil Rights movement, it served politically ambiguous purposes. On the one hand, the church had been allowed to form in part because slave owners thought it might help pacify black slaves with a message of deliverance in the afterlife. Embraced on such terms, black Christianity could have a quite conservative effect. But preachers and parishioners

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also fashioned a very different kind of black Protestant Christianity, one in which messages of deliverance were read not as a heavenly promise but as an earthly goal. Nat Turner was only one of many black preachers who led slave revolts. Under slavery, black Christianity developed a kind of double coding in which Bible stories became liberation stories. For example, the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt became a metaphor for slavery, and the promised land of Canaan became a very literal promise of freedom in Canada. Black ministers and black choral singers developed sermons and songs that contained elaborate coded messages about this-­worldly routes to freedom, such as the ones provided by the “underground railroad” of safe houses that led escaped slaves from the South to relative freedom in the North or in the still safer territory of Canada. Even when not used in this directly political effort to achieve freedom, the songs and sermons became a kind of liberation theology that kept alive alternative visions of the world that would, under movement conditions, be turned again to more earthly, political ends. In the aftermath of slavery, the long struggle to give emancipation a substantive meaning continued to involve the church in a central way. Especially in those places where all or most political rights and spaces for political activity continued to be denied to blacks, the church served as their de facto political arena. One of the ironic effects of segregation was that it contributed to the formation of tight-­knit black communities, and in those communities the churches became the heart of social and political as well as religious life. Black ministers were often the political leaders of their communities. Thus, when changing societal conditions opened up possibilities for a new kind of Civil Rights struggle, that movement often came wrapped in the language of black Chris­ tianity and was often represented publicly by ministers. Many preachers, but by no means all, became key figures in the freedom movement. Some black clergymen (and they were almost exclusively men) avoided or opposed the movement, often because, as the most prestigious and sometimes also the most prosperous men in their communities, they felt they had the most to lose. Any movement needs certain basic institutional infrastructures to function: an organizational foundation, a way to raise money, places to meet, a way to spread the word to new recruits. In many places, particularly in urban areas of the black South, the church provided all these

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resources. Movement scholars of the resource mobilization school have been particularly adept at measuring these forces. Church buildings became movement meeting places. Church social networks became movement networks. Church collection plates became the way to raise movement money. And moving from infrastructure to ideas, church sermons and church music became transformed into movement “sermons” and movement music that aided in the recruitment of thousands of participants. This process was not automatic or inevitable. Many conservative currents in black churches fought this transformation. But where it was done well, hundreds of black ministers and black con­ gregations were rapidly transformed into components of a growing movement. The church also provided a degree of cover for movement activities. Black churches were bombed in terrorist attacks by the Klan and its sympathizers, and many black ministers died for the cause, but churches were relatively safe meeting places and ministers the most respectable ambassadors to the wider white world. In both the white world and the black community itself, church involvement often sanctified the movement, made it more legitimate and less frightening in the eyes of many people. While over time some limits to the church-­based part of the movement became clear, church culture as it became transformed into movement culture was a key force for change, particularly for older segments of the community.13 Two other key sets of networks also proved crucial to the movement’s ability to act on new opportunities: the expanding group of black colleges and universities, and the large network of local NAACP chapters. Black colleges played a central role in the wave of sit-­ins in 1960 and 1961 that eventually involved some seventy thousand students and supporters. The NAACP was crucially important not so much as a national organization but rather as a network of local people who either on their own or nudged by activists from outside their communities seized opportunities to go beyond the organization’s own national agenda to create bolder movement actions.

LIBERATION MUSICOLOGY While many black cultural forms contributed to the Civil Rights movement, most participants and most analysts agree that music was the key

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force in shaping, spreading, and sustaining the movement’s culture and, through culture, its politics. As the three key networks of churches, colleges, and NAACP chapters were galvanized into action, no cultural force played a greater role at all levels of struggle than what became known as the “freedom songs.” Alongside and entwined with the “liberation theology” of black ministers stood the great “liberation musicology” contained in the tradition of African American song. Singing proved to have wide appeal across class, regional, generational, gender, and other lines of difference. It also crossed another line of distinction in the movement, described most succinctly by Ella Baker. Baker often spoke of the difference between “mobilizing” people and “organizing” them. Mobiliz­ ing focused on getting lots of bodies into the street for marches and large-­ scale demonstrations. Such actions had great dramatic value, and they were often a way to ensure media coverage of the movement. But they also tended to be fairly passive and transient events that did not necessarily bring the deepest changes. In contrast, the organizing tradition, as Baker defined it, focused on the slower but deeper task of bringing out the leadership potential in all people, and on building group-­centered, as opposed to individual, leadership in communities that would do the ongoing work of changing people and institutions.14 The freedom songs were used by mobilizers like Reverend King, and by organizers like Baker, Septima Clark, and Miles Horton.15 For the organizers, the value of these songs lay especially in their capacity to take the liberation messages latent in the black preaching tradition and make them available to ordinary people. The group-­centered process of singing, with a leader emerging periodically out of the group to “line out” a new chorus, was at once an instance of and a metaphor for the general model of nonhierarchical leadership the organizers were seeking to instill. It was also the perfect tool for organizing communities that were for the most part deeply rooted in an oral cultural tradition. As the great singer-­activist-­ethnomusicologist Bernice Johnson Reagon argues, freedom songs are one of the best records we have of the transformation of consciousness in the ordinary people, the masses, who took part in the movement.16 It is extremely difficult to invent a movement culture from scratch. It is far more effective to adapt existing cultural structures to support the new goals, ideas, and strategies set by the movement. No movement

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ever did this more effectively than the Civil Rights movement. One of the great tasks facing the movement as it took on new energy in the mid-­1950s was how to bring the strengths of tradition to bear on new conditions. Almost by definition, traditions are conservative. Their job is to conserve the past. But traditions are made, not simply given, when people choose from myriad possible cultural forms those they will preserve or reanimate as traditions. The legacy of American racism and resistance to it meant that black culture included broad traditions of struggle. But how could the movement bring that tradition of struggle into the contemporary scene, with its new opportunities and new tactics? The genius of the early movement was to bring the full weight of the liberation theology of black church music into the new struggle. By following the “river of song” as it flowed through the movement, we can see what forces were at play at various times, what ideas were central, and how they evolved; we can also capture some sense of what the movement felt like to those who enacted it. Music was the heart and soul of the movement, but it was always also a highly practical tool in the struggle.

MUSIC AS HISTORY Like many other elements of the movement, the use of freedom songs—­ which appears to be a natural or inevitable development—­was the result of much conscious, deliberate organizing over many years. Music did not enter the movement spontaneously, immediately, or automatically. An amorphous “freedom song” legacy had to be uncovered, reworked, made into a usable tradition. This involved planning, skills sharing, and active dissemination, not just natural evolution. Even when new songs, or new parts of songs, did arise spontaneously, they did so through a process something like the “spontaneous” improvisations of jazz, in which “inspiration” is built on hours and hours of careful preparation. In reaching older black people especially, church music functioned brilliantly as a way of pouring new content into old forms. The transition to the radically new ideas particular to the Civil Rights struggle was made far easier when attached emotionally and intellectually to the feelings and ideas found in the old spirituals and gospel songs. Some of the traditional hymns could be carried over into the movement intact, with

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no changes, because the change of context gave them new meaning: “I’m on my way to freedom land, I’m on my way”; “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” The limits set by segregation may not have been as total as those set by slavery, but a deep desire for freedom arose out of both conditions. Other traditional freedom hymns were remade in the movement, sometimes with practiced sponta­ neity, other times through studied rewriting or rearranging. Lyrics were changed to incorporate the particular meanings of the new times. Eventually, whole new topical songs were created. In two different but reinforcing ways, music gave a sense of history to the movement. First, the “traditional” gospel songs and spirituals provided a feeling of continuity over long periods of time. This was important because it let those for whom the movement seemed disturbingly new feel that it was also something quite old and familiar. It also gave a sense of depth and patience. While the theme of having waited long enough was often and rightfully voiced on many occasions, the movement frequently depended on a slow, evolving process. Organizing cannot be rushed. Whenever the immediate stakes seemed not worth the danger, pain, and frustration of the work, songs brought up from the days of slavery offered gentle reminders of how ancestors had faced far worse circumstances. At the same time, these songs also fired hearts with indignation that a hundred years after supposed emancipation, blacks still were not free. A second, different role that music played in history making might be called “instant historicizing.” This involved the altering of old songs and the creation of new songs that told stories of the evolving movement. Where the old songs connected the movement to its roots, the new songs celebrated the new accomplishments of the living generations. Writing new songs or new verses allowed the people in individual communities to claim their specific places in the long tradition of black struggle. This was especially the case when old spirituals were rewritten with lyrics about Nashville, or Hinds County, Jackson, McComb, or wherever the latest struggle had emerged. Often the two kinds of historicizing—­ finding roots and naming the history being made in the present—­were combined, as the songs would generally begin with the well-­known older verses and then add contemporary events into their narratives.17 More extended writing of movement sites, events, and people into history

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occurred in the form of new, topical songs like “The Ballad of the Sit-­ Ins.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the development of the role of music in the movement seemed to follow closely the growth and development of the movement generally. Three clusters of events in particular were key to the rise of both the music and the movement: the Montgomery bus boycott, the student-­led sit-­ins, and the Albany, Georgia, movement. Many histories name the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–­56 as the beginning point of the new phase of black struggle that came to be called the Civil Rights movement.18 Other boycotts aimed at segregated public transportation had occurred earlier in the decade—­ in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Tallahassee, Florida; and elsewhere—­but the Montgomery action was particularly well orchestrated and effectively publicized by movement activists. Myth has the boycott arising spon­ taneously when one tired woman refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Rosa Parks, the woman in question, had been a leading activist in her community for many years. Not long before her defiant act, she had been a guest at Highlander Folk School, that key movement center, where she learned a good many freedom songs and a good deal about civil disobedience tactics. Her refusal to go along with segregation law by giving up her seat was indeed a spontaneous decision that day, but it came from a life prepared for struggle through many years in the NAACP, and the quick transformation of a seemingly isolated act into a full-­fledged boycott was the result of careful planning by experienced activists. Parks’s case is an excellent example of the combination of quiet, persistent grassroots preparation and well-­timed dramatic action that is at the heart of successful social movement work. The individual who first seized on Rosa Parks’s heroic act and turned it to the movement’s advantage was E. D. Nixon, a man with a long history of activism in a key black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and in the local chapter of the NAACP. The Brotherhood played a very important role for several decades in advancing racial equality. In his role as NAACP chapter head, Nixon had been waiting and preparing for just such an opening as that provided by Parks. He immediately called into play the key networks in the black community, beginning with the ministers. Most of the local ministers threw themselves unhesitatingly into the action. One young minister, a newcomer

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to the community, was a bit more reluctant but soon saw the light. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. Soon Nixon had King not only involved but filling a central role. Precisely because he was new to the community, King appeared to Nixon to be a good, neutral choice for leadership, since he would not be caught up in any old personality conflicts or jealousies among the established ministers. And a fine choice it was, as King soon became a superb public relations person for the movement and the finest orator of his generation. While Nixon and the ministers played important roles, women were the real force behind the bus boycott. After Parks provided the impulse, Jo Ann Robinson and her Women’s Political Council did the grassroots organizing and developed the logistics that gave the boycott its bite. Robinson, an English teacher at nearby Alabama State College, had often felt the sting of segregation and racist insult, despite her relatively privileged occupation. She mobilized not only the council but also dozens of students and fellow teachers. Working furiously over the weekend after Parks’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council and its allies distributed thirty-­five thousand leaflets and by Monday had organized an extraordinarily successful boycott. Only a handful of Montgomery’s thousands of black citizens rode the bus that first day, December 5, 1955, and few did in the weeks and months to come. Robinson’s women organized car pools and commandeered every vehicle that could move (even including a few horse-­drawn ones) to transport boycotting bus riders. Many, many people walked, sometimes as much as ten or twelve miles a day, rather than continue to face the insult of segregated buses. For a year they walked and walked, withholding their business from the bus line and cutting deeply into its profits. Thus, it is no accident that several of the freedom songs that emerged in Montgomery as symbols of the boycotters’ efforts had a whole lot of walking in them. When five thousand of Montgomery’s black citizens gathered inside and outside the Holt Street Baptist Church on the evening of the first day of the boycott, they led off by singing the old hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers,” with its refrain “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war.” The song, written in 1864, set the movement in the context of Christianity and American history, and it was one that all of those in attendance, whether new to the Civil Rights struggle or veterans, knew. What did those gathered hear in the

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song and feel as they sang it? They heard and felt that theirs was a righte­ous cause. They heard and felt that they would need strength and fortitude, for they were involved in a protracted struggle. They heard and felt that the war that Rosa Parks had touched off would surely need as many foot soldiers as it could muster, would need an army. The song was an appropriate one to start with because the people assembled at the church were about to decide whether or not to continue the boycott that had initially been planned for just that one day. The song was the key for a crowd that was readying to commit to a long battle, one that ended up lasting more than a year. The song, however, was also one largely identified with the white Christian tradition, and as such it illustrates the rather conservative, middle-­class constituency that initially set the tone in Montgomery. A certain version of “racial uplift” ideology in parts of the middle-­and upper-­class portions of the black community viewed the old black spiritual songs as something to leave behind, as works full of excessive emotionality, as “primitive” and “unsophisticated” reminders of darker times. The freedom song movement as it emerged had to fight against this view of things, and in so doing it helped bridge class divides in black communities. Another old spiritual that became popular in Montgomery, “Walk Together Children,” even more literally seemed to fit the scene and mood, and was more rooted in black tradition: “Walk together children, don’t you get weary. / Walk together children, don’t get weary. / There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.” These and similar songs were deeply familiar to the respectable churchgoing folks at the heart of the Montgomery movement. They needed no changing come movement time, but were given new life and urgency by the movement. Rever­ end King later recalled that people would sometimes come to meetings two hours early in order to get in some good singing sessions: “Usually the hymns preceding the meeting were unaccompanied lined hymns of low pitch and long meter. One could not help but be moved by these traditional songs, which brought to mind the long history of the Negro’s suffering.”19 At the outset of this new phase of struggle, which some came to call the Second American Revolution and others the Second Reconstruction, the older hymns gave a sense of gravity, depth, and continuity to the movement. They made it clear that far more than comfort on a bus was at stake, that the boycotters were all part of a long, long story

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of suffering and triumph. That deep sense of history was carried more fully by song than by any other medium. At a time when few works of “black history” existed (most of what came to be so labeled emerged out of the movement), and when a major segment of the community had been kept illiterate, song played an immense educational role. In the wake of the success of the boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. was thrown into national prominence, and along with others he worked to form an organization to spread the movement gospel further. The resulting group, founded in 1957, came to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As the name suggests, SCLC began as a conference of southern black ministers interested in furthering the freedom struggle; it then evolved into a permanent organization devoted to sharing information, resources, tactics, and strategies, especially via the network of Baptist, AME, and other black churches. While its name promised leadership, often in the years between the Montgomery boycott and a mass upsurge after 1960, SCLC limited itself to coordination and information sharing, with most leadership and action generated and sustained at the level of local communities. Few of these local struggles received the dramatic attention accorded to Montgomery. One exception occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when federal troops had to be called in to protect black students whose efforts to integrate public schools in that city met with violent white resistance. That clash received national news coverage. During the second half of the 1950s, most of the work of the movement was done by local people who patiently built networks, tested alliances, identified friends, measured foes, and learned organizing skills and the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. A significant part of that work was done at the Highlander Folk School (later Folk Center), where songs played a central role in building a network of activists. Song sessions, often led by Highlander’s new music director, Guy Carawan, proved an ideal way to build solidarity, friendship, and trust. Part of the training of organizers involved the use of music, as a repertoire of freedom songs evolved. Visitors from all parts of the South and North brought with them local songs or local variations on traditional ones. Misnamed the “fallow years” of the movement by observers looking only for dramatic action, the late 1950s were a crucial period of planting seeds that would lead to a spectacular harvest. Harvest season, as it

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turned out, was announced in 1960 by four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina.

THE SIT-­IN REVOLUTION: STUDENTS TAKE UP THE SONG Inspired in part by a comic book about the Montgomery bus boycott, and armed with rudimentary knowledge of the movement tactic known as the sit-­in, four black college students walked nervously up to the “whites only” lunch counter at the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and asked politely to be served. Like Rosa Parks, these young men (Ezell Blair, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond) were in the right place at the right time to run smack into a “history-­making day.” The tactic was not new, but at that moment the act struck a chord with a new generation of young people. Soon the young men were joined by other students from their college. And those students were soon joined by students in other cities. Utilizing the black college network, a wave of student protest swept across the South. Within two weeks of the Greensboro action, sit-­ins had spread to fifteen cities. By the end of March more than twenty northern college campuses were also involved. Within eighteen months sit-­ins had spread to more than one hundred cities in twenty states and involved over seventy thousand demonstrators, most of them college and high school students. Police made more than thirty-­five hundred arrests for civil disobedience. Much of the effort in this particular use of the sit-­ in tactic was directed at private businesses, rather than the public facilities that had often been the main focus earlier. Targeting national store chains like Woolworth and Kress, these sit-­ins pointed up corporate complicity in state-­sanctioned segregation, and also helped spread the movement to the North, where outlets of these large chains were picketed and boycotted in solidarity with southern antisegregation efforts.20 In the South itself, one of the strongest local centers of student protest was Nashville, Tennessee. From there came one of the key movement music groups, the Nashville Quartet (James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Joseph Carter, and Samuel Collier), whose specialty was the popular music of black youth, “rhythm and blues.” The sit-­ins announced that a new generation was now the cutting edge of the movement, and, fittingly, that generation added its music to the fray. Unlike the traditional

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songs, which often had a strong liberation component already built in, the adaptation of popular student music required more radical alterations. For example, popular singer Little Willie John had a hit song at the time called “You Better Leave My Kitten Alone.” It was a typical song of lover’s jealousy, warning a rival away from the singer’s girlfriend. But in the Nashville Quartet’s version, the “kitten” became “segregation,” and the “you” became plural: “You better leave segregation alone / because they [white folks] love segregation like a hound dog loves a bone.” The “hound dog” line may or may not have been intended as a little slap at Elvis Presley, whose “hound dog” sound was widely understood as ripping off black musical style, but in any case the main message was clear: black folks had better leave segregation alone because white folks’ dogged attachment to it was a sign of what they had to lose. The performer whose repertoire was most often adapted was no doubt rhythm and blues soul singer Ray Charles. His songs, blending the traditionally opposed forms of gospel (God’s music) and blues (the devil’s music), appealed to young people in emotional and political transition. The Nashville Quartet, for example, celebrated the successful city­ wide integration of Nashville lunch counters with a new rendition of Charles’s “Moving On,” originally a song about moving on from a love affair gone bad. In the movement version, the bad relationship was with that embodiment of segregation, Jim Crow: “Segregation’s been here from time to time / but we just ain’t gonna pay it no mind // It’s moving on—­It’s moving on—­It’s moving . . . // Old Jim Crow’s moving on down the track / He’s got his bags and he won’t be back.” The song brought news of a new day, and the notion of “moving” captured perfectly the feeling of motion embodied by the movement (it also worked nicely as a marching song, in which the phrase “we’re moving on” became literal). For the skeptics, these lines were added: “Well I thought they was jiving about Jim Crow’s gone / but I went down to his house and he sure wasn’t home / He’s moving on.” Important here is the sense of personal witness. The movement workers had truly seen Jim Crow on the run, and they were going to continue to run him and his friends out of town.21 The thousands of sit-­in participants clearly needed to be organized, and in stepped the organizer’s organizer, Ella Baker, to help that process along, with a fair amount of musical help. Baker persuaded

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SCLC to fund a conference of student leaders, held on April 17, 1960. While SCLC had originally hoped to form a kind of youth auxiliary, Baker and others argued for an independent student organization. One result of that meeting was the founding in 1961 of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the movement group that became the center of struggle in the years to come. The number of student participants never regained the level reached early in 1960. Instead, SNCC (pronounced “snick” by activists) became a core group, never with more than a couple of hundred members, who spread throughout the South, bringing with them the message that building local, group-­centered lead­ ership, rather than a centralized organization, was the key to success. Many SNCC veterans point to the freedom song sessions held by Highlander music director Guy Carawan as a powerful force in harmonizing the diverse group of students at the founding conference into an organization. Carawan also offered the youth movement a further gift, his “Ballad of the Sit-­Ins”: “The time was 1960, the place the USA / February 1st became a history-­making day / Greensboro across the land the news spread far and wide / When silently and bravely youth took a giant stride.” It is revealing of the independent spirit that drove SNCC that this song, written by the white southerner Carawan, was quickly adapted and changed by the young black members of the Nashville Quartet. The Nashville students both shifted it musically from ballad form to a complicated rhythm and blues arrangement and dropped a key lyric. Carawan had written the line, “We are soldiers in the army of Martin Luther King.” While the students respected King, they also distanced themselves from him, especially from the patriarchal style of leadership he and SCLC embodied. Some referred to him as “De Lawd,” and they refused to sing the line about being in his army. Thus, the song embodies the dynamic by which important white contributions to the movement were always contextualized within what was at base a black liberation struggle.

ALBANY: THE SINGING MOVEMENT COMES OF AGE While the sit-­ins and their follow-­up, the “freedom rides” (discussed below), were dramatic actions garnering national media coverage, they were not typical of the movement’s development. More typical was the

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slow, long-­term process of community organizing. An example of this kind of work, which was also a high point in the freedom song movement, occurred in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962. Bernice Reagon offers numerous examples of freedom songs that evolved not only lyrically but musically as they moved from one site of struggle to the next. The Albany campaign was no doubt the high mark of this process as well. According to Reagon, whose view is supported by the testimony of many others, the community of Civil Rights workers in Albany took over, deepened, and expanded the role of freedom songs as none had before. As Reagon has recalled: “The mass meetings always started with freedom songs. Most of the meeting was singing. Songs were the bed of everything.”22 Even allowing for a little local bias (Reagon is from Albany), she makes an excellent case. Albany was the place where all the components of the freedom song repertoire coalesced into a kind of musical united front. The old spirituals had deep resonance with the older members of the community and again played a key role in bringing people together across class lines. Of course, the students brought their pop adaptations into full play (it didn’t hurt that one of their favorite pop singers to adapt, Ray Charles, was born in Albany). The labor union movement served as another key source, with many old labor songs, like “Which Side Are You On?,” receiving important makeovers in Albany and becoming part of the freedom song repertoire. The adult community was the backbone of the Albany movement, and all the freedom songs went through a new baptism into a deeper spirit coming out of a rich local tradition of religious singing. The musical alliance that was Albany culminated in the formation of the most aggressive force yet for disseminating the power of freedom songs, the Freedom Singers (originally Chuck Neblett, Rutha Harris, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Cordell Reagon, and Bertha Gober). While other musical groups, such as the Montgomery Gospel Trio and the Nashville Quartet, had played important local roles, the power of music in the Albany campaign convinced SNCC that a musical group could play an even larger movement role. The Freedom Singers eventually crossed the country many times, singing the movement story and raising funds through their concerts. They were particularly effective in bringing movement messages to the North and to young people on college

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campuses. The Freedom Singers also became associated with a burgeoning white folk music revival centered in Greenwich Village, New York. That connection proved a key link in recruiting northern white students to the Civil Rights cause. Freedom Summer of 1964, a massive SNCC campaign that brought more than a thousand northern students to Mississippi for three months of intensive movement activity, was greatly facilitated by links the Freedom Singers had made. Freedom Summer in turn proved to be of immense importance as a training ground for many of the activists who built the full range of student, antiwar, women’s liber­ ation, gay liberation, and other movements of the 1960s.23 The Freedom Singers gave institutional form to something that had already become clear: music was a vital political force in the movement.

WHITE TERRORISM AND LITANIES AGAINST FEAR “When you get together at a mass meeting you sing the songs which symbolize transformation, which make that revolution of courage inside you,” said Bernice Johnson Reagon.24 And, as movement historian Charles Payne writes, “the music operated as a kind of litany against fear.”25 Or, as put in song: “Oh freedom over me, Oh freedom / I’ll be buried in my grave before I’ll be a slave / No segregation over me, No segregation / I’ll be buried in my grave before I’ll be a slave.”26 The brutal murder of fourteen-­year-­old Emmett Till, a Chicago native visiting relatives in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1955 was in many respects an ordinary act of southern white terrorism. Estimates suggest that between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s, more than four thousand lynchings of blacks by whites occurred in the United States (most, but not all, in the South). Well into the twentieth century, lynching was a “spectator sport” enjoyed by all classes in the white community; whole families would come out to watch. Postcards of favorite lynchings were made to send to friends and relatives.27 Thus, while Till’s case was nothing new, the context of new times brought new attention to it. Till’s twin “crimes”—­allegedly speaking “fresh” to a white woman and mentioning that he had a white girlfriend back home in the North—­were typical of the slight pretexts used to justify these murders. Till was taken out of his home late at night, tortured, mutilated, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River with a weight attached to his body. The weight was

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not enough to keep the crime from surfacing, and when it did, it led to a trial that received national attention. The act was common enough that one local white man could muse that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about, since “that river is full of niggers.”28 What was new was not the act, but the national and even international attention that it drew. The shift in attitudes suggested by the Brown v. Board of Education victory in 1954 was further evidenced by media attention and some expressions of outrage from parts of the white community. Still, it was not enough, and despite confessing to the murder, the two men responsible were acquitted and “southern justice” affirmed. The Till case was one of many atrocities committed by whites against blacks that gained attention or, more often, remained in obscurity during the movement years. At least two other murders of blacks, both tied, unlike Till, directly to movement activity, occurred in Mississippi in 1955 alone. The new level of black resistance in the wake of the Brown decision was matched by renewed white terror and organization. The White Citizens’ Council, for example, emerged at this time. Combining “the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary” club, it provided a seemingly more respectable face for white supremacy but was ready to use any means necessary to maintain white power.29 But each new act of terror and each new level of renewed white support for segrega­ tion was met with greater resolve and redoubled efforts by the antiracist forces of the movement. Many of the young women and men who formed the cadre of activists in the peak movement years of the early 1960s recalled seeing images of Till’s dead, damaged body in the pages of Jet magazine. Some vowed then and there to avenge his death.30 Till’s story was kept alive by movement song activists, and later folk-­rock singer Bob Dylan further immortalized Till lyrically in his “Ballad of Emmett Till.” The unmistakable intended meaning of the Till murder and others like it is put succinctly by Charles Payne: “Black life could be snuffed out on whim, you could be killed because some ignorant white man didn’t like the color of your shirt or the way you drove a wagon. . . . Those who wanted to work for change had to understand that they were challenging a system that could and would take their lives casually.”31 Most of the imagined acts that allegedly precipitated lynching were as flimsy as the accusation used in the Till case. If one could be killed for an innocent remark, or, as in another contemporaneous case,

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for not getting out of the way of a white man driving his car, then how much more dangerous must it have been to openly challenge the racial hierarchy that random terror was meant to uphold? Imagine what dangers faced a Civil Rights worker under such conditions. Virtually anyone who took up the Civil Rights cause in the South, black or white, was essentially put under threat of death. Civil Rights workers could expect to lose their jobs, be beaten many times, have their homes firebombed or fired on in drive-­by shootings, have threats made against the lives of their children and other relatives. If these acts of intimidation did not work, and for most they did not, then the next level was assassi­ nation. The list of those who died for the Civil Rights cause is a long one. While song was not the only means by which fear was overcome, it appears again and again in accounts of that process. The “litanies against fear” that freedom songs became were an indispensable part of a deep-­seated process of personal political transformation. As Bruce Hartford remembers it, “We were singing. . . . Somehow, I can’t explain it, through the singing and the sense of solidarity we made a kind of psychological barrier between us and the mob. Somehow we made such a wall of strength that they couldn’t physically push through it to hit us with their sticks. It wasn’t visual, but you could almost see our singing and our unity pushing them back.”32 Cordell Reagon’s choice of words is likewise revealing in this regard: “You know you are . . . going to get . . . beaten, you know you might even get killed, but the sound, the power of the community, was watching over you and keeping you safe.”33 Note that it is “sound” that contains the power of community, the sound of the freedom songs. The direct practical power of this singing as empowerment is illustrated by an occurrence during one of the dramatic follow-­ups to the sit-­in wave, the freedom rides. The freedom riders were activists, both black and white, who attempted to ride interstate buses across the South, stopping at and integrating bus stations along the way. The riders met with brutal resistance at virtually every stop. There were so many casualties among the CORE volunteers who started the rides that SNCC had to step in to replenish the ranks. After the bombing of buses in two cities and brutal beatings in other cities, the freedom riders crossed the border into the most vicious state in all the South, Mississippi. One of the ride organizers, CORE’s James Farmer, later recalled that crossing:

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“Our hearts jumped into our mouths. The Mississippi National Guard flanked the highway, their guns pointed toward the forest on both sides of the road. One of the riders broke out singing, and we all picked it up. I remember the words: ‘I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line / I’m riding the front seat to Jackson this time / Hallelujah I’m a traveling / Hallelujah ain’t it fine / Hallelujah I’m a traveling / Down freedom’s main line.’”34 This spontaneous generation of new verses helped calm the fears of the freedom riders by reminding them that they had been there before, and they had survived. At the same time, it incorporated the new foe into the familiar terrain of the foe already met and faced down, and thereby cut the enemy down to size. Another kind of song used against white terrorism was the parody. These songs seem aimed at demystifying whites, showing their hypocrisy and the relative poverty of their motives in the struggle. This song, for example, was sung to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know”: “Jesus loves me cause I’m white / Lynch me a nigger every night. / Hate the Jews and I hate the Pope / Jes’ me and my rope. / Jesus loves me, the Citizens’ Council told me so.” And here is a rather different verse sung to “We Shall Overcome”: “Deep in my heart, I do believe / We shall keep the niggers down / They will never be free-­eee-­eee / They will never be registered, / We shall keep the niggers down.”35 As Charles Payne notes, much of the humor in these songs was “an attack on fear.” The songs made the Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils that held people in thrall seem less threatening and gently instilled in the singers the courage to take on the life-­threatening task of organizing. The Western tradition as embodied in the English language includes a series of reductive oppositional concepts that make little sense in the context of the Civil Rights movement. Practical/idealistic, transcendent/ immanent, sacred/secular, spiritual/political—­these oppositions make little sense in a movement where transcendence, idealism, and spirituality generated great, immanent, practical, earthly power. “Over my head I see freedom in the air.” There is a transcendence of self here that is also an immanent sense of personal power. It is not transcendence based necessarily in faith in a reward somewhere else. Traditional religion could offer that. It is very much a sense of power and satisfaction and personal reward felt in the moment, in the movement. Freedom songs deepened the sense of religious devotion in those whose connection to the movement

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was rooted in Christianity, but they also worked on the spirit of those with more secular orientations. Transcendence was immanent in the fight. Freedom was in the air freedom fighters breathed, not up in heaven. One verse that might otherwise seem strange makes perfect sense in this context: “We’ll never turn back until we’ve all been free.” Note that it is not until all “are free” but until all have “been free.” The movement did not just talk about freedom, it gave it. Being free was part of the experience of the movement. But “freedom is a constant struggle,” not a state achieved once and for all. At the deepest level, that sense of freedom came from overcoming the fear of death. While transcending the fear of death is often discussed as a metaphysical issue, in the movement it was very much a practical political issue. Fear, including the ultimate fear of death, had long been and was still a tool of white oppression. If those in the struggle had not been able to overcome that fear, there would have been no Civil Rights movement, no matter what political opportunities or economic structures came into place.

MUSIC AS STRATEGY AND TACTIC The movement did not happen because black people just “woke up one morning with their minds set on freedom.” “Freedom is a constant struggle.” “You have to keep your eyes on the prize,” and not “let anybody turn you round.” You have to know “which side you’re on,” “never turn back until we’ve all been free and we have equality.” “We shall not be moved.” “Ninety-­nine and half percent” of commitment won’t do. “You better leave segregation alone.” With these lines quoted or paraphrased from freedom songs and rearranged a bit, I mean to suggest that a good many ideas about movement needs, values, tactics, and ideology were conveyed and reiterated through song. In addition to the key role of fighting off paralyzing fear, songs played other strategic and tactical roles. As Charles Payne notes, “The changing fortunes of the movement and the morale of its par­ ticipants could have been gauged by the intensity of the singing at the meetings. Music had always been a central part of the black religious experience. Ministers knew that a good choir was a good recruiting device. In the same fashion, many who came to meetings came just to hear the singing.”36

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This was music that bypassed the commercial interests of the music industry, and it also downplayed the importance of singing talent. Singing in the black tradition is very much a participatory event. Thus, going to a movement meeting, even just to listen, could quickly lead to deeper levels of involvement. Get their voices, one might say, and their politics will follow. Music becomes more deeply ingrained in memory than mere talk, and this quality made it a powerful organizing tool. It is one thing to hear a political speech and remember an idea or two. It is quite another to sing a song and have its politically charged verses become emblazoned on your memory. In singing, you take on a deeper level of commitment to an idea than if you only hear the idea spoken of. The movement was all about “commitment,” and singing was often a halfway house to commitment. Music could be used to deepen specific kinds of engagement as well. Mississippi organizer Sam Block, for example, recalled using songs strategically to ease people into greater degrees of leadership. For him, freedom songs were important as “an organizing tool to really bring people together—­not only to bring them together but also as the organizational glue to hold them together. I started to give people the responsibility of thinking about a song they would want to sing that night and of changing that song, you know, from a gospel song [to a freedom one].”37 This deepening of commitment through song had much to do with the body as well. Civil Rights workers spoke often of “putting their bodies on the line” for the cause. Bodies were literally the nonviolent weapons of the movement, and “on the line” often meant in the line of fire for vicious kicks, flying fists and flying spit, rib-­crushing blasts from fire hoses, and sometimes bullets. The act of singing, as Bernice Reagon describes so well, is also a deeply physical thing. In meetings, letting one’s voice go, putting it “out there,” was also a kind of rehearsal for putting one’s body on the line in demonstrations. The sense of personal power that participants felt in the act of singing in full resonance among a mass of fellows was translated into movement power on the front lines. Reagon recalls a voter registration meeting in 1962 in which “the Negroes began to sing. The voices that were weak at first gained strength as they moved up the scale with the old familiar words: ‘We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.’”38 When the local sheriff came to disrupt the meeting,

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the singing grew stronger, culminating in a rousing chorus of “We Shall Overcome” as the sheriff retreated. Beyond helping recruitment and deepening commitment, music served to convey the key values and tactics of the movement. Kerran Sanger notes that often the order of verses in a song enacted a move from abstract values (freedom, equality) to concrete acts taken to secure those values (sitting in, going to jail, breaking an injunction).39 Various kinds of mass demonstrations, from marches to civil disobedience actions, were central to the movement. Initially, most demonstrations were silent, since police and onlookers would use any sign of “rowdiness” as a pretext for assault. Songs were first used only at rallies and in workshops teaching nonviolence. But eventually it became clear that they could be key elements in demonstrations and civil disobedience actions. Any time large numbers of black people gathered in the South, they were viewed as a threat, as a potential mob. Singing (along with prayer) became a perfect way both to keep a mass from becoming a mob and to convey to opponents that what was taking place was an organized event, not a mob action. Songs carried messages of quiet defiance, not rage, and clarified the values, stakes, and issues of the action. Singing could be both a rehearsal for collective activity and a direct part of the action. Singers are not generally imagined as threatening figures. By their very posture and activity, the singing activists conveyed their nonviolent intentions. Songs were often the primary means to convey this difficult idea of nonviolent struggle. Nonviolence was a core value of the movement, but like much else it was interpreted differently by different Civil Rights workers. For some it was a deeply held, often religious, principle. For others, the value of nonviolence was primarily tactical. In some situations, particularly in rural areas, activists were forced by circumstances to carry guns in self-­defense, even as they remained committed to nonviolence in their movement actions. Especially in situations where the opponents had a near monopoly on the tools of violence, and where the use of that violence was often legitimated by public opinion, nonviolence was a powerful weapon. Many songs juxtaposed acts of violence on the part of the segregationists with the nonviolence of the protesters: “We’ve met jail and violence too / But God’s love has seen us through,” or “We’re gonna board that big Greyhound / Carrying love from town

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to town.” These verses, both from “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” refer to the movement’s adaptation of Christian love for one’s enemies, as interpreted through the long tradition of pacifism. Love was almost as great a theme as freedom in the movement, used effectively to contrast with the hate unleashed by white supremacy in the form of police dog attacks, beatings, and myriad other forms of violence. When situations did threaten to get out of the organizers’ control, music could also serve more proactively as a tactic to change the mood and thereby the action of the participants. Music could calm a tense situation, or it could ignite a tired mass. Sometimes the same song could do either, depending on the tempo and spirit with which it was sung. There is no such thing as a definitive version of any freedom song, because all such songs were constantly adapted to the needs of particular situations, conditions, and locales.

“WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED”: COMMUNICATING OUTSIDE THE MOVEMENT That the freedom songs played many and varied roles within the movement is abundantly clear. But what about songs as a means of communicating to the worlds outside the movement? Did the music have the power to transform people not involved in the movement? There is evidence that it did, at least to an extent. Outright racist defenders of white supremacy were largely immune to such power, although a few stories of extreme conversions can be found. But among those undecided, those unsure of how to think about the movement, the effects of the music could be quite significant. Many, many accounts exist of bystanders being deeply moved by the dignity and power of the protesters in song. As one activist put it, “The music doesn’t change governments. Some bureaucrat or some politician isn’t going to be changed by some music he hears. But we can change people—­individual people. The people can change governments.”40 In particular, the movement’s singing power had an impact on journalists, whose surprising degree of sympathy for the Civil Rights activists was neither typical nor predictable, given the norms of their profession. Compared to political rhetoric, with which most white reporters had the familiarity that breeds contempt, movement music was something else, a different register of ideas and feelings against

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which members of the press had fewer built-­in defenses. One white southern journalist later recalled that the “songs, the mass meetings, not only made commonplace rituals of the society I lived in, the white society, seem pale by contrast, but spoke a condemnation that made them too, unpalatable.”41 Stories are also told of jailers and police sometimes moved by the songs to lessen their brutality. Southern wardens often seemed to enjoy black prisoners’ singing as a change from the dull routines of prison life, little suspecting that they were witnessing not “darkies” singing but activists communicating. The nature of the audience of movement songs is a complicated question. On the one hand, lyrical phrases like “We shall not be moved” seem like statements directed at outsiders. But more often they seem to be directed internally, as reminders to the singers not to “be moved.” Similarly, we hear the phrase “We are not afraid,” and this seems at once wishful thinking and a truth. Or, more properly, it is wishful thinking becoming truth as the act of singing itself gives the courage not initially felt. Movement songs seldom seemed to be directly aimed at outsiders, because that would have diminished the activists’ sense of their own power. It was more as if the singers were willing to be overheard making their musical declarations. The more important outside audience for freedom songs was no doubt that of the fence-­sitters, those who were perhaps sympathetic but also confused, frightened, or just not yet knowledgeable enough concern­ ing what the movement was all about. James Farmer, in jail during the freedom rides, rewrote the 1930s labor song “Which Side Are You On?” as a freedom song with just this kind of work in mind: “I rewrote the old labor song . . . on the spur of the moment in the Hinds County Jail, after the Freedom Riders who were imprisoned [with me] had been discussing and speculating about the attitude of local Negroes regarding the Freedom Rides.”42 His rewrite directly challenged the fence-­sitters: “They say in Hinds County, no neutrals have we met / You’re either for the Freedom Ride or you ‘tom’ for [segregationist governor] Ross Barnett // Oh people can you stand it, tell me how you can / Will you be an Uncle Tom or will you be a man?” Challenging white-­subservient “Uncle Toms” was the most aggressive form of address to those not yet in the movement. More common were songs of invitation, or songs that acknowledged levels of commitment. A good example occurs in the song

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“I’m on My Way to Freedom Land”: “I’ll ask my brother to come with me / I’m on my way, Great God, I’m on my way // If he can’t come, I’m gonna go anyhow . . . // If you can’t go, don’t hinder me // . . . If you can’t go, let your children go, / I’m on my way, Great God, I’m on my way to freedom land.”43 This lyric allows three levels of commitment: “come with me,” or at least “don’t hinder me” (perhaps by being an informer), and if you can’t help, at least “let your children go.” This last line is especially important because as the movement became youth driven in many places after 1960, generational conflict became a vital issue. The best young organizers were those who built upon the knowledge and organizational base of the World War II generation of activists in order to help bridge this gap. A brilliant practitioner of this was young black organizer Bob Moses, who after leaving graduate school at Harvard to join SNCC, worked closely and respectfully with the older Mississippi veteran activist Amzie Moore. As Charles Payne characterizes it, “Older activists [had] created . . . cooptable networks, and a younger generation found new uses for them.”44 In this process, as in so many others, music proved a useful tool for bringing older people in or at least encouraging them to “let their children go” to movement land.

MUSIC, COLLECTIVITY, AND IDENTITY Beyond particular strategic needs, music strengthened and transformed personal and collective identity for movement workers. One of the main dynamics in any social movement is the relationship between individual and collective identity. People enter movements as individuals, and they must continue to feel a sense of individual commitment, but at the same time they must gain a sense of collective identity as part of the group effort that is the defining feature of movements. The Civil Rights movement handled this delicate balance of individualism and collectivity better than most movements, and once again, music played a significant role. Listen, for example, to this line from the most famous song in the movement’s repertoire, “We Shall Overcome”: “Deep in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome some day.” Note how the line starts with an individualized statement of commitment, “I do believe,” then shifts to the collective with “we shall overcome.” The song actually began its life as a black spiritual, “I’ll Be Alright,” and was adapted in 1945 by

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the members of a tobacco union in Charlotte, North Carolina, most of whom were black women. It was they who turned the “I’ll” to “We” to support their collective union struggle. The song was further refined and adapted to the Civil Rights struggle by Zilphia Horton, the first music director at Highlander. She taught it to folksinger Pete Seeger, who in turn taught it in 1950 to the man who became Highlander’s second music director, Guy Carawan. But it was not until 1960, when Carawan held a region-­wide song workshop in the South, that the song started to gain a central role in the movement. Three weeks after that, it was a featured song at the founding SNCC convention. In making it their own, the students further changed it musically and lyrically. Thus, the song most closely associated with the collective identity of the movement evolved through the contributions of many individuals. Music, of course, was not the only force in shaping movement identities, but it clearly was among the most powerful. Bernice Reagon beautifully illustrates, for example, how a moment of musical improvisa­ tion can be a direct outgrowth of, and contributor to, collective action, even as it also brings personal transformation. In the midst of a tense moment during the struggle in Albany, Reagon recalls: “Charlie Jones looked at me and said, ‘Bernice, sing a song.’ And I started ‘Over My Head I See Trouble in the Air.’ By the time I got to where ‘trouble’ was supposed to be, I didn’t see any trouble, so I put ‘freedom’ in there.”45 I would suggest that in the moment, Reagon was not simply expressing a change of feeling but enacting it as the music changed her. As she describes it: “The voice I have now I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail. I did the song, ‘Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air,’ but I had never heard that voice before. I had never been that me before. And once I became that me, I have never let that me go.”46 The notion of being born again in the spirit is deep in certain Christian traditions. As Reagon suggests, the movement bred such feelings too. The sense of a freedom deeper than freedom pervades the stories told by movement folks. The word transcendence is usually used to describe something above and beyond mere politics. But in the movement, transcendence of self was also a discovery of self. Gaining the sense of “somebodiness” that was so crucially a part of the movement’s work often came paradoxically when the self was given up to a larger whole, a collective spirit.

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The claiming of a positive sense of blackness is often credited to the Black Power phase of the African American freedom struggle in the latter part of the 1960s, but the Civil Rights years laid down some important elements of that identity reclamation project. And music was a key part of that project. For many southern blacks, particularly those from the middle classes, the great spirituals and gospel songs reworked by the movement were part of a heritage they sought to deny in favor of cultural forms with more cachet in the white world. For many movement participants, reclaiming freedom songs was part of claiming an identity as self-­defined black people proud of their ancestry, rather than as white-­defined “Negroes.” The urban Black Power identity, discussed in the next chapter, owes more of a debt to the Civil Rights phase of the movement than is generally acknowledged. Charles Payne summarizes this evolutionary process as embodied in the music and other rituals of local mass meetings: “Mixtures of the sacred and the profane, the mass meetings could be a very powerful social ritual. They attracted people and then helped them develop a sense of involvement and solidarity. By acting out new definitions of their individual and collective selves, people helped make those selves become real. Informed and challenged by the speakers, pumped up by the singing and the laughing and the sense of community, many of those who only meant to go once out of curiosity left that first meeting thinking they might come “once more, just to see.”47 And that “once more” often became many more times, and that performed self-­singing became the real self acting for change.

MUSIC AS CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE Why freedom songs? Why not justice songs, or equality songs, or some other term? Freedom was the touchstone word of the movement. The songs and the movement had an elective affinity: freedom was from the beginning a major theme of the movement, but the songs played a role in making that concept even more central to movement ideology. Why was that word so important? It had both breadth and depth. First, there was the historical depth, the resonance with the major fact of black history, slavery. In addition, the word pointed to an open-­ended present and future; it could mean many things in the imaginations of many

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different participants and potential participants. Freedom was also one of the few political words almost universally embraced by Americans, at least in theory. Equality, probably the only competitor for the label, was a far more controversial concept. Perhaps most important, in the South the concept of freedom had great resonance because all black people in the region had felt deeply a sense of unfreedom, had felt fettered by having to restrain and contain themselves in order to play the roles demanded by a segregated society. While equality might have suggested a desire to be like white people, freedom suggested an open horizon to explore the many realms that had been declared out of bounds to black people. Freedom worked on many levels, from the most intimate to the most broadly public. There is another, more specific way in which the word freedom resonated especially well in the movement. One of the most important sites for both the composition and singing of freedom songs was jail. Much of the movement was based on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, the purposeful breaking of laws judged to be unjust. Since the whole system of segregation was unjust to blacks, occasions for going to jail were many. Beyond that, the entire Civil Rights movement was essentially declared illegal by the white southern power structure, which harassed activists constantly, arresting them for petty or made-­ up offenses above and beyond acts of civil disobedience. Going to jail, therefore, was a major fact of life for movement participants, and it could be the most grueling and dangerous part of the work. It could be particularly frightening for those raised with conservative religious views. Thus, several songs portrayed God as endorsing and even demanding the experience: “Well, have you been to jail? certainly Lord, / Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord.”48 Singing freedom songs became a favorite way for those in jail to pass time, maintain solidarity, keep their spirits high, and communicate with one another. Incarceration also provided long stretches of time that could be spent writing and rewriting songs and otherwise developing the freedom song tradition. As Cordell Reagon recalls: “We were in the Hinds County jail, and we were fasting and singing all the time. We were in separate cells, but we could sing to each other so it wasn’t bad.”49 Another account shows how music kept solidarity alive even in solitary confinement. Bob Zellner, a white southern movement activist,

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was placed in solitary after being threatened with castration by other white prisoners. His movement mate Chuck McDew was placed in solitary at the same time. Each was confined to a five-­by-­seven-­foot cell with only a five-­inch-­square ventilation opening and a small grate in the ceiling. Zellner heard a familiar whisper coming from the ceiling and realized that McDew was in the cell directly above him: “Then we sang. As the police pounded on the door threatening to whip us we sang ‘Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Set on Freedom.’ Even after they turned the heaters on and blasted us with unbearable heat for seven days, we continued to sing—­‘We’ll walk hand in hand.’”50 Freedom songs did some of their best work in jail, where they made all the more palpable the feeling that freedom was in the air, air that could move freely, like the mind and the spirit, out of the confines of a prison cell or the prison house of a racist society.

MUSICAL PLEASURES In stressing the important, even instrumental role that music played in the movement, I do not mean to neglect the fact that singing could also be a plain old source of pleasure and recreation. Movement work was often unimaginably arduous. In such a context, as in any movement context, really, time needs to be made for pleasure and relaxation. And there too music was often a key element. In addition to songs drawn into the movement for specific practical uses, there was music around just for fun. SNCC activist and later U.S. congressional representative John Lewis notes in his memoir that in addition to the freedom songs, and sometimes as a respite from them, he spent many a long drive down country roads listening to the latest pop songs on local radio stations, especially with the emergence of “soul” music in the 1960s.51 “Soul” music later became, according to former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, the “sound track” to the Black Power movement and may have, to a far lesser degree, played a political role in that phase of the black freedom struggle. But in the context of the Civil Rights struggle, it was more often the sound track participants used to forget the movement for a while. Some pop songs, like Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” which became “Get Your Rights, Jack,” and Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song,” which was adapted into a freedom rider version,

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did become part of the freedom song repertoire. But Lewis’s point is that the hard, patient, dangerous work of organizing was grueling, and any movement that does not leave room for just plain fun is likely to burn out its participants. Given the constant threat they faced, the freedom fighters in the rural Deep South had a particularly strong need for music that offered occasional freedom from freedom songs, with their powerfully disturbing reminders of the struggle.

SINGING AS AND AGAINST IDEOLOGY As one movement veteran observed, “When Mrs. Hamer finishes singing a few freedom songs one is aware that he has truly heard a fine politi­ cal speech, stripped of the usual rhetoric and filled with the anger and determination of the Civil Rights movement. And on the other hand in her speeches there is the constant thunder of and drive of music.”52 Fannie Lou Hamer was not alone in being able to turn a series of songs into political speech. Many organizers learned to do something like this. The movement’s best organizers understood that success required an unusual degree of openness in terms of movement ideology and strategy. Organizing was further complicated by situations that varied from state to state, from county to county, and between rural and urban black communities, not to mention the many different class, gender, sexual, and educational backgrounds of movement participants. A single approach to ideology and struggle would most certainly have failed to create the solidarity necessary for success. Given this complexity, songs were uniquely suited as organizing tools. As we have seen, sometimes people would just come for the music and then find themselves drawn into the fray before they knew it. Through songs, movement ideas could be conveyed to the illiterate and to the literate who were deeply rooted in an oral tradition. The larger point here is that music, as the center but hardly the whole of the movement culture, functioned as an overarching site. It served not only as an active tactical force and strategic unifier but also, more fundamentally, as a baseline context in which differences could coexist. Movement cultures function best when they both express and move beyond ideology. Ideologies—­elaborated key ideas and values—­ are crucially important to any movement. But they are also often the

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points of contention that pull movements apart. The very vagueness (or, more positively, open-­endedness) of “cultural” forms, which has kept many social scientists from examining them seriously as a movement force, is precisely one of their virtues. Sometimes open-­ended expressions can do work that more precise forms cannot. The “freedom” in freedom songs was never precisely defined. As we have seen, it could be made very concrete in particular situations, such as the freedom to be served respectfully at a lunch counter. But it could also mean many things to many different people. Freedom songs formed the core of an extraordinarily rich movement culture that harmonized diverse constituencies, values, strategies, tactics, and goals, and in doing so they became a central force in moving the nation further down that long, unfinished journey to a place beyond racism.

REVERBERATIONS The influence of the African American struggle for freedom quickly moved out beyond that movement’s immediate focus on black folks to shape virtually every subsequent social movement in the United States, not only on the left but on the right as well. The Civil Rights movement was the seedbed for the wider category of “1960s movements”—­the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the antiwar and draft resistance movements, the New Left and student power movements, the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, ethnic rights movements for Latino/a, Asian, and Native Americans—­all of which drew upon the example of the Civil Rights movement, adapted to the particu­ lars of their own cultures and grievances.53 All of these progressive forces, which merged in the minds of many to become simply “the movement” in the 1960s, were inspired and informed by the philosophy, tactics, style, organizational forms, and power of the Civil Rights movement (and the same remains true of movements today). This includes the music of the Civil Rights movement. “We Shall Overcome,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and many other songs were adopted by and adapted to subsequent struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the people who became active in these other movements had been involved in the struggles in the South. The SNCC spirit of radical democracy, the desire to put ordinary people, not extraordinary leaders, in charge of change

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pervaded most of these emerging movements. Most important, perhaps, was the proof that people fighting outside the regular political channels of parties and lobbyists could bring about profound change in daily life as well as in political and economic institutions. The openness of the Civil Rights movement, its desire to expand “freedom,” set off a contagion that freed up the lives of millions experiencing a variety of oppressive or otherwise limiting conditions.

FROM FREEDOM SONGS TO POWER PLAYS The accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement between the mid-­ 1950s and mid-­1960s are quite astonishing. Two major federal Civil Rights acts in 1964 and 1965 greatly extended rights for all Americans, especially for people of color. By the late 1960s the vicious system of legal segregation in the South had been almost totally dismantled, and with it much of the systematic white terrorism that stood behind it. The “citizenship schools” and “freedom schools” that grew up during the movement had also by the mid-­1960s laid the groundwork for the radical reworking of black history that was a key stage in the evolution of what we now call multiculturalism. Indeed, it is hard to overestimate the transformative effects of the Civil Rights movement on American culture. Yet the limits of the movement’s success must also be confronted. For many participants who could not see the long-­term impacts of their actions, the movement seemed as much a failure as a success by the mid-­ 1960s. More recently, the movement has borne the burden of mainstream acceptance, becoming hallowed as an American success story by the very forces of complacency that stood in the 1960s and stand now in the way of further progress toward racial justice. The movement has become a museum piece, its radical power stuck in amber, its meanings reduced to Martin Luther King Day platitudes. This process of denying or forgetting the radical dimensions of the movement began as early as the late 1960s, when new, allegedly more radical forces arose in challenge. On the Meredith march, one of the last great events of the Civil Rights phase of the movement, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael scripted a performance that would signal a shift to new sites and styles of black struggle. Carmichael planned his speech for the rally that night as a direct counter to and challenge of Martin Luther King’s leadership of

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the march. Carmichael’s chosen method of combat was a battle of key words. At such rallies, it was common for a speaker to shout, in call-­ and-­response style, “What do we want?” to which the traditional Civil Rights response was “Freedom now!” But on this night Carmichael had asked his comrade Willie Ricks to seed the audience with people armed with a different script. Timed to Carmichael’s call, Ricks and others shouted back not “Freedom now!” but rather “Black power! Black power!” The phrase quickly drew media attention and was read as signaling a split in the movement. As open-­ended as the term freedom, the phrase black power came to have a dizzying array of meanings, but at that moment it did indeed signal a sea change in the movement.54 The Civil Rights movement had always been about power. It wielded its power quite successfully in all the ways discussed here, and, more important, it empowered thousands of ordinary African Americans. But especially for those on the front lines of SNCC and others among the hard-­core organizers, the accomplishments seemed thin compared to the sacrifice, and the emotional and physical scars ran deep. In relation to the abiding poverty and continuing racism in the South and the North, these people did not feel very powerful. They understood better than most the work still undone. They particularly understood it when they looked to the northern ghettos, where a long period of freedom from legal segregation had not removed other deep economic, political, and cultural forces of racial injustice. Drawing strength from the southern struggle even while strongly critiquing it, the Black Power phase of the ongoing African American liberation struggle took center stage in the late 1960s.

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2 DRAMATIC RESISTANCE

THEATRICAL POLITICS FROM THE BLACK PANTHERS TO BLACK LIVES MATTER The scene opens in the spring of 1967, in the parking lot of the California state capitol building in Sacramento. Thirty young black people, twenty-­four men and six women, are pulling rifles, twelve-­gauge shotguns, and .357 Magnum handguns out of their car trunks and loading them. Dressed in uniforms of black berets, black leather jackets, and powder-­blue shirts, they begin to move in loose formation up the steps to the capitol. One of the young black men on the scene shouts, “Look at Reagan run!” as then governor and future president Ronald Reagan beats a hasty retreat in the face of this phalanx of armed black Americans. But the troops are not especially interested in the governor. They are headed into the legislative chamber. Some hold their guns pointed to the sky, others point them to the ground. As they walk around the outer perimeter of the assembly chamber, people clear a path for them amid many astonished looks. Photographers and TV camera operators are ahead of them, walking backward as they move closer to the doors of the chamber. About five or six feet from the gateway into the assembly hall, a security officer jumps in front of the black man at the head of the action and shouts, “Where the hell are you goin’?” The man calmly replies, “I am going to exercise my constitutional right to see my government making laws, and my right under the Second Amendment to bear arms.” Someone shouts with alarm, “There are Black Panthers with guns on the second floor of the capitol!” And he is right. It is May 2, 1967, 43

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and the men and women who appear to be about to raid the center of government are members of the recently formed Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense. They have driven up to Sacramento in a caravan of cars from their headquarters in Oakland. Some of the armed Panthers make their way onto the assembly floor, others are in the viewing balcony above. As the cameras continue to roll, very confused-­looking legislators mumble and shout. Amid much agitation, the Panthers leave the scene and return to the capitol steps, where Panther chairman Bobby Seale, leader of the action, reads Panther minister of defense Huey Newton’s “Executive Mandate #1”: “The Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”1 That night, TV news around California, the United States, and the world presented video of the dramatic encounter: Bobby Seale reading the mandate, as from the background the noun motherfucker makes its way onto broadcast television for the first time. The Black Power movement was mostly an urban, northern movement complementing, building on, and critiquing the mostly southern, often more rural, Civil Rights phase of the black freedom movement. Some argue that Black Power is part of the Civil Rights struggle, while others see it as a break with the movement. A balanced analysis enables us to see it as both. The peak years of Black Power, roughly 1965–­75, brought a profound transformation in American life, inside and beyond black communities. Building on the work of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement brought a sweeping change in consciousness and identity for black people, and it shaped every level of African Ameri­ can life. While moderate and even conservative voices continued to exist in the black community, the dominant voices of the era spoke the language of Black Power. The loudest of these voices belonged to members of the Black Panther Party, who burst onto the stage of history through the “scene” narrated above.2 The real-­life events at the California capitol unfolded in the dramatic way I have related them. The guerrilla theater siege of

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Sacramento was one of many dramatic moments in what was a very dramatic time. The talking blues, proto-­rap artist Gil Scott-­Heron sang in 1968 that the “revolution will not be televised.” But he was only half right. Much of the revolution going on in the United States at that time was televised, or at least reported via television, and that fact shaped the history of the period in positive and negative ways. The Black Power phase of the Civil Rights/black liberation movement dominated much of the iconography and dramaturgy of the late 1960s. The “drama of the Black Panthers” addressed in this chapter encompasses two different things: (1) a body of theater work designed to act as part of the cultural arm of the Black Power movement, and (2) the idea that much of the Black Power movement, particularly the Black Panther Party, can be understood as a kind of theatrical performance. This second point is not meant to belittle the Black Panthers; rather, it is offered as a reason to take them more seriously. All politics involves a theatrical element, and a failure to understand the relation between the “poetics” and the “politics” of the Panthers is a failure to understand the Panthers at all.3 Much of the public activity of the Black Panthers was built around highly dramatic, stylized confrontations, often involving guns and the police. These are among the main actions that earned the group notoriety. As I will explain in this chapter, this theatricality was in many ways the most important cultural contribution of the Panthers, but it was also their greatest political limitation. Hegemony—­the process of getting people to consent unwittingly to their own oppression—­takes place largely by accretion, as many, many sites reinforce the same ideas. In the case of black Americans, at the moment Black Power arose, many sites in both white and black America were very much teaching messages of black intellectual and cultural inferiority. The cultural front of the Black Power movement exerted considerable influence because it managed to launch new messages of black pride and empowerment into so many different spaces on so many levels of culture. The Black Power movement included an intellectual formation, led by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Ron Karenga, and Stokely Carmichael, among many others, and it spawned an immensely influential intellectual field, black studies. Black Power also included a variety of pervasive cultural formations in the literary and performing arts centered on the

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notion of an independent “black aesthetic.” The black arts/black aesthetic movement reshaped virtually all the arts: jazz and soul music, painting, dance, poetry, and theater. Black Power also reshaped black theology, sports, even black folkways. It influenced what people ate (“soul food”), the clothes and hairstyles they wore (African-­derived fashions, “natural” or “Afro” hair), the holidays they celebrated (Kwanzaa instead of Christmas), the language they spoke (a “soulful rap” expressing black pride, declaiming that “black is beautiful”), and the gestures they made (Black Power handshakes, the raised-­fist Black Power salute). Many of these attributes and styles were said to possess “soul,” something like the everyday-­life or folk equivalent of the black aesthetic in its celebration of the unique and positive dimensions of black style.4 Black Power cultural forms also reshaped popular culture, particularly music, drawing in previously nonpolitical performers like James Brown (“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”) and generating a radical revision of the talking blues in artists like Gil Scott-­Heron and the Last Poets. While music was not as central a force in the Black Power movement as it had been in the Civil Rights struggle, it did provide the sound track for Black Power, and even the Black Panthers had their own soul music group, the Lumpens. In sum, virtually no corner of black life remained untouched by radical cultural revisions. The Black Power movement had within it a vast array of political ideologies, and its most radical political agenda certainly was not achieved. But as historian William Van Deburg argues, if it did not achieve the political revolution many called for, it did succeed in revolutionizing black consciousness in ways that continue to echo today and have profound political importance. Van Deburg contends that “Black Power is best understood as a broad, adaptive, cultural term serving to connect and illuminate the differing ideological orientations of the movement’s supporters. Conceptualized in this manner, the Black Power movement does not appear, [as] it so often has, a cacophony of voices and actions resulting in only minuscule gains for black people. Viewing the movement through the window of culture allows us to see that language, folk culture, religion, and the literary and performing arts served to spread the militants’ philosophy much farther than did mimeographed political broadsides.”5 Especially if one includes speeches among the “performing arts” and also considers certain Black Power

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movement actions as “theater,” as I suggest here, this is an important insight. Much of the Black Power movement’s political impact came through cultural channels, but without the political movement that impact would have been much reduced. The changes brought by the movement varied considerably in long-­term impact, and the key force accounting for these variations was the degree to which style changes were connected to specific political ideas and movement fractions.

BLACK NATIONALISMS As we saw at the end of chapter 1, the phrase black power had its origin in a highly staged event during the southern struggle. Stokely Carmichael’s dramatic use of the new phrase encapsulated an important rhetorical and political shift in the black movement. The move from “freedom now” to “black power” embodied a sense that overthrowing the constraints of segregation would not be enough if substantial shifts in economic and political power failed to follow. The new slogan’s immediate effect was to deepen a split in the southern movement, but its larger, long-­range impacts were felt mostly in northern ghettos. Both the flair for dramatic symbolism and the rhetorical weight of the phrase black power moved rapidly to the center of the urban northern phase of the movement. By 1967 Black Power movement was the name most often applied to the northern struggle. The desperate, angry mood of the ghettos was apparent as a series of “riots” or “urban insurrections,” depending on your ideological viewpoint, tore up American cities in the 1960s. A series of “long hot summers” began with a violent riot in the African American Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, followed in subsequent years by massive insurrections in Chicago, Detroit, Newark, and a hundred other cities across the country. The government commission investigating the “civil disturbances” found evidence of “two Americas, one Black, one white,” moving in opposite directions. The Black Power movement attempted to give shape to the inchoate “black rage” that fueled the riots, and to turn it into empowerment rather than self-­destruction.6 Carmichael had sharpened his version of “Black Power” while he was organizing an alternative political party in Lowndes County, Alabama, one of the most dangerous places in the South to organize.

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The symbol of that party was a black panther, and some of the people involved referred to it as the “black panther party.” When a year later two brash young black men, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, formed a new political organization in Oakland, California, one of the nation’s toughest ghettos, they named it the Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense, in homage to their Lowndes County predecessors. The new organization formed by Newton and Seale quickly became the most visible, most widely known embodiment of the symbolism, rhetoric, and ideology of the Black Power movement. The movement drew not only on radical currents in the new southern struggle but also on a long history, going back at least to the eighteenth century, of African American activists using the concept of “black nationalism.” While the concept had been present in a variety of incarnations with quite different ideological agendas, from conservative to revolutionary, the essence of the Black Power movement’s black nationalism was the notion that in some sense blacks in America were a nation apart. Rather than viewing this as a liability to be overcome through integration into white America, black nationalists argued that black people should organize themselves to reflect pride in their history and culture, and to gain a significant degree of independent economic and political power. Due especially to the work of Malcolm X, black nationalism was a mass force again by the time of his assassination in 1965. The black nationalism of the 1960s is traditionally divided into two main forms: cultural nationalism and political nationalism. Cultural nationalists stressed the development of independent artistic and cultural forms based in black tradition. Political nationalists stressed contestation with and the need to radically alter the white-­dominated political and economic system. I want to complicate this useful but limiting distinction by suggesting that cultural nationalism (represented by individ­ uals like poet and playwright Amiri Baraka) and political nationalism (represented by the Black Panther Party) overlapped and were intertwined in significant ways. The distinction was and is a serious one; in at least one case it was a deadly one, when armed conflict broke out between representatives of the political nationalist Panthers and the cultural nationalist followers of Ron Karenga in Los Angeles. But the cultural/political distinction is also misleading, both because the cultural nationalists had political ideas and impact and, more to the point of this chapter, because

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the political nationalists had cultural ideas and impact, an impact made largely through dramatic action.

A NEW STAGE OF STRUGGLE The early 1960s saw the rise of two entwined forces that would have a dramatic influence on the style of the Panthers: the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the theater of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. I want to outline here a three-­stage evolution of “Black Power dramatics,” from the dramatic speeches of Malcolm X to the plays of Amiri Baraka to the real-­life dramatic actions of the Black Panthers. Malcolm was to the northern ghetto what Martin Luther King Jr. had been to the southern struggle—­the great articulator. From 1952, when he joined after a life of petty crime, until 1964, he was an increasingly important figure in Elijah Muhammad’s black nationalist organization, the Nation of Islam. Born Malcolm Little, he replaced his slave name with an X to mark his refusal to be named by white society. After breaking with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm struck out on his own broader path with an increasingly international focus. During this period, until his assassination in 1965, Malcolm’s views on Reverend King and the Civil Rights struggle also changed from open hostility to respect and qualified support. But throughout his short life Malcolm argued that conditions in the urban North demanded both a different kind of rhetoric and different strategies from those used in the southern struggle. Malcolm became the master of a rhetorically violent but carefully legal wake-­up call to the urban ghettos. He understood that for blacks in the North the issue was not segregation, though there was plenty of that (missing only the legal sanction given the southern form). Rather, the issue was systematic degradation through a thousand deprivations—­poverty, demeaning jobs and unemployment, police brutality, everyday racist insults, inadequate schools, substandard health care—­that often led to a sense of self-­hatred and despair. Malcolm believed that only a kind of shock therapy addressed to “Negroes” could turn them into proud black actors on the national and world stage. In his speeches Malcolm sought to separate what he called, using a metaphor drawn from slave days, the “house Negroes” (or Uncle Toms), who upheld or accepted white racism, from the “field Negroes,” who plotted slave insurrections or violent revenge on the white masters.7

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At the same time, and under the influence of Malcolm X’s rhetoric, a young black poet and playwright named LeRoi Jones was turning himself into Amiri Baraka. Jones transformed himself from a Greenwich Village bohemian poet into the playwright Baraka, who offered dramatic theater to match the dramatic rhetoric of Malcolm’s new black nationalism. As part of a wider black arts movement that included radical poetry, fiction, art, and music, a theater of action aiming to support and/or enact a black revolution rose rapidly in the mid-­1960s. The beginnings of Black Power theater are usually traced to the work of Jones, who, mirroring a larger process of renaming and collective transformation in black identity in the 1960s, gave up his “slave name” to be reborn as Amiri Baraka. Most historians of black culture see the 1964 production of Baraka’s play The Dutchman as the opening salvo in the black theater revolution. The Slave followed in that same year, and before long a whole movement emerged, with dozens of young playwrights following Baraka’s lead. In 1965, in an important symbolic gesture, Baraka moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS). The school became a testing ground for many black actors and playwrights, as well as a place for Baraka himself to experiment. The Civil Rights movement had already produced one important theatrical group, the Free Southern Theater, organized by SNCC, and as Black Power emerged within SNCC that company’s work also metamorphosed into a significant Black Power theatrical force in the South. As it evolved, Black Power theater took many forms, from full-­scale plays to short vignettes meant to be enacted as street theater on corners or vacant lots in the ghetto. The most common form was the one-­act play—­long enough to develop significant ideas but short enough to reach audiences not used to theatergoing. This latter point was important, as the playwrights sought to reach audiences beyond the small middle-­class black playgoing contingent. As theater historian Mance Williams describes it, the central task of Black Power theater was to use dramatic enactments to overcome internalized self-­hatred in blacks, “who had been brainwashed and psychologically maimed by centuries of physical and mental abuse” (a notion of therapeutic violence found in the work of the immensely influential psychiatrist and theorist of decolonization Frantz Fanon).

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For Baraka, violence (rhetorical at least) was a key component of black arts, an element necessary to break through crusted layers of internalized oppression in blacks (and less directly to break through layers of complacency in whites). At the level of style, the black theater movement sought to instill pride by celebrating existing cultural elements in the black community and synthesizing them into elements of a distinctive “black aesthetic.” This meant, according to Williams, that “it would synthesize and codify all those creative and artistic expressions peculiar to Afro-­Americans,” including not only such indigenous art forms as gospel music, spirituals, jazz, the blues, and black dance forms but also such broader cultural styles as black English (black slang, syntax, diction, and speech rhythms) and even elements of black kinesics (ways of walking, gesturing, and body language generally).8 All these things were, often for the first time, brought into black drama during these revolutionary years. To help create a more participatory experience, the new black theater often utilized the call-­and-­response pattern that was built into black religious observance and much black music. Sometimes this involved putting an actual church service onstage, with a minister preaching Black Power, or an onstage “congregation” challenging the lack of Black Power rhetoric in a traditional minister. Either way, the audience was encouraged to join in. This not only got a Black Power message across but also undermined the authority of conservative clergy, who often stood in the way of the new radical phase of the movement. In the spirit of black nationalist independence, Baraka insisted that BARTS be run entirely by blacks, with the plays produced, directed, and acted only by blacks and performed for all-­black audiences. In cases where white characters needed to be played, Baraka had black actors apply “whiteface,” in symbolic contrast to the long racist tradition of minstrelsy, in which white artists donned blackface makeup to perform stereotyped imitations of blacks. In his own plays, Baraka sometimes created self-­consciously stereotyped whites as comic figures. His theater was a “theatre of assault”: The Revolutionary Theatre, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of “high art” and weakfaced

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Dramatic Resistance dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a theatre of assault. The play that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad sentimen­ tal groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are reading this.9

Baraka’s assaults on white racism and black fear of freedom were very powerful, and they played an important role in the creation of a “black aesthetic” throughout the arts that echoes to this day. At the same time, Baraka’s work was also at times virulently mis­ ogynist, sexist, anti-­Semitic, and homophobic, and frequently based on a confining notion of a biological black essence. One reason to champion Black Panther theater over Baraka’s work is that the party took official positions against these hideous views, although certainly many members struggled unevenly with them at the personal level. Where cultural nationalism often became frozen in black essences, the revolutionary political nationalism of the Panthers continued to evolve as political alliances broadened the organization’s vision. Newton expressed his distance from purely cultural nationalists in these words: There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end goal being the people in power. . . . Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. . . . The Black Panther Party, which is a revolutionary group of black people, realizes that we have to have an identity. We have to realize our Black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it’s unnecessary and it’s not advantageous in many respects. We believe

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Dramatic Resistance  53 that culture itself will not liberate us. We’re going to need some stronger stuff.10

The Panthers’ political approach to culture proved richer than Baraka’s cultural approach to politics, a fact Baraka himself implicitly acknowledged when he later developed positions closer to the Marxist internationalism of the party.

REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS While the Panthers rejected what Newton called “pork chop” cultural nationalism (as if eating soul food was inherently liberating), they still learned from it, especially from Baraka’s Black Power drama. Baraka’s theatrical ideas influenced the Panthers, both directly through encounters with his work (he lived in San Francisco in the late 1960s) and indirectly through the playwright-­theorist’s influence on another key figure in the new black theater movement, Ed Bullins. A young playwright who had studied with Baraka, Bullins became for a brief time minister of culture for the Panthers and was in their orbit during their and his formative years.11 According to theater historian Williams, it was Bullins who sought to move Black Power dramatic ideas more out into the community as “street theater.”12 Bullins played a key role in moving theatricality ever more fully into the movement itself. Bullins was also a founding member of Black House, a community center/theater in San Francisco that was taken over by the Panthers soon after another Black House founder, Eldridge Cleaver, became minister of information for the party. The Panthers’ takeover of a community theater is neatly emblematic of my argument that the party became the leading edge of political-­cultural theatrical nationalism. While the seizure of Black House, and Bullins’s association with the party, offers evidence of the Panthers’ direct connection to Black Power theater, my claim is broader. My notion is that the party took a feel for drama beyond the playhouse, into Panther political actions. The Panthers took the kind of shock-­action theatrics practiced by the new black playwrights out of the theaters and into the streets. Precisely where the interest in drama came from is something of a side issue, but it is a suggestive fact that Panther cofounder Bobby Seale

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had acted in local plays and was, by Newton’s account, a brilliant mimic who undermined the political positions of other, less radical white and black leaders through his right-­on imitations of their voices and styles: “[Seale] could also imitate down to the last detail some of the brothers around us. I would crack my sides laughing, not only because his imi­ tations were so good, but because he could convey certain attitudes and characteristics so sharply. He caught all their shortcomings, the way their ideas failed to meet the needs of the people.”13 In a related claim, I suggest that Panther actions were an imitative extension and critique of cultural nationalist theater. What Mance Williams says about the theory and practice of black drama in the 1960s could be said equally of the theory and practice of the Black Panther Party: “Many of the Black Revolutionary Plays were based on myth, but the myth of revolution the Black playwrights created was no less real than if it had actually taken place. Since theatre occurs in the mind, within the imagination of the spectators, the illusion of revolution can affect the audience if its members are willing to accept the possibility of the real events. In most cases these plays were rituals and rites, designed for purposes of purgation and catharsis and intended, through stylistic incantations, to will into reality an actual revolution.”14 As Williams suggests, the line between a “real” revolution and a revolution in consciousness is not absolute. It is in plays along this ambiguous line that I would locate the main successes of both Black Power theater and Black Power as theater. Much of this dramatic theory, it seems to me, describes Black Panther ideology as well as the party’s manifestos and speeches. Their impact was dramatic, and their drama drove their impact. Certainly in the life consciousness of one of the most famous black revolutionaries of the era, Angela Davis, two dramatic events stand out as key moments in her political awakening. Davis has written that it was hearing Malcolm X speak at Brandeis University that first awakened her to blackness, and it was seeing the image of the armed Panthers on the steps of the California capitol that affirmed in her a sense of the possibility of concerted black revolutionary action. Studying in Germany at the time with Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, Davis saw that image of the Panthers in the local Frankfurt newspaper and knew instantly that something new was brewing in her homeland.15 It would not be

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long before Davis’s own iconic image would have a similarly empowering effect on young black and nonblack women and men throughout the world. To lesser and greater degrees, dramatic images of the Panthers (and their allies, including Davis) awakened countless numbers of Negroes into African Americanness. The mass media became enamored of the Panthers and provided them an audience many times larger than those attending the plays of Baraka, Bullins, and the whole tribe of black playwrights.

BLACK PANTHER POWER PLAYS As Angela Davis confirms, for many the Black Panther Party burst onto the national and international scene with the carefully staged event at the state capitol building in Sacramento described at the opening of this chapter. For my purposes it is a nice coincidence that at the time the governor of California was Ronald Reagan, a man who himself had been an actor, and who would later play a starring role as president in a tragicomic, partly successful attempt in the 1980s to roll back many of the gains made by the wave of social movements that peaked in the 1960s. The director of the Sacramento action, Huey Newton, and its lead actor, Bobby Seale, had been friends at Merritt Junior College and later talked politics together at the Oakland Poverty Center, where Seale worked. Seeing firsthand the limits of government programs intended to address poverty deepened the two young men’s sense of the troubles in the black community and confirmed their belief that liberal reform would not touch those problems. Like their idol Malcolm X, they understood the need for black people to organize themselves independent of white influence, as well as the need to find allies in the wider (and whiter) society. In 1965, Malcolm’s assassination and the riots in Watts deepened their conviction that the black community needed new leadership. Their answer was to draft a document laying out their Ten-­Point Program for the group they called the Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense.16 The ten points included bold demands for decent housing, education in black history, full employment, and release of all people of color from military service (because they should not fight in the racist war in Vietnam) and from prisons (because in white America their only real crime was being black). The document ended with a

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quotation from the Declaration of Independence to drive home the message that the black community was declaring independence from white supremacy. The influences behind Black Panther ideology are summed up neatly by the allegorical naming of Bobby Seale’s son, who was born during the Black Power era. Seale named the boy Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale. Malik, the Muslim name adopted by Malcolm X, represents the legacy of black nationalism in the United States; Nkrumah, for Kwame Nkrumah, famed leader of anticolonialism in Africa, represents the Third World internationalism of the Panthers; and Stagolee, notorious bad dude of black folklore, represents the Panthers’ commitment to the ordinary street “brothas and sistas” of the black community. This last identity is perhaps the most original contribution of the Panthers, for just as Baraka had put street dudes onstage as characters, Black Panther theater took black street style and recoded it with a revolutionary new message. The aura of violence in the blues/folkloric image of Stagolee as the tough black dude (and to a lesser degree the image of bluesy “nasty gals”) was transferred into a threat of black self-­defense, and possibly offense, against whites. Many young black men and women, often after passing through the battle zones of riots/insurrections, began to transform the strut and stride of the street hustler into the assertive posture of the black revolutionary. Anthropologists and sociologists have long noted the deep importance of “performativity” in the black community, the premium put on highly stylized forms of behavior. In this cultural context, Panther style was substance. The black aesthetic movement popularized the expression “Black is beautiful,” but it was the beautiful men and women of the Panthers, standing erect, nattily dressed in black leather, arms raised in clenched-­fist Black Power salutes, marching in tight formation, who gave body to the phrase. The Panthers were nothing if not telegenic. In the late 1960s television screens across America were filled with images of Panthers looking both black and powerful. The messages contained in those theatrical gestures helped awaken thousands of black people to new ways of being, especially when the gestures were backed by street-­level organizing, powerful community word of mouth, and concrete programs. While the Sacramento action was the party’s most famous theatrical work, I would argue that it was merely an extension of the theatrical

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practice at the center of the Panthers’ activity. Panther leaders understood early on that they needed to win over the ghetto community with more than talk. They were not above such far-­from-­revolutionary acts as getting a stoplight installed in a dangerous intersection when the city power structure’s indifference to black life had led to the deaths of several children. Informing city officials that armed Panthers would stand guard at the intersection until a traffic signal was installed proved just the leverage needed to get the job done. Eventually the party evolved a whole series of “survival programs” as interim measures related to the many things demanded in the Ten-­Point Program, including free food, education, clothing, medical care, and legal counseling. A better-­known early part of the Panthers’ dramatic presence in the black community took the form of their policing of the police. Panther members, armed with rifles and law books, followed police officers around Oakland, patrolling for incidents of police brutality and other violations of the rights of black citizens of the city. In the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, they were creating an alternative, parallel institution. But this one was different. In effect, this strategy was the mirror image of that key Civil Rights movement strategy, civil disobedience. Law books and civil codes were used to symbolize that the police were engaged in uncivil disobedience to the law, and that the Panthers were there to enforce the letter of the law. The action reversed the gaze of surveillance, so that the watchers were now the ones being watched. By carrying guns, the Panthers meant to challenge symbolically the state’s monopoly on the use of violence, and to give notice that guns used to enforce white supremacy would be met by black self-­defense. Realizing that legal fictions covered up oppressive practices, the Panthers were not attacking the law but rather exposing its racist appli­cation. In the South segregation laws were the clear enemy, but in the North a more complex situation existed in which putatively race-­neutral laws rendered invisible de facto segregation in housing and employment, inequality in schools, and routine police harassment and brutality directed at those whose only “crime” was being black in white America. As an article in the party paper summarized the Panthers’ position: The Black Panther Party recognizes, as do all Marxist revolutionaries, that the only response to the violence of the ruling class is the revolutionary violence of the people. The Black Panther Party

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Dramatic Resistance recognizes this truth not as some unspecified Marxist-­Leninist truism, but as the basic premise of relating to the colonial oppression of Black people in the heartland of Imperialism where the white ruling class, through its occupation police forces, agents and dope peddlers, institutionally terrorizes the Black community. Revolutionary strategy for Black people in America begins with the defensive movement of picking up the Gun, as the condition for ending the pigs’ reign of terror by the Gun.17

The Panthers knew that their actions would be seen very differently in the “two Americas, one white, one Black” described in the U.S. government’s official report on the civil disturbances rocking the ghettos. Seale’s discussion of Newton’s planning around the Sacramento “invasion” (as the white world reported it) shows his clear sense of this dual audience: “When brother Huey planned Sacramento he said, ‘Now the papers are going to call us thugs and hoodlums.’ . . . But the brothers on the block who the man’s been calling thugs and hoodlums for 100 years, they’re going to say, ‘Them’s some out of sight thugs and hoodlums up there.’”18 Indeed, events like the Sacramento action brought the “brothers” and the “sisters” pouring into the organization. In less than two years, there were Panther chapters in cities around the country, including New York; New Haven, Connecticut; Raleigh, North Carolina; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago; and Los Angeles. The party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, had a peak circulation of nearly 140,000 by 1970. A Harris poll done for Time magazine in March 1970 found that one out of four blacks in America had a “great deal of admiration” for the Panthers. A Market Dynamics/ABC poll taken later that same year found the Panthers judged to be the organization “most likely” to increase the effectiveness of the black liberation struggle. Two-­thirds of blacks polled showed admiration for the organization, despite the fact that by that time it had been subjected to four years of vilification in the white press and constant harassment by law enforcement. Does this mean that Black Panther revolutionary ideology was embraced by the black community? Probably not. It was far more likely that Black Panther theater was embraced by the community in the sense that images of proud black men and women in black berets facing down cops gave evidence of a new kind of black person in the world, one who would not bow to racism anymore. In this sense, Black Panther theater

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proved far more successful than the specifics of Black Panther ideology, though the former sometimes carried with it significant elements of the latter, especially for the hundreds who were drawn by those images to join the party. The task of playing along the line I have been sketching between “poetics” and “politics,” and between two very different audiences, was a very tricky one. Some of the difficulties are clear in this interview of Panther David Hilliard by two CBS correspondents, George Herman and Ike Pappas, and Washington Post reporter Bernard Nossiter, which took place on December 28, 1969: MR. PAPPAS:  . . . I was at the [anti–­Vietnam War] Moratorium Day ceremonies and I heard [you say] “We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill anyone. Any blankety-­blank who stands in the way of our freedom.” And it is a very simple question: Do you think Richard Nixon is standing in the way of your freedom? Number two, would you kill him? MR. HILLIARD:  . . . I would say that Richard Nixon is the chief spokesman for the American people. He is the highest official in this land. If Richard Nixon stands in opposition to freedom guaranteed to us under the alleged constitution, then the man is designated as enemy. But I did not and I will not here designate—­I will not take responsibility of saying assassinate anybody. MR. NOSSITER: Well, what you are suggesting, Mr. Hilliard, is that this was a metaphor, a figure of speech out in San Francisco. MR. HILLIARD: I am saying that it was political rhetoric. We can call it a metaphor. It is the language of the ghetto. This is the way we relate. Even the profanity, the profanity is within the idiom of the oppressed people. So in the context of that speech I said that and I am not going to take that back. MR. NOSSITER: Okay. Then let me ask you this: Is your revolu­ tionary—­are your revolutionary slogans, are these too metaphors? Is this also rhetoric or do Panthers literally believe that a violent overthrow of the government must take place in this country? MR. HILLIARD: Let’s just say this: Let’s say that we could have our freedom without a shot being fired, but we know that the imperialists, that the fascists on a very local level would not withdraw from the arena without violence. They have proven

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Dramatic Resistance themselves very violent and thus far haven’t done anything to insure us our freedom. We were in the forefront of peaceful demonstrations for peace abroad, while right here at home we are being victims of attacks day and night by the criminal agencies manifested in police departments. Our slogan is that we want an abolition to war, but we do understand that in order to get rid of the gun it will be necessary to take up the gun.19

In this exchange, Hilliard is trying tortuously to add nuance to a discussion the journalists want to force into easy oppositions. He is trying to talk about the violence of racism as it affects the black community in America, and he is arguing that the possibility of radical change without violence has been rejected by the powers that be. He is also suggesting that his “political rhetoric” performed for a black audience (in “the language of the ghetto”) is systematically misheard by the white world. He is even willing to grant that his violent talk is a “metaphor,” but at the same time he does not want to lose its force as a “weapon” of change justified as defense against racist and “imperialist” violence. As the party did often, Hilliard is pointing to the hypocrisy of a power structure that drops tons of bombs on Vietnam and exercises police brutality daily in the ghettos and yet criticizes the violence of his mere words. While the Leninist–­Maoist rhetoric of the Panthers could at times become numbing, it was often combined with enough street-­smart “jive” to serve as radical political education. Just as the cool hustler became the cool revolutionary, the fast-­talking jive of the street became a rapid-­fire rhetoric uniting class and racial analysis: “The United States of America is a barbaric organization controlled and operated by avaricious, sadistic, bloodthirsty thieves. The United States of America is the Number One exploiter and oppressor of the whole world. The inhuman capitalistic system which defines the core reality of the United States is the root of the evil that has polluted the very fabric of existence.”20 As Nikhil Singh points out, the Panthers had dramatic success in their “attempts to politicize and reshape the frequently episodic and disjointed life-­world of urban, Black subalterns by replacing everyday violence and temporary fulfillments of hustling and surviving with a purposive framework for political action.”21 Most of the dramatic impact of the Panthers came not from shoot-­outs, but from day-­to-­day performances: speeches, marches into

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demonstrations and rallies, press conferences, and so forth. The Panthers were an unmistakable presence both in the black community and in the white media, especially television. As Van Deburg remarks, “The Black Power movement brought irrevocable changes in the Afro-­ Americans’ attitudes both about themselves and about the legitimacy of the white world order.”22 No single force moved those changes along more than the attitudes projected in both the rhetoric and the iconographic postures of the Panthers. While to many the Panthers may have seemed to be engaging in mere posturing, for others their revolutionary posture spoke volumes about no longer knuckling under to white power. Those people may not have believed that a revolution was at hand, but they got the message that only a new kind of black person would dare even to speak revolution to the white world.

PANTHER PARTY ORGANIZATION AND IDEOLOGY The organizational pattern chosen by Newton and Seale for their new party was essentially a military one. Feeling that black people on the street needed discipline, they structured the Black Panther Party as a rigid hierarchy with a central committee made up of various ministers (of defense, information, culture, and so forth) and emphasized military-­ style training in arms use and marching in formation. The Marxist vanguard element was based on the idea that “the people” needed to be educated to their oppressed condition and have resistance to oppression modeled for them by a dedicated cadre of revolutionary activists. In contrast to the organizing tradition invoked in the southern struggle, the party took a position, derived indirectly from Lenin and Mao, that radical change needed to be pushed by an enlightened elite. While the rigidity of this organizational structure would come to haunt the party, the Panthers espoused an open-­ended, coalitional politics that allowed them to evolve politically over time. In a speech he gave in 1970, Newton described the main changes he, as the party’s chief theorist, did much to shape: In 1966 we called . . . ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was a revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions

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Dramatic Resistance a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. . . . We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. . . . But since no nation exists [in a transnational world], and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves “intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into communities of the world.23

The Panthers were a key force in the development of a Third World/internal colonial position that featured alliances with postcolonial and revolutionary groups in the developing world as well as alliances with other radicals of color within the United States. The rhetorical/ political trick of identifying U.S. people of color as part of the Third World transformed an American “minority” into a global “majority.” The Panthers developed alliances with revolutionary groups in Cuba, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and with U.S. radical groups including the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Brown Berets, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Asian American I Wor Keun (Red Guard). They also allied themselves with white radicals such as those in the Peace and Freedom Party and Students for a Democratic Society. Late in the 1960s the Panthers made connections also to feminist and gay liberationist groups. The clearest example of this is a piece Newton published as a pamphlet in 1970 that was reprinted in 1972 as part of a collection of his essays and speeches edited by Toni Morrison. Titled “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” the essay was apparently prompted in part by his friend Jean Genet, a French playwright known for his radical gay views. Newton wrote: “We haven’t established a revolutionary value system; we’re only in the process of establishing it. I don’t remember us ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of injustice. . . . [We Panthers] say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We haven’t said much about the homosexual at all, and we must relate to the homosexual movement because it’s a real thing. And I know through reading and through my life experience, my observations, that homosexuals are

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not given freedom and liberty by anyone in society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society.”24 These statements, and the alliances built to put them into practice, undercut the isolation and freezing of “blackness” that limited the effectiveness of many other black nationalist organizations. To be sure, the Panthers did not always practice what they preached, but they left a legacy of struggle with multiple forms of oppression that has often been lost in histories of Black Power that deal only with race and in recent forms of neonationalism that claim the Panther legacy but remain sexist and homophobic, and treat blackness as a cultural or biological essence rather than as a historically constructed and changing strategic identity. These ideological positions are an important legacy for those who care about progressive change in black America. They can serve as an antidote to insular black separatist versions of nationalism that isolate the black community from the kind of wider alliances that are necessary to bring significant, structural economic and political change. It is important to realize that the Panthers’ larger ideological gestures were always matched by the specific demands of the Ten-­Point Program and by the organization’s everyday actions in bringing food, medicine, education, transportation, child care, and elder care to black communities through the survival programs. These programs did far more than any gun-­toting actions to endear the Panthers to local communities. The Panthers understood that there was no contradiction between important reformist self-­help actions and radical goals. Indeed, they understood that without concrete, immediate improvements in people’s lives, no mass commitment to deeper change would ever occur.

COURTROOM DRAMAS AND ACTS OF REPRESSION The inability, or unwillingness, of the white world and its forces of law and order to appreciate the distinctions that Hilliard and other Panthers labored to explain meant that the real theatricality of the Panthers’ violent rhetoric led to much real violence in the form of gunfights with the police. From the police patrols onward, the Panthers had always been extremely careful to know and work within the law. When the law they were protesting in Sacramento was passed, for example, they immediately stopped their armed police patrols. Not surprisingly, Panther street

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theater, with its inclusion of former real-­life street “hoodlums” in the supporting casts, did not play so well to law enforcement audiences. Not only did the local Oakland police dedicate themselves to stamping out the organization, but also FBI director J. Edgar Hoover soon declared the Panthers the “most dangerous extremist group in America.” Eventually, so many FBI-­placed “extras” (infiltrators) became part of Panther dramas that the question of who was writing the scripts becomes impossible to answer. A murderous cat-­and-­mouse game, in which the cool-­cat Panthers came more and more to look like the mice, began to unfold. It became increasingly difficult for the party to uphold its claim to be working within the letter of the law. Those Sacramento protesters had been arrested, and most had received six-­month sentences. This continued a pattern already set by the Oakland police, and dozens of harassing arrests followed. Most of the trumped-­up arrests ended in acquittals, but even those tied up the organization’s funds and personnel for years. In select cases, one of which involved party chairman Huey Newton himself, arrested for the alleged murder of a police officer, the trials became national and international events. Though eventually acquitted of the crime after a series of trials, Newton spent three years in prison, from 1967 to 1970. Those were crucial years for the party. While Newton continued to try to shape the path of the Panthers from inside prison walls, and a massive “Free Huey” campaign became a major rallying point and fund-­raising source for the group, the loss was considerable. Much of the time Panther theater was reduced to the “radical chic” drawing-­ room dramas lampooned by conservative new journalist Tom Wolfe. These well-­staged shakedowns of rich and guilty white liberals proved effective in raising funds but did little to push the revolution forward.25 Cofounder Bobby Seale also became involved in a major courtroom drama when he and seven white radicals became the notorious Chicago Eight, charged with fomenting the confrontations surrounding the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in 1968. Seale’s codefendants included Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the clown princes of the white New Left and founders of the surrealist, countercultural Youth International Party, or Yippies. The theatrical Yippie organizers came to their trial dressed in costumes evoking the American Revolution and did their best (and their best was very good) to turn the

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Black Panthers invade the California state capitol on May 2, 1967. Courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.

courtroom proceedings into a circus. Denied a change of lawyer, Seale was forced to represent himself in the trial. He soon so irritated the judge, Julius Hoffman (whom Abbie facetiously called Uncle Julie), that he was declared in contempt and ordered bound and gagged in the courtroom. This image of Seale, the sole black defendant, receiving not blind but shackled and gagged justice in the white man’s courtroom played powerfully in the court of black public opinion, confirming the Panthers’ long-­standing claim that they faced only kangaroo courts, not courts of justice. With the Panthers’ key leaders already in jail, the FBI and other agencies unleashed a sweeping, vicious program of repression against the organization and other radical groups in the late 1960s through COINTELPRO (the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program). From 1967 through 1971, COINTELPRO employed more than seven thousand undercover agents and police informers to infiltrate the Panthers and other radical groups, with the mission of disrupting their efforts by any

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means necessary. This included falsifying documents in an attempt to create power struggles within the Panthers and between that organization and other black radical groups. Most COINTELPRO efforts were focused on increasing the level of violence among the Panthers; in at least one case this meant providing dynamite to a Panther chapter.26 The state was attempting to erase the distinction between self-­defense and offense, and it successfully forced a literalization of Panther theater. Pushing the Black Panther Party across the line from symbolic to literal violence was one of the main goals of COINTELPRO. The two most important intellectuals influencing the Black Power movement, Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, both had argued that violence was one of the necessary means of awakening Negroes into the power of blackness. Fanon, writing in the context of the anticolonial struggles of Third World majority populations ousting white minorities, analyzed how in revolutionary situations symbolic violence could turn into armed struggle. But the late 1960s in the United States was not a revolu­ tionary situation in the military sense. The Panthers’ genius was in showing that the threat of violent self-­defense could be used to expose the everyday violence of police brutality and the structural violence of poverty. In March 1968, the Panther minister of information expressed it this way in the party paper: “Let us make one thing crystal clear: We do not claim the right to indiscriminate violence. We seek no bloodbath. We are not out to kill up white people. On the contrary, it is the cops who claim the right to indiscriminate violence and practice it every day. It is the cops who have been bathing black people in blood and who seem bent on killing off black people.”27 Unfortunately, both the police and some elements within the Panthers were not so “crystal clear” on this distinction, and soon a series of not-­so-­revolutionary pitched gun battles began. The government’s efforts to increase the level of violence in the Panthers testify tellingly to the foolishness of violence in a nonrevolutionary situation. Or, in my terms, they testify to the necessity of maintaining the distinction between theatrical violence and violent theatrics. Doing so might have extended the longevity of the Black Panther Party, not to say the lives of many Panther members. Many encounters between police and the party, like the killing of Chicago Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were effectively political assassinations by the alleged upholders of “law and order.”

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Hampton and Clark were shot dead in their beds during a predawn raid in December 1969. Some eighty thousand Chicagoans paid homage to the slain Panthers and checked out for themselves the truth of the police version of events by taking a Panther-­sponsored tour of the scene of the murders. The hundreds of bullet holes that riddled the rooms made it clear just how acts of counterrevolution would be staged. The FBI’s one-­ act drama was the most brutal of all the agency’s acts to suppress the Black Panther Party. Its message needed no theater critic to interpret. Other encounters the Panthers had with law enforcement were more ambiguous or implicated some members of the party in their own undoing. Where claims of self-­defense and rhetorical evocations of revolutionary violence may have stirred “the people,” the actual gun battles that led to so many dead and imprisoned Panthers had a chilling effect on resistance. By the end of 1969, 30 Panthers faced charges in death penalty cases, 40 faced charges that could result in life imprisonment, 55 were awaiting trial for crimes punishable by up to thirty years in prison, and another 155 were in jail or being pursued by the law.28 Many of these Panthers were not as lucky in their verdicts as leader Newton had been; several were still in prison thirty years after their convictions.29 By getting caught up in gunfights with police, the Panthers played into the hands of the state, both because the government’s greater force showed up the weakness of the would-­be revolutionary forces and because the real battle at that moment was still the symbolic one, the battle to shift the consciousness of forces for and against radical change. With unrelenting pressure from the FBI and dozens of other branches of “law enforcement,” including numerous infiltrators urging members of the party toward armed resistance, the Panthers lost that delicate balance achieved by Malcolm X—­knowing the difference between rhetorical violence and very real bullets. Much liberal and some radical critique has faulted the Panthers for their use of violence. But any critique needs to sort out very different kinds of violence in and around the party. I agree with the position taken by one of the Panthers’ most astute recent analysts, Nikhil Pal Singh: Generally, the evocation of trauma and failure is depicted as a question of who was the most violent during the 1960s, a discussion that proceeds as if violence is something transparent, rather than a concept in need of careful contextualization and theorization.

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Dramatic Resistance Indeed, many accounts confirm this by regularly sliding between condemnation of Panther gunplay and criticism of their militant or violent rhetoric, as if these are the same thing, or as if one automatically produces the other. This collapse of politics and poetics spurs obsessional efforts at adjudication, at sorting out the innocent from the guilty, the victims from the villains, and deciding where the Panthers finally fall. The irony of this is that while the Panthers’ rhetoric is often dismissed as inflated, overheated and out of touch, it invariably returns as the implicit cause and/or emblem of an all-­ too-­real body count that effectively ends the discussion. What has resulted is a flattening and even erasure of the richness and ambiguity of the Panthers’ racial and political self-­fashioning, along with a more careful analysis and differentiation of the manifest and symbolic forms of violence that they deployed and confronted.30

As I have suggested, sorting out the “manifest and symbolic forms of violence” in the world of the Panthers is a difficult task. There is no doubt that the party’s performances were riddled with “ambiguities,” not to say contradictions. All sides of those contradictions have lessons to teach, and no side of them should be ignored, in celebration or in condemnation.

CURTAIN TIME: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE PANTHERS The Panthers’ period of greatest influence, roughly 1966–­71, was cut short by external repression and internal battles. Eventually Panthers not only fought and killed other black activists, like those in Ron Karenga’s Los Angeles–­based United Slaves (US), but also fought and killed each other. Feeling under siege from all sides, Newton made a decision in 1972 to further centralize the organization and move into the electoral arena. He asked all Panthers from around the country to move to Oakland to strengthen the electoral base for a run for mayor by Bobby Seale and the city council candidacy of soon-­to-­be Panther party chair Elaine Brown. Though Seale finished second among a host of candidates, he lost a runoff election. Brown too failed in her bid for a spot on the city council. The party began to implode soon after the electoral failure. Paralleling founder Newton’s descent into drug addiction and physical abuse

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of other Panthers, the party continued largely as a shadow of itself. Sorting out the gangsterism from the revolutionism during this phase is not always easy. But it is clear that when the revolutionism was thwarted, a certain amount of gangsterism flourished within the organization. The decline of the party is a sad tale indeed, not just on its own terms but for the ways in which it contributed to the decline in parts of the wider black community from activism to despair to a gang and drug culture that many believe was ignored, if not even fostered, by the federal government.31 Debate continues to swirl as to whether internal dissension or external repression best accounts for the decline of the organization. Certainly the latter exacerbated the former. But it is too simple to let the party off the hook by seeing it purely as a victim. The original paramilitary structure of the party became increasingly centralized and authoritarian in ways that made it easy for paranoia to take root among the leaders. The Panthers’ failure to appreciate the extent of their symbolic power undermined their efforts to delegitimate the state’s monopoly on violence. By playing into the hands of agents provocateurs (“law enforcement” agents paid to infiltrate the group and encourage violence), they left themselves vulnerable to hundreds of arrests and countless legal battles. They fatally confused militancy and militarism. Ultimately, this led to a lot of dead and imprisoned Panthers—­a loss that permanently weakened the movement and sowed seeds of paranoia in the survivors. Strong doses of vanguardist elitism and masculinist egotism often cut leaders off from the grassroots forces in the party, while their hierarchical, clandestine, paramilitary organizational form also bred paranoia that left the Panthers vulnerable to infiltration and disruption. In addition to the structural problems, some of the people attracted to the party, including several in key leadership positions, like Eldridge Cleaver and, in his later days, Newton himself, were “crazy mothafuckas” in far too literal a sense. Their personal pathologies, leading in Cleaver’s case to revolutionary fantasies and in Newton’s case to drug addiction, deeply damaged the organization. If the Panthers had been a more democratic, grassroots organization, such leaders could have been held in check. Instead a star system emerged in Panther theatrics, with figures like Cleaver and Newton acting out a drama of little or no interest to the rest of the party, let alone the rest of black America.

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However, the pathologies of some members should not obscure the dedication to improving the lives of millions of black (and other) Americans that motivated the several thousand still largely unstudied “foot soldiers” of the party. One historian deeply critical of the party’s self-­destructive elitist and authoritarian streak notes, nevertheless, that “the Panthers contributed significantly to making America a more democratic, egalitarian, and humane society. Party members led the movement to end police brutality and create civilian police-­review boards. The BPP’s free breakfast programs became a catalyst for today’s free meals to poor school children. More than most progressive political groups, the Party highlighted, connected, and protested U.S. oppression abroad and U.S. injustice at home.”32 Panthers and Panther associates like Angela Davis also have been at the forefront of the prisoners’ rights movement. That movement continues to grow in the face of the massive expansion of the “prison–­industrial complex,” which has put more young black men in jail than in college. Out of that struggle in turn have arisen Black Lives Matter and other current struggles to resist police abuses and cover-­ups as well as the new wave of white supremacist violence that has been unleashed in the Trump era.

BEYOND THE THEATER OF THE GUN The problem with stressing the most violent scenes in the Black Panthers’ theatrical repertoire is that this approach obscures other important dimensions of the party’s legacy—­for example, Huey Newton’s strong stand against homophobia in mainstream and black communities, and his alliance with the emerging gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. It also tends to obscure the central role of women in the organization and the ways in which these women, and some of the men, challenged “male chauvinism” and misogyny inside and outside the party. Two-­thirds of the party members were women, some of whom held key positions, including, in the case of Elaine Brown, the top position.33 The theater of guns also overshadows the less dramatic, daily work of the party: circulating petitions, making phone calls to the press, hawking the Black Panther newspaper on the streets, serving food in the breakfast program. While there were numerous showboaters in the organization, especially among the men, there were also dedicated women and men

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who brought with them practical organizing skills. Perhaps it is telling that while all the party’s media stars survived the Black Power era, its best grassroots organizer, Fred Hampton, was singled out for police assassination. An overemphasis on violence also obscures the internationalism and the coalitional nature of the Panthers, their alliances with the external and internal Third World. Unlike many strands of black nationalism before, during, and since the Black Power era, Panther nationalism was not based on some unchanging notion of black identity. While the Panthers recognized that mobilizing a sense of pride in blackness was important in the work of organizing their core constituency in the underclass, Panther politics was never an “identity politics.” It involved coalitions with radical white groups and radicals of color in the United States and around the world. An often less remembered aspect of Panther theater is the party’s actions on the world stage, which included enacting foreign policy with regard to Cuba, Algeria, numerous African states, and China. Meetings of Panther leaders with heads of state in these countries dramatized a kind of secession of people of color from the United States and embodied the politics theorized by Newton as “intercommunalism.”34 This was a community-­to-­community connection that bypassed the nation-­state and anticipated the kind of “globalization from below” being enacted by some on the left today. Gun fetishism also obscures the less dramatic but equally important pragmatic side of the party represented by the “survival programs”—­ the free breakfast programs, the schools, elder care, and health clinics. The party’s electoral campaigns, though ultimately unsuccessful, provided another public stage for putting forth key elements of the Panthers’ revolutionary ideas. To romantic nationalists, these are signs of a sellout of the radical movement. In reality, they were among the party’s strongest links to local communities and a key means through which radical ideas were disseminated. Most Panthers saw no contradiction between revolutionary rhetoric and “taking care of business” in the neighborhood through activities too easily labeled as reformist. Newton argued that hungry students are poor students, that the future of black and other poor communities, including future revolutionary possibilities, would be lost if children went hungry. The Panthers characterized the survival programs as socialism in action, but they also made it clear

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Black Panther rally for Huey Newton in New York. Courtesy of Roz Payne.

that these were stopgap measures, not the revolutionary changes they fought for.35 Refusing the easy dichotomy of reform versus revolution, the Panthers’ survival programs offered much-­needed practical services while performing symbolic acts designed to show up the violence done by the lack of such services in black communities within white capitalist America.

POWERS OF CULTURE As historian William Van Deburg puts it, “As a movement in and of culture, Black Power was itself an art form. In the words of Lerone Bennett Jr., it ‘made everything political and everything cultural.’”36 I would add that while the political and the cultural can be collapsed into one by movements in moments of active struggle, they can also be driven asunder again. The message of Black Panther theater is twofold: first, that the cultural form called drama can be a vital political tool; second, that for the cultural to be truly effective politically, it must remain connected to social movement groups with a clear, explicit agenda for structural economic and political change.

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The Panthers’ revolutionary rhetoric was most meaningful when it was tied to their famous Ten-­Point Program and to their survival programs, a stirring mix of concrete demands and utopian vision.37 When they ceased to organize at the grassroots level, they not only stalled the progress of the revolution but also left themselves without the protection once accorded them by the community (at one point early on, for example, community members prevented a planned police raid on party headquarters by massing outside, placing themselves between the Panthers and the police). When the Panthers had been destroyed by COINTELPRO and their own internal difficulties, it did not prove difficult to turn revolutionary style into a mere style revolution. The Panthers’ revolutionary Stagolee was turned back into an apolitical black dude, or, worse still, into a cop, through a wave of “blaxploitation” films in the late 1970s, such as Shaft. African garb (dashiki robes for men, headdresses for women, tiki necklaces for both) and “natural” hair (mimicking the revo­ lutionary “Afro” of Angela Davis and Panther women) soon became the commodified signs of blackness empty of political meaning. To paraphrase the words of Panther Bobby Seale, power does not grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki. But, contra Seale’s pal Huey Newton’s paraphrase of Mao, neither does power grow out of the barrel of a gun, at least not when the other side has an endless and more powerful supply of guns. The real weapon of the Panthers was a sense of how to deploy theatrically powerful imagery to evoke a sense of Black Power in the black underclass. The survival programs and the Ten-­Point Program’s call for “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace,” when combined with dramatic images of black women and men standing up to the powers of the U.S. government, helped create a new kind of black person. At their best, the Panthers dramatically melded questions of black identity with questions of economic, political, and cultural change. By contrast, theatricality without organizing severely limits the depth of change. Put in the terms of this analysis, the Panthers provided too few spaces for average black Americans to take part as actors, not spectators, in their dramatic actions for change. As playwright Jean Genet, for a time a close confidant of Panther leaders, put it, “Wherever they went [in the world], Americans were the masters, so the Panthers would do their best to terrorize the masters

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Angela Davis and Jean Genet. Courtesy of Robert Cohen

by the only means available to them. Spectacle.”38 By at times confusing their spectacular revolutionary theater with a revolutionary situation, the Panthers ultimately squandered a good deal of their “black power.” But as Frantz Fanon wrote in that key 1960s text The Wretched of the Earth, “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it transforms individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors with the gran­diose glare of history’s floodlights upon them.”39 For a brief but utterly transformative moment, the Black Panthers turned the glare of history’s floodlights on the Third World inside and outside the United States and turned many colonized spectators into privileged actors on the world stage.

PANTHER LEGACIES: FROM HIP-­HOP SCENARIOS TO THE ART OF BLACK LIVES MATTER A vast amount of cultural criticism, particularly from black feminist or “womanist” authors and from LGBTQ2+ folks in the black community,

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has profoundly rethought the nature and limits of black nationalism in the years since the Panthers’ heyday. The party struggled more than many organizations of the day against sexism, or, as it was more often called, “male chauvinism,” and women played key roles in the party even when they were absent from leadership positions. But the nation’s pervasive sexism took a toll within the black nationalist movement. And, as is often the case with movements, the very successes that were achieved eventually became problems. In the case of the Black Power movement, successes resulted in a certain level of black nationalism becoming “common sense” in black communities. But “common sense,” as Antonio Gramsci argued, is the seat of both useful and useless ideas. In becoming common sense, less useful ideas become deeply entrenched, taken for granted, and difficult to dislodge. The diffusion of Black Power movement ideas into everyday life, as Wahneema Lubiano, among others, has argued, has led to both positive values and dangerously unreflective ones.40 In particular, certain sexist, homophobic, and essentialist dimensions of Black Power have often carried over in the process of translation from movement ideology to common sense. I want to end this chapter by looking at one “dramatic” site where this positive and negative process is at work, the cultural formation surrounding rap music and hip-­hop culture, including its extension into the movement known as Black Lives Matter. One key factor in the relative success of social movements seeking to better the lives of poor, marginalized people in the 1960s was the widespread perception that the great American economic pie was getting bigger and bigger. And this perception was generally accurate; the period between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 saw the largest, most sustained economic growth in human history. The American economy, initially free of any competition given the devastating effects of World War II on other national economies, was booming, which meant that tremendous financial gains were being reaped—­although unevenly, to be sure. But by the mid-­1970s, President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” was long gone, and soon a war on the poor was taking its place. Amid a sense that the pie had stopped growing, fear of competition from minorities fueled a white backlash that eventually segued into the “voodoo economics” of President Ronald Reagan, whose policies boldly

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robbed the poor to fatten the rich. Poverty reached devastating new levels in the inner cities as whites flocked in great numbers to the suburbs, leaving behind tax bases too small to support even the basic needs of schools and neighborhood safety for the people of color who remained. Out of these conditions, there emerged in the late 1970s a powerful cultural force in black and Latino communities, creating art forms—­ especially rap/hip-­hop music—­that had strong links to black and brown nationalism. The rise of rap music and hip-­hop culture out of the devastation of inner-­city ghettos and barrios was from the beginning a highly schizophrenic phenomenon. The first two rap songs to make the move from neighborhood folk culture to the national pop culture reflect this split nature. One of those songs, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang, was, as the title implies, a fairly lighthearted, commercially marketable piece of fluff. The other song, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, had, as its title implies, something to say—­it delivered a strong, clear message of anger about the horrendous conditions in the inner city. For the next two decades, complicated variations on rap as delight and rap as political message vied for the airwaves. The two sides of rap, of course, intermingled, for the line between message and entertainment is never absolute.41 Certain early rap groups and artists like Public Enemy, Paris, and Dead Prez clearly took some of their messages and dramatic imagery from the Black Panthers. Their efforts displayed both the strengths and the weaknesses of rap as a political art and the Panthers as role models. On the one hand, messages found in some rap lyrics and images in rap videos played a role in keeping black nationalist discourses generally and the name Black Panthers specifically alive during a movement doldrums period. At the same time, while paying homage to the Panthers, many rappers displayed an ideological confusion that revealed their limited understanding of the Panthers and sometimes replicated their least admirable dimensions. The work of the late Tupac Shakur illustrates several levels of contradiction. Shakur’s stories of black pride and empowerment were important for many young black men and women. At the same time, his songs, and even more his videos, often featured displays of commercial sexism and materialism. And his otherwise positive hip-­hop homage to women like his Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur, inadvertently

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played into a family-­values scenario worthy of a conservative Republican.42 Other black nationalist rappers have had too little to say about sexism and homophobia among their fellow rap artists, and have sometimes shown evidence of both in their own music, despite corrective jabs from early feminist rappers/singers like Queen Latifah, Salt-­N-­Pepa, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Me’Shell Ndegeocello, India.Arie, Zap Mama, and Roxanne Shante, among others. Likewise, as Angela Davis has noted, Public Enemy sometimes deified and reified the masculinist paramilitary “look” of the Panthers, rather than their political substance. Ideological confusion is also demon­ strated when artists such as self-­proclaimed Panther rapper Paris embrace the socially conservative Nation of Islam along with the revolutionary socialist Panthers.43 But, as I have shown, the Panthers too were riddled with contradictions. Certain rap acts remain among the most important forces of resistance in black communities. Rappers are among the most likely voices to spark new national movements for economic, social, and political change. Many are doing just that now at the local level. From the Stop the Violence movement of the 1980s to the Speak Truth to Power Tour in 2003 to Kendrick Lamar and rappers who support Black Lives Matter, conscious hip-­hop has embraced the best legacy of the Black Panthers—­those points where brilliant theatricality engages with movement action. Music-­based scenes provide one key link between the Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement. The origins of the Black Lives Matter movement and its subsequent trajectory are complicated, but the story of the movement’s naming is clear. In July 2013, Alicia Garza, a longtime activist and special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, posted a “love letter to Black people” on Facebook in the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot black teen Trayvon Martin in Florida. She ended the post with “I am surprised at how little Black lives matter.” In response, one of Garza’s good friends, Patrisse Cullors, coined the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag went viral, and soon Garza, Cullors, and a third friend, Opal Tometi, found themselves building the hashtag into an organization. All three women were longtime activists dealing with a range of social issues, including feminist and LGBTQ2+ issues in the black community, poverty, and prison reform. The critiques of masculinism, sexism, and heteronormativity in

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black nationalism by Davis and many others also carried over into the new movement, which was sparked by and has been led to a large degree by queer women of color. Over the next several months the network of Black Lives Matter affiliates grew to more than thirty independent groups around the United States and Canada. The Black Lives Matter hashtag was almost immediately attacked from the right with a dismissive, intentionally misinterpreting rejoinder: All Lives Matter.44 The Black Lives Matter hashtag focused concern, anger, frustration, fear, and a profound desire for change that had been welling up among African Americans and supporters from other communities in response to the mounting numbers of apparent murders of black men and women by individuals supposedly hired to “serve and protect” all citizens. The verdict in the Trayvon Martin case was followed by the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, each of which sparked major waves of protest. Soon the movement brought to public attention the names of dozens of men and women of color who had died at the hands of police officers. The high-­profile cases of Martin, Brown, and Garner led to the unmasking of a long and bloody history of questionable deaths involving law enforcement.45 While Black Lives Matter is the name that many people use to refer to this new phase of antiracist struggle, as the cofounders of the BLM network would be the first to note, the movement is much bigger than any one organization. Some of the many groups at work on these issues support the coalition Movement for Black Lives.46 Ultimately, the name is less important than the fact that protest quickly evolved into a new phase of a movement that has been going on since the first Africans revolted on the ships carrying them into enslavement in the “new world” in the 1600s. While the current movement’s initial focus was on the shooting of unarmed African Americans by police officers, it was clear from the beginning that those slayings are part of a much larger set of issues affecting black lives. Central among these is the incarceration of black men and women at rates far higher than those for whites, including whites who commit the same or similar crimes. African Americans make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for close to 40 percent of the prison population. Numerous careful university and government studies have demonstrated that

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the higher incarceration rates for blacks stem in no small part from deep racial biases in the American judicial system. Since the 1970s, Angela Davis has focused much of her activism and her scholarly work on prisoners and the prison system in the United States. This work was sparked in part by Davis’s own prison experience and her connection to many Panthers who were incarcerated as part of the concerted law enforcement conspiracy to destroy the party. Both Davis’s work and her presence have helped shape twenty-­first-­century activist movements like Black Lives Matter that are targeting the continuing economic, political, and judicial injustices that are devastating many communities of color. Racism in policing agencies has been well documented at all levels—­ local, state, and federal. This racism seems to have increased rather than decreased in recent years, though it has been suggested that increases in the reporting of racist incidents are at least in part responsible for the higher numbers observed. One possible factor that may be contributing to an increase in racist incidents is the conscious strategy of some white supremacist groups to infiltrate law enforcement.47 Looking at the larger picture, the antiracist movement argues that systemic racism at all levels of U.S. society has led to the disproportionate level of poverty suffered by African Americans, poverty that in many ways drives the crime statistics. One of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, and the incarceration statistics for African American females are also appalling. To contextualize these numbers, it is crucial to examine what scholars have come to call the prison–­ industrial complex, a term that expresses the idea that increases in the numbers of prisoners are driven in part by the increases in profit their incarceration generates for the private corporations associated with the prison system.48 Prisons were once wholly governmental institutions, but over time, first parts of prison systems and then entire prisons have been privatized, turned into profit-­making entities. Private prisons have been immensely profitable in part because prisoner labor can be exploited; paid only a small percentage of what workers outside prison would be paid for doing the same jobs, prisoners constitute what is virtually a slave labor force. The prison–­industrial complex also includes a whole web of corporations providing medical supplies, food, clothing, and a host of incarceration-­related services. Since the 1990s, prisons in the United

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States have become a major growth industry, one that can continue to grow only if the number of inmates grows. This situation has created a hideous incentive for certain corporations to lower costs by decreasing the quality of prison life at the same time they seek ever more effective ways to exploit prison labor. The term prison–­industrial complex is meant to evoke the concept of the military–­industrial complex, a phenomenon that President Eisen­ hower warned the nation about in 1961. Eisenhower noted how private defense contractors are driven to push for ever greater military spending not because it is truly needed for national security but because they seek to increase the profits of the corporations that make weapons, planes, tanks, ships, and so on. In a parallel way, the prison–­industrial complex effectively pushes, both directly and indirectly, for an ever-­higher prison population to increase profits. Tied into this logic is a deeply racist system in which people of color are incarcerated at rates far higher than those for whites, even for the same crimes, with the tacit understanding that incarcerating nonwhites is far more socially acceptable to the dominant white population than would be imprisoning whites at similar rates. One recent example of this logic at work is the contrast between the criminalizing approach taken in response to the crack epidemic in communities of color and the medical approach taken in response to the opioid epidemic, which is more associated with white communities. The Movement for Black Lives has therefore placed reform of the prison system and the associated criminal justice system at the core of its demands, alongside a demand for an end to police brutality and police-­ delivered murder, racial profiling, and random harassment of men and women of color. The movement recognizes that an entire interlocking system must be addressed. This includes the fact that mass incarceration of young black and brown men and women contributes significantly to the impoverishment of many communities of color by removing wealth-­ creating individuals and generating large numbers of youths who find themselves unemployable because of their records of incarceration. Like the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter and the wider Movement for Black Lives have received a significant amount of criticism around questions of violence, criticism magnified in this era of online trolls and starkly polarized political discourse. Despite intense negative attention from right-­wing forces, according to polling conducted by the

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prestigious Pew Research Center, the movement has maintained a quite positive image, even after several years of highly confrontational protests. During the initial stages of the movement, Pew found that 65 percent of African Americans supported it, with about 12 percent opposed. Among whites, 40 percent supported the movement, and 28 percent were opposed. The rest either had no strong opinion or did not even know about the movement. For a highly confrontational and disruptive movement, these are strong positive numbers. They are in fact stronger in some respects than polling figures for the now universally praised Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.49 By 2017, 57 percent of whites opposed BLM, while more than 80 percent of African Americans approved. The shift in white opinion was due in part to a vicious misinformation campaign directed against the movement by right-­wing media (Fox News and Breitbart, especially) during the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election.50 Polls also showed that half of all Americans believed that the criminal justice system is unfair to minorities. That number surely reflects the work done by BLM and associated forces. It also clearly reflects the deep social divide in U.S. politics overall in the second decade of the twenty-­first century. Even during the period when it was most positively viewed, BLM had to fend off many kinds of attacks, including the claim that the group promotes violence. In an eloquent rejoinder to these critics, Simone Sebastian pointed out in a Washington Post op-­ed that the now-­revered Martin Luther King Jr. was widely reviled during the Civil Rights era and faced similar claims that he was a promoter of violence. Sebastian rightly noted that King often courted violence in his opponents and that the violent acts of white racists as well as those of blacks not asso­ ciated with any Civil Rights organizations were nonetheless blamed on the movement.51 BLM participants have responded to critiques by opponents and sympathizers alike by disseminating information on the ways in which the movement has been misunderstood or mischaracterized.52 They refute the claim that the movement is “leaderless” by asserting that it is in fact “leaderful,” and they state clearly that they respectfully reject the idea that they need a single charismatic leader such as a Dr. King. In this they resemble SNCC’s critique of hierarchical leadership, one reason many SNCC veterans have collectively endorsed BLM.53 BLM

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participants also dismiss as palpably untrue the more general charge that the movement rejects all Civil Rights movement precedents. They point out that they have learned from previous black struggles, but they recognize the need to evolve their own period-­specific ideas, tactics, and methods of organizing. The broad Movement for Black Lives continues to build on black nationalist and Civil Rights traditions and legacies but also recognizes the limits of those legacies, particularly around issues of gender and sexuality. In the realm of the arts, movement participants also recognize a constituency musically moved by new freedom songs coming mostly out of hip-­hop. And they seek to adapt to new environments by using cell phone cams, social media sites, and the whole panoply of new media to bring their case to the public as directly as possible. The movement takes on multiple issues using a variety of tactics, including marches, direct action, protest art, and lobbying for specific policy changes at local, state, and federal levels.54 The dramatic work of the movement’s activists has certainly played a role in bringing to the surface the ongoing racism that erupted with renewed force during the rise to power of the Trump regime. These efforts have made it clear that the claim that the United States has entered a “postracial” era is false. While BLM’s continuities with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements are apparent, and most of the predominantly young activists acknowledge important elements of that legacy, they also point out significant differences between their movement and those of the past. It is no accident that one of the group’s founders works for an organi­ zation named for one of the greatest activists of the Civil Rights era, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. But in the words of one BLM activist, “This ain’t yo mama’s Civil Rights movement.” Rahiel Tesfamariam explains what she means by that phrase: In the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the new movement for black lives was radicalized by legions of poor and working-­class youth who forced the nation to grapple with black rage. They fearlessly confronted a militarized police force, tear gas, snipers and tanks designed for warfare while Americans watched on their television screens. These young people, including countless women and LGBTQ people who have organized the movement’s most powerful acts of resistance, have changed the predominant image of black activism in America.55

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Tesfamariam might well have added that the movement’s sound track has changed too, from freedom songs and soul to hip-­hop and neo–­rhythm and blues. And the theater of black empowerment is most frequently expressed through the medium of music videos. Strong womanist statements by artists like M.I.A., Yo-­Yo, Nicki Minaj, Janelle Monáe, and Beyoncé help to ensure that the new movement will fight sexism along with racism. By mid-­2018, more than two dozen songs and videos overtly supporting Black Lives Matter had been released, including works by major artists like Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, and Beyoncé. One of the most moving pieces was created by the brother and sister of Eric Garner, the black man from Staten Island who famously choked out the words “I can’t breathe” as he was manhandled by police and died. “I Can’t Breathe” is also the title of their song, which includes the chorus “I can hear my brother crying ‘I can’t breathe’ / Now I’m in this trouble and I can’t leave / We all know the solution but they blame you and me / We ain’t gonna stop, until all us free.” Undoubtedly, the single most widely circulated artistic intervention into Black Lives Matter is Beyoncé’s video for her song “Formation,” along with her highly theatrical presentation of the song during the halftime show at the 2016 Super Bowl. The version presented at the football stadium paid clear homage to the Black Panthers, with dancers wearing black berets over Afros and giving Black Power salutes. For some observers, the message of the song was undermined in this per­ formance by the highly sexualized female dancers’ costumes, but others read the display as part of Beyoncé’s call for black women to fully and positively embrace their sexuality outside the male gaze. In a perfect storm of timing, the video for “Formation” dropped during Mardi Gras week and Black History Month, on the late Trayvon Martin’s birthday, and just before the Super Bowl gig. The video begins with a male voice asking what happened to New Orleans, as Beyoncé is seen lying on a half-­submerged New Orleans Police Department cruiser, which by the end sinks beneath her weight—­clear swipes at authorities’ racist handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the lyrics celebrate Beyoncé’s Louisiana Creole and Alabama “Negro” roots and embrace her black-­coded physical features and her female-­centric sexual power, the imagery even more directly says Black Lives Matter. The most direct image shows a very young black kid in a hoodie (à la Trayvon) facing a

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line of police in riot gear; as a sign flashes the words “Stop Shooting Us,” the cops in formation hold up their hands as if in surrender. The video repeatedly jabs at folks who don’t think black lives matter, and calls for black folks to get in formation for resistance to racism and sexism.56 Looking for ideological consistency in a rock video is a hopeless task, especially in one that nearly broke the Internet and has been seen by millions of people and was even imitated by the First Lady of the United States. “Formation” has been both widely celebrated and widely attacked, and the video has been interpreted in wildly different ways, but what would the Panthers have given to be able to reach that many people with their messages? One of the most astute and relevant interpretations of the video is no doubt that offered by BLM cofounder Alicia Garza, who, while not ignoring the imperfections of the song, welcomes Beyoncé to the movement: “Movements are multi-­faceted, and never without contradictions. Even the most radical among us grapple with those contradictions. That’s why, even with the criticisms [of the “Formation” video]—­ some of which I agree with—­we as a movement should celebrate that we have helped organize arguably one of the most iconic celebrities in the world to use her extensive platform to celebrate black resistance, to place herself in history as one who is resisting, and who puts her money where her mouth is. It’s not perfect, but none of us are.”57 Likewise, Black Lives Matter, like the Panthers, is not perfect. But no movement is, and this one has been key to putting vital issues of racialized criminal (in) justice on the nation’s agenda.

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3 THE POETICAL IS THE POLITICAL

FEMINIST POETRY AND THE POETICS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS For women, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, and then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought. —­Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider

No social movement in the past fifty years has had a greater cultural impact than the women’s movement, which reemerged in the 1960s and has grown in multifaceted ways into the present. The tremendous impacts of feminism on everyday life include, but extend far beyond, changes in laws, regulations, and political institutions. The texture of the life of every single person living in the United States has been changed by the new feminism. Here is a short list of ideas about women that were unimaginably radical for most American men and women to think, let alone endorse, up to the 1960s, but are now viewed largely as commonsense notions: • Women as a group have a right to earn as much as men. • Women in traditionally defined women’s jobs (nurses, maids, elementary school teachers, child-­care workers) should be paid at rates comparable to those paid to men who do similar work. 85

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• There are few, if any, jobs that women can’t do. • Women should have access to higher education equal to that of men, including in fields traditionally reserved for men. • Female writers, artists, and musicians should have respect, support, and opportunities equal to those given males in these cultural fields. • Women are entitled to sexual pleasure as much as men are. • Women should not be confined to working only within the home but should be free to choose to do so, and that choice should be respected. • Women and men should share household and parenting work. • Women don’t need romantic relationships with men to be happy. • Treating women as mere sex objects is wrong. • Women should not be subject to sexual harassment in the workplace or in school. • Girls and women should be encouraged to engage in sports. • Women should have equal power in interpersonal relationships with men. • Women have a role in the military. • Women have a right to feel safe from the threat of rape. • Battering women is a political issue, not a personal matter. • Women have a right to be part of any decisions about if and when they have children. • Women have as much of a place in the business world and the political world as men do.

Before the women’s movement reemerged in the mid-­1960s, not one of these ideas was widely held by men or by women in the United States; most would have considered them unacceptable. Today, these are ideas that most Americans embrace, although many are still not fully realized. As with most social movements, however, while people came to support these views, many continue to distance themselves from the means by which the ideas came into being—­feminist activism—­as something too radical to identify with. In this chapter I will trace the social movement process by which the once radical idea that women were entitled to equality with men moved from the margins to the center, from the unimaginable to common sense. I will begin by describing the general contours of the women’s movement, and then use feminist poetry as a case study for how feminist ideas were formed in women’s movement cultures and subsequently

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projected out into the wider culture. One key aspect of this process was something called “consciousness-­raising.” Feminist consciousness-­ raising in the late 1960s involved women meeting in small discussion/ action groups to share their personal experiences in order to analyze them and identify common political and structural sources of inequality for women. Consciousness-­raising, while certainly not the only method used by the women’s movement, touched all realms of feminist action. Compared to the drama of sit-­ins and other acts of civil disobedience, or the shock of tragic shoot-­outs with the police, the poetic “dramas of consciousness-­raising” described in this chapter may at first sound quite tame. But part of my point is to suggest that they are anything but tame in their effects. Feminists did and do engage in many large, dynamic public demonstrations, and “zap actions” (small group acts of civil disobedience) were a key part of the movement, especially in the early years. These included the infamous attack on the Miss America pageant in 1968 that earned feminists the misnomer “bra burners” (no bras were burned, but many were thrown into a “freedom trash can” to symbolize the throwing off of the constraints of male-­dominated notions of femininity and women’s body image). But to argue that poems are every bit as dramatic as these demonstrations, or as confrontations with police, is to make a feminist point: what counts as dramatic has often been defined in limiting ways based on male-­centered visions of heroic performance. If the goal is to change the world, there is reason to believe that publicly performed or privately read poems have been a force as powerful as any other. Before the 1960s poetry was still mainly a genteel, feminized but male-­dominated form, and that aura still lingers around it. But there was nothing genteel about the raucous, often sexually frank, and always politically charged poetry that came out of the women’s movement. Moving poetry from polite lecture halls and quiet living rooms out into the streets was part of many 1960s movements, but no one did it more intensely or effectively than the poets of the women’s movement, and in doing so they reclaimed public space as women’s space. Consciousness-­raising was especially important in that key feminist theoretical act of challenging the boundaries of what counted as “political” by rethinking the border between public and private life. One of the best-­known slogans to emerge out of the new women’s movement was “The personal is political.” The basic argument was that, given the

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historical separation of the Western world into a male public sphere (of business, art, and government) and a female private sphere (of domestic and family issues), the full range of ways in which women were oppressed could not be addressed without a shift in the definition of politics to include the “personal” private sphere. This decidedly did not mean that the movement was uninterested in public issues; rather, the point was that even those public issues needed to be rethought in terms that refused the easy separation between personal and political realms. On the one hand, the movement sought to give women the right to access all the goods of the public sphere: equal access to education, good jobs, fair wages, positions of political power, and so forth. And on the other hand, it sought to redefine the “personal” private sphere, where many dimensions of gender relations were formed, as a “political” sphere of discussion and contestation.

“POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY”: POEMS AND/AS CONSCIOUSNESS-­RAISING Consciousness-­raising was crucial in forming feminist thought on a whole range of issues, from economics to government to education, but it was particularly useful in giving a name to the “nameless” forms of oppression felt in realms previously relegated to the nonpolitical arena of “personal” relations. The premise of this chapter comes primarily from an essay by feminist poet/activist/theorist Audre Lorde, quoted in the chapter epigraph. As a child of Jamaican immigrants, a working-­class black woman, a mother, a lesbian, and a socialist, Lorde richly embodied the complex multiplicities within and around feminism. In her landmark essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde provides one of the strongest and clearest cases for the value of consciousness-­raising without ever using the word. What she describes instead is the process of writing a poem. This is no coincidence, I will argue, but rather a convergence because both consciousness-­raising and poetry writing make the subjective objective, make the inner world of “personal” experience available for public “political” discussion. While poetry is often thought of as the pure expression of personal feelings, only very bad poetry fits that description. Good poetry makes personal experience available to others by giving it an outward form.

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As I look at poetry in this chapter as one key place where the ideas, attitudes, positions, and actions of the women’s movement were formed, expressed, and circulated to wider communities, I will also be using poetry as a metaphor for the larger process of inventing feminist analysis and diffusing feminist ideas and actions throughout the culture. The modern women’s movement has never fit the mold of social movement theory very well, partly because that theory still largely holds to the division between the cultural and the political that the women’s movement has done so much to challenge. The women’s movement can be and has been forced into that older mold, but in that process much of the nature, power, and influence of the movement is lost. No movement shows more clearly what is left out of the social movement story when the full range of culture is not explored.1 Some social scientists divide social movement activity into (serious) “instrumental” social and political action and (merely) “expressive” cultural activity. We will never find the real women’s movement if we use these categories. Culture was a prime “instrument” of change for the movement, not some decorative, “expressive” addition. So-­called cultural activity, or what might more accurately be called “cultural politics,” created changes in consciousness that provided the basis for demands for legislative and other forms of political change. And changes in consciousness were even more important in shaping behavioral change in those “personal” realms that feminist consciousness-­raising redefined as “political,” such as family life; male–­female interactions in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room; female–­female solidarity; female bodily self-­image; and women’s right to reproductive decision making. Feminist cultural activity also brought attention to the politics of cultural sites between government and the private realm: the workplace, the medical office, the classroom, the church. Culture can be defined both as a kind of action in itself and as all those meaning-­making processes that make any kind of acting in the world possible. It is surely possible to “act thoughtlessly,” but we gen­ erally denigrate such actions and claim to prefer consciously “thought-­ out” actions. Much of our behavior is driven by social norms that we do not think about. However, movements, especially movements like feminism, with a strong interest in reshaping culture, are thoughtful about those actions we take for granted most of the time. They are of

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great importance precisely because they are one of the key sites where resocialization, or reeducation, is particularly intensive and extensive.2 Only the dead parts of a culture are merely “expressive.” Culture is fundamentally a creative process, a ceaseless process of unmaking old meanings and making new ones, unmaking old ways of being, thinking, and acting and making newer ones. Social movement theorists Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman have offered the useful term cognitive praxis to describe the ways in which movements bring into the world new ideas that have great, dare I say instrumental, impact. In an even broader sense, movements engage in many varieties of “cultural praxis” or “cultural poetics”—­the generation of new ideas and also new “structures of feeling,” new ways of being and seeing, new thought-­ feelings and felt-­thoughts. In this sense, the phrase “poetry of women’s liberation” refers both to actual poems and to a larger “cultural poetics” of social change. Culture, to paraphrase Lorde, is not a luxury for feminism; it is a material force at the heart of the movement.

ROOTS AND STRANDS OF THE NEW FEMINISM(S) The new energy around the rights and power of women that came into focus in the late 1960s is sometimes called the “second wave” of feminism, in recognition of earlier, “first-­wave” efforts that began in the United States in the mid-­nineteenth century and culminated with women’s gaining the right to vote, established in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.3 While useful in connecting the new movement to the past, the term second wave has also been criticized for linking the movement to the limitations of the earlier phase, especially with regard to racism and class inequality, limitations that continued into the more recent period.4 The “waves” story has served to marginalize the key roles played by women of color in feminist organizing across the centuries. But it is less the wave metaphor than who defines the content of the metaphor that is at stake. Those critical of the whiteness of the waves have sometimes inadvertently erased the important role played by women of color of all classes, as well as working-­class white women, in both “waves,” despite racism and class privilege, and their increasingly central role in what is sometimes called the third wave of feminism, currently under way. As feminist theorist Ednie Garrison has

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argued, the wave metaphor may need to be reinterpreted rather than abandoned—­seen not as a solid wall of (white) water but instead more like radio waves emanating from and traveling out in many different directions.5 While the systematic denigration of women that came to be known as sexism was close to a universal female condition in the 1960s, different women experienced sexism in very different ways. Because feminist consciousness emerges out of the specific, material conditions of particu­ lar women, there are many different origins for the women’s movement(s) that arose during that era. Differences in class, race, region, nationality, and sexuality led to very different ways of articulating the nature and needs of women. Conflicts within feminism around these and a host of other social differences have been extremely difficult to resolve, and many remain unresolved to this day. But the struggle to address the differences among women has also led to ever-­broadening constituencies committed to equality for all women. The new women’s activism that sprang up in the 1960s not only came from many different social locations but also took many different forms. Some movement historians divide these forms too neatly into categories—­“liberal feminism,” “radical feminism,” “socialist feminism,” “cultural feminism,” and the like. In reality there was much crossover and overlap of people and ideas in the various kinds of organizations and approaches. (Such crossover is typical of social movement organizations, which tend to exist as overlapping clusters rather than as wholly distinct groups.) Movement historians Myra Marx Ferree and Beth Hess argue convincingly that the tendencies in feminist thinking should not be seen as “branches,” since branches of a tree remain separate and distinct; rather, they should be conceived as “strands,” since strands weave together but may also unravel at certain points.6 Common delineators used for the general strands of the new feminist activism include “reformist” and “revolutionary,” “bureaucratic” and “collectivist,” “liberal” and radical,” and “equal rights” and “women’s liberationist.” As Katie King suggests, these categories are far more easily seen in retrospect than they were in the heat of early struggles to define a new feminism.7 Some new feminist groups focused primarily on reforming the gov­ernment in ways that would make it more favorable to women. This tendency eventually coalesced around large organizations like the

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National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women’s Political Action Caucus (WPAC), and the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). At other times and for other issues, movement activists preferred to organize themselves into smaller, less hierarchical groups, which Steven Buechler has characterized as “movement communities,” as opposed to more formal “movement organizations.”8 In some instances, feminist activism has been embedded in struggles around racial and class oppression in which gender cannot be neatly isolated as a factor (a variable, in social science lingo). At times feminists have worked in separatist groups centered in ethnic identity, class, nationality, or sexual orientation, while at other times they have organized in groups and coalitions that cut across these differences. Similarly, sometimes feminists have worked for specific, limited reforms, while at other times they have called for more sweepingly radical change of whole systems of male domination and the larger race–­class systems in which they are embedded. Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval has argued that from the perspective of U.S. feminists of color, these various elements of feminism may not be seen as opposed schools but rather as a tool kit of tactics to be used in various combinations depending on the issues and conditions at hand.9 One key source of the new feminist energy that arose in the 1960s was community organizing among working-­class women of color. Not necessarily articulated as feminist struggle, this important strand has often been ignored or downplayed in stories of the women’s movement centered in the experiences of middle-­class white women. Women struggling for economic survival in black, Native American, Latino/a, Asian/Pacific American, and working-­class white communities never easily accepted gendered limits on their actions and often realized that sex­ism inhibited their efforts to fight against the racial and class oppression faced by their communities. They formed activist groups like ANC Mothers Anonymous and the National Welfare Rights Organization that forged a feminist path within other movements, including the labor movement. Race-­based power movements often drew the first loyalty of women of color. Women played key roles in all these struggles but also often found themselves struggling against male dominance within the racial revolution. Some asserted themselves within ethnic nationalist struggles; others formed explicitly feminist groups of color like the

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National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Collective, Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, Asian Sisters, and Women of All Red Nations (WARN). These groups were a key force of antisexist action and codified a long history of struggling simultaneously with the intersections of gender, race, and class long before white feminist theory began to recite this mantra.10 From the beginning, the women’s movement—­or, more accurately, women’s movements—­emerged from within and was entangled with a host of other social movements. While for some middle-­ class white women these other movements provided merely models to appropriate, for working-­class white women and women of color there could be no disentangling of the struggle against racial and class oppression from the struggle against gender oppression. Black feminist Frances M. Beal referred to the condition of women of color as “double jeopardy,” and a similar case of “double jeopardy” characterizes the position of white, middle-­class lesbians, while working-­ class lesbians and lesbians of color face even greater difficulties (triple jeopardy?).11 While stereotyped dismissal homophobically characterizes all feminists as lesbians, in fact lesbians had to fight their way into recognition in feminist organizations. In the most notorious example, Betty Friedan, cofounder and first president of NOW, referred to lesbians as a “lavender menace” whose visible presence in the movement could damage efforts by feminists to achieve legitimacy. When warning of this menace, Friedan assumed she was speaking of women outside her organization, but not long after, in a classic “zap” action, lesbians within NOW turned off the lights at a meeting, took off their coats, and had a mass “coming out” party, wearing shirts bearing the slogan “Lavender Menace” and taking over the meeting. Lesbians of color within ethnic nationalist and heteronormative feminist groups met similar resistance and offered similar challenges, most forcefully through ideas and actions pioneered by the black feminist Combahee River Collective. Feminist theory written or inspired by lesbians of color came to show brilliantly that racism, sexism, and heterosexism are intimately tied together, that fighting homophobia is a key element of fighting for women’s equality, and thus that struggles for gay/lesbian rights before and during the rise of what came to be narrowly defined by some as “the” women’s movement played a crucial role in the wider struggle for gender equality.

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All of the diverse emergent groups and subgroups of feminists included women who had experienced relative freedom and empowerment on the home front during World War II. During the war, women were recruited to fill a variety of previously male-­identified jobs in factories, government, and business. The poster “girl” for this process was the stereotypically young, white “Rosie the Riveter,” but in fact women of all races and classes took part in wartime employment. When the war ended, most of these women were summarily drummed out of their new jobs. Middle-­class white women were told to return to the home as “housewives.” Many working-­class women became feminists when they saw that their once highly touted contributions to the economy were being reduced or ridiculed and that their paychecks were shrinking as they lost men’s jobs and men’s wages. Many women of color who had filled higher-­paying factory jobs during the war were forced back into domestic service as maids or had to return to lower-­paid jobs as waitresses, cooks, or janitors—­a different form of “redomestication” to “women’s work” as food makers and cleaners. After the war, a vast government and corporate public relations campaign was put in place to turn Rosie the Riveter into Dolly the Homemaker, or Maria the Maid, but not all middle-­class women embraced the transformation, and most working-­class white women and women of color who survived on work outside their own homes could not afford to embrace it. There had been a 50 percent increase in the number of married women in the workforce during the war, and of the women workers polled at the end of the war in 1945, more than 75 percent expressed a desire to keep their jobs. Despite the campaign to redomesticate women, a significant number remained in the labor force, and some middle-­class women who did not remain regretted their decision when domesticity proved considerably less satisfying than promised. Thus, many of the women who would reanimate feminism in the 1960s and beyond, including many middle-­class women, were working women or had grown up with working mothers. Redomestication also included a huge rise in the birthrate after the war, the famous “baby boom” that gave its name to the generation that came of age in the 1960s. Much of the baby boom occurred among middle-­class families in the new social space of the suburbs. A deeply

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racist “white flight” from increasingly multiracial urban areas played a major role in the quick growth of these new suburban spaces. Suburbs were built upon the new model of the isolated “nuclear” family, in contrast to the centuries-­old model of the extended family, with many aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and other relatives living together or nearby. Many women experienced life in the suburbs as isolating and depressing, and were unconvinced by the new ideology of “feminine mystique” that celebrated the joys of housewifery.12 For these women, the problem was not the role of homemaking, but the claim that this was the only “natural” or “proper” role for women, even as actual homemaking was trivialized in the new suburban system. Many middle-­class women experiencing these conditions joined the fight for equal rights, and many passed on to their daughters an even stronger will to fight for radical improvements in the conditions of women’s lives. President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Committee on the Status of Women, formed in 1961, is often cited as a precursor of the more moderate strand of the movement, seeking government reform or “equal rights.” Longtime feminist and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee, and her personal prestige did much to draw attention to its work. Roosevelt also provided a link with the previous wave of feminist activism that had continued, despite hitting “doldrums,” from the 1920s to the 1960s. Feminist scholars have shown that many cultural links helped maintain feminist energy despite relatively low levels of public engagement during the intervening decades.13 The equal rights strand drew strength from, but was also profoundly limited by, this past, and it was primarily the more radical waves of activism engaged in by women from poor communities and newly radicalized young, white, middle-­class women that transformed the meaning of feminism into something far deeper and more profound than new rights. With grassroots support from these other strands, the reform strand achieved some key legislative and legal victories, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (broadened from an initial appli­ cation only to race to include “sex discrimination” as well); Title IX, part of the Education Amendments of 1972, which in effect guaranteed federal funding for girls’ and women’s athletics in schools; and the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on reproductive rights (1973). Much

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of the activity of this strand was then funneled into the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful, the campaign did much to educate women around the country about the rights they did and did not have. Among the other, more radical strands of the women’s movement that emerged in the late 1960s was the one most commonly known as “women’s liberation.” This strand had its roots in other social movements of the era, especially the Civil Rights movement, ethnic nationalist movements, the student movement, and the anti–­Vietnam War movement.14 Less formal “movement communities” and collectives were particularly popular among the (often) younger, more revolutionary elements of the movement, who dubbed their goal the “liberation” of women in the context of other liberation movements based in race and class. Detractors referred to these activists scornfully as “women’s libbers.” The women’s liberation component included many female college students and recent college graduates, reflecting the increasing number of women in higher education during these years, a trend driven by the postwar economic boom. Deferral of marriage and a broadening of intellectual horizons during college years, along with the freedom from unwanted pregnancy provided by “the pill”—­newly available oral contraceptives—­contributed greatly to the ranks of independent young women attracted to the liberation movement. Working-­class, community-­activist feminisms also linked up to the women’s liberation strand through the involvement of young, mostly middle-­class white women in the Civil Rights movement and the student-­led movement known as the New Left emerging in and around college campuses. New Left groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) sought alliance with Civil Rights groups to build an inter­ racial movement of the poor. Efforts like SDS’s Economic Research and Action Projects brought many young white women into contact with women of color who were community activists. While the projects were sometimes marred by condescension on the part of some participants, they were also powerful models of attempts to acknowledge and resist the privileges that came with whiteness and affluence.15 Women-­ to-­women dialogues across divides of race and class in these projects helped shape the kinds of feminisms that emerged later in the decade.16

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The women who formed the core and the corps of this strand of the movement drew upon a great deal of social movement experience, and some of that experience led them to create their own movement. Many women in the Civil Rights, ethnic power, student, and antiwar movements experienced marginalization, harassment, disrespect, and disproportionate workloads. Sensitized to issues of inequality and injustice, they turned their analyses back upon their male colleagues, demonstrating to the men that they were not living up to their own egalitarian ideals when it came to the treatment of women. Two of the most important early manifestos in this development were position papers drafted within SNCC in 1964 and 1965, one by a young black activist, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the other by two young white women in the organization, Casey Hayden and Mary King. Both of these essays argued, as would many others in short order, that analogies could be drawn between the position of women in SNCC and the position of blacks in white America. By the late 1960s, “sexism” emerged as the central movement concept, intended as a parallel to the concept of “racism.” The analogy, while immensely productive in terms of new ideas and attitudes, was also highly problematic, since race and gender are different in many respects, and treating them as parallel initially seemed to erase women of color. As a later book title colorfully expressed it, “All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave.”17 While some men within SNCC and other radical movement groups responded favorably to the arguments put forward by women, many more did not, calling their criticisms trivial and a distraction from the “real” struggles around race, class, and war. Some feminists continued to work on issues of gender equity within these movements, forming “women’s caucuses” within organizations. While some success was achieved in this way, and while women continued to work on all these issues, increasingly feminists felt the need to carve out an independent movement to address their concerns. Initially this proved easier for white women; many women of color continued to feel that racial oppression had to be their central concern, or that gender oppression was a parallel rather than an intersecting concern. African American activist Florynce Kennedy, for example, listed her affiliations in 1970 as the black lib­ eration movement and the women’s liberation movement. But all the radical feminist groups formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s were

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deeply shaped by the mood set by groups like the Black Panthers; they saw women’s liberation as part of a larger revolutionary movement to overthrow a racist, capitalist, and patriarchal order.18 When these young activists started their own women’s liberation groups, they drew deeply upon the antihierarchical forms that were dominant in groups like SNCC and the radical SDS. But having seen the limits to real equality within those supposedly egalitarian groups, they were highly aware of the tendency of inequalities of power to emerge even within organizations dedicated to equality. Thus, they formed movement communities that were very carefully designed to fend off hierarchy. Just as blacks had come to feel that the presence of whites in their liberation movement hampered the independent development of black empowerment, many of these women feared that the presence of men would be detrimental and insisted that their new communities include only women.

CONSCIOUSNESS-­RAISING The typical social science story of the women’s movement has a difficult time dealing with the fact that large-­scale, mass organizations with clear hierarchies were only a small part of the movement. Indeed, such organizations were often seen as part of the problem. Most commonly, movement activists were involved in small groups or collectives. These “consciousness-­raising (or CR) groups” or “rap groups,” consisting most often of five to twenty women, gave a mass movement an unusually intimate form as well as forums that were highly appropriate to the movement’s goals and ideologies.19 While sometimes associated with white women’s liberationist part of the movement, consciousness-­raising, under various names, has been central to all feminist struggles. Toni Cade (Bambara), for example, wrote in 1970: “Throughout the country in recent years, black women have been forming work-­study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries . . . women’s workshops on the campuses, women’s caucuses within existing organizations, Afro-­American women’s magazines.”20 Consciousness-­ raising groups are among the clearest, most widely effective examples of grassroots cultural transformation. As the other common name for CR groups, rap groups (from the black English term for intense conversation), suggests, the roots of the

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form can be seen in practices such as the consensus-­seeking meetings in SNCC (see chapter 1). The women’s liberation strand of the late 1960s and early 1970s systematized what is often a more inchoate movement process. A handful of CR groups became famous because of their locations in big cities or because of their widely circulated publications: Bread and Roses, New York Radical Women, the Furies, Redstockings, Radicalesbians, the Combahee River Collective, WITCH. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s thousands of such groups were meeting in cities and small towns across the United States.21 As African American feminist Cellestine Ware characterized it in 1970 in her brilliant book Woman Power, the role of CR groups was to express, compare, analyze, theorize, and then organize against all the ways in which women were oppressed. This meant thinking about and challenging the specific sexist structures in every “public” and “private” social space: factory, sweatshop, kitchen, bedroom, classroom, boardroom, playing field, courtroom, or the halls of Congress. From the beginning, the new feminists realized that this largely unexplored set of analyses needed to be made from the ground up, through a process of comparing individual women’s stories and subjecting them to structural analysis. The point was to move from collected personal experiences to theorized general conditions, and then to further actions flowing from the analyses.22 A new language had to be invented to characterize the experiences of oppression and liberation that had no names. Sometimes this meant literally inventing new words; for instance, the newly minted concept “sexism” was used to examine the ways in which discrimination against women was built into the very structure of the language. Women challenged every generic use of man or he claiming to refer to or speak for all “humanity,” and they invented or adopted words to displace the presumptive “man” at the center of all public activity: firefighter for fireman, worker for workman, business executive for businessman, chair for chairman, police officer for policeman, representative or member of Congress for congressman, and so on across all the various social spaces and places where women were absent or underrepresented. This task also moved in the opposite direction, replacing feminized and invariably lesser female versions of terms with gender-­neutral forms. Thus, flight attendant replaced stewardess, or more to the point of this chapter, poet

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came to be used in place of the condescending poetess. But beyond neo­ logisms, the deeper task was to find language to express oppressions and liberations that had no names. Whether from formal CR groups, informal discussions, or shared writings, there emerged from consciousness-­raising a host of new issues for the agenda of women’s liberation. Shared stories moved women from the isolation of battering to a collective analysis of domestic violence, from a personal sense of sexual inadequacy to calls for equal sexual pleasure for women, from a sense of the social “double jeopardy” of being a woman and of color to women-­of-­color feminisms, from personal fears about pregnancy or forced sterilization to calls for reproductive rights, from poverty viewed as personal failure to analyses of welfare rights and the feminization of poverty, from personal experiences of intimidation by bosses to the concept of sexual harassment, and so on. Dozens of issues were moved from the personal to the political through collective dialogue, discussion, and debate. The formal CR group, according to the early women’s movement activist Pam Allen, proceeded through four stages: opening up (revealing personal feelings), sharing (through dialogue with other group members), analyzing (seeking general patterns by comparing to other experiences), and abstracting (creating a theory). Sometimes misunderstood as therapy, which it no doubt became on some occasions in some groups, CR was intended to strengthen the theoretical basis for revolutionary action. As feminist theorist and women’s movement historian Katie King notes, the aim of “CR is not to exchange or relive experience, nor is it cathartic. Rather, its purpose is to teach women to think abstractly, and the purpose of thinking abstractly is to create theory in order to clarify and clear the ground for action.”23 Much important feminist thought and action emerged from this process and was presented in written form in such early feminist anthologies as Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), The Black Woman (1970), Radical Feminism (1973) (which collects materials from three earlier collections, Notes from the First Year, Second Year, and Third Year), and, in poetic form, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (1973). As several feminist critics have argued, some kind of positing of group commonality plays a necessary heuristic role in all feminist organiz­ ing (and in any other movement that includes an element of collective

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identity).24 The problem arises with the rush to give that heuristic concept a specific content. Some feminists can be justly accused of this kind of “essentialism,” arguments that homogenize all women as essentially alike (in oppression or in resistance).25 But there has always been a way of drawing on experiences, a way of doing consciousness-­raising, that suggests a path through this dilemma. Rather than simply being replaced, consciousness-­raising can be, and often has been, re-­placed into a more varied public space where conflicting and complementary “experiences” have provided the bases for painful but productive arguments within feminism that have broadened and deepened the movement(s). This is precisely what happened in many parts of the early feminist movement, and it has continued to happen ever since. As I have suggested, formal consciousness-­raising groups in the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s were just a particular form of the larger, more general process of raising consciousness that goes on in many movements in many forms. In women’s movements, one of the key forms, though hardly the only one, has the been the writing, reading, and performing of poetry.

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT POETRY AND THE RANGE OF FEMINIST ISSUES Poems about women in economic poverty and spiritual poverty; poems about battering and resistance to battering; poems about sisterly solidar­ ity and unsisterly betrayal; poems about factory work and maid work; poems about men as oppressors and men as lovers and men as loving oppressors; poems about women loving women; poems about the power in menstruation and the beauty of vaginas; poems about bad sex and good sex; poems in Spanglish and Nuyorican, black English and white Wellesley diction; poems about the pain of abortion and the pain of childbirth; poems about sterilization of poor women and the sterile lives of upper-­class women; poems about women’s history and women’s future; poems about reform and revolution; poems about women in barrios and Chinatowns, Indian reservations and ghettos; poems revaluing traditional women’s work and celebrating women breaking barriers into male-­dominated jobs; poems about women lumberjacks and women quilters; poems about witches and bitches, brujas and voodoo queens;

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poems about women athletes and bookish women; poems about breast-­ feeding and breast cancer; poems about laundry and feminist theology; poems about war and peace; poems about women in Vietnam and Spanish Harlem; poems about Harriet Tubman and Marilyn Monroe; poems about Wall Street and Main Street; poems about changing diapers and changing lives; even poems about writing poems. Poems poured forth by the hundreds from the new wave of feminist activity crystallizing in the late 1960s. Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman assert in their Guide to Women’s Publishing that “poetry was the medium of the movement,” and that while “every revolutionary movement has had its poets and its poetry, no other movement has been so grounded in poetry as Feminism.”26 I do not think it is necessary to call poetry “the” medium of the movement, but it has certainly played a very important role for many feminists. One reason for this is that no movement has had a more sweeping need for epistemological transformation, for transformation in the nature and scope of knowledge. In effect, the feminist movement claims that half of the world’s population has largely been excluded from production of what counts as knowledge about that world. As noted above, the women’s movement has transformed every field of human knowledge, from business to science to politics to art and literature to “home economics.” Feminist poetry is certainly not alone in bringing about this profound transformation, but it touches all these social and cultural realms, among others. Above and beyond these particular realms, however, femi­ nism has also brought about a more general transformation of conscious­ ness. To get at these two different dimensions, I will look first at “women’s movement poetry” as a general tool of social change, and then at a more narrowly defined “feminist poetry movement” as an example of a forma­ tion aimed at one particular cultural sphere, the profession of poem making. The movement understood that knowledge was power, and that knowledge/power was vested in language. At the center of this was the notion that dimensions of women’s voices had been silenced, distorted, or trivialized for centuries. Thus poetry, as one of the richest tools for exploring the dynamic meaning-­making processes of language, was bound to become an important movement resource. Poetry was

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particularly well equipped to challenge two crucial dichotomies: the separation of private and public spheres, and the split between “emotion” and “intellect.” Poems had practical advantages as well. They could be produced in the interstices of the busy multitasking lives most women lead. They took far less time to write than books, and they were far easier to reproduce and circulate. They could be nailed to trees and tele­ phone poles, taped to windows, and slid under doors. They lent themselves to performance in public, during a highly dramatic, performative era. They could also be set to music, turned into song. The whole panoply of feminist issues that emerged from formal CR groups and from dozens of other sites of consciousness-­raising activity can be found in poetry produced in and around the movement. In addition to anthologies of feminist poetry, most of the general anthologies of feminist thought from the new movement included poetry. The widely circulated collection Sisterhood Is Powerful, for example, was edited by a poet, Robin Morgan, and included a section titled “The Hand That Cradles the Rock: Poetry as Protest.” And one of the first major collections of feminist writings to center on women of color, The Black Woman, was edited by fiction writer/poet Toni Cade (Bambara) and privileged poems as the first set of readings. This is not because poetry “reflected” feminist issues, but because poetry was one of the main tools used to identify, name, formulate, and disseminate those issues. Poetry was consciousness-­raising. Poetry was theory. Poetry was feminist practice. When the radical women’s liberation phase, with its emphasis on interconnections among race, class, and gender, was being displaced in the mid-­1970s by a more mainstream brand of feminism, poetry became a key site for the articulation and contestation of feminisms. Poets like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Janice Mirikitani, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Griffin, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Wendy Rose, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Irena Klepfisz, Robin Morgan, Nellie Wong, Chrystos, June Jordan, Marge Piercy, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Joy Harjo, and Cherríe Moraga used poetry as part of an ongoing dialogue about the nature(s) and purpose(s) of feminism(s). In this context poems became mediators between a collective “woman” and particular communities of “women.” Poetry played an important role in diffusing these subject positions out into the wider culture, where their impacts were often independent of

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knowledge of their movement origins. (Copyright issues prevent me from quoting much of this marvelous poetry here, so I hope readers will seek out anthologies and books by these founding figures, as well as by other, more recent “third-­wave” feminist poets.) For some people who might be recruited to a movement and for some people already in it, poems (and other forms of art) are more effec­ tive in conveying movement ideology than are manifestos and other directly political forms. Katie King has argued that what she calls “art theoretical” discourses, including poetry, were central to the production of feminist cultures that were in turn “the primary location of feminist identity politics in the 70s and 80s.”27 These “art theoretical” “writing technologies” (King includes “song” and “story” alongside “poetry”) were especially important in the struggles of various women-­of-­color feminists to dislodge white middle-­class women from the center of feminist thought. In this sense, poetry as theory and consciousness-­raising did much to challenge the limits of theory emerging from the often fairly segregated movement groups. Two poets, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, edited one of the most influential books in the history of feminist thought, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which not only featured poetry alongside more conventional forms of analysis but also insisted on poetry’s role as a form of feminist theory. Poems in this anthology (and others like it) drew upon personal experience mediated through race and ethnicity as well as gender to show up the limiting “whiteness” of the identity proffered as normative in much women’s movement culture. While poetry was by no means the only medium through which this critique was offered, it was a particularly powerful one. Many other forms and forums of writing—­manifestos, academic books and articles, novels and short stories, speeches, debates, and that close cousin to poetry, the song lyric—­also contributed greatly to this process. King notes that mixed genres were particularly effective, as their challenging of generic boundaries embodied their efforts to challenge the borders of what counted as feminism and feminist theory. This category would include, for example, Audre Lorde’s mixing of autobiog­ raphy, poetry, fiction, legend, and essay in her “biomythography” Zami

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(1982), and the mixing of poemas, cuentos, and essais in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983).28 The writing of poems, however, preceded even these longer works. Lorde suggests why this might have been so: she notes that poetry is economical not only in terms of expression but also in terms of the material support needed to produce it: “Poetry can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class [women], and [women of color].”29 This Bridge Called My Back used poetry to articulate both a col­ lective “women-­of-­color position” and various ethnicity-­specific positionings. Other collections of writings, again invariably mixing poetry with prose fiction and nonfiction, focused on specific ethno-­racialized communities of women. These texts identified points of solidarity and difference within such groups as Chicanas/Latinas (Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras), African American women (The Black Woman and Home Girls), Native American women (Reinventing the Enemy’s Language), and Asian/Pacific American women (Making Waves). Lesbians of color played significant roles in all of these volumes, and each dealt seriously with issues of sexuality as interwoven with class and other differences within communities of color. Similar volumes, like Nice Jewish Girls, did much the same for a variety of self-­defined feminist movement subcultures.30 In these volumes poetry did much of the work of “autoethnography,” of showing the experience of the self to be part of and in tension with the experience of the collective, the social group. The poems also became what Stacey Young calls “autotheoretical” works, in which self-­exploration, as in all good consciousness-­raising, is the beginning, not the end, of a process leading to theory and action.31 Again, the point is that poetry does not simply “reflect” ideas already in the air; rather, in giving “form” to ideas, poetry brings them into public existence and helps to invent identities, not merely express them. Movements in general are highly productive places, sites of a great deal of “cultural poetics”—­the bringing into visibility and audibility of new thoughts and feelings. In this case, the cultural poetics occurred through actual

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poetry. But the lines across genres in this respect were constantly transgressed: Rich, Lorde, and Anzaldúa were as well known for their essays as for their poems, and each reinforced and added nuance to the other. The process of feminist consciousness-­raising continues, and poetry still plays a role in each new site or phase of activity, helping to form new issues and new feminist identities. The rise of antimilitarist, environmen­ talist feminisms in the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, was inspired in part by poet Susan Griffin’s lyrical study Woman and Nature (1978), and various “ecofeminist” anthologies have used poetry to present new ways of thinking about relations between the devaluing of women and the denigration of nature.32 The critically important challenges to the ethnocentric dimension of U.S. feminisms that have emerged from feminist movements in the Southern Hemisphere and from postcolonial theory in the universities have also used poetry as one key mode of contestation. Figures like Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh­ha, Lata Mani, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, and Rey Chow gained prominence in the early 1990s by analyzing and countering the homogenizing, racist conceptions of “women in the Third World” found in much U.S. feminism. This process gained support from poets whose defamiliarizing verses challenged dominant Anglo-­American feminist paradigms. Trinh’s poetic, autoethnographic Woman/Native/Other offers one example, while Spivak’s literary critical essays on Bengali women poets and storytellers present another.33 Over time, virtually every constituency or position within the wide terrain of feminisms has been constructed in part through poetry, from the most essentialist statements of universal womanhood to the most deconstructive celebrations of postmodern fragmented subjectivities.

THE FEMINIST POETRY MOVEMENT AS A CULTURAL FORMATION Let us turn now from “women’s movement poetry” to the “feminist poetry movement.” The distinction is partly artificial, since the two forms of activity overlap and intertwine, but it is useful to separate them in order to understand the full cultural impact of feminism(s). The distinc­ tion can be put this way: in “women’s movement poetry” the movement comes first and is the central focus, with poetry as one of many means of serving the movement, while in the “feminist poetry movement”

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poetry comes first and the central concern is to establish a new kind of poetry.34 The feminist poetry movement is a cultural formation by and aimed at professional poets and the cultural institutions (publishing houses, literature departments, bookstores) surrounding them. The feminist poetry movement is both inside and beyond the women’s movement. It is what British cultural theorist Raymond Williams calls a “formation,” an intellectual or cultural school of thought, like impressionism in painting or naturalism in fiction writing, that can have “significant and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture, and which [has] a variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions.”35 As historian of the feminist poetry movement Kim Whitehead puts it, “Feminist poetry began in a hundred places at once, in writing workshops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables of self-­publishing poet/activists, and in the work of already established poets who began slowly to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibilities.”36 The grassroots troops of the new feminist poetry movement grew out of the hundreds of consciousness-­raising groups and collectives. As these radical new feminist poets began to emerge, they caught the attention of some powerful, already-­established women poets whose own poetry began to change under the influence of the movement. Poets like Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Gwendolyn Brooks were in varying degrees part of the poetry establishment when the women’s movement emerged. The movement helped them understand ways in which they felt marginalized, stifled, or distorted by the male-­ dominated institutions and formations of the poetry world. At the same time, some of these poets had anticipated feminist themes in their work and with increasing self-­consciousness brought that work to bear in the context of creating the women’s movement. This led not only to a reworking by these poets of their own work but also to a rethinking and researching of the role of women in the history of poetry. Among living links to a longer legacy, no poet was more important to the movement than Muriel Rukeyser. A winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize in 1935, Rukeyser had given up a career of safe verse making to immerse herself in the social and political struggles of the Great Depression years, a commitment she brought with her into the movements she associated with in the 1960s. Rukeyser, along

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with younger but established poets like Rich (who also had won the Yale prize for her first, premovement volume), became an indefatigable teacher of poetry and poetics to the emerging generation of women’s movement poets. Over time this process moved the label “woman poet” from a dismissive one to one charged with possibility. As it emerged, the feminist poetry movement drew upon several other compatible developments in the field of poetry. Three strands from existing schools of poetry were particularly influential as rewritten into the terms of an emerging feminist poetic consciousness. First, the Beat poets had begun in the 1950s a return of poetry to public performance. Poetry reading had become a rather genteel affair, taking place most often in libraries or living rooms. Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg were infamous for their raucous public poetry rituals. This process was then taken up by many protest poets in the 1960s, particularly antiwar poets (including Ginsberg) and poets in the black arts and other cultural nationalist movements. No group developed this return to poetry as performance, rather than silent reading, more powerfully than feminist poets, who fostered hundreds of public readings at feminist bookstores, music festivals, and demonstrations. Second, the confessional school of poets, founded by figures like Robert Lowell in the 1950s and including some protofeminist poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, had opened up possibilities for personal psychological exploration that played well into the intimate psychological dynamics of emerging feminist experience. And third, the Black Mountain poets, among others, had begun moving poetry away from rigid formal lines to more open, free-­verse forms. These forms were both better suited to feminist poets’ open explorations of self in society and less daunting than rigid metrical poetry for women excluded from formal literary training. Just as the early feminist movement scoured all history for examples of women struggling to liberate themselves from male-­defined institutions and social roles, when the feminist poetry movement emerged, it naturally set out to find its poetic precursors. This task entailed both uncovering women poets buried under male-­centered poetic histories and rereading and reinterpreting female poets who had managed to find some hold in the mostly male-­defined pantheon of important poets. In the United States it was nineteenth-­century poet Emily Dickinson who served most often as a distant American foremother to the feminist

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poetry formation. The full range of Dickinson’s poetry had only recently become available in the 1950s, and as her reputation grew as one of the two great poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century (alongside Walt Whitman), feminists struggled to rescue her from those who would ignore the powerful things she had to say about the minds and spirits of women. Several poetry anthologies appearing in the early years of the new women’s movement played a key role in solidifying the formation. The most successful of these was No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (1973), edited by Florence Howe (cofounder of Feminist Press) and Ellen Bass.37 The collection starts with poems by Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and other members of the modernist poetry movement of the early twentieth century, then presents an array of contemporary poets “shaped in the women’s liberation movement.” The collection includes 220 pieces from eighty-­six poets, about twenty of them women of color. The title comes, not surprisingly, from a feminist poem by Rukeyser telling women to take off the false faces put upon them by patriarchy, and the subtitle indicates that the search for “poems by women” did not necessarily restrict the collection to a political definition of “feminist poet.” Howe reports in the preface to a later edition of the anthology that the book began as something of a “lark, a game” of collecting women poets that she engaged in with her then student Bass. As she puts it, “In the early seventies it was still possible to use a card catalog under the word ‘women’ and find ‘poets,’ though we could not have known then that many poets had slipped away, out of that net into invisibility.” This process of scouring library card catalogs netted about fifty established women poets for the collection, and then, Howe notes, the “younger poets found us: Word spread quickly in the early seventies through women’s liberation newspapers and newsletters. We received three hundred submissions through the mail.”38 From this Howe and Bass culled the collection, with only their “inchoate” feminism and an insistence that the “poem please us aesthetically” to guide them. This second criterion, the aesthetic one, is the mark of the formation on their efforts. The larger task, which might define the formation, is expressed by Howe as a set of questions in the preface to the original edition: “A nagging doubt: are women victims of prejudiced editors or are women

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poets out of the mainstream of modern poetry? What is the mainstream? And what do women write about?”39 No More Masks! was one of several anthologies that took on the task of answering these questions by making available for the first time a wide range of historical and contemporary poems by women. Other, similar volumes emerged in this same period. It was clearly the moment when the formation was strong enough to begin shaping its own tra­ dition. One such work was Rising Tides: Twentieth-­Century American Women Poets (1973), the goals of which the editors stated baldly in a prefatory paragraph: “Because representation in most poetry anthologies of the past has not gone beyond tokenism, most women writers have remained minor figures in the male-­dominated literary world. This book is an attempt to make both men and women aware of the vital force women poets today represent.”40 As a blurb on the back cover put it, “Rising out of the same growing consciousness that spawned the women’s liberation movement, this book is a feminist statement in the largest sense.” A year later came The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–­1950 (1974), a collection whose title, again from a Rukeyser poem (“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open”), shows its connection to the movement, and whose subtitle indicates that it is aimed at helping to establish a still longer tradition.41 By the end of the twentieth century, this literary formation had contributed mightily to a rewriting of the entire history of poetry. It is now possible to go to any literary bookstore in the United States and find dozens of anthologies dedicated to one or another of numerous strands and schools of feminist and/or women’s poetry. Under the onslaught of this formation, and interrelated formations in ethnic and gay writing, literary history has been rewritten. It now not only includes but also has been radically changed by the presence of a panoply of female (and often feminist) poets. And the future of poetry by women has been forever shaped by this remaking of the universe of poetry into an available tradition for women to build upon, just as surely as the wider culture was radically rewritten from top to bottom by feminist challenges to dominant paradigms of thought and action. As impressive as the success of the “feminist poetry formation” was, it was only one among many similar feminist intellectual and cultural

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formations. Parallel efforts in academe, for example, gave birth to the closely connected formation of feminist literary studies, and also to feminist sociology, feminist political science, feminist anthropology, feminist science, and so on. Few, if any, realms of the arts or sciences remain unaffected by the kind of feminist formation represented by the feminist poetry movement. All of these formations have had both local impacts on particular areas and mutually reinforcing impacts across these realms of thought, such that they form a broader feminist intellectual/cultural formation of great power.

BUILDING FEMINIST CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS Both women’s movement poetry and the feminist poetry movement depended on the creation and development of parallel feminist institutions. I have argued that, given the centrality of experience, emotion, language reformation, and intimate spheres of action to the feminist process of consciousness-­raising, poetry, with its linguistic and affective precision, was well suited to play a major role in diffusing feminist ideas out into the world. But a very concrete process of institution building underwrote this predisposition. Drawing on the tradition found in the Civil Rights, New Left, and ethnic nationalist movements of creating “parallel institutions” to challenge inadequate or corrupt ones in the dominant society, all strands of women’s movements built formal alternative cultural structures. Many CR groups, the first level of institutionalization, for example, became writing groups. Feminist CR/writing groups in turn produced at first feminist broadsides, and then underground journals run by feminist publishing collectives. Feminist publishing collectives sponsored poetry readings and poetry festivals that widened the audience, encouraging small feminist presses to move into bigger projects. These processes produced and rediscovered enough writing to justify the creation of small feminist bookstores, and these bookstores in turn encouraged the creation of larger feminist presses. Larger feminist presses proved the existence of a market for women’s writing that mainstream publishing houses could not ignore. They began to broker deals with mainstream publishing houses that guaranteed a wider audience for feminist writers and netted the feminist presses profits that allowed them to bring more radical writers into print.42 By 1978 a phenomenal

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seventy-­three feminist periodicals and sixty-­six feminist presses had sprung up, along with dozens of women’s bookstores.43 While institutionalization certainly involved some watering down of feminist writing upon its entry into the “mainstream,” many feminist writers resisted and continue to resist that process and the individualizing, divide-­and-­conquer strategy it often entails. When, for example, white feminist poet Adrienne Rich won the National Book Award in 1974, she indicated, as part of a joint statement written with two African American feminist poets, fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, that she accepted the award “not as an individual but in the name of all women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.” More generally, poets and editors negotiate between movement and nonmovement sites, making individual and collective decisions about when to support feminist presses and when to send their work out as incursions into the wider world. The process of feminist institution building also included the creation of an academic institution, women’s studies, with a strong literary component that assisted the feminist poetry movement and used literature as one means of classroom consciousness-­raising. This led to efforts to rewrite the canon of literature to include far more women’s literature and a significant amount of feminist literature. This process moved from movement anthologies to women’s studies textbooks to such major revisionist works as the Heath Anthology of American Literature, which in turn forced a reworking of such mainstream collections as the Norton Anthology of American Literature. This process has taken several decades, but from these small group beginnings a vast body of feminist writing has emerged that has touched every level, layer, and corner of American society. There is now a great body of feminist thought enmeshed in virtually every literary anthology available for use in the classroom or by the casual reader. Ultimately, Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and the vast women-­of-­color literary movement that Morrison embodies, grew out of movement contexts through these layers of mediation. As usual, by the time that point was reached, the originating movement contexts had been lost in the mists of time (and hegemony), but their diffusion was nevertheless movement work. One might note, by way of materially tracing this process, that Morrison edited and wrote introductions for both the first collection of Huey Newton’s Black Panther writings,

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To Die for the People, and one of the most important early collections of black feminist thought, The Black Woman, compiled by Toni Cade (Bambara). Again, this can stand as but one example of a massive dif­ fusing of feminist and other radical movement ideas into the mainstream. That this process also involves some defusing, some lessening of the explosive impact seen when texts are produced and received within a movement culture, is no doubt true. But that just suggests the need for ongoing movement struggle, struggle that should include taking far more credit for the powerful impact already achieved by the incorporation of feminist ideas into commonsense, mainstream thought and action.

THIRD-­(AND FOURTH-­?) WAVE POETICS The debates within feminism in the 1980s and 1990s were interpreted differently by different women. To some liberal white women committed to maintaining the status quo, the debates were divisive, particularly in the context of a “backlash” against feminism in the years of Reaganism and Christian conservatism.44 To women in the Third World/global South, U.S. women of color, and their white allies who believed feminism should not be dominated by one set of privileged voices, the turmoil, however painful, was healthy and transformative. Similar ferment surrounded the language and concept of a “third wave” of feminism. Some suggest that the critique of “hegemonic feminism” by lesbians and women of color in the United States and the global South itself constituted a third-­wave movement. Others see this as a process that cleared the way for a younger generation to take the movement in new directions. Some speak of yet another, fourth wave. For others still, the wave metaphor is always falsely homogenizing, untrue to the variety of sites of feminist movement activity.45 But however one characterizes it, feminist activity is alive and well in the twenty-­first century, both in the form of ongoing women’s movements and in the impact of feminism within other progressive movements. The massive Women’s March in 2017 and the pervasive #MeToo movement against sexual predation testify that increased empowerment continues apace amid yet another period of misogynistic backlash. It is also clear that as these movements continue, poetry will continue to be a powerful feminist tool. The feminist music movement,

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which has always been closely linked to feminist poetry, was given renewed energy in the 1990s by a new wave of feminist music, most notably represented by the independent folk-­rock of Ani DiFranco, the postpunk energy of the Riot Grrrl movement, and feminist rap by performers like Queen Latifah and Roxanne Shante. The feminist poetry movement is also one of the forces behind the current strong interest in spoken-­word performance, with artists like Alix Olson, C.C. Carter, Blythe Baird, and Suheir Hammad, among many others. Growing as hop culture pioneered by black and well out of the powerful hip-­ Latino/a youth (which in turn owes much to Black Power and Latino/a nation­alist poetics, as noted in chapter 2), spoken-­word performance is an important site of feminist consciousness-­raising, and its ongoing importance is a sign that poetry continues to be one key site of feminist action. And, of course, pop, rock, and rap song writing continues to be an equally important and widespread form of feminist/womanist analysis in figures like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Janelle Monae, and many others. The latest wave of feminist activism stemmed from the hashtag #MeToo, created in 2006 by African American sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke. The hashtag resonated with many women in its first incarnation, but in 2017, in the wake of the election of a man who bragged on video of “pussy-grabbing” and was accused of sexual assault by nineteen women, the phrase set off a major social movement. The massive Women’s March that year announced that feminist energy was alive and well and ready to fight the latest conservative backlash. Many #MeToo outpourings drew upon feminist poetry. New works by slam poets, new songs and poetry collections like Deborah Alma’s #MeToo anthology added lyrical energy to the movement. Like consciousness-raising groups, the storytelling of individuals built into a collective understanding and will to change the structural conditions— cultural, political, and economic—that give rise to sexual abuse and allow it to go largely unpunished. In the wake of this massive outpouring of personal stories, the organization Time’s Up, inspired by farmworker women and given a public relations boost by entertainment-industry professionals, helped take the movement to the next level. A powerful new wave of feminist activism swept across the country and the globe, making clear that ending sexual abuse was deeply tied to improving the economic and social status of women.

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4 REVOLUTIONARY WALLS CHICANO/A/X MURALS, CHICANO/A/X MOVEMENTS

The people who came to be called Mexican Americans came into existence through resistance to two wars of conquest. The first was that of Spanish conquistadors, who in the sixteenth century invaded and decimated the Native peoples of the territories now known as Mexico and the southwestern United States. Rape, concubinage, and intermarriage among the Spaniards, various Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and others eventually created la raza cósmica, the multihued mix of peoples that is Mexico. The second war of conquest was that of the United States against Mexico. The U.S. states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as parts of Wyoming and Colorado, were part of Mexico before they were forcibly brought under U.S. dominion through the Texas and Mexican–­American wars of the mid-­nineteenth century. Begun on a dubious pretense and resisted by many in the United States as a war of imperial conquest, the Mexican–­ American War ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Forced on a defeated Mexico, the treaty extended the U.S. empire into the Southwest and California. Overnight, thousands of Mexicans found themselves strangers in their own land, putatively “American” now but generally treated as second-­class citizens. Mexican Americans can rightfully claim deeper roots in these regions of the United States than most other citizens, yet they are often confused with and portrayed as “illegal aliens.” Maintaining their cultural 115

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heritage while becoming citizens of the United States was a complicated process involving sporadic open conflict (like that between Mexican American outlaws, white ranchers, and Texas Rangers) as well as subtle daily acts of resistance across many generations. The process of “becoming Mexican American,” as George Sánchez names it, was long, complex, and multifaceted.1 It produced identities riddled with contradictions resulting from decades of racism, both externally imposed and internalized. Before the 1960s, many Mexican Americans, especially those in a small but influential middle class, believed that the best way to be accepted as Americans was to deny much of the Mexican and Indian side of their heritage and assimilate into the white or “Anglo” world. But that world was most often hostile and exploitative rather than welcoming. Despite legal gains made by Mexican American civil rights groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC, a group similar to the NAACP) and the veterans’ group the American GI Forum, Mexican Americans entered the 1960s segregated in barrios (Spanish for “neighborhoods”), with inferior schools and services, high unemployment, and a staggering rate of poverty. They were routinely subject to racist insults to their culture, as well as brutality from the police and discrimination from employers. The once open border between the United States and Mexico had become a zone of harassment separating families and loved ones and subjecting both Mexican visitors and Mexican American citizens to constant threats of deportation or refusal of reentry. But resistance was also present amid assimilation and acquiescence. The popular front social movement of the 1930s and 1940s, driven by labor union struggles, shaped many future leaders of what would become the Chicano movement.2 Mexican American labor leaders like Josefina Fierro de Bright, the “cannery women” strikers in California, and Bert Corona of the Los Angeles branch of the longshoremen’s union set models for later activism and in some cases directly involved themselves in the new struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Many Mexican American activists in the 1930s were also part of El Congreso de Pueblo de Habla Español, an important progressive political coalition of “Spanish-­ speaking people.” Despite significant racism among the white working

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class, workplaces in the 1930s and 1940s also included multiracial coa­ litions, reflecting the sense that class unity was needed to overcome the racist divide-­and-­conquer strategies of employers.3 When the new “Chicano generation” rose to prominence in the 1960s, its members had to negotiate the complications of these multiple identities, challenging assimilation, building on activist models laid by predecessors, improvising new elements, and exorcising elements of internalized racism that hindered the creation of a newly politicized sense of self and community. Despite these difficulties, the efforts made by people of Mexican descent living in the United States to claim the right to their own dignity, identity, language, and culture broadened in the 1960s to become el movimiento, the Chicano movement. Various social factors help to account for the rise of this new activism: the increasingly urbanized Mexican American population was growing rapidly (doubling after World War II in some areas, including Los Angeles), with a larger proportion of youth owing to the postwar baby boom, and the numbers of Mexican American college students were increasing thanks to financial aid for students of color in the wake of the black Civil Rights movement. A new group of Mexican American activists arose who had learned organizing skills in student-­centered protest groups like SNCC, SDS, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Women like Maria Varela and Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, both SNCC veterans and the former a cofounder of SDS, brought a new kind of movement know-­how into the community. Veteran labor movement activists like Corona and César Chávez added to the storehouse of community organizing skills.4 As the 1960s rolled on, a new generation, led primarily by students but also by many from earlier generations, began to call themselves Chicano, a term taken from street slang that announced the emergence of a new political identity. Chicanos reversed the policies and ideologies of assimilation and sought instead to recover, understand, and celebrate the cultural heritage that made them unique, while insisting on their economic and political rights as citizens of the United States.5 Many identified with the Mexican revolutionaries of the early twentieth century and sought sweeping, radical change to wipe out racism and class inequality.

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MURALS IN MOVEMENT, MOVEMENT IN MURALS While Chicano/a movement artists worked and continue to work in many media, and while artists from many other racial and ethnic backgrounds have produced murals, most historians and critics of the Chi­ cano/a movement note a special affinity between that movement and the community mural movement.6 Some sense of this affinity is conveyed by the fact that in the Los Angeles area alone (from which I will draw most of my examples), more than a thousand Chicano murals have been created since 1965. Chicano murals can also be found in great numbers throughout Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and in some midwestern cities, like Chicago, where large numbers of Mexican Americans live. The most common reason given for the attractiveness of the mural form for Chicano (male) and Chicana (female) artist-­activists is the inspiration of the great Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. These men were important to the cultural politics of Mexico, and during the 1930s they were significant figures on the cultural side of the popular-front labor movement in the United States. To a large extent the modern mural art form is the invention of these Mexican artists. Los tres grandes (the three greats), as they are known, were important models not only as major modern artists but also as political activists who rooted their muralism in support for the struggles of the poorest, most exploited members of their communities. The work of the Mexican muralists was extended into the United States during the 1930s through government-­ sponsored mural programs that eventually covered the walls of hundreds of post offices and other public buildings. Knowledge of this legacy inspired many of the creators of Chicano murals and played a role in the general public appeal of murals. But there was another key element in the popularity of murals: the prior existence in the barrio of a model of popular painted public art. This was pulquería art, the painting of landscapes and other scenes on the exterior walls of taverns, restaurants, shops, and other public buildings in Mexico and in U.S. barrios. The tradition of pulquería art lent a sense of familiarity to the murals that began to appear in Mexican American communities with the rise of the Chicano movement. Just as

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the adaptation of black church music for the purposes of the Civil Rights movement allowed a radical new content to enter through a familiar, nonthreatening mode, the existence of pulquería art probably lessened the shock of the radical new messages being conveyed by community murals. Other features of early Chicano murals drew from an image system familiar to many in the barrios. These included the use of images drawn from Mexicano/Chicano religious observations, particularly altares (the small religious shrines found in many Chicano homes), as well as estampas and almanaques (chrome-­lithographed religious prints and calendars). On the more secular side, muralists drew upon the styles of customized ranflas (lowrider cars), tatuajes (homemade india ink tattoos), and placas (spray-­painted graffiti logos). Initially less familiar but soon ubiquitous images drawn from Indigenous art, especially Aztec, Olmec, Maya, and Toltec sources, round out those elements that contributed to a specifically Chicano aesthetic. Add to these sources images drawn from American pop culture that had, by the 1960s, become part of a national youth culture shared by young Chicano/as, and you have the main image repertoire used for movement murals. In various combinations these images became the aesthetic base for the articulation of complex, painted political messages that played a key role in reinventing Mexican Americans as Chicanos.

PAINTING HISTORY ON THE WALL As I explore the interwoven histories of Chicano/a movements and Chicana/o murals, I will view the murals as expressions of key aspects of and issues in el movimiento while periodically addressing the political possibilities and limits of the community mural as a form. I will discuss a series of murals created by Chicano and Chicana artists from the late 1960s to the present, where the now rechristened ChicanX movement continues to address vital issues like immigrant rights. The intertwined nature of the Chicano movement and the mural movement is apparent already in one of the first Chicano murals executed in California. Painted by Antonio Bernal on the wall of the offices of United Farm Workers/El Teatro Campesino cultural center in Del Rey in 1968, this mural can be read as a kind of origin story of the Chicano

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movement.7 To begin with, the location of the mural immediately points to one of the political struggles that gave birth to the Chicano movement and underscores that murals were not the only important Chicano movement art form. El Teatro Campesino (the farmworkers’ theater) was a vital theater group that grew up on the front lines of the farmworkers’ union movement led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. El Teatro Campesino originated in the fields in actos (one-­act skits) performed by farmworkers themselves, in which they urged their compañeros and compañeras to support the union. Under the guidance of Luis Valdez, El Teatro later expanded its repertoire to take up issues facing urban Chicanos and acted to bridge the divide between rural farmworker families and their city counterparts. El Teatro inspired many other Chicano theater troupes that formed throughout California, Texas, and the Southwest. Turning to the mural itself, and “reading” it from left to right, we get a clear, strong portrait of the forces feeding into and inspiring the Chicano movement. On the far left we see La Adelita, mythical heroine of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. La Adelita is a kind of composite figure for all the soldaderas (women warriors) who fought in the revo­ lution, one whose spirit has often been celebrated in corridos (political ballads, which have a long history in Mexican and Mexican American culture). That revolution sought to return control of Mexico to ordinary peasants and workers, particularly to those of Indian ancestry who had never fully accepted Spanish domination. This celebration of indigenismo (the Native indio component of Mexican identity) was part of a similar celebration of the Indian part of Chicano identity and a downplaying of the European side (seen as too close to the dominant U.S. Anglo identity). Alongside La Adelita are two heroes of the revolution, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. These two peasant leaders became folk heroes to young Chicanos who saw themselves as involved in a similar guerrilla struggle of poor farm laborers and industrial workers against Anglo domination in the United States. To the right of Villa is the legendary Joaquín Murieta, the Mexican/Californian Robin Hood of the gold rush era. Murieta is said to have fought bravely against European American gold miners who stole the claims of Mexican Californians. The gold rush era was the time when the transition of California from a Mexican

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to an Anglo state was largely completed, primarily through the illegal seizure not only of mine holdings but also of many of the landholdings of Mexican Californians under the newly imposed, Anglo-­dominated state government. Murieta symbolizes resistance within the confines of the once-­Mexican parts of the United States, just as Zapata and Villa represent resistance by ordinary people to class and racial hierarchy within Mexico proper. Like La Adelita, Murieta has been and continues to be the subject of numerous corridos. These four figures from history serve to evoke a heritage of struggle by the peoples inhabiting the space where Mexico and the United States have permeable boundaries. They express that el movimiento, though often led by young people, quickly developed a strong sense of history and drew strength from a long line of predecessors who had struggled in greater Mexico (including the U.S. Southwest) for justice against oppression. Retelling the history of Mexico and of Americans of Mexican descent was a key part of the movement. This desire to create a new history free of stereotyped docile Mexicans with an inferior culture led to struggles to form Chicano studies programs that could assure these new stories a place in the university curriculum. A militant generation of Chicano/a historians and social scientists gave rise to new scholarship that saw the United States as an imperial power that, having conquered part of Mexico, tried to force its people to conform to Anglo values, language, and culture. They emphasized the ways in which attempts to impose European American culture were defeated by strong familial and communal resistance from Americans of Mexican descent. Neighborhood murals in which historical figures like these were portrayed as quite literally larger than life became important “textbooks” that spurred an interest in history. This interest was then nourished by the writings of insurgent historians whose academic work carried the movement to high schools and colleges, where hundreds of students walked out of classes or went on strike for an education that respected their heritage and identity. These “blowouts,” as they were known, started in high schools in Southern California and were immensely inspirational. They challenged older people to catch up with the younger ones. Moving into more recent times, the next two figures in the mural represent struggles that fueled Chicano pride and activism more directly in the mid-­1960s: César Chávez of the farmworkers’ movement and

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Reies López Tijerina of the Hispano land grant struggle in the Southwest. Chávez was a community organizer who became a union organizer and therefore understood that workers are always part of larger communities. While the United Farm Workers (UFW) union had members of many ethnic groups, the majority were Chicano/as, and Chávez and union cofounder Dolores Huerta placed symbols of Mexican and Mexi­ can American culture at the heart of their nonviolent organizing efforts. The UFW flag (which Chávez holds in the mural) proudly bore a black Aztec eagle against a red background, a symbol soon to become identified with the Chicano/a movement generally. The union began its first huelga (strike) on September 16, 1965, the day commemorated as the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. And when they marched, the UFW members carried a statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of the Mexican poor, thus linking the Catholic faith of the majority of union members to the struggle, as black Christianity helped form a base for the Civil Rights movement. In this way Chávez sought to reclaim the spirit of Christianity from a conservative church hierarchy, much as Reverend King and other black ministers had reclaimed the protesting spirit of black Protestantism. While Chávez, deeply influenced by the multiracial labor coalitions of the popular front era, never saw himself as leading a Chicano union or as part of an exclusively Chicano movement, the union and its members became powerful symbols whose strikes, marches, boycotts, and other protests inspired pride and resistance among the new Chicano generation. Next to Chávez stands another figure of great importance to an emerging Chicano movement. Reies López Tijerina led the Hispano land grant movement during the mid-­and late 1960s in the Southwest. Tijerina and his followers claimed descent from the original, pre-­Anglo Spanish settlers (hispanos) of the Southwest, whose land had been stolen by the invading Yankees. After repeated attempts to press their claims in court, the members of Tijerina’s group La Alianza took up armed rebellion on June 5, 1967, surrounding and then occupying a courthouse symbolic of their land claims. Word of Tijerina’s guerrilla action spread quickly among the Chicano community, offering a contemporary exemplar of the kind of resistance practiced by Zapata and Villa. Though hardly a revolution, the courthouse raid seemed to link the legendary bandits and revolutionaries of the past to the current moment

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and to reinforce a sense among many militant young Chicanos that perhaps only armed resistance could overthrow Anglo colonization of the U.S. peoples of Mexican descent. More broadly, Tijerina’s focus on land fed into the developing notion of Aztlán, quasi-­mythical ancient homeland of the Aztecs, said to cover most of those areas of the United States that now have large Chicano populations. A desire to reclaim Aztlán was a deeply symbolic expression of the right to feel at home within the confines of the United States, and an attempt to found a newly awakened Chicano raza (people, nation) on the resurrected memory of a homeland that predated by hundreds of years the coming of Europeans. Evocations of Aztlán became common in the political rhetoric, poetry, music, and murals of the movement. Finally, the mural depicts to the right of Tijerina two African Americans, a composite Black Panther/Malcolm X figure and Martin Luther King Jr. These figures express Chicano solidarity with the struggles of African Americans and also presumably acknowledge the debt of the Chicano movement to the model of struggle provided by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. César Chávez frequently acknowledged his debt to King’s concept of nonviolent resistance, and it is not hard to draw a parallel between Tijerina’s tactics and those of the Black Panthers and other militant African Americans with whom he made alliances. The inclusion of these figures suggests that el movimiento was allied to a larger movement for justice for all peoples oppressed within a United States dominated by rich white men and an all-­white notion of “American” culture. If I were to give the image of community conveyed in Bernal’s mural a name, it would be something like “community as militant or revolutionary solidarity.” To achieve this image of solidarity, the mural collages together, or some would say paints over, several ideological differences. The nonviolent strategies of King and Chávez, for example, exist unproblematically alongside the armed struggle represented by the Mexican revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, and Tijerina. And while the overall image was surely intended to evoke an emerging chicanismo, a Chicano nationalism similar to the black nationalism discussed in chapter 2, none of the pictured individuals, including the contemporary ones, were full supporters of a nationalist position. But this expresses

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both a truth of the movement and one of the strengths of muralism. The truth is that a spirit of common struggle did unite a great many Chicanos at this time, despite ideological, tactical, regional, gender, class, and other differences. No medium was better equipped to express this solidarity-­in-­difference than the wordless form of the mural, where the complexities of verbal political positionings are muted in a visual language of pure juxtaposition—­all the figures forming a single, united front of resistance. This sense of united effort is given historical depth not only by the historical figures in the scene but also by the style of the mural, which draws from the Mexican muralists who had drawn from the style of ancient Indian friezes (which, like Bernal’s mural, typically depict people in three-­quarter profile). Out of this ethos, inspired by Chávez, Tijerina, and the Mexican revolutionaries, with models of action, culture, and rhetoric drawn from these figures and from the black liberation struggle, and out of an increasing dissatisfaction with liberal assimilation, a vibrant, widespread Chicano movement had arrived by 1968. El movimiento was expressed largely through regional power bases rather than through a single national organization. In Texas and parts of the Southwest the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and its offspring La Raza Unida Party played the central organizing role. La Raza Unida challenged Anglo dominance through city, county, state, and national electoral campaigns that were at the same time movements of community and Chicano cultural pride. In Denver the Crusade for Justice, led by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, was a powerful grassroots movement with a strong separatist bent that celebrated Chicano culture and the most militant heroes of the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. Significantly, Gonzales was also the product of an urban barrio; a bit younger than Chávez and Tijerina, he was better able to express the spirit of an increasingly young and urban Mexican American generation. In his epic poem Yo Soy Joaquín (I Am Joaquín) (1967), later made into a short film by Luis Valdez of El Teatro Campesino, Gonzales created a powerful compilation of Chicano history from the Aztecs to the United Farm Workers, drawing together and popularizing many of the key themes and aesthetic motifs of Chicano cultural nationalism.8 California was the center not only of the United Farm Workers but also of the struggle for Chicano studies in the universities, a struggle

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won usually through student protests and strikes. In Santa Barbara, California, the creation of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) in 1968 united several existing student groups into the single most important student group of the Chicano movement, one that became a force on and off campus, in high schools as well as community colleges and universities. California was also home to one of the most radical groups in the movement, the Brown Berets, a paramilitary group with many similarities to the Black Panthers that protested police brutality in the barrios and often provided security for marches and rallies. These various groups had differing ideas and agendas, some reflecting regional variations in the lives of Chicanos, some representing differences in political ideology, but all were imbued with a sense that Chi­ canos would never accept being second-­class citizens ashamed of their culture. Some of the energy of MEChA emerged from the great student “blowouts” of March 1968. Begun as a student strike at Abraham Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, the blowouts eventually involved more than ten thousand students and effectively shut down the city school system. The thirty-­six demands of the strike committee included hiring Mexican American and Spanish-­speaking teachers and administrators, offering classes in the history of Mexican and Mexican American culture, and ending other racist practices in the schools. On the picket lines outside the schools and school board headquarters, signs proclaiming “Chicano Power!” and “¡Viva La Raza!” drew media attention. As the first major mass protest by Mexican Americans specifically against racism, the blowouts had a stunning impact on an emerging generation of young activists. Another famous Chicano mural that embodies this ethos and extends the scope of solidarity even beyond Aztlán is based on a widely circulated poster with a close-­up image of Latino revolutionary guerrilla Che Guevara next to the declaration “We Are Not a Minority.” Both the poster and the mural versions parody the “Uncle Sam Wants You” recruitment posters of World War I. They became in effect a kind of “Uncle Che Wants You” recruitment device for the Chicano movement. The mural version of the image shows the ability of murals to be at once powerfully direct and usefully ambiguous in their rhetoric (even when assisted by some words). For example, to some viewers this piece offers a clear revolutionary message, either a cultural nationalist one about

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internal colonialism oppressing Chicanos or a revolutionary internation­ alist one suggesting worldwide solidarity among peoples of color. These two related but different brands of revolutionism were both prominent in the 1960s and early 1970s. The notion of “internal colonialism,” developed powerfully in one of the books that shaped the Chicano movement, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, argues that the position of Chicanos within the southwestern United States is parallel to the status of a nation under European colonialism: the dominant culture attempts to impose its forms on a subject people, extracts a wealth of resources from those occupied territories, and gives back little other than paternalistic claims to be helping backward peoples.9 The “internal colony” notion was a powerful one, especially when tied to the idea of Aztlán as Chicano “homeland.” While this first interpretation stresses the situation within the United States, a second interpretation of the Che mural places it within a wider claim about an international movement of resistance. Che Guevara was an Argentinean by birth who played a decisive role in the Cuban Revolution against a corrupt U.S.-­backed regime and later died fighting for a similar cause in Bolivia. Just as the black movement drew strength from the image of anticolonial struggles in Africa, Chicanos drew special inspiration from the struggles in Spanish-­speaking countries of South America against European and U.S. colonialism. In the Black Power movement some groups, like the Panthers, stressed alliance with any groups, including white radicals, that sought to further revolutionary change, while others held a separatist, all-­black position. Similarly, Chicano groups divided over this strategic question. This division is usefully invisible in the mural. Probably the majority of people in the community would read the Che mural more modestly and generally as a reminder that in the wider world, people of color are the majority, not the minority, and that within the United States no one should accept the second-­class status that the term minority conveys. There is also an attempt in the mural to give historical depth to the community through an infusion of indigenismo in the form of the letter A, which appears in the shape of a Maya pyramid. These various political positions do not easily coexist, and they became the source of bitter ideological struggle, especially in the early 1970s. But the mural shows that the phrase “We Are Not a Minority”

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is meaningful to a very large segment of the Chicano community, a community that the visual rhetoric of such murals helped to form. The Del Rey and Che murals dramatically convey the political bravado of the early years of the movement, roughly 1968 to the early 1970s, a period when certain cracks and contradictions just beneath the surface could still be plastered over. Later, failure to come to terms with ideological contradictions between reformism and revolutionism, as well as others regarding gender and class, would be part of the undoing of the most radical phase of the movement. I want to suggest here that these murals were expressing a strategic ambiguity or openness that is a key ingredient in moments of movement formation. Such images of community speak a connection caught in el movimiento’s terms by carnalismo, a “blood” connection deeper than ideology and carried not biologically, as the term misleadingly suggests, but through a shared cultural history of exploitation, oppression, and resistance. Such a notion is part of an “essentialist” moment that is probably an inescapable phase in any emerging movement. “Essentialist” notions (suggesting a natural, biological, essential connectedness) must always be weighed strategically against the costs of suppressing necessary debate about political and cultural differences. These moments embody a confusion between the idea that the movement expresses the community and the truer sense that it is part of an attempt to invent such a community, one that existed previously as at best a potentiality. If these first two murals capture well the radical, even revolutionary, fervor of the early Chicano movement, we turn now to some murals that express the equally important, and equally pervasive, pragmatic side of el movimiento. I want to examine some murals that were used more as survival strategies within the everyday life of the barrio than as revolutionary signs. The pragmatic messages of this type of mural were generally of two types: those designed to instill pride by fighting racist stereotypes and those designed to lessen intracommunity violence. The former concern, for example, is embodied in a mural by members of East Los Streetscapers (Wayne Alaniz-­Healy and David Rivas Botello), La Familia. At one level it is a piece so conservative it might easily be titled “family values.” Its male-­led familial utopia is intended in part as a reply to stereotyped representations of Mexican Americans as shiftless street kids and gang members, or as parents who let their children run

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wild in the streets. The mural is a vivid indication of the deep value placed by Chicanos on family life, both inside and outside the movement culture proper. This mural is more than an image of the family in a narrow sense because the image of la familia is superimposed over a series of scenes from rural and urban Chicano lives, which appear to be linked by the radiating power of the family (represented by rays of sunlight). The family thus represents not simply home life but also community and Chicano national life—­community as a kind of metafamily headed by a metapatriarch whose authority is superimposed on the diverse scenes of community activity. The male figure in the mural dominates the scene, his female partner tucked under his arm; it is his power, not hers, that holds together “the” community. This image was paralleled quite explicitly at times in the political rhetoric of the late 1960s and early 1970s when talk of “the family of Chicanos” served to unify forces. But it also served as one focal point for Chicana feminist critiques of patriarchal relations in the movement as they elaborated parallels between male dominance of families and male dominance of el movimiento. A more complex and striking image of family life was painted in what became known in the mid-­1970s as Chicano Park in San Diego. This mural is not only a fascinating composition in its own right but also has a story that raises some important issues about the politics of public space entailed in mural making. In the image, a male farmworker, arms outstretched across a freeway pylon, appears at once to be crucified and to be spreading his strong arms/wings like the Aztec eagle on the UFW flag. He is both a powerful patriarch protecting his brood and a victim of labor exploitation, at once pre-­Christian indio and Catholic martyr. Again, these elements might evoke complicated political and cultural contradictions if put into words, but here they are held together effortlessly by the powerful nonverbal language of muralism. The park in which this and almost two dozen other murals appear was created through a struggle over public space—­the kind of struggle that most community mural work entails to some degree, but that is dramatically illustrated by the history of this particular project. A struggle for public land erupted when a long-­standing request for a park in the Barrio Logan section of San Diego was answered instead with a city plan to shove an eight-­lane interstate freeway through the heart of the

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barrio, displacing more than five thousand people. This struggle over land could be linked to the history of Chicano resistance to Anglo land-­ grabbing going back to the mid-­nineteenth century, while also remaining very much a pragmatic current issue. More broadly, it can stand for the attempt in barrios across the country to create Aztlán, for what the park makers were doing was reclaiming local space as their own. Aztlán was both a mythical homeland and a very real way to rename the land where Chicanos lived. As one of the participants in the park struggle put it: “In English barrio means ‘ghetto.’ In Spanish it means ‘neighborhood.’” Aztlán was not just a mythical place in the past but a symbol of the way in which the Chicano movimiento was returning the barrios to the people who lived there, making them places that celebrated and defended the interrelated cultures created by Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. Nothing stated that reclamation more visibly than the proliferation of thousands of murals produced in and around the Chicano movement culture. While the freeway could not be stopped, an attempt to set up a Highway Patrol parking lot beneath the freeway was met by an occupying army of Chicanos who claimed the site as their own. Surrounding and then appropriating the bulldozers sent to lay out the parking lot, the community members began instead to build a “Chicano Park.” After a long, intense struggle, the community won the battle and the park was built, complete with the Centro Cultural de la Raza that is still a community rallying point today. This Chicano cultural center was one of dozens of similar spaces throughout California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and anywhere else Chicano communities existed. These cultural centers acted as educational institutions, organizing points, and artists’ studios, where dance, music, art, theater, and other cultural forms were taught in the context of Chicano history. In turn, students in these centers became teachers of that history as part of the struggle for Chicano dignity and rights. That struggle included a large-­scale “muralization” of San Diego’s Chicano Park over a period of many years, including a “muralthon” in 1977–­78 involving artists and mural collectives from all over the state. The crucified farmworker mural was done earlier by José Montoya and the Rebel Chicano Art Front (a legendary Chicano art collective centered in Sacramento, California) and inspired other muralists to use the

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park’s unique “canvases.” What is perhaps most ingenious in that work is the incorporation of the particularities of the setting into the composition, especially the freeway pylon itself, which becomes the mural’s cross. But it is only the most striking of many imaginative efforts to incorporate the far-­from-­ideal site into the overall composition. This effort at site-­specific composition is an unusually vivid and effective extension of the normal process of community mural making. (Here I use community in its more local, neighborhood sense.) Many muralists spend days and weeks seeking the right site in a given community, and weeks more learning about the community’s particular needs and values, before attempting a mural. Both the space and the mural content are thus often complexly negotiated texts, texts that raise issues in the community to new levels of debate. At the same time, community murals, placed on the outsides of buildings rather than inside museums, challenge dominant notions of the art object as fetishized individual production with no real connection to any audience. A second major arena of pragmatic community concern articulated through murals is a kind of flip side of the concern to portray the Chicano community as strong in family values: an effort to acknowledge and examine the issue of gang violence. While such violence has frequently been the focus of racist moral panics directed from outside the community by the dominant society, these murals offer a perspective from the inside where these events can be seen correctly as being most often intracommunity violence conditioned by oppression. A piece known informally as Homeboy, for example, painted in 1974 by Manuel Cruz in the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles, joins issues of gang violence with a key theme of much early Chicano mural work, the articulation of the Indian dimensions of Chicano identity. In the mural, Aztec human sacrifice is recoded as community suicide in the form of a gang of homeboys killing another homeboy. While indigenismo was later criticized by some people as an uncritical celebration of the Aztec and other Indian empires that failed to acknowledge their oppressive elements, there is here already an ironic suggestion that the much-­mythologized Aztec religious practice of human sacrifice is preferable to the meaningless street sacrifice of homeboy life. But there is also an inspiring suggestion that a historically deep warrior spirit has

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been misdirected to rub out fellow members of la raza rather than to uphold and build cultural traditions. An extraordinary piece titled The Wall That Cracked Open richly documents the power of a mural as public art to intervene directly at a specific site of social struggle. Executed by Willie Herrón in City Terrace, East Los Angeles, in 1972, this mural was done on a cracked wall in an alley where the artist’s brother had been beaten nearly to death by gang members, and it ingeniously incorporates the already present gang graffiti into the composition. The multiply layered message here includes the idea that the graffiti are themselves part of an aesthetic impulse that could be further developed and redirected, just as the energy expended in gang violence could be redirected toward more politically charged aims. Mural projects were sometimes used to accomplish precisely that form of redirection. One of the most artistically unusual Chicano murals brings together several issues, from the local to the national to the international, suggesting their linkage as part of the continuum of Chicano experience. The piece is Black and White Moratorium Mural, by Willie Herrón and Gronk, done in 1973 at the Estrada Courts housing project in East Los Angeles (undoubtedly the most muralized housing project in the world, with more than ninety murals). As the name suggests, the mural is unusual first for being done in black and white rather than the far more common rainbow of bright colors, but the subdued colors are appropriate to the subject matter. The subject is war, war abroad and at home, and the black, white, and gray tones echo one of the great antiwar paintings of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. The wall commemorates an event known as the Chicano moratorium, a march and rally in August 1970 involving more than thirty thousand people who opposed the war in Vietnam and linked that war to war at home against Chicanos. While often misrepresented as a white student movement, the antiwar movement had many dimensions, many constituencies, and many links to other issues. This march organized by el movimiento was part of the national moratorium, a tactic that declared an escalating series of strike days against the war (a new day was added for each month the war continued). The Chicano march was intended to protest the fact that people of color in general, and Chicanos in

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particular, were dying in the war at rates far above their percentage of the nation’s population. The war was being fought disproportionately by people whose experiences of racism and poverty made them far more vulnerable to being drafted and to enlisting out of economic need. The mural vividly depicts the police riot unleashed against the demonstrators at the end of the rally, capturing the screams of victims and linking this police brutality to similar acts visited routinely on barrio residents. In that riot, the Los Angeles police, in what they claimed was an accident but what others believed to be an assassination, killed Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar. Salazar had worked for the Los Angeles Times and was one of the very few journalists who were acting to transmit el movimiento’s ideas fairly to a mainstream public. His death was a major blow and has been commemorated in other murals and artworks in addition to this one. The rally (and the mural that memorializes it) also pointed to the ways in which President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” economic reforms were being decimated by the costs of the war. As a consequence, more Chicanos were dying in the streets of the United States from the

Willie Herrón and Gronk, Black and White Moratorium Mural, East Los Angeles, 1973. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

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economic violence that leads to gangs and drug abuse. In these ways the mural brilliantly encapsulates the arguments of the Chicano movement as they moved from the barrio to the national government to international politics and back again.

CHICANISMA Most participants in and observers of the Chicano movement agree that the first phase of the movement had come to an end by the mid-­1970s. A great deal was accomplished in that period. El movimiento had succeeded in creating a new sense of identity that all people of Mexican descent benefited from and were affected by, even those more conser­ vative folks who rejected the term Chicano. A new sense of the dignity and depth of Mexican and Mexican American character and culture had been achieved through the work of countless organizers, including the cultural workers who made poems, paintings, dramas, movies, dances, and, most visibly and tangibly, murals to represent the key components of this new identity. But this insurgent phase of the movement was also riddled with problems and had reached certain political limits. Many factors contributed to these problems, not the least of which was a great deal of political repression of the kind that had been enacted against the Black Panthers and other radical groups in the 1960s. Internal factors also limited this phase of the movement, most centered on limited definitions of chicanismo and ethnic nationalism. For one thing, La Adelita notwithstanding, we can note a heavily male cast to the murals I have analyzed thus far in this chapter. This emphasis accurately reflects early domination of both el movimiento and the mural movement by men. But Chicanas, who had been deeply involved in both movements all along, were by the mid-­1970s asserting an increasingly powerful presence as activists and artists. Their presence was the single most important element in expanding and reopening the story being told about the Chicano community through el movimiento. The double oppression experienced by Chicanas positioned them to articulate a richer movement vision that supported much of the cultural nationalist stance but also recognized that there were other issues both within and beyond the Chicano community that needed to be addressed. Chicana feminist reinterpretations of community became the key force

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Yreina Cervantez, La Ofrenda (The offering), for Dolores Huerta. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

in a shift toward a more fully inclusive politics. These issues are theorized explicitly in the crucial works of Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Alvina Quintana, and Chela Sandoval, among others, but they are also articulated through the Chicana murals of Judy Baca, Yreina Cervantez, and many others. The piece La Ofrenda (The offering), by Yreina Cervantez, for example, helps to retell the history of the Chicano/a movement. It places Dolores Huerta, UFW cofounder along with Chávez, in her rightful place at the center of the movement. This is important not just for doing greater justice to Huerta as an individual but for symbolizing all the work done in the 1960s, 1970s, and earlier by Chicana activists and cultural workers—­work that had been downplayed, ignored, or overshadowed by the dramatic self-­importance often claimed by men in the movement. Women did much of the most effective, day-­to-­day, grassroots organizing, the work that truly sustains a movement, while men too often occupied themselves with strategizing sessions quite removed from the concrete realities of ordinary Chicano lives. Obviously, not all men behaved this way, and some women did manage against great odds

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to achieve leadership positions, but too often the pattern was one of male generals and female foot soldiers. Indeed, La Adelita is only further evi­ dence of this, since she is not a real individual like “General” Zapata, but a composite figure of all the anonymous women who followed him and Villa into battle. And this very image of battle was part of the problem: for too many in the movement, the rhetoric of armed struggle became the only language to express Chicano manhood, and a fetishizing of the gun, as with the Black Panthers, often got in the way of the real struggle for the hearts and minds of everyday Chicanos. Thus, Cervantez’s mural also represents work done by Chicanas to incorporate the quieter heroism of everyday community life into the movement story—­in this case, the world of religious life as represented by an allusion to the home altar. La Ofrenda is also indicative of the feminist articulation of solidarity among women that helped to cross certain rigid community borders. Thus, for example, Huerta’s Chicana heroism in the United States is connected to the struggle of Salvadoran women being victimized by U.S. policy and military repression in El Salvador. Giving Huerta her rightful place in the movement is paralleled by a feminist rearticulation of the continuing struggle of farmworkers in the United States in such murals as Las Lechugueras (The lettuce pickers), by Juana Alicia. This piece offers an “X-­ray vision” of a child in the womb of a lettuce picker in the field to dramatically depict how the environmental and personal dangers of pesticides present a still greater potential for harm to pregnant farmworkers and their unborn children. The mural powerfully supports efforts by the farmworkers’ union to limit the use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals that harm farmworkers. An emerging sense of a Latina solidarity that cuts across national community borders was also articulated by Chicana feminist mural collectives like the San Francisco Bay Area’s Mujeres Muralistas. Originally formed in 1974 by three Chicanas (Patricia Rodríguez, Irene Pérez, and Graciela Carrillo) and one Venezuelan (Consuelo Méndez), the evolving collective included other Latinas and Chicanas in subsequent incarnations and became an emblem of cross-­national communication for the diverse Spanish-­speaking populations of the Mission District. The collective’s piece Latinoamérica, for example, develops this theme by using a common feminist focus on everyday women’s activities and common

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threads of color to blend designs executed by different Latina artists drawing upon their differing national styles and traditions. At the level of aesthetic inspiration, the rediscovery of the work of Frida Kahlo played an important consciousness-­raising role for many Chicana and some Chicano artists. Long before Kahlo was rediscovered by the New York art crowd, an exhibit of her work at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco’s Mission District contributed to the feminist rewriting of art history. A piece titled Homenaje a Frida Kahlo (Homage to Frida Kahlo), painted by Mike Ríos to announce the exhibit, not only helped to mark Kahlo’s emergence from the very large shadow of her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, but also pointed to another dimension of the reappropriation of public space by the mural form. Ríos’s mural is actually painted on a commercial billboard near the gallery where Kahlo’s show was appearing. Over a period of two years, muralists and other community supporters engaged in a battle with the owners of the billboard, painting over its commercial messages with their artistic/political ones, until eventually the owners gave up and donated the billboard to Galería de la Raza. This kind of reappropriation of billboards and other public walls has been a significant part of the mural movement—­an important assertion of community rights over property rights and an argument about the very public nature of public buildings. In the context of the Chicano movimiento, this retaking of public space was part of a rebuilding of Aztlán not as a mythic land in the mists of time but here and now as a liberated zone.

MURAL/MOVEMENT Any discussion of ChicanX murals owes a huge debt to Judith Francisca Baca, both because she is among the most prolific and visionary muralists in the world and because her work brings together and extends many of the themes regarding the relation between murals and movement cultures that I have sketched thus far. Baca’s murals are painted in the spirit of what Charles Payne calls the “organizing tradition” pioneered in the Civil Rights movement. Her extraordinary career also offers further evidence that the dual identity of Chicana and feminist continues to expand the vision of the Chicano/a and mural movements toward connection with a wider multicultural resistance force. But in

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using Baca as my exemplar, I want to make clear that she herself works collectively and that she is only one among many other cultural workers who are equally deserving of attention. Baca’s work extends to something near its logical extreme a theme of communal production that has long been at the heart of mural work. Most of the murals I have discussed so far have been the work of mural collectives, often involving numerous nonartists from the communities in which the murals are to appear and usually based on input from those communities. Baca has moved this process to a new level of complexity and political power. For example, she was director of the Citywide Murals project in Los Angeles in the mid-­1970s, which produced more than 250 murals, many done under her direct supervision. That project entailed major input from Baca and other Chicano/as, but it was also a multiracial effort throughout the diverse neighborhoods of the city. Funded in part by the city, the project encountered the deep tensions that community murals generate, as well as the complicated political negotiations they involve. Such projects often become struggles between those hegemonic forces of the dominant culture seeking to turn murals into barrio and ghetto “beautification” projects, designed literally to paint over signs of deprivation and exploitation, and those forces seeking to turn murals into critical sites of communal resistance that precisely point out exploitation while also celebrating cultures drowned out in the so-­called mainstream. The continued power of muralism will lie in muralists’ abilities to resist the former forces and defend the latter.

THE GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES AND RADICAL MULTICULTURALISM The kind of large-­scale vision that informed the Citywide Murals project was taken in a different, even more spectacular direction in Baca’s supervision of the largest mural ever undertaken—­the half-­mile-­long “Great Wall of Los Angeles.” This work is a radically multicultural retelling of the history of Los Angeles and California from prehistoric times to the present. Begun appropriately in the bicentennial year 1976 and continued through five subsequent summers (with projections for extensions in the future), the work was accomplished through Baca’s

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direction of teams of Asian American, Native American, African Ameri­ can, Anglo, and Chicano/a youth. Many of these young people came to the project out of the criminal justice system, with mural work offered as an alternative to further jail time. Far from being a captive labor force, the young people working on the mural were encouraged to become involved in the complex invention, design, and execution of the work. Baca and her team thus sought to create a liberated force for community change. As in her other projects, Baca facilitated the creation of the Great Wall by bringing together professional historians, community story­ tellers, and a variety of people from all the communities that were to be represented in the mural. The young people took part in intensive revisionist history classes that included lively exchanges about their pasts and even livelier arguments about their futures. In these classes, in the streets, and on the Great Wall itself, the revisionist history now appearing in textbooks was anticipated and incorporated in story forms that linked the past to the vitally contested political terrain of the present. In fact, the wall came to be used by local teachers as a kind of painted textbook that lets their students walk through time. The Great Wall that emerged from this collective process presents powerful sets of images linked by narrative bridges. The mural draws connections among diverse communities, weaving a history of interracial conflict into a wider history of shared oppression and resistance. Here the multiculturalism inherent in the Chicano identity, combined with a feminist vision of everyday personal political linkages, has facilitated the creation of a complex vision of the separate but interacting histories of Los Angeles, California, and America’s diverse populations. Mural panels laid out in chronological order depict a range of peoples and events, often in very telling juxtaposition. The section on the 1940s, for example, includes panels on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the flight to Los Angeles of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and the “zoot suit riots” unleashed by attacks on Chicano street kid pachucos by white sailors. The mural stories richly interweave race, class, sexuality, and gender, often with great humor. One panel, for example, centers on an image of Rosie the Riveter, symbol of the independent working woman, who is being sucked by a vacuum cleaner into a television set. It wittily makes the connection between a redomestication of women in the “father knows best” years of the 1950s

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Judy Baca and crew at the Great Wall of Los Angeles. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

and the racial phenomenon known as “white flight”—­the flight of many whites to the suburbs as cities became more and more racially integrated. What emerges from Baca’s method of composition and from the mural itself is a sense of the integrity of the different ethnic enclaves and cultures of the city, and their inextricable interconnection. The rich story of Chicano/as in “Califas” (California) is maintained, but written also in terms of gender, class, and sexuality and linked to other racialized groups. This entire story of multiple intersections, and the power system at its core, must be addressed if a radically democratic, truly multicultural society is to become more than a glittering promise. Connecting these issues has become a matter of central concern to all resistance movements in recent years, and the issues themselves raise some difficult questions. How, for example, can movements balance the danger of an almost infinitely fragmentable politics of identity against the dangers of a prematurely homogenizing emphasis on common interest that erases important cultural as well as ideological differences? How can ethnic identities be created that honor the diversity of gender, class, and sexuality within communities while maintaining a united

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front against intersecting dominations? The Chicano community mural movement and projects like the Great Wall and the Citywide Murals program offer at least some glimmerings of how a movement-­inspired public art can move us closer to answers to these questions.

FROM REPRESENTATION TO ARTICULATION: REIMAGINING COMMUNITY The interlinked Chicano/a and community mural movements allow us to see that community is a powerful concept, a powerfully enabling fiction, yet with real points of reference in the world. However, the struggle to suppress differences (of gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and ideology, among others), particularly at the height of the nationalist phase, reminds us of how often the term community is used to close debate rather than open up possibilities. There are, no doubt, moments when it is necessary to articulate communal racial, class, or gender identity univocally. But can we find ways to speak that acknowledge unity as the provisional product of multivocal debate and as a negotiable contribution to a necessarily multicultural alliance? If a community must at times speak with one voice in order to generate the utmost power, is it possible still in that voicing to recognize dissent, internal otherness, and difference? Can an identity-­based movement progress from a politics of representation, which presumes to speak for an already known community, to a politics of articulation that freely portrays community as an always contested process, not a set thing?10 Can community be conceived as an ongoing, strategic, and negotiated reality and still be community? Or is every gain in self-­ consciousness necessarily a loss in solidarity? Is there some quality of community that can be recognized as preceding or exceeding ideology without resort to exclusionary and mystifying claims to blood consciousness? Is there a view of interconnectedness that is not so easily assimilated to an empty, homogenizing kind of humanism long allied to oppression? Can community be reconceived in something like concentric circles, communities layered one upon another, but also with loose ends, openings of the circle? The Chicano/a community mural movement, with its development into a “critical multiculturalism,” offers a model through which to

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think about some of these questions.11 A younger generation of muralists had emerged by the 1990s to take up the movement/mural connection. Artists like Alma López combine fierce racial pride with open treatment of once forbidden topics like straight and lesbian sexuality. Like her subject matter, López’s style, alternating between the traditional mural form and the newer digital mural format, reflects both continuity and change.

MOVING ON The wider Chicano/a/x movement evolved through the 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-­first century in directions often paralleling those of the mural movement as represented by Baca. New scholarship and new “movements within the movement” brought the concerns of Chicanas, LGBTQ2+ folks, and other previously marginalized groups to the center of concern. New immigration from Latin America reinforced a need to think multiethnically within the ChicanX/LatinX U.S. community, even as still wider multicultural coalitions seemed necessary for further progress. Chicano/a/x studies evolved more complex, absolutely vital positions, dealing more fully with issues of class, sexuality, and coalition making.The strengths and limits of ethnic nationalisms have been carefully examined, and both the theory and practice of new models of organizing are richly visible. Movements for the rights of immigrants and citizens of Latin American descent continue to grow and change, to face the challenges of another conservative backlash brought to a fever pitch in the 2016 presidential election, and to assert the powerful presence of Latinos/as/xs in the ongoing struggle to achieve liberty and justice for all in this nation of immigrants.

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5 OLD COWBOYS, NEW INDIANS

HOLLYWOOD FRAMES THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT Do you remember Leonard Peltier? Do you remember he stood at the window of the farm house in South Dakota yelling Stella! Stella! while the FBI surrounded him and the rest of AIM, a cast of thousands. It was epic, a Cecil B. DeMille production made intimate when two FBI agents were shot to death. —­Sherman Alexie, “The Marlon Brando Memorial Swimming Pool”

Native American “red power” warriors moved “like a hurricane” across the U.S. landscape in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 These new “Indians” challenged five hundred years of colonial domination by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for Native nations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation for the minerals exploited from reservations, and a renaissance of Native culture. The most famous and infamous Native American organization of the red power era, the American Indian Movement (AIM), will be my focus here. Despite its name, AIM was not the Indian movement; rather, it was only one organization among many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other important Indian resistance groups preceded and ran parallel to AIM, but AIM was the most visible and media oriented of the radical Indian movement groups, and media visibility is very much to the point 143

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because the art form I will pair with the Indian movement in this chapter is the mainstream Hollywood film. While drawing information from various written sources and two important documentaries about AIM (Incident at Oglala, 1992, and The Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1990) as background, I will focus on three fiction films that deal to one degree or another with the group. After introducing AIM and discussing its use of and by the mainstream media during its years of peak activity (1968–­73), I will address the films in order of release: Powwow Highway (1989), Thunderheart (1992), and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994).2 I will assess and compare the films’ strengths and weaknesses as representations of the nature and aims of Indian radicalism to the moviegoing U.S. public. “The public,” of course, is a very vague, problematic concept, so at points I will try to be more specific about what particular audiences might do with each film. To do this I supplement my observations with as many reviews and reactions as I have been able to gather, from both Indian and non-­Indian audiences. The independent Native American documentary and fiction film community is a vital, thriving one, yet so far it has not experienced a breakthrough to the mainstream to equal those of African American, Latino, or Asian American filmmakers.3 Racism and extremely high production costs have kept Hollywood-­style films largely beyond the control of Native Americans, the economically poorest population in North America. This means that the filmed stories about AIM have not emerged directly out of the movement culture, or even out of the Native community. This is particularly unfortunate because studies suggest that Native aesthetics and cultural rhetorics differ in all manner of ways from Hollywood filmmaking.4 AIM activists were involved to one degree or another in each of the three narrative films I discuss here, but in none did they have anything approaching control of the final cinematic product. Rather, AIM members made various attempts to influence a moviemaking process that was in the hands of mostly sympathetic but culturally and politically limited white outsiders who were translating movement ideas and values, sometimes well, more often poorly. And these outsiders, mostly from that mythical land called Hollywood, attempted their translations within a medium saturated with a history of racial stereotyping totally

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at odds with the goals of the Indian movement. The AIM activists were trying to get their message out to a wider public whose political unconscious, like that of the filmmakers, was deeply shaped by the “cowboy and Indian” conventions of the Hollywood western.5 To further complicate this whole picture, I will suggest that the “real” AIM activists and their “real-­life” opponents were to a certain extent acting out their own internalized Hollywood scripts from the beginning of the movement. From the start, for better and for worse, AIM was engaged in a battle for control over its mass-­mediated image. Thus, the films about AIM can be viewed as an extension of, not something wholly different from, the movement’s work. In this chapter I analyze the relationships between a “movement culture” and a sym­ pathetic “cultural formation” within the dominant culture, a formation we could call “pro-­Indian Hollywood.” The formation began with the early interest in Indian activism of actor Marlon Brando and spread to others, including Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Michael Apted. My analysis addresses both the usefulness and the limits of this formation in supporting the work of the movement. Of course, the lines between these two kinds of formation are fluid, not rigid. In other words, the movement was always already partly in Hollywood, and vice versa.

AIMING INDIANS IN NEW DIRECTIONS AIM was founded in Minneapolis in July 1968, with early leadership provided by Anishinaabe (Chippewa) organizers like Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Mary Wilson. American Indian Movement was not the first name the group members considered; they were originally going to call themselves Concerned Indians of America. And while the acronym CIA certainly would have been a resonant one, the choice of AIM says a good deal about the genius and the arrogance of the group. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior offer the best chronicle of AIM written thus far, and they stress the sense of drama and the orientation toward the mass media that were both AIM’s strengths and its weaknesses. In their excellent book on the Indian movement, Like a Hurricane, Smith and Warrior summarize the dramatic flair already apparent in AIM’s self-­naming:

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Old Cowboys, New Indians [The name was] perfect because it suggested action, purpose, and forward motion. Perfect because it was big, transcending the lesser world of committees and associations and congresses and councils. Organizations had recording secretaries and annual dinners. Movements changed history. The initials—­A-­I-­M—­underscored all of that, creating an active verb rich in power and imagery. You aimed at a target. You could aim for victory, for freedom, for justice. You could also, defiantly, never aim to please. Written vertically and stylized a bit, the acronym became an arrow.6

Though they do not say so here, it is clear from the rest of the book that Smith and Warrior also recognize that the name was extremely presumptuous. Imagine what would have happened if the Black Panther Party had tried to name itself the Black Power Movement, or if the Brown Berets had called themselves the Chicano Movement. AIM’s bold naming and equally bold actions certainly got the group the attention the founders wanted, but in the process it did some disservice to those Indian resisters who came before and those alongside whom the group struggled in the 1960s and 1970s. Two main sources of inspiration shaped AIM in its early years. The first was precisely the work of these other, insufficiently acknowledged Indian activists. Before AIM, the members of a new generation of radicalizing Indians were reforming older Indian organizations like the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) and focusing new grassroots efforts that were emerging from many sites around Indian country. When young Vine Deloria Jr. assumed leadership of NCAI in 1964, he sought to link this older, established organization with new local groups of a more radical bent, and with the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). Led by figures like the great Ponca organizer Clyde Warrior, the NIYC became the cutting edge of Indian politics in the mid-­1960s. Many in the NIYC became interested in direct action, inspired in part by actor Marlon Brando, who spoke to them of translating the example of the black Civil Rights movement into Native American terms. This new spirit of direct action was exemplified by the so-­called fish-­ins in the Pacific Northwest. Organized by local Indians, with support from the NIYC and from Brando and other Hollywood activists, these events in the early 1960s called for restoration of traditional Native

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American fishing rights. In the San Francisco Bay Area, local Indian activists had laid groundwork for years that emerged into prominence with the dramatic Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, an action meant to remind non-­Indigenous Americans of their status as immigrants living on Native American land.7 AIM found its other important source of inspiration in militant antiracist organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense. Like the Panthers, AIM was started primarily by victims of the criminal justice system. At the time of AIM’s founding, Indians made up 1 per­ cent of the Minnesota population but 50 percent of the state’s prison population. Like blacks and Chicanos, urban Indians were (and are) routinely victimized by the police, and early AIM actions included a police observation plan that resembled the one in Oakland set up by the Panthers to resist police harassment and brutality (see chapter 2). Though AIM was initially peopled largely by Anishinaabe men and women from the reservations north and west of the city, the decision to locate its headquarters in Minneapolis and its early focus on urban issues gave the organization an urban image. This was initially a limitation in the context of a city/reservation split. The Native American world had been torn asunder by two devastating federal government actions during the 1950s that went by the ominous names “termination” and “relocation.” The 1953 Termination Act brought an end to many reservations and entailed the relocation of many Indians to urban areas, a process carried out under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part of AIM’s work, along with that of many other Indian activist groups, was to attempt to bridge the growing chasm between the reservations and the cities. Thus, after initially focusing on providing various daily-­life services to Minneapolis Indians and working Panther-­style against police brutality in the city, AIM extended its work to actions in white-­dominated towns that bordered reservations, such as Custer, South Dakota. In many of these towns Indians were routinely beaten, and sometimes killed, by local racist ranchers (encounters with “real” cowboys that set a tone for later run-­ins). AIM successfully intervened in several disputes between reservation residents and people in the bordering towns, forcing local law enforcement to take the cases seriously and serving notice that Native Americans would not take abuse anymore. It was largely

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these actions that first built a following for AIM on the reservations. In addition, AIM’s brash style and penchant for staging dramatic media events at sites of traditional, nationalist white power spread word of the group’s work. For example, at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, AIM held an action challenging the Thanksgiving myth, offering evidence that the white settlers were in fact giving thanks for a recent triumph in massacring New England Indians. A similar action was staged at Mount Rushmore, symbol of white desecration of the Black Hills, a sacred site for several Native nations. Such well-­publicized actions sparked the establishment of AIM “chapters” all over the country, some totally unknown to the central leadership. AIM also played an important role, along with numerous other Indian activist groups, in the “Trail of Broken Treaties” car caravan that crossed the country from west to east in 1972. The caravan picked up various tribal contingents along the way and stopped at sites that rep­ resented the continuing impact of two hundred years of treaties made and broken by the U.S. government. The trail ended in Washington, D.C., with an unplanned occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office. AIM members and others, with help from FBI provocateurs, sacked BIA headquarters, destroying and stealing documents and other government property. The action split the Indian community deeply, greatly increased the notoriety of AIM, and upped the ante of FBI surveillance and counterattacks against the organization. Whatever its limits as an action, the BIA trashing had great symbolic power to many young Indians who had felt themselves being trashed by Washington bureaucrats their whole lives. And to a nation whose most popular, currently circulating image of Native Americans was that of Indian actor “Iron Eyes” Cody weeping in a television public service announcement aimed at curtailing littering, the image of young Indian warriors littering the BIA building with the bureaucratic detritus of two hundred years of broken promises was surely startling. But all this was soon overshadowed by AIM’s most notorious and dramatic action, the two-­and-­a-­half-­month armed standoff with law enforcement during the Indian occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in spring 1973. This AIM-­led siege is the event most often referred to in all three of the films I discuss in this chapter, and it amply illustrates my point about the entwining of cinematic

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images and real-­life AIM actions. The occupation started after AIM was invited by elders onto the Oglala Pine Ridge Reservation to help the tribe in its efforts to oust corrupt leader Richard “Dickie” Wilson. The village of Wounded Knee was a resonant stage for the action, given its proximity to the site of the last great massacre of Indians by the U.S. Cavalry, the 1890 slaughter of three hundred undefended men, women, and children.8 This second battle at Wounded Knee—­which, in an eerie echo of the first, involved about three hundred Indian resisters—­was ostensibly about wresting tribal governance away from Oglala leader Wilson, who had the backing of the U.S. government, and returning it to the sovereign Oglala Nation. But beyond the local dispute, this was clearly a symbolic battle to reassert the sovereignty of all Indian nations as once guaranteed by government treaties. Real bullets were exchanged during the siege, and two Indians were killed in the course of the action. Still, the war by guerrilla tactics was clearly less important than the war by guerrilla theater. There is more than a little evidence to suggest that the Wounded Knee occupation included much “acting” and “staging” by participants on all sides. Cultural critic Kathleen Turner (not the actress) and historians Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith, among others, have described the AIM actions at Wounded Knee as “theater,” arguing that the occupation was a self-­conscious attempt on the part of Indian activists to stage a media event that could dramatize claims about broken treaties, continuing economic exploitation of American Indian lands, and an unrepresentative, puppet government on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI and other government forces were equally theatrical in their actions, and generally more successful at manipulating the media. For example, they initially banned reporters from the area and then restricted media access throughout the occupation; the FBI also threatened to arrest representatives of the progressive press who offered sympathetic accounts from inside the AIM compound. A careful study by Michelle Dishong of the coverage of Wounded Knee II by “the news­paper of record,” the New York Times, richly documents the bias of accounts toward the government side of the story.9 Comments made by activists and journalists on the scene at the battle of Wounded Knee in 1973 also draw attention to the role the Hollywood imagination played in the action. Indeed, this was probably inevitable since no groups have been more powerfully and archetypically

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mythologized by U.S. popular culture than cowboys and Indians. Journalistic accounts of AIM–­FBI encounters at Wounded Knee reflect this mediation, and those who read such accounts at the time undoubtedly interpreted them in part through reception mechanisms shaped by years of cinematic and televisual images. AIM member John Trudell, for example, commented that if “FBI agents that grew up watching John Wayne and cowboys and Indians come out here and want to play cowboys and Indians, then they [have] got to suffer the consequences, just as we do.” In speaking like this, Trudell revealed the extent to which he and his compatriots were also playing out the “cowboys and Indians” script. And that script was further encouraged by the mainstream media. For example, one journalist who had been on the scene at Wounded Knee later recalled that correspondents “wrote good cowboy and Indian stories because that was what they thought the public wanted.”10 If the occupation of Wounded Knee was a staged production, then AIM leader Russell Means was surely its star. One Time magazine reporter covering the occupation noted that Means could sometimes be seen directing cameras and staging events for the media’s benefit.11 Means’s career subsequent to the Wounded Knee siege is also suggestive of the role he played during the occupation. He went on to appear in several movies, and he performed the voice of Powhatan in Disney’s 1995 animated travesty of the Pocahontas story. Indeed, his acting career led one cultural critic to invent a new term for Means’s social role. American Indian studies scholar James Stripes refers to Means as an “actor­ vist,” a term that might fit John Trudell, national leader of AIM in the late 1970s, even better, since Trudell appeared in two of the fiction films I will discuss and was interviewed in both of the documentaries noted here as well.12 Certainly a case can be made that the role of leader of AIM in the early 1970s was one that trained Russell Means well for a career in “real” acting. More than one historian of the American Indian Movement has spoken of Means’s flair for the dramatic. During the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in 1972, for example, Means let himself be caught on camera using a confiscated oil portrait of then president Richard Nixon as a shield while engaging police on the steps of the building. Means’s “shades and braids” image was enough to get him more than the “fifteen minutes of fame” Andy Warhol suggested all Americans

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would soon have, and resulted in an actual portrait of Russell done by Warhol himself. More than one detractor in Indian country has used such facts to portray Means as more image than substance, and he was sometimes accused of “impersonating” an Indian even before Hollywood, during his AIM heyday, partly because he spent very little time in Indian country while growing up. But implying that these AIM “actorvists” sold out to Hollywood or were never real activists is too easy. Both Means and Trudell (who died in 2012 and 2015, respectively) remained vocal critics of Indian oppression, and both claimed that they were using, not being used by, the mass media. As Means framed it, “I haven’t abandoned the movement for Hollywood. I’ve brought Hollywood to the movement.” I partly agree with his statement, though I would rephrase it to say that Hollywood, for better and for worse, was in the movement from the beginning. In this sense, the fiction films about AIM are a logical extension of a process already at work in AIM actions themselves. Thus, I look at the films as embodying a struggle between the cultural frames offered by movement activists and the cultural frames of the Hollywood film, and I want to suggest that at times those frames overlapped and interacted, fusing and confusing the picture.

POWWOW HIGHWAY Perhaps the most unambiguously positive thing I can say about the films in which AIM is represented is that Kevin Costner (also known as “Dances with Wolves”) was not involved in any of them. On the other hand, similarly inclined movie mogul Indian wannabes were involved. Ted Turner was behind one of the films, Robert Redford was involved in another, and former Beatle George Harrison produced a third. Whatever limitations these films have, they are an advance over the Dances with Wolves version of noble savagery in one important respect: the AIM films attempt to portray living American Indians. Costner’s film, while arguably a slight improvement over the traditional Hollywood western, reinscribes a contemporary version of the noble savage myth that pervades U.S. culture in the form of nostalgia for what “the Indian” allegedly was. The perpetuation of this myth takes several forms: pseudovision quests in the so-­called men’s movement; the “New Age” claims of

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some white women and men who, as Native scholar-­activist Andrea “Andy” Smith notes, boast of having been Indians in their past lives in order to make a great deal of money in their present lives by selling images of American Indian spirituality; and liberal guilt about what “the white man” did to the Indians in the past.13 The sentiments seldom extend in any significant way to concern about the hideous injustices that continue to be heaped upon Native peoples in the United States today. In Hollywood, the only really good Indian is still a dead Indian. The AIM films, whatever their flaws, are at least among the very few mainstream productions that have even attempted to make visible the generally “disappeared” lives of Indians in contemporary America. Powwow Highway, bankrolled by George Harrison, is an inde­ pendent film that managed to gain something of a mainstream audience after its release in 1989, especially via television and home video. As arguably the first widely circulated attempt to present something of the contemporary lives of Native Americans in film, this relatively low-­ budget and low-­tech production is in some ways better equipped than the other two, glossier films to convey the low-­budget, low-­tech lives of most Indians today. In its best moments, Powwow Highway gives a complex sense of some of the intricate struggles between tradition and modernity faced by descendants of First Nations and captures a certain casual resistance to white ways that people in Indian country identify as “living on Indian time.” At other moments it seems little more than a buddy film, a kind of On the Road, Indian-­style. Indeed, when the then somewhat highbrow TV network Bravo screened Powwow Highway, it characterized the film as “an offbeat road movie,” evoking visions of Jack Kerouac in braids or, worse still, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the road to Pine Ridge. The film is based on the novel of the same title by former AIM member David Seals, who eventually came to dissociate himself from the movie. The protagonists are Philbert Bono, a seemingly none-­too-­bright, gentle, three-­hundred-­pound Cheyenne who fancies himself a spiritual warrior and refers to his beat-­up old car as his “pony,” and Philbert’s pal Buddy Red Bow. Buddy is a former AIM activist, a veteran of Vietnam and Wounded Knee, and a still-­angry fighter against federal/corporate corruption and exploitation of the reservation. Clearly, the friendship between the two men is weighted with symbolic value. Philbert and

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Film poster for Powwow Highway.

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Buddy embody the complicated play between Indian spiritual tradition­ alism and modern militancy that was part of AIM’s history. When Philbert attempts to get elder wisdom from his great-­aunt, she laughs derisively and tells him she is sick of young Indians looking for some magic in the past. Undaunted, Philbert begins to cobble together bits of traditional “medicine,” filtered through the distorted lens of white Indian fantasy. Author Leslie Marmon Silko suggests in her novel Ceremony that traditional rituals have always changed to meet the needs of the present, rather than being lodged in an impossible-­to-­return-­to past. Similarly, Powwow Highway suggests that contemporary Indian survival depends on the blending of respect for the past with wild improvisation, a making-­do with the impure tools of the present (as when Philbert leaves a candy bar as an offering to his ancestors). We first meet Buddy in a powerful scene in which he challenges a slick presentation to the Cheyenne tribal council by a sellout Indian “apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside) working for a corporation that hopes to mine uranium on the reservation, further exploiting the tribe’s mineral wealth. Buddy eloquently rattles off statistics on Native American poverty and compares the rosy promises of the cor­ poration to those in the hundreds of nice-­sounding treaties signed and ignored by the U.S. government over the past two hundred years. He ends his speech by rejecting the mineral-­rights colonialism being offered as a chance at the American dream, noting that Indian country “isn’t America. This here’s the Third World.” When Buddy’s sister is busted for possession of drugs in New Mexico in what turns out to be an FBI-­directed frame-­up used to get Buddy off the “rez” so that the uranium deal can be pushed through, Buddy teams up with Philbert, the only person he knows who has a car. The plot meanders as the two travel none too directly from Montana to New Mexico to get Buddy’s sister out of jail. The unfolding plot includes a slight mellowing of Buddy’s anger in the face of Philbert’s gentle but strong faith in his partly improvised spiritual tradition. In this the plot resembles the increasing commitment to traditional spirituality that AIM demonstrated as it evolved. The most direct treatment of AIM in the film occurs in the middle portion, when Philbert, following the “powwow highway” rather than the most efficient route to New Mexico, diverts his trusty Buick pony,

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named Protector, to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There Buddy meets up with some of his old comrades from the Wounded Knee siege. When he arrives, his friends tell Buddy of the terror still being waged against AIM sympathizers on Pine Ridge—­“a shooting every day,” as one of them remarks. This is hardly an exaggeration, given that close to seventy AIM members and sympathizers were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances in the three-­year period following the Wounded Knee occupation. Scholars have attributed most of these unsolved deaths to AIM’s prime enemy, conservative tribal chairman Richard Wilson, and his vigilante “goon squad,” actively or passively abetted by the FBI. In Powwow Highway Buddy has a brief encounter with the leader of the goon squads that have been harassing his friends. He publicly backs the goon down at a powwow, with the aid of a knife thrown as a warning by a war buddy suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. This is an important moment because an unusually large number of AIM members were Vietnam veterans who concluded that they had been fighting against the wrong government. They turned their deep anger and their military skills to the service of Indian war against the U.S. government and its tribal puppets, and in so doing they brought the war in Vietnam home in ways that deeply shaped Native American radicalism.14 The morning after the powwow, Buddy and Philbert give a ride to a couple of friends, a husband and wife, who have been besieged by the goons, dropping them off at a suburban tract house. The subplot here involves Buddy’s reaction to his friends’ choice to leave Pine Ridge. He claims that the man has sold out, but his friend points out that Buddy himself has not been living under the constant threats the friend and his wife have been enduring. A kind of respectful standoff is achieved, in which Buddy’s ongoing militancy is given greater weight at the same time the difficulty of his friend’s choice is recognized without condemnation. I read this as a kind of reconciliation narrative working within the orbit of AIM, where many such difficult choices were being made in the years following the internal struggles and savage repression by the FBI and other authorities in the wake of Wounded Knee. The remainder of Powwow Highway never discusses AIM directly, but we do see the FBI’s involvement in framing Buddy’s sister as a clear indication of the continuing collusion between the federal government and corporations in exploiting mineral rights on Indian lands, one of

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the key elements of AIM’s position. The climactic event of the film suggests a complicated play of media frames. Philbert, with the aid of powerful medicine he has gathered along the powwow highway, springs Buddy’s sister from jail Old West–­style by pulling out the bars of her cell using his Buick “pony’s” horsepower. Philbert’s inspiration for this Indian liberation moment comes while he is watching an old western on TV. The scene suggests that Indian resistance requires a combination of turning white mass-­media culture against itself, Philbert’s traditional tribal magic, and Buddy’s AIM-­inspired militancy. The final scene of the movie, immediately following the jailbreak, helps to undermine the “buddy movie” quality somewhat. We see Philbert, his “pony” lost to fire after a car chase by the police, walking down a road alongside Buddy, Buddy’s sister and her two kids, and a white girlfriend who helped with the escape. In the background is the pragmatic Cheyenne tribal chairman whose faith in the more ideologically aggressive Buddy led him to assist the war party from a distance. The ending is a utopian one, suggesting that forces separating AIM-­style militancy from existing tribal governments, Indians from whites, men from women can be easily transcended. It seems at best only a magical resolution, a fantasy projection rooted as much in New Age white imaginations as in serious Indian resistance. While the film has its moments, reviews by Euro-­American critics suggest that much of its subversive potential is recontained for a white audience. The AIM material is given too little context, and either the harmless buddy film or a feel-­good-­about-­Indians, New Age, spiritual reading predominates. Turning to Native reactions, reviews and personal accounts suggest that Powwow Highway was received with mixed feelings in Indian country. On the one hand, there seems to have been a certain amount of appreciation that living, breathing “rez” Indians were portrayed on-­screen at all. On the other hand, there was a sense of disappointment that a rather whitewashed and superficial portrait emerges. Several reactions, including that of author Seals, focused on how the film sanitizes the book, making the Indians too good, as if merely switching black hats for white could undo the limits of the “cowboys and Indians” formula. The novel’s Indians are far more ambiguously depicted, with real human flaws; Buddy’s sister, for example, is not just a victim of an FBI frame-­up but really is dealing drugs. Seals’s response includes having the

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film appear briefly as a spectral character in his novelistic sequel to Powwow Highway, Sweet Medicine, in order to underscore the movie’s dif­ ferences from his novel.15 Clearly Powwow Highway broke some new ground in Hollywood cinema, but ultimately it veers away from tough questions.

THUNDERHEART The second of our films, Thunderheart, was directed by British filmmaker Michael Apted. In the same year it was released, 1992, Apted’s documentary about AIM, Incident at Oglala, funded in part by Robert Redford, also came out. Incident at Oglala focuses on the case of Leonard Peltier’s alleged involvement in the murder of two FBI agents in 1976. Thunderheart’s fictional story is a thinly veiled effort to deal with the period of AIM activity after the events at Wounded Knee had passed. The film opens with the following words on the screen: “This film was inspired by events that took place on several Indian reservations during the 1970s.” This would seem to be at once a claim for realism and a disclaimer, probably aimed at Justice Department lawyers. “Inspired by” seems to leave enough room to claim poetic license if the FBI took exception to being portrayed in the film as conspiring to commit murder, obstruct justice, and collude with private corporations to steal uranium-­ rich Indian lands. The name of AIM is changed in the film to ARM, the “Aboriginal Rights Movement,” and the name of the FBI is changed, too, but in quite a different way. The FBI’s name changes are made by a character in the film named Walter Crow Horse, a local Oglala cop whose skills make him a kind of cross between a Hollywood Indian scout and Sherlock Holmes. Played with brilliant humor by Graham Greene, Crow Horse makes a series of revisionist readings on the most famous initials in American law enforcement: from “Federal Bureau of Intimidation” to “Federal Bureau of Interpretation” (here stressing the fictive dimension of interpretation). Finally another Indian points out that on the rez, “FBI” stands for “full-­ blooded Indian.” This progression from intimidator to interpreter to Indian also marks the progress of the central character in the film, an FBI agent played by Val Kilmer. Kilmer’s character, Ray Levoi, is a naive young agent who has an American Indian heritage he has deeply and

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Film poster for Thunderheart.

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successfully buried, at least until he arrives on the reservation. He is sent there as a token Indian to help legitimate the FBI’s attempt to apprehend an ARM member whom the bureau claims murdered another Indian. The ARM activist is played by AIM “actorvist” John Trudell. The rather predictable plot revolves around the gradual re-­ Indianization of Kilmer’s character as he is at once seduced by the powers of ARM’s tribal elder medicine man, played by Ted Thin Elk, and appalled to find evidence of an FBI plot to frame the ARM activist and abet the sale of uranium-­rich lands. Thunderheart, like Powwow Highway before it, rightly draws attention to the deadly effects that illegal mining practices have had on Pine Ridge and other reservations, both economically and through water contamination. One key moment in the film momentarily shatters the Hollywood frame, which dominates this film more than the other two. It occurs when Trudell, playing James Looks Twice, is arrested by Kilmer and his hard-­nosed FBI boss, played with aptly laconic flatness by Sam Shepard. Kilmer’s character calls Looks Twice a militant, to which he replies, “I’m not a militant, I’m a warrior.” Shepard’s character retorts, “Yeah, and I’m John Wayne.” Looks Twice follows up with a quick speech: “[I’m p]art of a five hundred year resistance. Deep voices that have to be heard. You can kill us but you can’t break our spirit.” These words closely echo words that Trudell used in his AIM speeches, and it probably matters little to this analysis whether he gave them to or got them from the movie script (although I think it likely was the former). The effect is a momentary crack in the film’s melodrama. As in Powwow Highway, Thunderheart has strong themes of the connections among tradition, spirituality, and warriorhood. In the real-­ life history of AIM such connections were often the goal, though one not always achieved. But accounts of the involvement of Sioux elders in the decision to make a stand with AIM at Wounded Knee suggest that that event may have done much to solidify a bond between the mostly urban Indians of AIM and spiritual traditionalists. That bond is one of the most important legacies of the AIM era (even though AIM’s often vague pan-­Indianism paid too little attention to particular tribal cultural histories). But no account I know of says anything about a turncoat FBI agent playing a role in any of this. And that is surely among the most

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disappointing elements of Thunderheart. Just as the film Mississippi Burning undercuts its important retelling of the history of Freedom Summer by making the FBI, which did so much to try to destroy the Civil Rights movement, a hero in the film, Thunderheart’s use of this turncoat FBI agent threatens to transform the film into a ridiculous “Mississippi Burning Goes West.” But at least in this case the Indian FBI agent is used as a device to expose the FBI, not to make the bureau the unsung hero of another movement it attempted to destroy. In Thunderheart the device may work to some extent to lure in the unsympathetic audience member who might initially identify with the position of the FBI, given the agency’s prominence in hegemonic Ameri­ canism generally and its reported role in saving the nation from militant “wild Indians” like AIM. But the device undermines the film in many other ways and turns it in some absurd, Hollywood directions. Kilmer’s character is revealed to be a descendant of Thunderheart, a medicine man killed at the original massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. A kind of blood essentialism perversely combines with a paternalistic suggestion that only a hero from the outside, trained in the white world, can rescue the Indian nations. This plotline severely undermines the political pull of the film, and particularly the movement dimension. The movie suggests too little sense of even symbolic collectivity around ARM, and what sense of Indian community it does convey is undercut by an incongruous ending in which Kilmer’s character heads down the road as if this were just one in a series of adventures. In a serious confusion of the “cowboys and Indians” plot, the movie ends with the FBI Indian “riding” off into the sunset alone, cowboy-­style. The film thus ends on a rather hazy, nostalgic moment that locks Indian activism in a more recent past as surely as Dances with Wolves locks Indian cultures in the nineteenth century.

LAKOTA WOMAN: SIEGE AT WOUNDED KNEE The third and final film I examine is Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, a Ted Turner–­Jane Fonda coproduction originally shown on television and then released on home video. The film is based on the controversial (auto)biography of AIM activist Mary Crow Dog, “as told to” Richard Erdoes. The book is controversial for several reasons, including

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Poster for Lakota Woman video.

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the question of who “really” wrote it, its sympathetic treatment of AIM, and its failure to find a publisher for many years. This last point is of interest because the reason given for the book’s initial failure to find a publisher, in the late 1970s, was in effect that Indians were no longer fashionable. This raises the question of why Native Americans became “fashionable” once again in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when all these films were produced. One partial answer, which probably mitigates the effects of all the movies, lies in the American culture’s pervasive capacity to dampen any topic with dismissive nostalgia, even one as initially disturbing as the red power movement. In this case one might speculate that this general nostalgia was augmented by the particular nostalgia of Fonda, who had assisted in airlifting supplies to the Wounded Knee encampment during her more radical youth. In any case, the passage of time between the original events and their filmic reenactment surely works to the advantage of the “cowboys” in this story, since in the intervening years they viciously suppressed the American Indian Movement, using the goon squads when necessary, disinformation campaigns at every opportunity, and the court system continuously. The general strategy was to use trumped-­up charges that were later dropped after they had done their damage of keeping key figures in jail awaiting trial or otherwise tied up in legal battles so that movement funds were directed toward legal fees rather than organizing. Sometimes the government had greater success in actually framing and incarcerating individuals, such as Leonard Peltier. Although AIM won 92 percent of the cases against its members that made it to trial, the costs—­in money, time, and movement energy—­were devastating. While AIM continues to exist to this day, the movement never recovered from this assault. With those limitations in mind, it is possible to say that Lakota Woman is the most complete, and in most respects the best, of the AIM fiction films produced so far. Much of the credit must go to the original material, since Mary Crow Dog was for a time at the heart of AIM, and she provided a lucid and compelling story for Erdoes and later the filmmakers to work with. Another key factor is that the story is told from the point of view of an Indian woman. One of the least admirable aspects of AIM, as in other movements, is a tendency toward masculinist posturing, and Crow Dog does a nice job of puncturing such male

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displays from time to time in both the book and the film. In the case of AIM, I read that posturing as in part a product of the Hollywood script, in which warriorhood is always about armed confrontation rather than about building and protecting community by many means. Putting Crow Dog at the center of the story decenters the “cowboys and Indians” dynamic considerably. It is also important because women have played and continue to play key leadership roles in many parts of Native cultures, and they certainly were (and are) important in AIM. The film correctly shows, for example, that traditional women of Pine Ridge played a particularly strong role in pushing to invite AIM to take up the occupation at Wounded Knee. When a male leader suggests in the film that women leave the encampment, Crow Dog and the other women present give a resounding response of “Hell no!” More generally, a female center is important because, as in most movements of the era, women in AIM did much of the real organizing work while too often male leaders took the roles in the spotlights. Those starring roles, however, also meant that it was disproportionately the men who ended up in jail. Eventually women in AIM formed their own organization, WARN (Women of All Red Nations), which supported the men of AIM but recognized the need (and the traditional right) of women to form separate groups. WARN remains today one of North America’s most important Native resistance organizations. The character of Mary Crow Dog, played by Irene Bedard (who performed the voice of Pocahontas in Disney’s animated film), is also used to illustrate the ambivalence in AIM about the use of violence. While the women in the film are portrayed as every bit as militant as the men, they do not fetishize guns. On the one hand, the advertisements for the television presentation of the film seem to play up Mary’s woman warrior stance by picturing her peering through the scope of a rifle. On the other hand, in the movie itself we learn that when she looks through that scope and gets a government soldier in her crosshairs, she acknowledges his humanity and does not pull the trigger. That is an important moment because, looking back on the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear that the FBI “cowboys” tried to provoke violence as often as possible in order to discredit movements. Dismissing radical movements as “violent” and “extremist” has long been a way for the government to avoid confronting the issues raised by such movements. In the case of

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AIM, while government agents wanted to avoid a second Wounded Knee massacre, they were pleased whenever they helped the warriors live up to the violent, criminal “renegade” image they and the media had crafted for them. While AIM’s official stance was always one of violence only in “self-­defense,” that proved a difficult distinction to make, as it had been for the Black Panthers. It was made more difficult by law enforcement infiltrators who joined AIM often for the express purpose of pushing for more violent actions. Mary Crow Dog’s involvement with AIM becomes the center of the story in the film even more than in the book, and the movie gives a far more detailed portrait of the spirit, ideas, and goals of AIM than any other film, including the two documentaries. The film is also careful to make clear at the beginning that it is the story only of “Mary Brave Woman [as she was named after she gave birth inside the encampment during the siege]—­this is how she saw it.” While this statement may, again, have been written partly as a legal disclaimer, it also makes clear that this is a partial portrait, not a definitive one. Following these opening printed words, the film segues quickly to scenes of the Pine Ridge landscape, as Mary tells us in voice-­over that this is the story of how she “finds her soul.” She says modestly that it is “only a little story” compared to that of Crazy Horse and other great warriors, but it is hers. The film is good at giving a quick but textured sense of the background that led Mary and many Indians like her to join the movement. An early scene contrasts her material poverty with a sense of the strength of family in Native communities. Mary narrates, “We were poor but I didn’t know it and we had love and respect.” The story of the first Wounded Knee massacre is also told as both a tribal and a family affair through Mary’s grandfather, who witnessed it. This scene of military genocide is soon followed by attempted cultural genocide as symbolized by Mary’s Indian braids being cut off in a repressive Christian boarding school, which systematically goes about trying to erase her cultural heritage, as such schools tried to do for many generations. We also get glimpses of her teenage years, which can perhaps be described most aptly as aimless. We get statistical information on the poverty and unemployment rates on the reservation that contextualizes what in the other films is too often mere background (though both of the other fiction films make remarks about the rez being part of “the Third World”). Mary and

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her friends court death, and in one case meet it, in drunken car-­chase games. In the documentary The Spirit of Crazy Horse (directed by James Locker), alcoholism among Native Americans is read as a form of resistance to the life imposed on them by the dominant culture, and while that view is not made explicit in Lakota Woman, it is clear that Mary redirects some of her reckless energy and anger at what has become of her people under white domination into the more creative and active response of working with AIM. Her involvement is portrayed fairly carefully as developing in stages rather than through some flash of conversion, as too often happens in films about radicals. There is an amusing scene in which she first learns about radical Native American activism from an alternative newspaper given to her by a young “hippie chick” who is clearly thrilled to be talking to a real live Indian. Later she gets a more direct lesson in the movement while in jail after one of her drunken adventures, and she gradually drifts into movement circles. A male inmate gives her the gist of AIM philosophy as follows: “We light the spark; we’re gonna take it all back, and then we’re gonna set it free.” Bedard as Crow Dog offers voice-­over narration that allows for a fair amount of discursive development of AIM views and contextuali­ zations, providing useful information for the audience as the film moves rather quickly through most of the major events in the evolution of AIM. The account begins with the intervention into border-­town killings that first established AIM as a force in the Dakotas. The uprising around the murder of Wesley Bad Heart Bull in Custer, South Dakota, which solidified AIM’s reputation, is staged carefully. Crow Dog tells us in voice-­over that Bad Heart Bull’s mother was sentenced to three to five years in prison for allegedly inciting a riot outside the courthouse where her son was being tried, while the murderer was set free. The Mount Rushmore action, where an AIM activist humorously remarks that “we reclaim this piece of bad art in the name of the Lakota people,” is also touched upon. Crow Dog’s narration adds that while “we had no magic to restore the mountain, the FBI acted like they believed we might” and proceeded to brutalize the protesters. Another scene raises the important issue of archaeological desecration, again with a touch of humor at the expense of white presumptuousness. AIM activists approach a dig overseen by a professor surrounded by graduate students

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and ask the befuddled prof, “Where’s your grandmother buried? We want to dig her up and put her in our museum.” When the archaeologist asks, “Who are you people?” the activists reply: “We are walking scientific specimens. We are quaint tourist attractions. We are living fossils. We are your conscience, if you have one.” When the film turns to the siege at Wounded Knee, which takes up most of its second half, the effort to achieve accuracy is clear. We get scenes of speeches by Russell Means (played by Lawrence Bayne) that give the spirit, if not always the specific content, of AIM ideology. We also get a sense of how the urban members of AIM became acquainted with and were influenced by traditional elders on the reservations. That some of the conservatives among the elders opposed AIM is also acknowledged, at least in passing, and one asks a question frequently directed at AIM: Will these outside guys be here when the smoke clears? And in the meeting where AIM’s decision to go to Wounded Knee is made, the women are accurately depicted as the ones taking the strongest stance. Leonard Crow Dog, the young Lakota medicine man who became a spiritual adviser to AIM and whom Mary married after Wounded Knee, has a central role in the latter part of the film. Lakota spirituality and its relation to AIM work is handled with some care and without the heavy-­handedness found in the New Age version. While some have argued that any depiction of Native spirituality is a sacrilege, Lakota spiritual advisers were hired to ensure sensitive handling of the ritual scenes, and humor was used to fight against Hollywood medicine man stereotypes. For example, one elder remarks that “father peyote” will lead AIM back “into the spirit world,” “where we’ll talk about the great mysteries of life, like where the sunglasses go when you lose them.” (This is perhaps also a gentle slap at the “shades and braids” image of the male AIMsters.) The battle with the forces of Dickie Wilson (played with icy power by August Schellenberg) is also trenchantly portrayed. Direct quotes from Wilson’s press conferences, including his famous threat to cut off Russell Means’s braids, give a sense of his growing frustration with challenges to his paternalistic authority at Pine Ridge. More seriously, Wilson’s campaign to wipe out AIM is referred to appropriately as a “reign of terror,” and his collusion with white vigilante cowboys in addition to the federal marshal cowboys is clearly represented. In one scene we

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overhear putative law enforcers relishing that fighting Indians is giving them a chance to be “real” cowboys. Another scene stresses that, as it was in the past, most of the firepower is on the side of the cowboy cavalry. Unlike in the original coverage of the events by the New York Times, the FBI’s training of Wilson’s goons to use automatic weapons is carefully documented, as are details of the far greater firepower of the cowboys, including two armored personnel carriers. The presence of and limited understanding of events provided by “the media” are also thematized. Mary notes that the reporters “loved our Indian uprising” but suggests that their focus on the “cowboy and Indian” dimensions ignored the substantive issues, and that they quickly grew tired unless new dramas were produced (which may account for those events the real Russell Means allegedly staged). When Mary herself is asked by reporters to explain the meaning of the siege, she at first tries to defer to the male spokesmen, but then offers her own answer. She lists the names of various tribes—­Mohawk, Nisqually, Ojibway, and Cheyenne, among many others—­whose members had come together at Wounded Knee. To illustrate what this means, she holds up her hand, fingers spread, then brings the fingers together into a tightly clenched fist. But rather than digging deeper into the meaning of her gesture, the reporters just ask her repeatedly to reenact it. In another scene, the Russell Means character chastises the press for not doing the background work necessary to understand what the occupiers were fighting for. Later the characters of Dennis Banks and Means address the issue of violence as raised by a reporter. Banks says, “The history of AIM is one of action, not violence.” When a follow-­up question asks about the guns in the AIM compound, Means makes a plea of self-­defense by reeling off the names of Indians murdered in recent months, linking the deaths to a long tradition of “injun” killing. There are other points I could detail in which documentary-­style information about the Wounded Knee events and the surrounding context are given. One could also point out inaccuracies and distortions in detail, mostly attributable to poetic license. But I want to close my discussion of the film with remarks about a different dimension, its portrayal of the ethos of the AIM encampment. One of the most profound aspects of collective, social movement action, at least from my experience, is the feeling that political theorist Hannah Arendt referred

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to as “public happiness,” the sense of exhilaration that comes when one throws one’s whole being into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom captured in film, with its bias toward individualized storytelling. But a sense of community, so much a part of Native nations as well as social movement cultures, is conveyed relatively well in the film. It is summed up by Mary’s remark that she never felt more “free” than when she was inside the Wounded Knee camp. That one can indeed feel most “free” when in jail for civil disobedience or when surrounded by trigger-­happy federal marshals and FBI agents is a paradox of social activism rarely portrayed in the mass media. The sense of the encampment as a community, one both mundane and extraordinary, comes through powerfully at points. While framed as one woman’s story, and thus caught up to a certain degree in Euro-­American notions of individuality, the film’s narrative moves toward collective power and communal responsibility. The film ends on a powerful note, one that attempts, not fully successfully, to fend off the nostalgic move that might lock Indian resistance in the past. Standing in front of the mass grave monument to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, Mary looks directly into the camera and details the ways in which the government lied in its negotiated settlement of the occupation, notes the role played by the media in the action, counts off some of the assassinations that followed in the wake of the occupation, and then recites the names of AIM members still in jail. She goes on: Once we put down our guns and the television and newspaper reporters went home, the arrests began. They could say anything they wanted. Whatever we said was gone in a cold Pine Ridge wind. Nearly everything is gone now. The government tried to extinguish all signs that Indians once made their stand here. It will do them no good because the world saw, the world heard. Even though in time [some of our people] were murdered by goons. Even though once again the government lied and betrayed us. Even though some of our leaders are still in jail. In the end it will do them no good at all to try to hide it because it happened. Today it is still not ours, but tomorrow it might be. Because of that long moment those short years ago at Wounded Knee. Where we reached out and touched our history. I was there. I saw it. It happened to me.

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Then, in Lakota and English, she adds, “So that our people may live,” as two Indian children are seen running across the screen. The film’s ending offers both a refusal to have the past erased and a call to bring the warrior legacy into the future. The ending is a powerful one, but it also solidifies a feeling that the film has been too perfect, too neat. The Indian-­maiden beauty of Bedard herself seems to tie together a film with too few rough edges, too much Hollywood idealism. The Indian resisters are a bit too good to be true, the black hats on Dick Wilson’s Indian cowboys fit a bit too tightly. There is little sense of the internal strife that wracked AIM, little sense that some of the leaders had less pure motives and less admirable characters than they are given in the film. Incarceration and service in Vietnam had deeply wounded many AIM members, some of whom were unstable, not to say just plain crazy. And, as I have suggested above, the “shades and braids” corps gave in more than once to a vanity that did not serve the movement. In addition, the film says far too little about the failure of AIM to follow through in the aftermath of its symbolic victories. In their efforts toward sympathy, the filmmakers whitewash AIM, make it too purely a victim. By robbing the AIM activists of their human imperfections, they ironically rob them of much of their human agency. The ending is also problematic in its elegiac tone. Seeing Crow Dog/Bedard alone before the site of two Wounded Knee struggles with nothing but the wind blowing undercuts the sense of collective agency of Indian resistance and evokes the “vanishing Indian” trope; it is as if only a return of the Ghost Dance, rather than concerted tribal action for sovereignty, will lead to a different future. But looking at Lakota Woman from the angle of production rather than product suggests a different ending to the story of Indian resistance through film. One of the more admirable facts about Lakota Woman, and one that, along with its woman-­centered story, no doubt accounts for many of its strengths, is that the filmmakers went to some lengths to hire Native Americans not only as actors but also as crew members and consultants to ensure a degree of accuracy on several levels. In addition to Richard Moves Camp, consultant on Lakota spirituality, the film employed Mary Crow Dog herself as a consultant (on her own life story) and other former AIM members to go over details about the occupation.

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More important than the gestures toward authenticity, however, is the hiring of the crew members. I agree with critic Judy Merritt, novelist David Seals, and many others in Indian country that in the future Indian films should be made as much as possible by Native American people. Merritt challenges the Ted Turners and the Robert Redfords to put their money where their mouths are by turning over whole productions to Native American crews. Seals has said that he will not authorize a film sequel to Powwow Highway unless it is directed by an Indian. And the Lakota people worked to get Ted Turner to stop production on a proposed film about the figure he calls Crazy Horse and whom they know as Ta’ Shunke Witko. This is not racial essentialism or “blood quantum” theory at work; it is about the need for a degree of cultural competence that Hollywood has again and again fallen short of, and it is a call for the rights AIM aimed at from the beginning: self-­ determination and self-­representation for Native people everywhere. Cinematic self-­representation, will, of course, be no panacea. It will be subject to all the contradictions that trouble Native American communities today. But it will be an important step in a larger process, just as surely as Wounded Knee itself was a step in a struggle that continues. In the meantime, we have these films about AIM, which have strengths as well as serious flaws. None was created within the movement culture of AIM, but all are parts of a larger cultural formation informed by that movement. They also mirror some of the flaws of AIM itself. Perhaps the deepest flaws in AIM were its misogyny and its excessive reliance on the mass media, a flaw that my presentation here risks replicating. The misogyny eventually led to brutal acts perpetrated against women in AIM, including in all likelihood the murder of AIM activist Annie Mae Aquash.16 AIM was spectacularly successful, for brief moments, in drawing attention to Native American issues through effective guerrilla theater. Actions like Wounded Knee awakened members of Native nations throughout the United States and around the world. But the often vague, pan-­Indian politics of AIM could not address the differing, complicated situations of Indian nations. And while AIM’s mass-­media approach can mobilize, it cannot truly organize people or communities. That takes face-­to-­face, painstaking work. In the wake of the relative decline of the organization due to internal strife and FBI repression, much of the work of AIM passed on to

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specific local political, cultural, and spiritual warriors in the many Indian nations. Great successes in rekindling Native pride, cultures, and rights have occurred in the years since AIM’s heyday, despite ongoing economic exploitation of Native lands and peoples. This work has been less visible, less spectacular, than AIM’s symbolic actions, but it has also gone far deeper. From this deeper base in various Indigenous communities, cross-­nation and even worldwide Native organizations have emerged to continue interlinked struggles for land, sovereignty, and legal redress. At the same time, Native art, poetry, fiction, and film have flourished, stirring Indian hearts and minds while addressing difficult questions to the white world. But clearly in this new context, AIM’s work is not done. In a time when, as Smith and Warrior note, young Native Americans are growing up with little knowledge of the AIM era, AIM’s stories, even as told in the flawed films discussed in this chapter, may prove useful.17 When encountered by chance on TV or used by a teacher or organizer who can point to the distortions, one or another of the films might spark some questions, possibly touch off some “Crazy Horse dreams.”18 New kinds of Native resistance efforts are being ignited, represented by Idle No More and the mass protest against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, as new generations of Indigenous activists and allies examine and learn from the successes and the failures of the AIM era.19

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6 “WE ARE [NOT] THE WORLD”

FAMINE, APARTHEID, AND THE POLITICS OF ROCK MUSIC Millions of kids are lookin’ at you You say, “Let them drink soda pop” . . . From the African nation to the Pepsi generation . . . You’re gonna make it rich as long as some poor bastard in Africa is lying in a ditch. —­The Pretenders, “How Much Did You Get [for your soul]”

We’re rappers and rockers United and strong. We’re here to talk about South Africa We don’t like what’s goin’ on. —­Artists United against Apartheid, “Sun City”

The mid-­1 980s saw the rise of a series of globally televised concerts, records, and videos that have been variously called “charity rock,” “benefit rock,” and, with a nod to a rather different tradition, “agit-­pop” (a play on agitprop, the shorthand term for so-­called agitation propaganda used by radicals to characterize movement-­based political art in the 1930s).1 Benefit concerts are hardly a new thing. They are at least as old as the Paterson Pageant of 1913 and have a rich history, especially in the 173

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1930s and 1960s.2 But the global scale of these events of the 1980s was unprecedented, and they set off a new wave of “rock-­and-­roll activism” that continues today. The archetype and best known of these agit-­pop events is the African famine relief concert Live Aid, which took place in 1985. Following upon Live Aid, dozens of such efforts were mounted in countries around the world to raise money for a host of different causes, from the abolition of apartheid to the environment to support for people with AIDS to justice for political prisoners. These events were especially important because they emerged in the famously conservative and greed-­ ravaged era of the 1980s, when progressive causes often seemed to be in eclipse. In actuality, several important social movements were under way during that decade, including a strong antimilitarist/antinuclear movement and a host of “solidarity” movements attempting to change U.S. policy toward El Salvador, Nicaragua, and, most relevant to this chapter, South Africa.3 The “benefit rock” events are important because they are among the most compelling attempts to create moments of “popular global culture,” in contrast to “global pop culture.” They are riddled with political contradictions and limitations, but they also suggest one possible, progressive axis of transnational communication in this globalizing era. In this chapter I examine two clusters of these agit-­pop events, with the aim of suggesting the possibilities and limits of their use by social movements as a point of entry into the terrain of the “mass media” or “popular culture.” In particular, I analyze these recordings, concerts, and associated books, T-­shirts, and so forth as presenting popular ideas about relationships between the so-­called underdeveloped Third World and the (over)developed First World. In the process I want to suggest a middle ground in two long-­standing debates about popular culture and social change. The first debate is between those who find the mass media inherently conservative, because of their commercialized nature, and those who see popular culture as a zone of significant political resistance. The second debate is between those who see U.S. pop culture as part of a “cultural imperialism” that dominates and overwhelms other cultures of the world and those who believe that, despite U.S. dominance, significant amounts of postmodern “transnational culture” flow from many locations and in many directions. Although I do not address

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these very large questions directly, my analysis is meant to suggest that both sides of each of these important debates have at best part of the truth.4 To approach these issues, I first look at Live Aid itself, along with the associated famine relief projects Band Aid and We are the World/ USA for Africa. By way of contrast, I then analyze a cluster of musical texts originating in the United States and Britain in support of resistance to South African apartheid, in particular the American Sun City music/ video project and the Nelson Mandela seventieth birthday tribute concert held in England. I have chosen the famine and anti-­apartheid projects as examples because they are similar enough to allow certain important political contrasts to stand out, and because they allow me to examine two different ways that movements can contest for the meanings circulating in popular culture. The most obvious similarity is that both famine relief and the struggle against apartheid directly and indirectly comment on relations between colonial and neocolonial nations (like Britain and the United States) on one hand and the emerging, decolonizing nations of the Southern Hemisphere on the other. A focus on Africa allows me to analyze both the dangers and the possibilities of Western pop and rock music as embodiments of and resisters to the domination of “the West” over “the rest” of the world. It further allows me to show how a global phenomenon can be attached to local movement sites of action. The prime difference between these two sets of events is that the famine project had its politics more or less thrust upon it and thus represents a case of a struggle by a movement to appropriate an ambiguous cultural text, while the anti-­apartheid project was politically radical from the beginning and thus represents a test of the limits of an attempt to create a movement text within the confines of the mass media.

BENEFIT POP/ROCK AND AFRICAN FAMINE Let’s begin by looking at the Live Aid cluster of texts through a kind of double lens: first, a textual analysis that elaborates a composite portrait of highly negative critical interpretations of the famine benefit; then, a more positive contextual analysis that suggests the inadequacy of this first kind of narrowly text-­based analysis. These contrasting readings demonstrate how the necessary task of analyzing a text as a formal structure

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must be supplemented by analysis of the ways in which the meanings of texts change as they are placed into new historical and political frames of reference. In the standard story told, the African famine relief pop/rock benefits began with the efforts of the then moderately well-­known Irish rock musician Bob Geldof. It is interesting that in this origin story Geldof ’s efforts are themselves set in play by the mass media, in this case by a BBC documentary on the famine that Geldof saw more or less by accident. The famine, which stretched through Africa’s Sahel region from Senegal to Ethiopia, caused an estimated one million deaths in the 1980s. Stunned and disturbed by the images and facts presented in the film, Geldof organized British rock and pop stars to produce a record that would draw attention to the famine and raise relief money. The first result of this project was the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” performed by various British artists under the name Band Aid and released as a single late in 1984.5 This record was followed a few months later by the release in the United States of a similar kind of song, “We Are the World,” performed by a number of American artists under the name United Support of Artists (USA) for Africa; an album of the same title was also released.6 Then, finally, on July 13, 1985, the huge and extremely financially successful Live Aid concerts were held in London and Philadelphia and were telecast worldwide to more than 1.5 billion people. Even granting that there are a fair number of Christians in northern Africa, it is difficult to imagine a more culturally insensitive question to ask musically than “Do they know it’s Christmas?” Moreover, how likely is Christmas to be first on the minds of starving people? This dubious question typified the narcissistic self-­importance and ethnocentric disregard for cultural differences that permeated much of this project. An inability to see the very different cultural conditions of Britain and Africa was reinforced by the virtual absence of black artists from the British recording session and from the British half of the Live Aid concerts. This is important not because every record or event has to be racially balanced, but because the absence of blacks served to underscore the emerging, no doubt unintended, racist message that the relief effort was about helpful whites helping helpless blacks. The absence of black artists was especially unforgivable given that the many Rastafarians among

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black British, Afro-­Caribbean, and African American performers view Ethiopia, one of the nations most devastated by the famine, as a spiritual homeland. From the point of view of fund-­raising with regard to the target audience, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was perfectly conceived to play into those seasonal spasms of humanist “goodwill toward men” that get engraved on Christmas cards and fill Salvation Army donation buckets every holiday season in both the United Kingdom and the United States. In purely financial terms, the song exceeded all expectations, becoming a number one hit and raising more than eleven million dollars. While this fund-­raising success was impressive, and while the personal motives of most of those involved were undoubtedly sincere, these initial efforts of Band Aid recycled some of the most problematic humanist ideas, from patronizing, patriarchal “charity” and philanthropy to deeply racist, imperialist echoes of “the white man’s burden” (the nineteenth-­century notion that the “white man” is bringing “civilization” to the backward peoples of the world). In fact, “modern” agricultural development contributed to undermining the food base, as well as the culture, of the Africans who were experiencing the famine.7 When the text of musical famine relief migrated across the Atlantic to the United States, some of its most suspect aspects were mitigated a bit, but not much. Here the origins were significantly different in at least one respect: the race of the prime movers, virtually all of whom were black. Inspired by Geldof ’s project, Harry Belafonte touched off the American effort. An entertainer with a history of political activism, including a long association with Martin Luther King Jr., Belafonte was involved in numerous progressive social movements. He soon persuaded his friends Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Stevie Wonder to take over work on an American version of the Band Aid record. Unfortunately, Wonder, the only one of the trio with even minimal political know-­how, was forced by other commitments to drop out, and the actual composition of the song fell to Jackson and Richie. The result was the immensely (if briefly) popular “We Are the World.” Once ubiqui­ tous, still insipid, it remained the biggest-­selling single of all time until it was overtaken by Elton John’s 1997 version of “Candle in the Wind” with new lyrics written in tribute to the late Princess Diana.

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The We Are the World video received wide airplay on the then relatively new cable TV channel Music Television, or MTV. Again it was a spectacular success. Like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” the text of the song “We Are the World” can be characterized as extraordinarily ethnocentric, displaying a self-­centeredness reinforced in the video by images of lots of rich musicians looking and sounding at once sincere and self-­satisfied. The extremely static staging of the video visually reinforces a sense of inactivist self-­containment; no one moves from the claustrophobic recording studio, and intercut images of Africans present them only as victims, not as active human resisters. The lyrics play back and forth between identity and difference in such a way as to negate any perception of Africans as capable social actors while simultaneously promoting the pretense that “they” are just like “us.” The presumed identification between “the starving children” and the well-­fed rock stars is a classic example of how liberal humanism obscures important differences of condition, making political analysis impossible. As the presumptive “we” of the title designates the First World, it serves to remove “our” responsibility by folding us into the Third World as one world. There is no difference or distance from which to construct notions of relative responsibility for the famine. “We” too are its victims. While empathetic connection to those suffering from the famine might be desirable, such a pure identification with “them” erases the distance needed to understand and challenge the sources of their very different political, economic, and cultural conditions. Such an easy sense of connection covers differences of class, race, religion, and political ideology within Africa and within First World countries (where hunger also exists in the midst of plenty). The problem is that the two worlds come to be conceived as generically prosperous on the one hand and generically deprived on the other. Even as this too-­easy sense of connecting the “worlds” is offered, the subtext suggests its opposite, a pure difference between “us” and “them,” we the saviors and they the victims. Thus, the most ironically truthful line in the song is the one that goes, “We’re saving our own lives.” Intended to achieve identification with the “victims,” it marks the true distance by suggesting that the “we” who will be saved are not the Africans, but the song’s singers and audience, saved from having to think

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seriously about an “unpleasant thing” by simply giving a few dollars for famine relief. This vision masks the true connection between the two “worlds”: an unequal world economy built on a history of colonial exploitation and continuing today in neocolonial form. It covers over the fact that the prosperous lives of people like the musicians and most of their audience come at the expense of those whose labor makes that prosperity possible. (It also, incidentally, covers over economic inequality within the “developed” world.) Taken together, these two records could be said to add up to this message: “We” (in the West) are the world, and “they” (in Africa) don’t even know it’s Christmas. The problematic aspects of these two record/video efforts are mag­ nified, but also somewhat diffused, by the megaconcert that grew out of them, Live Aid proper. Unlike the records, which make no reference to the famine itself, and the videos, which make only minimal reference to it, the televised concerts did attempt intermittently to address the famine and some of its causes. Recorded vignettes by “experts” in the field of hunger were interspersed with musical performances. But the ideological limits of those vignettes were quite narrow. No one, for example, seriously addressed the relation of hunger to Western agricultural policy or the role played by First World manipulation of the economies of the Third World. Countries throughout the developing world have been forced to borrow money from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (both organizations largely controlled by the United States), and in exchange they have been made to develop their economies only in ways acceptable to and profitable for the United States and the other major capitalist nations. The mechanized, chemical-­dependent techniques of large-­scale agriculture are in many cases less efficient than traditional methods, some of them thousands of years old and based on a rich knowledge of local ecologies. Once having committed themselves to expensive, U.S.-­defined modes of modernization, developing countries are often drawn into a web of debt that leaves them vulnerable to First World influences on their politics and cultures. More subtly than in the days when Europe could simply declare the rest of the world to be part of its empire, but often just as devastatingly, the political and cultural independence of the so-­called underdeveloped global South is

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undermined, with a loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity. And, as in the case of the African famines, these political economic manipulations often cost thousands of lives. Apart from or combined with philanthropic appeals, most commentaries during the rock aid events coded the famine as either a natural disaster or a technical problem. Coding the problem as “natural” removes all human, political responsibility for the cause. And calling the problem “technical” reinforces the sense of African “backwardness” implicit in the “underdevelopment” notion underpinning the overall story of “victims and saviors.” Some of the appeals did move a bit beyond charity or the suggestion that Western technocratic elitism was the answer (rather than part of the problem), but not many. And particularly in the American context of broadcast on commercial television, these gestures seemed quite obscene set alongside the perpetual orgy of consumption portrayed and appealed to in commercials. Moreover, again and again, the African famine was portrayed in the televised event through pictures of starving “women and children.” As these images built on one another, Africa itself was in effect both feminized and infantilized. One pervasive logo for the event, used throughout the American broadcast, began as an outline of the African continent and then suddenly and magically transformed into an image of an electric guitar. Indeed, in a curious metamorphosis it appeared as though the feminine womb of Africa was giving birth to the phallic guitar that would be its savior. Some critics have suggested that as these messages mixed with TV commercials pushing consumption of consumer goods, the American audience started in effect to consume Africans. Another logo for the project superimposed a table place setting, with knife, fork, and spoon, on a map of the African continent. Cultural theorist Zoë Sofia has argued, only partly tongue-­in-­cheek, that the only solution to what she calls the “Cannibal-­Eyes” of mass-­mediated consumer capitalism is for the poor to “eat the rich,” preferably on a prime-­time game show.8 Whether or not eating the rich is the solution, surely consuming the poor as a heartwarming television spectacle is part of the problem. Summing up various critical readings of the famine relief benefits I have been paraphrasing, one could say that Live Aid used a falsely universalizing liberal humanism, robbed Africans of their own power,

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reinforced Western ethnocentric racism, put forth a vision of passivity that equated children with women and both with Africa, and obscured the neocolonialist sources of the famine by coding it as a natural disaster or as a technical rather than political problem. Put more colloquially, this analysis views Bob Geldof as a kind of clueless but slightly hipper Jerry Lewis who took up starving Africans as his “kids” and put on the biggest telethon in history. As the vicious pleasure with which I have presented this analysis makes clear, I find a good deal of truth in it, particularly as an analysis of some of the likely immediate effects of the event as presented to an Anglo-­American audience. But I do not think this kind of analysis is the whole or final truth about the events if they are conceived not as one moment in time but as the beginning of a contest over what meanings would be attached to the famine and the relief efforts. That such a contest over meanings took place is apparent as soon as one moves from examining the texts to considering their historical and political context. As cultural critic Stuart Hall has argued, the rele­ vant historical context is the rise in both the United States and the United Kingdom of a very successful right-­wing political project that was called Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain (named for the respective national leaders of the day, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). This project, at the center of the “me decade,” included a largely successful effort to wipe out all vestiges of liberal or progressive notions of community and of responsibility to anyone less fortunate than oneself. It promulgated the myth that a “free market” would magically distribute goods fairly, rewarding the hardworking and leaving the lazy to wallow in deserved poverty. People were told that all they needed to do was develop enough “character” to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Unfortunately, the political impact of this ideology left many without shoes, let alone boots, with or without straps. In such a context, Hall contends, even read most minimally as liberal philanthropy, the Live Aid events were the single most important countermoment to the installation of this right-­wing orgy of greed and self-­interest. Hall calls the famine relief effort “one of the great popular movements of our time” and asserts that it offered a “direct democratic” challenge to “bureaucratic” power. He even suggests that Live Aid put

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the “new right” on the defensive, that it represented one of the few significant rips in the seams of the right’s emerging hegemony.9 Hall is perhaps exaggerating a bit here to balance what he sees as a kind of knee-­jerk left purism that produces the kind of analysis I have presented above. But I think the core of his logic has been borne out, both in the evolution of the Live Aid project itself and, more important, in the project’s use as a model for many of the more directly counterhegemonic musical megaevents that came in its wake. With regard to Live Aid, let me try to at least partially redeem the rock star and “his” megatelethon by describing the way in which Geldof responded to critiques like those I have leveled above. As the Irish rocker freely admitted, he began his project as a political naïf, so much so as to claim that the famine was not a political issue. Finding himself, however, on the covers of the conservative journal Spectator and Marxism Today during the same week, he soon got the message that his event was political, and that it could be claimed by both the right and the left. Amid this political maelstrom, Geldof learned about Third World debt, defense spending, and world agricultural policies, and he eventually found himself speaking at the United Nations, scolding the assembled delegates for not dealing with the effects of Western agricultural policy on Africa and supporting a call for a total moratorium on African debt, among other things. Convincing criticism from the left moved Geldof and the project further and further away from charity and its discourses. Policies for disbursal of Live Aid funds were formulated that put only what was absolutely needed into emergency relief, with the rest directed to long-­ term development programs and eventually to attempts to Africanize those programs by turning them over to local control by the people affected.10 Although millions of people desperately needed what these efforts could supply, many on the left (I among them) seemed willing, almost eager, to believe the worst about the disbursal of Live Aid funds and goods. Rumors of corruption and inefficiency spread wildly. But an independent audit found the Live Aid project to have been extremely efficient, above the standard for such work. Indeed, funds were still being distributed years after the concert, from a total raised that approached $250 million in cash, goods, and services.11

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I dwell on Geldof not to make him heroic but to offer him as an allegory writ large for a process that many of the viewers of Live Aid underwent in a less visible way when they tried to do more than send a check. They joined various ongoing hunger relief projects in droves, and once there they usually began a process of political education that was for many also a process of radicalization. That did not happen automatically, however, and that is my key point: it happened because some on the left chose to struggle for the meaning that Live Aid would have, to try to reshape it to their analysis and their agenda. Rather than just condemning it as naive, neocolonialist, racist, and so forth, they chose to attempt to decolonize the event, to liberate it into more fruitful political talk and action. The second, related struggle set off by Live Aid was an effort to use the specific breach it had made in the new right’s hegemonic process to open up other spaces of resistance. Hundreds of subsequent musical benefits and megabenefits in dozens of countries attest to the ongoing impact of Live Aid. Of those the most dramatic, especially in reversing some of the imagery of Live Aid itself, were those projects entwined with the anti-­apartheid struggle.

ROCK AND RAP AGAINST APARTHEID In the United States the most interesting of the efforts to draw upon the precedent set by Live Aid was carried out by a group of musicians calling themselves Artists United against Apartheid. Their major project was a record album and video titled Sun City.12 Far more politically explicit and aggressive than Live Aid, the Sun City project constituted a kind of test case for examining how well radically progressive ideas can be conveyed through mass-­media forms. Far more directly than the relation between AIM and Hollywood discussed in chapter 5, these efforts sought to connect a movement to a pop culture formation. The Sun City project was started by “Little Steven” Van Zandt, formerly the lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and later, like Geldof, a moderately successful solo artist and producer. In Van Zandt’s telling, after learning from some American anti-­apartheid activists about the situation in South Africa, he traveled there himself and spoke with numerous white and black South Africans involved in

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the liberation movements. Asking different groups what he could do to be most effective, he was told again and again that his appropriate role would be to tell his fellow musicians not to play at Sun City, a Las Vegas–­like tourist complex set in the middle of one of the barbed-­wire-­ surrounded black ghettos that white South Africans euphemistically called “homelands.” So began the Sun City project, aimed at reinforcing and expanding the United Nations–­sponsored musicians’ boycott of South Africa and at educating the American public via music about the liberation struggle and about conditions of blacks living under racist systems, not only in South Africa but in the United States as well. Eventually the project came to include a single, an album, a video (directed by Jonathan Demme and Hart Perry), and various ancillary texts (including the obligatory T-­shirt as well as glossy picture books and a “rockumentary”).13 I will discuss the video first because several contrasts with the We Are the World video are immediately apparent. The first important difference is that in Sun City black people—­African American and Afro-­ Caribbean musicians and, most important, black South Africans—­are visible in active central roles. Second, the musicians are moving, they are going somewhere; there is movement, perhaps even a movement, happening. The sense both lyrically and visually is a demand to act on these images, not just consume them. Third, this message is reinforced by the images themselves, which are far more kinetic throughout than the images in We Are the World. On the one hand, Sun City fits relatively seamlessly into the flow of MTV-­style rock video imagery, which allows it to enter that mass-­mediated space. On the other hand, on closer inspection what it shows are raised, clenched fists (mostly black ones) ripping away at apartheid and by suggestion ripping away veils of televisual illusion to show some of the realities of apartheid beneath. It is of key importance that it is clearly Africans, not just the rock stars, who are ripping away at these images. Van Zandt started his project as a more politically savvy and politically radical individual than Geldof, and thus his project too was more radical from the beginning. When he, like Geldof, eventually found himself at the United Nations, in this case to receive a humanitarian award for his work, he was careful to make explicit his project’s distance from charity and its attendant discourse of victimage. He said in part: “This

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Sun City rock stars superimposed on South African protesters. Scene from The Making of “Sun City.”

is not a benefit record because though the needs of black South Africans are great they do not ask us for our charity, and though the black South African suffering is horrifying, they do not ask us for our pity.”14 Despite this clear attempt to distance the Sun City project from the discourse of Live Aid, Van Zandt has frequently acknowledged that his project would not have been possible without various precedents set by the famine project, from directing focus onto the African continent to disinterring notions of international human rights to politicizing rock musicians (several of whom took part in both projects). The Sun City project’s tack was not to totally reject liberal notions of humanitarianism but instead to try to move the audience through and beyond that position to a more politically engaged one. This is reflected in the distribution of the funds raised by the project, which were more or less equally divided along lines that allowed the project to finesse the ideological border between humanitarianism and political action. Roughly one-­third went to the families of political prisoners; one-­third went to

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educational centers and colleges set up in Tanzania and Zambia by the prime anti-­apartheid force, the African National Congress; and one-­ third went to grassroots educational outreach efforts by the anti-­apartheid movement in the United States.15 In virtually all the materials released by the Sun City project, fingers were pointed not just at South Africa but also at the United States as a prime supporter of South African apartheid and as a site of homemade racism. At every opportunity, Van Zandt was careful to articulate this key point: “I hope that by focusing on the exaggeration of racism in [South Africa], we can realize that racism is very much alive in our own country, and that we can begin to dismantle our own apartheid right here at home.”16 By “apartheid at home,” Van Zandt meant U.S. racism generally, but this includes apartheid within the musical community, both the segregation of black and Latino music and the domination of the industry by white producers. He and collaborator Arthur Baker tried to undermine the segregation and segmentation of musical audiences by bringing together the particular mix of musicians used on the Sun City sessions (rappers, rockers, punkers, funksters, reggae singers, salseros, new wave musicians, jazz artists, and, significantly, Nigerian and South African musicians, among others). While the music industry likes to talk about diverse musical styles as simply reflecting different, freely chosen “taste cultures,” demographic analysis makes clear that race, ethnicity, class, gender, and, of course, age make up the prime determinants of musical subcultures. Musical subcultures certainly reflect tastes, but they also serve to reinforce social divisions that doubly serve capitalism: by dividing potential oppositional forces and by economically exploiting and trivializing ethnic diversity commercially. Attempts to bridge these subcultural divisions musically formed an important subtext of the Sun City project. Using the term musical apartheid to describe these divisions risked trivializing political apartheid, but it was also a key to bringing the issues back home. This multiple crossover list of artists also had a pragmatic mar­ keting value. The idea was to achieve maximum airplay, as the various specialized radio formats would pick up on particular artists representing their genres. But, as I will discuss in a moment, this part of the strategy met limitations.

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ROCKIN’ THE GRASSROOTS I find two aspects of the Sun City project particularly suggestive. First, it utilized virtually all the available relevant mass-­mediated forms, pushing them close to their didactic limits, while maintaining enough of each form to keep it recognizable and thus available as a pop(ular) item. And second, the project sought to create substantive links to grassroots activism. As I have already suggested, the Sun City video uses the hyperactive style of rock videos but tries to disconnect that manic energy from the postmodern aimlessness of MTV culture and connect it to political struggle and direct action.17 Some critics have suggested that the video does this by making political action look too much like fun, too much like a street party. But I would argue that this is precisely one of its strengths. This objection exemplifies a continuing left puritanism that is deadly to the possibility of a counterhegemonic project. The inability of recent oppositional movements to articulate (link) politics and pleasure is one of the key factors that has condemned them to marginality even among the members of that notoriously rebellious social category, youth. Indeed, the pleasures of political transgression remain one of the better-­kept, presumably guilty, secrets of the left, and recent attempts to foreground the pleasures of political as well as cultural transgressions seem to me a key area of theorizing activity. In addition to the music video, the Sun City project used two other video formats, recoding what is perhaps the most banally narcissistic of all popular culture genres, the “Making of . . .” format. “Making of ” videos are designed to take viewers “behind the scenes.” In the project’s versions, viewers are indeed taken “behind the scenes,” but the pretext of giving glimpses of the recording and filming processes is used to extend their exposure to life behind the scenes of apartheid. The Making of “Sun City” video, a ten-­minute version of which was shown on MTV while a forty-­five-­minute version was released for home use, includes charts and graphs illustrating economic conditions in South Africa, interviews with Winnie Mandela and other anti-­apartheid activists, and testimony from most of the musicians taking part in the project. The musicians’ comments naturally vary considerably in their level of political insight, but that too may serve a function, as it allows points of connection for viewers who may feel initially too uninformed to act.

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Thus the star–­fan matrix, normally a site for adolescent fantasies, is here used to secure identifications that open the possibility of viewers’ acting despite their not (yet) having an elaborated analysis of South African politics. Space needs to be left in such a project for the less well informed to take first steps, and the inexpert comments of the musicians provide this opening. Similar use is made of the “star book” form, the glossy, vacuous genre normally used to provide purchasers with a mini-­poster collection, full of pictures and with minimal, usually not very intellectually demanding text.18 The Sun City project’s version of this book genre does have lots of pictures, including obligatory ones of the musical stars who play on the record, but it also includes pictures of Nelson Mandela, of South African miners, and of the victims and the resisters of apartheid. The glossy book does have enough pictures of self-­indulgent star nonsense to draw in fans, but it also has a fairly substantive, though not daunting, text that includes plenty of encouragement to get a more in-­ depth analysis of apartheid. Indeed, the book, the record, the cassette, and virtually all other associated paraphernalia of the project contain bibliographies on South African history and the anti-­apartheid movement, as well as ways to contact anti-­apartheid organizations. This leads me to the second dimension of the exemplary actions by the Sun City project. From its inception, Van Zandt had a sense that the project, having grown out of his contacts with grassroots activists in South Africa, should be put to the service of grassroots activists in the United States. He tried to accomplish this in several ways. Most directly, he traveled around the country, offering himself as a speaker and making contact with dozens of local anti-­apartheid solidarity groups. He also made the video widely available to these groups for use as an organizing tool, both to draw new people to meetings and to educate them once there. The Sun City project also created a teaching packet to accompany the video for use by both community groups and schools. The packet included not only educational materials but also a list of direct political actions taken all around the country that had been inspired by the Sun City project, actions that could be emulated or improvised upon locally.19 The Sun City project was an ambitious and in many ways successful attempt to mediate between a mass-­produced and mass-­distributed

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cultural text and local sites of reception. Put more strongly, it set out actively to produce connections to local movement groups and created more general “reading formations” that would ensure a radical reading of the text. But if the project reveals several potentially useful approaches to making and distributing oppositional mass-­mediated texts, it also suggests some limits likely to be encountered by any such effort. First, while the anti-­apartheid project made a significant financial and educational impact, when compared to the more politically vague famine relief efforts, its impact was less spectacular. The album and single made it onto the Billboard Top 40 but had trouble getting sufficient radio airplay and never moved very far up the charts. This underscores my sense that the project may have pushed near the limit of what a didactic, radical intervention could do within the commercial mass media’s terms. While radio stations offered a variety of plausible nonpolitical reasons for not giving the song more airplay, it seems clear that its political message scared them. Similar difficulties were encountered when the project sought to have The Making of “Sun City” aired on PBS. The offer was refused, despite the video’s having received numerous awards, on the grounds that it would violate the “journalistic integrity” of the network to air a program that simply promoted the ideas and careers of its producers. At the time PBS offered this statement, it was running two Lucasfilm documentaries on the making of those apparently less commercial ventures, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. As a result of this virtual censorship, the Sun City project’s impact was not on the scale of the impact of We Are the World, although such things are difficult to measure precisely. My own informal poll of my students conducted in the mid-­1990s, probably not a scientific sample of two billion people, confirmed my sense that Sun City is considerably less well known than We Are the World, even among progressive students. But more than half of those surveyed had seen the Sun City video or heard the song. According to one source, the Sun City video received a “heavy rotation” slot on MTV—­a serious amount of airplay.20 The Sun City project years, 1985 and 1986, were peak years for anti-­apartheid activism in the United States, particularly through various divestment campaigns on and around college campuses. The Sun City project certainly did not create this movement, but just as certainly it

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furthered the movement’s efforts, providing a far more powerful outreach tool than those usually available to local activists. The project harmonized with a developing anti-­apartheid movement centered on American college campuses. Student activists led the way with campaigns aimed at getting their universities and colleges to remove from their huge investment portfolios corporations that bolstered the apartheid economy of South Africa. Students around the country built cardboard shantytowns, mirroring conditions in many black townships in South Africa, and placed them in prominent campus locations, often near administration buildings. This street theater was accompanied by educational campaigns detailing the investments of the activists’ schools. Some campaigns also included hunger strikes by students, rallies, sit-­ins, and a host of other efforts to dramatize the issues. Many shantytown demonstrations were accompanied by a sound track provided by Sun City, mimicking the spirited, festive music accompanying black resistance efforts in South Africa itself. The circulation of the Sun City project’s records and videos was a significant recruiting device, preparing students to hear the messages being offered through the other movement “texts,” such as the shantytown installations. This campus movement was successful in getting universities to pull millions of dollars out of the South African apartheid economy, and as part of a worldwide divestment campaign it had an immense impact on the white South African government.21 The Sun City project also helped pave the way for the next stage of contestation, an effort by the anti-­apartheid movement to go after the level of “spectacle” achieved by that master event, Live Aid. The movement held its Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert on June 11, 1988, at Wembley Stadium, the same London venue that had been a site of Live Aid, and invited a few hundred million people to join in the celebration.

THE NELSON MANDELA CONCERT At the level of global spectacle and in terms of sheer numbers, the Nelson Mandela concert rivaled even Live Aid. Its worldwide audience is estimated to have been around 600 million people in some sixty countries.22

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Once again, I would not want to speculate on what these numbers meant across the staggering array of communities in which the event was received, but it is possible to say something about what the concert meant in the United Kingdom and the United States, which in this case provide interesting contrasts. Tony Hollingsworth, who produced the birthday tribute, claimed that he hoped to make the show act as “a flagship . . . whereby the local anti-­apartheid movements could pick up from the enormous coverage . . . and run a far more detailed political argument than you could have on a stage.”23 Local anti-­apartheid groups in Britain at the time of the concert were organizing a “Nelson Mandela: Freedom at Seventy” campaign, into which the concert played very effectively. Chitra Karve, a spokesperson for the British anti-­apartheid movement, said that given this context, “every second of the [concert] was political.”24 This would seem to be confirmed by the threefold rise in membership in local anti-­ apartheid groups in the weeks after the concert. A postconcert survey in Britain showed that 75 percent of people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-­four knew of Mandela and supported his release.25 Such knowledge may not have run very deep, but it was apparently broad enough to effect changes in, among other things, media coverage of South Africa. According to Hollingsworth, the agitational and consciousness-­raising elements of the concert combined to alter the terms of media discourse in Britain with regard to the liberation movement. Before the concert, Mandela was routinely referred to on the BBC and in other media as the leader of a “terrorist” organization; after the concert and its attendant publicity, Hollingsworth claimed, this kind of representation was no longer possible.26 Even making allowance for a promoter-­activist’s exaggeration, there is no doubt that events like the Mandela concert played a key role in transforming the image of Mandela and his political party, the African National Congress, not only in Britain but also worldwide. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to this claim came from Nelson Mandela himself, who, upon his release from prison in South Africa twenty months after the concert, chose to make his first major public appearance in Britain not in Parliament but at a rock concert at Wembley Stadium. By his presence there and in the speech he delivered

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on the occasion, Mandela made clear his belief and the belief of the anti-­ apartheid movement that events like the seventieth birthday tribute were playing a role in their struggle. Did rock songs and musical spectacles lead to the freedom of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid? No, of course not. Twenty-­ seven years of struggle by black South Africans, a worldwide network of solidarity workers, and a complex process of pragmatic gambling on the part of the white South African government did that. Moreover, Mandela was still only relatively free even after serving as the president of his liberated country, because his people had still not gained their freedom from the poverty, disease, and factionalisms left in the aftermath of apartheid. But did these spectacles and the work of musicians play any signifi­ cant role? There I think the answer must be an equally emphatic yes—­ especially if those events are seen as connected to the vast networks of local organizers who appropriated them for their work at the grassroots. The anti-­apartheid projects suggest the possibility that transnational and even global texts can be articulated to particular local political conditions with ideological goals partly outside of mass-­mediated frames.

CORPORATE MOBILIZATION AND ROCK ORGANIZING Let me conclude by using the rather different experience of the reception of the Mandela concert in the United States to suggest some limitations, pitfalls, and points of struggle for those attempting to use mass-­mediated public cultural forms for movement purposes. The Mandela concert broadcast in the United States was a significantly deradicalized version of the British concert. The Fox network, which secured American rights to the event, chose to cut out all of the anti-­apartheid political speeches, including those by musicians prefacing their songs. Moreover, in a deeply ironic, perhaps intentionally cynical, fashion, several of the sponsors of the American showing were themselves companies doing major business in South Africa. This is a stark example of something that should never be forgotten: because these events and texts occur in a matrix of late capitalist enterprise, commercial sponsors can both subtly and directly undermine projected political meanings.27 Since the mid-­1980s, the number of public events and institutions free of commercial sponsorship has declined drastically.28

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More generally, such events do not significantly challenge, and in some ways they reinforce, capitalist relations of production. Megaevents require immense amounts of capital, and thus most involve some degree of capitulation to corporate sponsorship.29 This dependence can be lessened, however, and the potential for oppositional messages heightened, through the use of the “ideology of rock.” Rock music defines itself against commercial “pop” music by stressing rebellious authenticity.30 While much of the time this difference is turned into little more than a marketing niche by multimedia conglomerate record companies, activists can build on rock’s self-­definition as rebel music. They can appeal to rock musicians and other wealthy music industry personnel to demonstrate that they take their rebellion seriously by providing noncorporate funding for alternative political records and events. The Sun City project was able to convey a stronger message in part because it was not a capital-­intensive venture, but also because it was conceived in essence through the discourse of “rock” as it defines itself as rebel music against the discourse of tamer “pop” in events like Live Aid. Those who wish to use rock music to carry truly oppositional messages have a built-­in ideological advantage: they can call out rock musicians to be the truly rebellious figures they claim to be by becoming involved in serious, movement-­based rebellion.31 So far, the challenges that megaevents offer to late capitalist modes of consumption are also relatively weak ones. Their images of normally highly individualistic performers and highly individualistic audiences doing collective work do provide some sense of collective, structural, as opposed to merely personal, power. Without a movement culture connection, however, this power can be folded back into the more empty collective power felt at any large rock concert. Some critics have questioned whether consuming images of Nelson Mandela raising his fist is significantly different from consuming images of Michael Jackson raising his.32 Certainly there is the potential for rock music in benefit contexts to obscure or trivialize the politics the benefits represent. But it is not inevitable, and to make no distinction between the images of Jackson and Mandela is the worst kind of postmodern, postmortem posing. The Sun City and We Are the World videos, for example, do address viewers in different ways, and I think those differences matter politically. But the differences are only weak potentialities when left to float

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in the vast sea of commercial culture. Until they can be linked to movement cultures around and beyond these media texts, they are easily absorbed back into the dominant system. Certainly, movements are not pure spaces of resistance. Hegemonic forces of the so-­called mainstream flow through them as well. But they are spaces where an unusually direct kind of cultural-­political literacy can be practiced, where a relatively strong counterpublic sphere can shape the reception of mass-­mediated messages. The process of “rock versus pop” is often carried out at the level of subcultures in contrast to mainstream pop culture, and it is taking place on an increasingly global scale. In the ongoing debates about the meanings of “globalization,” thinking through the phenomenon of agit-­pop is of great importance. Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has pointed out that how one makes sense of the globalization of culture depends in great part on the starting point of analysis. Jameson notes that if you focus on the texts of global cultural production, “you will slowly emerge into a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation: suddenly all the cultures around the world are placed in tolerant contact with each other in a kind of immense cultural pluralism.” If you focus on the economic production side of this global culture, “what comes to the fore is increasing identity (rather than difference): the rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere . . . a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale.”33 At the level of cultural theory the question posed is how fully “commodification,” the turning of cultural text into a salable item, controls the meaning of that text. But I would argue that that question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can be answered only through political struggle. And that political struggle will in large measure center on attempts to politicize subcultures. There is a central paradox at the heart of mass culture. On the one hand, mass culture thrives on standardization and reduction of all cultural meaning to marketability. On the other hand, it must have innovation; it must constantly produce newness in order to overcome the boredom inherent in standardization. Innovation can seldom come from inside mass culture. Thus, mass culture is largely dependent for its success on its ability to appropriate energy and style from subcultures (think of the way subcultures like punk, grunge, and hip-­hop have been

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essential to the music industry in the past several decades). Subcultures, by contrast, inherently define themselves against mainstream pop culture and against commercialization. The trick for those who would bring progressive political power into this process is to convince the inevitably arising subcultures that their vague anticommercialism will not prevent the “selling out” of their values because the pop industry needs them and will selectively appropriate them. Again and again that process has meant the dilution and often the destruction of subcultures’ power of self-­definition. The argument would be that for “rockers and rappers [to be] united and free,” they must develop explicit, full-­fledged political and economic analyses of their situation. This entails, in effect, transforming aesthetic or stylistically based subcultures into movement (sub)cultures. We have a clear example of what is at stake here in the contrast between the parallel stories of the grunge and Riot Grrrl subcultures. These two subcultures grew up in the same period and within a few miles of each other in the state of Washington. Both had strong “scenes” and innovative musical styles that eventually attracted major record companies. But where grunge has become almost fully absorbed into the pop mainstream, despite its avowed anticommercialism, Riot Grrrl, despite flirting with the mainstream, largely has maintained itself as a powerfully independent force. The difference, I would argue, is that the third-­wave feminism of Riot Grrrl gave members of the subculture a basis for launching a political and economic analysis that they used to fend off transformation of their politically charged work into mere “style.”34 This is not fundamentally about maintaining purity, but about recognizing that subcultures are inevitably entangled in political economic struggles with the mainstream that they can turn to their advantage by joining forces with or acting as movement cultures. Recall that the great Civil Rights organizer and theorist Ella Baker always made a distinction between mobilizing people and organizing them. Charismatic leaders, whether preachers, politicians, or rock stars, play a role in mobilizing people. But organizing them is something else. Organizing people to struggle with and for themselves requires deeper, more sustained dialogue and different kinds of actions than those of consuming mass-­mediated images. However, if it is true that mobilizing people is not enough, it is equally true that without mobilization there can be little organizing.

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Romantic images of face-­to-­face contact cannot alone compete with the dramatic visions of the mass-­mediated imaginary. A process of moving from the streets to the mass media and back again, mediated now most often by the middle space of the Internet, is essential for movements today if they hope to make significant challenges to the dominant order. The space of social movements is different from the space of mass-­ media hyperreality, and an understanding of that difference is crucially important to the creation of a radically democratic politics. But for the space of movements to be more than a refuge for the politically correct, we must also create a third space of mediation that attempts to shift that bizarre mass-­mediated virtual public sphere in truly democratic directions. Just as mobilizing is surely not enough in itself, any social movement that is serious about extending its constituency beyond the margins needs at some level to contest for and with the realm of mass-­mediated messages. That kind of politics, as I have been arguing, may need some global counterspectacles and more than a little of that transnational language known as rock music. However, this is not to underplay certain dangers in celebrity involvement, which can distract from the ongoing, less visible work of activists that alone can ensure significant change.35 The energy set in motion by Live Aid continued decades after it began. When Bob Geldof ’s protégé, U2’s Bono, addressed the U.S. Senate on the Third World debt crisis and traveled to Africa with Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill in 2002, debating policy all the way, he was building on that legacy. Bono went on the help raise half a billion dollars for HIV/AIDS work. At a time when there are millions of people in Africa with HIV/AIDS, and when a new, possibly even more devastating famine is emerging on the Africa continent, finding ways to harness the power of global pop culture to assist grassroots global movements has never been more urgent.

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7 ACTING UP AGAINST AIDS

THE (VERY) GRAPHIC ARTS IN A MOMENT OF CRISIS This chapter explores one of the most dynamic and successful social movement groups of the late 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. One key argument of this book—­ that all movement politics involves a degree of cultural politics—­owes much to recent activist groups like ACT UP, which have made such an insight difficult to ignore. ACT UP, as much as any movement yet invented, has made self-­conscious cultural struggle part of its core work. Those of us who now see culture everywhere, even in movements from earlier centuries, owe a great debt to groups like ACT UP that have brilliantly highlighted the impossibility of fully separating cultural from political dimensions of movement activity. ACT UP attempted to reinvent the politics of protest in the face of the changed political, economic, and cultural conditions often given the label “postmodern.” While I think that claims to a unique, postmodern condition are often exaggerated, they do point to certain cultural developments that have reshaped the terrain on which movements function, and no group has done more to address those developments than ACT UP. Postmodern perspectives call attention to the notion that the cultural landscape is now so media saturated and commodified that it is hard to tell the real from the virtual, past from present, entertainment from news, resistance from co-­optation. One of the many ways in which this media-­saturated environment has had an impact on social 197

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movements has been through the trope of decade segregation. It is not unusual to hear the media use a phrase like “sixties-­style demonstration,” which at once trivializes movements as a “style” and suggests that the movement in question is an anachronism (as though it had missed the one decade when movements were apparently allowed, the 1960s). This attempt to ghettoize movements as the phenomena of a single decade is part of a larger trend in which it has become more and more difficult for movements to get the attention of the public. Part of the genius of ACT UP has been the group’s amazing creativity in challenging the media’s packaging of protest and trivialization of movements, particularly through its use of the visual and performing arts. This work has included a remarkable ability to mobilize emotion, to draw upon a panoply of affect, from rage to love to humor.1 As we will see, ACT Up has done this most effectively through the use of striking, aesthetically rich images accompanied by witty, sound-­bite-­worthy slogans. Drawing heavily on AIDS DemoGraphics, a remarkable book by Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston that covers the work of New York City’s branch of ACT UP, I will trace the major themes, foci, and actions of the organization primarily through a trail of graphic—­sometimes very graphic—­slogans and images emblazoned on signs, posters, banners, stickers, T-­shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, and other paraphernalia.2

PROTEXTS AND CONTEXTS Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which came to be known as AIDS, emerged in the United States in the early 1980s. By historical accident, in the United States the syndrome arose initially primarily among gay men, a fact that forever colored the responses to it. For the first couple of years, as the AIDS epidemic took hold, very little attention was paid to it outside the gay community. This was due in no small part to homophobia, a social disease on the rise in a time of right-­wing ascendancy in national politics. The far less virulent infection called Legionnaires’ disease, which was identified around the same time when an outbreak occurred among a group of older, white male war veterans, received far more medical attention. When AIDS was first identified, it was labeled gay-­related immune deficiency (GRID), a name that obviously reinforced the association of homosexuality with the disease.

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Members of the religious right, recently emboldened by the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency, quickly seized on the situation to deepen their attack on homosexuality and their promotion of an antifeminist agenda that sought to return sexuality to the control of patriarchal heterosexual men. The response in the gay community moved quickly from confusion and panic to self-­organization. In the face of neglect from government and the medical system, service organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) emerged in many cities. GMHC took on the monumental task of lobbying for medical research while also seeking to attend to the needs of those afflicted with the mysterious disease. GMHC and groups like it gradually became institutionalized as vitally important AIDS service organizations, in effect filling in for local, state, and federal governments, which continued to ignore the epidemic. These groups provided the latest medical information, disseminated “safer sex” guidelines, and organized care for those with the disease. By the mid-­1980s, with the death count rising, and during the administration of a conservative president who had yet to utter the word AIDS in public, let alone offer a policy on the disease, the gay community was

ACT UP reworks the U.S. flag. Courtesy of AIDS DemoGraphics.

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feeling a growing sense of crisis. In this context, GMHC and other ser­ vice organizations began to seem too tame, too overworked, and too tied to bureaucracies that still had done far too little to address AIDS. As has happened in so many areas of contemporary society, economic slowdowns and conservative antigovernment politics forced voluntary, largely self-­sustaining organizations to provide services that should have been the responsibility of governments. And in providing those services, these organizations inadvertently helped a political system that had shown its unwillingness to help them, by insulating governments from the demands of those in need. In the case of AIDS, government (in)action pushed responsibility onto impossibly underfunded service organizations like GMHC, and the results were deadly. Reacting to the injustice of this situation, a new generation of activists sought to tear away the insulation, provoking confrontation, not compromise, direct action, not accommodation, in the face of government and corporate indifference. And then in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, that it was legal for states to continue to outlaw homosexual acts. This negative decision outraged and mobilized thousands of gays and lesbians just as surely as the court’s positive decision in Brown v. Board of Education energized the African American Civil Rights movement.

NEW YORK STORIES ACT UP was founded in New York City in March 1987 amid a deep­ ening sense of the horrifying extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The group declared itself a “diverse, non-­partisan group united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”3 In myth, ACT UP springs up spontaneously during a speech by AIDS activist Larry Kramer. The speech and Kramer’s passion were certainly important inspirations, but as we have seen for other movements, the truth is somewhat different from the myth. The origins of ACT UP are multiple and complex, drawing from various elements of the women’s health movement, earlier AIDS activist groups like the Silence = Death Project, disgruntled members of the more moderate Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and various gay and lesbian liberation groups. ACT UP eventually grew to national

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and international dimensions. By early 1988 chapters had appeared in various cities throughout the country, including Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. By the beginning of 1990, ACT UP had spread throughout the United States and around the globe, with more than a hundred chapters worldwide. While this growth led to great diversity, ACT UP’s New York origins left an indelible mark on the group. One can chart much of the activity and cultural shape of ACT UP through a social geography of New York City. Four of the major targets of ACT UP have a strong historical presence in the city: the mass media (Times Square, home of the national TV networks), corporations (Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange), advertising (Madison Avenue), and the arts (SoHo, Greenwich Village, Broadway). Two other favored targets of ACT UP activists, the Catholic Church and government bureaucracies, also have major New York sites that proved convenient points of focus. And New York’s proximity to Washington, D.C., made a host of federal government sites accessible to ACT UP as well. As an organization, ACT UP had an unusual, if not unique, set of material and cultural advantages, as well as substantial disadvantages. On the negative side, especially in the early years, it was lobbying on behalf of several highly stigmatized communities, including gay people, intravenous drug users, and prostitutes. Add to this the stigma of working on the terrain of a disease about which little was known and around which much fear of contagion circled, and formidable obstacles confronted the group. On the positive side of the ledger, the organization drew much of its membership and support from middle-­and upper-­ class professionals and semiprofessionals, including people employed in some of the very sites the group would target. This provided unusually large amounts of material resources and unusual kinds of intellectual resources. Of particular relevance for this analysis is that ACT UP’s membership included visual artists, advertising copywriters, and media professionals who knew intimately what would and would not work—­ what would and would not sell—­in contemporary U.S. culture. They understood, for example, that modern mass-­media news coverage most often takes narrative form; thus, ACT UP’s dramatic demonstrations always sought to tell good, carefully plotted stories.

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THEORIZING IN AN EPIDEMIC OF WORDS AND IMAGES ACT UP’s somewhat atypical constituency also included an unusually large number of academics, artists, and others who were conversant with, if not enmeshed in, contemporary cultural theory. Cultural critic/AIDS activist Cindy Patton claims that ACT UP, especially the New York City group . . . provides an interesting example of emerging postmodern political praxis using deconstructionist analyses and tactics. A number of key people in the group are artists or intellectuals with deconstructionist politics. To many people actively involved in gay and now AIDS anarchist politics, deconstructionist, cultural marxist, and post-­ structuralist methods and jargon are fairly familiar, whether coming directly from Derrida, Gramsci, or Foucault, or simply as part of a zeitgeist. In addition, particular postmodernist texts form the reading list of the ACT UP New York group, which holds discussions of the relationship between their particular praxis and their experience/politics.4

Allowing for the likelihood that Patton exaggerates the influence of her own preferred theoretical-­political style in the organization, it is clear that ACT UP’s work was informed by postmodern theory in some significant ways. This was manifested particularly through the group’s stronger-­than-­average sense that, in Michel Foucault’s terms, power and knowledge are inseparable. This led to great sensitivity to the ways in which even the most factual, scientific knowledge is a cultural construct caught in politically inf(l)ected webs of language. ACT UP employed this sensitivity especially in taking on socially constructed medical knowl­ edge and in analyzing and using mass-­media framings of the “real.” In the same year ACT UP was founded, cultural critic Paula Treichler published an essay that did much to bring theory into the orbit of AIDS activism. In the essay, Treichler notes that AIDS is not only a disease of epidemic proportions but also a phenomenon that has spawned an “epidemic of signification.” She offers a kind of primer for a postmodern understanding of language as implicated in the process of creating AIDS: “The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look ‘through’ language

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to determine what AIDS ‘really’ is. Rather we must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language.” Treichler quickly refutes the common misunderstanding of postmodern theory that sees it as claiming that nothing is real, or that any story is as good as any other. She writes: “Of course AIDS is a real disease syndrome, damaging and killing real human beings. Because of this, it is tempting—­perhaps in some instances imperative—­to view science and medicine as providing a discourse about AIDS that is closer to its ‘reality’ than what we can provide ourselves. [But] try as we may to treat AIDS as ‘an infectious disease’ and nothing more, meanings continue to multiply wildly.”5 After demonstrating brilliantly how even the most elemental scien­ tific “facts” about AIDS are infected with cultural assumptions, Treichler calls for an approach to the medical knowledge about AIDS that is neither dismissive nor submissive: “We need to use what science gives us in ways that are selective, self-­conscious, and pragmatic (‘as though’ they were true). We need to understand that AIDS is and will remain a provisional and deeply problematic signifier.”6 This understanding of knowledge about AIDS as “provisional” and “problematic” was crucial to giving ACT UP the power to challenge the proliferation of questionable cultural meanings imposed on the disease by the medical community, the government, and the media. What became clear to the members of ACT UP, with the help of the writings of cultural theorists like Treichler, Michel Foucault, Jan Grover, Cindy Patton, Simon Watney, and Douglas Crimp, was that homophobia, racism, and sexism were deadly social diseases that needed to be fought along with the virus, not only in the outside world but inside ACT UP as well. Prejudice against gays, people of color, drug users, and women set back the process of treating people with AIDS and seeking a cure for the disease and its causative agent, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The country’s long-­standing puritanical attitudes toward sex made it difficult to talk publicly about a sexually transmitted disease. It became clear that in an “information age” and a “knowledge economy,” more than ever knowledge was power, and power knowledge. The war over HIV/AIDS was going to be very much a “discursive” bat­ tle, a battle over the meanings of words and images. This was surely not something wholly new in a social movement, but the extent to which

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“semiotic” warfare became self-­conscious and central to the work of ACT UP was unprecedented. The postmodernist element in ACT UP politics reinforced the strong preference for decentralized, antihierarchical organizational forms that the group inherited from other movements, most directly from the antinuclear direct-­action movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. ACT UP was structured in a set of “affinity groups” (typically consisting of five to fifteen individuals), each of which maintained a strong degree of autonomy within the organization. Few rules or overarching ideas limited ACT UP activists, other than a general commitment to non­ violence and a desire to bring an end to the AIDS crisis. Mobility and flexibility were deemed crucial resources in a cultural environment constantly in motion. ACT UP’s postmodernist tendencies were also manifested in the group’s complicated relation to so-­called identity politics—­the efforts of groups to organize around specific racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, or other characteristics. On the one hand, the group understood the necessity to deploy a “gay” identity at times as an organizing tool. But even as they demonstrated a willingness to use “identity” politically, members incessantly questioned the assumptions through which identities often devolve into static, homogenizing essences. ACT UP put into play the complexly ambiguous identity “queer,” an identity that at once reminds those using it of the label’s oppressive origins as a homophobic epithet, resignifies it as a positive identity, and articulates a queering (blurring) of the lines between gay and straight, normative and oppositional. Thus ACT UP members learned to see identity formation as an ongoing collective and strategic practice, not an unchanging essence. Postmodern perspectives on the instability of identities also proved useful, as Joshua Gamson has argued, for dealing with one of the central contradictions faced by ACT UP: the need to challenge the mainstream, homophobic view that AIDS was a “gay disease” while at the same time mobilizing the gay community to see the AIDS epidemic as a com­ munity crisis tied to the politics of lesbian and gay liberation. Rather than becoming stymied by this seeming double bind, ACT UP was able, thanks to its postmodern critique of such easy dichotomies as gay/ straight, to treat this contradiction as a useful one that could challenge dangerous oversimplifications perpetrated by the mainstream media.7

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More generally, this theoretical understanding meant that ACT UP members recognized that in addition to fighting government bureaucracies, media bias, and corporate self-­interest, they were also fighting, as Gamson phrases it, an “invisible” force: social norms defining what is normal, natural, and appropriate versus what is abnormal, unnatural, and deviant. The power of these norms lies precisely in their invisibility, their deep embeddedness in culture such that they are taken utterly for granted. ACT UP developed several strategies for bringing these invisible norms out of the closet and into the open, where they could be challenged.

CULTURAL QUE(E)RIES While ACT UP was never an exclusively LGBTQ2+ organization, its movement culture drew heavily on institutions, forms, and styles within gay male, lesbian, and “queer” communities. In turn, ACT UP played a significant role in transforming those communities. A gay culture that had previously remained largely underground had been strengthened, extended, and moved aboveground by successive waves of movement activity from the 1950s onward. Three overlapping waves of activism preceded the emergence of the ACT UP generation: a “homophile” phase in the late 1950s and early 1960s that established baseline positions in a style reminiscent of the NAACP; a more radical “gay liberation” and “lesbian-­feminist” phase in the late 1960s to mid-­1970s, shaped by revolutionary models provided by feminist and ethnic radicals; and a “gay and lesbian rights” phase from the mid-­1970s to the mid-­1980s that consolidated and institutionalized what the radical movement had begun. In this context, ACT UP and spin-­off gay groups Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers represent a fourth phase, a reradicalization aimed at both the AIDS crisis and assimilationist elements in lesbian and gay communities. As the rise of AIDS fueled a new demonization of gays that showed signs of reversing the modest but important gains of the gay rights era, ACT UP pushed back on the political and cultural fronts simultaneously. Each movement phase not only strengthened semiautonomous gay culture(s) but also contributed to a process that brought greater visibility to elements of queer culture that were deeply embedded in key terrains of U.S. high and popular culture. Even as each emergent wave

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created new, interwoven institutions for gay people, it also complicated gay/queer community life by revealing internal differences in race, class, gender, political orientation, and sexual practices. As waves crash against the shore, they dissolve and re-­form into new configurations; just so, lines between radical and reformist, integrationist and separatist are seldom neatly traceable in highly fluid situations. Thus, ACT UP emerged at a highly complex moment, and its actions were never less than controversial across various lesbian/gay/queer subcultures. Despite and because of this complexity, it is clear that queer cultural connections and styles enabled and shaped virtually all dimensions of ACT UP, from the social networks it recruited from to the sites chosen for meetings to fund-­raising sources to, most pertinently, its graphic images, slogans, costumes, and highly theatrical demonstration style. The rise of gay, lesbian, and queer studies in the universities; the creation of gay bookstores, coffeehouses, movie theaters, and health clinics; the expansion of the gay press—­all of these provided material-­intellectual resources of great importance to ACT UP. These institutions made more widely available a set of gay cultural codes that could be deployed positively in organizing and parodically used against a mainstream “white, male, heterosexual” world. A sense of how a playfully gay cultural coding worked in the movement is apparent in the group’s name itself. The acronym ACT UP has multiple meanings. It clearly signals a sense of the need to act, to act defiantly, and to stand up against oppression. At the same time, this rather macho sense of activism is undercut by echoes of the phrase acting up, both in the sense of not working properly and in the sense of behaving badly, as a child might. And, of course, the emphasis on acting clearly signals a sense of performing or pretending that is supposedly the opposite of serious political action. The name thus suggests a characteristic political seriousness in ACT UP that was entangled with an equally serious and equally political playfulness (demonstrated, for exam­ ple, by the act of wrapping antigay Senator Jesse Helms’s home in a giant yellow condom). A pointed example of how gayness played politically can be seen in one of ACT UP’s first demonstrations. At a Washington demonstration in June 1987, District of Columbia police officers displayed their homophobia and hysteria about “catching” AIDS (or gayness?) through

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casual contact by wearing bright-­yellow rubber gloves as they arrested several dozen ACT UP members who were engaging in civil disobedience. As Crimp and Rolston report it, the “activists, many looking unusually respectable in conservative business clothes, raised a very queer chant, ‘Your gloves don’t match your shoes! You’ll see it on the news!’” Amid the campy humor, the chant was perfectly designed to “out” the police hysteria, and its point was made more memorable through its catchy, rhymed phrasing. It was just the kind of chant (connected to a visual image) that would ensure that not just the police but also the protesters would see themselves “on the news.” Another contribution of gay culture to ACT UP actions is hinted at by the reference to “conservative business suits” in the passage above. This particular costume in part reflects the professional class and business world where many ACT UP members worked in their “day jobs.” Some activists sometimes used this mode of dress straightforwardly, as it were, to reflect their class similarity to those they were protesting against. At other times, however, group members used this costume as a disguise, as what they called “Republican drag.” This ability to “pass” sent a message about the ubiquity of gayness and the contingency of “normal” identity. It also served activists well in such efforts as “zapping” the New York Stock Exchange or “crashing” international AIDS medical conferences. In conservative drag, ACT UP members could infiltrate an audience, for example, and pepper gathered scientists with the kind of troubling questions from which they were often insulated in their academic or corporate ivory towers. At still other times, the drag employed was the more traditional, cross-­dressing kind, and was used to express an unrepentant otherness in gay culture and gay humor, symbolized by the favorite chant of ACT UP’s cousin Queer Nation: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Campy humor informed other dimensions of the organization as well. Movement affinity groups such as those that formed the core units of ACT UP have a long history of clever self-­naming. In ACT UP, this self-­naming frequently took on a decidedly queer quality. For example, one group’s acronym was CHER, in homage to one of the favorite divas of a segment of the gay male community. The meaning of the acronym changed frequently, but one explication is particularly rich: Commie Homos Engaged in Revolution. This version of CHER at once sends up

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homophobia and expresses solidarity with the long-­suffering American left against which the label “commie” had been hurled to dismiss anyone so “deviant” as to question the U.S. political system. In similar fashion, another colorful affinity group called itself the Pinkos. Both names hint at the hysterical connection drawn during the “un-­American activities” witch hunts of the 1950s between deviant politics and deviant sexuality, between the allegedly “contagious” “spread” of communism and sexual perversity.8 The campy humor of ACT UP underlines the impossibility of separating the “political” from the “cultural” dimensions of a movement. The group’s humor was both an effective tactic and a mode of defiant assertion of identity. And even the “expressive” mode was political in that it deepened solidarity in the movement. ACT UP understood that humor could be disarming and used wit strategically to counter half-­ witted messages circulating in the mainstream (when protesting the Catholic Church’s deadly stand against condom use, members chanted, “Curb your dogma”). Sometimes, as in the acronym ACT UP itself, they used humor to make fun of their own emerging ideological rigidities. They also used it just for fun. But as Crimp and Rolston put it, “ACT UP’s humor is no joke. It has given us the courage to maintain our exuberant sense of life while every day coping with disease and death, and it has defended us against the pessimism endemic to other Left movements, from which we have otherwise taken so much.”9 Humor proved essential to ACT UP, but it needs to be seen in the wider context of the organization’s unusually effective mobilization of emotions. Emotions are always a key part of social movements, since movements often stem not only from ideological disagreement with dominant trends but also from visceral, emotional reactions to perceived injustice. As social movement scholar Deborah Gould has shown in great detail, ACT UP managed to channel a variety of emotions—­fear, rage, mournfulness, as well as campy humorousness—­into a set of political actions to contest the story of AIDS.10

SILENCE = DEATH ACT UP’s media savvy and aesthetic sophistication combined to create a series of remarkably catchy images and slogans, texts to catch both the media’s and the public’s attention. The group understood that in an

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image-­saturated, sound-­bite culture, getting people’s attention is no easy task. But, as noted above, many ACT UP activists were media veterans, and their expertise helped the group gain an unprecedented amount of media coverage. While the slogan and image “Silence = Death” precedes the birth of ACT UP, the group quickly adopted the phrase and its accompanying image, a pink triangle on a black background, which became its most identifiable image-­text. As political slogans go, it is certainly a strange one, alerting us that there was from the beginning something different about this particular group of activists. While most traditional activists would view as a liability the lack of immediate clarity about what the phrase might mean, to ACT UP that ambiguity was precisely the point. ACT UP created many brilliantly clear, pointed slogans. But the group also understood the importance of strategic ambiguity. In this case, the equation was meant to, and on countless occasions did, evoke the question: “What does that mean?” As such, it became an invitation to a pro­ longed discussion of the AIDS crisis. Various answers to the question were possible, but many would begin by saying that the pink triangle was fastened on gay prisoners as they were marched to Nazi concentration camps. Silence about those camps led to millions of deaths. By analogy, fearful silence about the extent of the AIDS crisis, including fearful self-­ silencing by gays and other stigmatized groups, deepened a crisis they believed would soon reach Holocaust proportions. But this pink tri­ angle inverted the one gays were forced to wear by the Nazis; this one pointed up in hope, not down in despair. If silence equaled death, speaking out and acting up could equal new chances for life.

ART IS NOT ENOUGH The Silence = Death graphic eventually found its way into an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo in 1988. By that time the Silence = Death collective was metamorphosing into the key ACT UP graphic collective, Gran Fury (named after the kind of cruising car favored by the gay-­harassing police). Titled Let the Record Show, the exhibition demonstrated ACT UP’s early targeting of some in the art community, as well as the support it received from others in that community. As noted above, ACT UP counted among its members many visual artists, advertising professionals, actors, and playwrights,

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whose aesthetic powers and visual-­theatrical orientation proved crucial to the group’s successes. In addition, a particular, “postmodern” aesthetic then prevalent in part of the art world lent itself well to activism. Much postmodern art and criticism was de-­emphasizing the individual artist of genius in favor of a sense of art as a social process embedded in political contexts. This attitude meant that ACT UP was able to recruit artists quickly and appropriate whatever aesthetic styles the group believed would further the visibility of the movement. Appropriation itself had the imprimatur of the avant-­garde, since “appropriation art,” in which the myth of utter originality was being challenged by artists deliberately imitating or directly copying works by earlier artists, was all the rage. ACT UP shifted register to the other, emotional definition of rage but kept the aesthetic possibilities. But the art community did not automatically or fully embrace the fight against AIDS. ACT UP had to gain that support by organizing and acting. The group protested, for example, an exhibition of protest graphics at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that included no examples of AIDS activist graphics. ACT UP accused MoMA of perpetuating a sense of art as above the political fray by emphasizing formal elements of the protest graphics on display and by embalming art objects while excluding living activist-­artists like the Silence = Death/Gran Fury collective. Let the Record Show was a counter to this more mainstream art tradition and became the first of many shows raising awareness of AIDS and, in benefit form, raising money for AIDS activism. The exhibition title itself plays on the distinction between “mere” documentation (“the record”) and “true” art (worthy of a “show”). This counterexhibit and the MoMA protest both challenged the sense that real art is about form and abstract, universal human experience and sought to break down the complacent distinction between art as representation and art as action: acts of representation were held politically accountable, and political acts were celebrated for the terrible beauty of the crisis they brought into view. At the same time, as seen in a Gran Fury ACT UP poster produced near the beginning of the crisis, art, however useful, is “not enough.” In striking white letters on a mournful black background, the poster declaims: “with 42,000 dead, art is not enough. take collective direct action to end the aids crisis.”

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MEDICINAL CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE The central targets on ACT UP’s initial agenda were the intertwined issues of health education, medical research, drug availability, and disease treatment. Following the kind of position articulated by Treichler and others, ACT UP members became skeptical medical consumers and, often, amateur medical researchers themselves. The group’s professional membership included doctors and medical researchers, but beyond that many other members took up the task of learning about the process and substance of drug development, testing, and distribution. Their understanding of the social construction of disease and their analysis of the corporate–­government process of drug approval led them into several kinds of civil disobedience. This included what we might call medicinal civil disobedience in the form of publicizing, making available, and using illegal or not-­yet-­legal medicines. It also took the more traditional form of demonstrations against pharmaceutical corporations and the federal drug bureaucracy, as well as aggressive actions such as invading medical conferences. It sometimes took the form of theatrical actions like wearing lab coats and presenting “guerrilla” slide shows that parodied conference presentations, or doctoring real slide shows by inserting slides stating, “He’s lying” or “This is voodoo epidemiology.”11 ACT UP actions also challenged health educators, from the surgeon general on down. The group called for education about AIDS that was frank, not euphemistic, unprejudiced, not homophobic, and targeted in culturally sensitive ways to particular communities, rather than blandly generic. This included challenging the dominant model of medical expertise in which the opinions, experience, and cultural location of the client-­patient had been deemed largely irrelevant. Drawing inspiration from the women’s health movement that grew out of second-­wave feminism, and wielding the privilege embodied in its highly educated constituency, ACT UP had grudging but substantial success in changing attitudes and practices inside and outside the medical establishment. ACT UP’s basic strategy might be called the politics of shaming. Through demonstrations, flyers, posters, informational media actions, newspaper advertisements, letter-­writing campaigns, civil disobedience, and sit-­ins and small “zap” actions in corporate, government, and media offices, the group sought to draw attention to shameful government sluggishness, shameful corporate profiteering, and shameful media bias.

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Art Is Not Enough. Courtesy of AIDS DemoGraphics.

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Faster drug approval, lower drug costs, community-­targeted health information, more humane treatment programs, easier availability of experimental drugs, more money for medical research—­all these goals were furthered by ACT UP action and negotiation, and all prolonged or saved lives. These victories had ramifications beyond the context of AIDS, benefiting all users of the American health care system.

AIDS: IT’S BIG BUSINESS, BUT WHO’S MAKING A KILLING? Given these concerns, it is no surprise that the first major ACT UP “demo” (demonstration) targeted pharmaceutical corporations and their allies in the federal government. Specifically, the demonstration was aimed at Burroughs Wellcome, maker of the first important anti-­AIDS drug, AZT, and its relationship with the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Burroughs Wellcome had proposed a price for this critical drug that would amount to an expenditure of $12,000 per year for each patient. As ACT UP saw it, in a country without universal health care this was tantamount to condemning to death all but the wealthiest people with AIDS. Noting the heavy subsidizing of medical research by the federal government and the exclusive contract given Burroughs by the FDA, ACT UP argued that there was outrageous price-­fixing collusion between government and pharmaceutical companies. ACT UP descended on Wall Street at 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 4, 1987, to protest the alliance between the FDA and Burroughs Wellcome. Protesters tied up busy commuter traffic for several hours. As Crimp and Rolston note, “The demonstration made national news, and several weeks later, when [the FDA] Commissioner announced a speed-­up of the FDA’s drug approval process, CBS anchor Dan Rather credited ACT UP’s pressure.”12 The action also proved a recruitment device; stock trader Peter Staley, for example, was so impressed by the demo and so disturbed by the homophobic reaction to it by his fellow traders that he started “living a double life, trading by day, going to ACT UP meetings at night,” until eventually he devoted himself to the group full-­time. He became a stalwart member of ACT UP and later a founder of the spin-­ off group TAG (Treatment Action Group).13

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ACT UP’s corporate targeting included a brilliantly innovative use of sticker graphics. Members moved through pharmacies and affixed small stickers with the words “AIDS Profiteer” to cold-­care medicines and other medical products manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome. A later continuation of this action included a poster with a slogan that at once called for a new type of boycott, selling stocks, and paid witty homage to the tradition of campaigns to free political prisoners: “Sell Wellcome, Free AZT.” ACT UP took on other pharmaceutical corporations as AIDS medicine evolved; one effective tactic was backing up the label “AIDS Profiteer” with strategically placed ads detailing the prices of particular drugs and the yearly profits of the companies making them. This politics of shaming often proved quite effective, as in the dip in the Burroughs stock price that followed the demonstration against the firm.

THE GOVERNMENT HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS As part of its targeting of government inaction, ACT UP went after the FDA itself, in particular the agency’s cumbersome process for approving new drugs and treatments. Activists challenged what they saw as the deadly neglect entailed by long-­ delayed approvals of experimental drugs. In the group’s inimitable style, an ACT UP graphic proclaims: “Time Isn’t the Only Thing the FDA Is Killing.” A tactic developed to dramatize this problem and used in numerous ACT UP actions was the “die-­in.” Adapted from antinuclear activism, ACT UP’s version was, according to Gamson, not only a direct commentary on drug policy but also a swipe at normalizing: “A ‘die-­in,’ in which activists draw police-­ style chalk outlines around each other’s ‘dead’ bodies, gives death another meaning by shifting responsibility: these are deaths likened to murders, victims not of their own ‘deviance,’ but shot down by the people controlling the definition of normality.”14 Moreover, these “living dead” protested their relegation to the hospice and the cemetery or to the silence that equals death. By moving “death” out into public space, ACT UP resisted the death sentences written by normative discourse and social indifference to the search for AIDS treatment and cure. In a similar vein, a good deal of the cultural struggle around AIDS was focused on blood. Where “contaminated” blood was used to separate

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AIDS: It’s [still] Big Business! Courtesy of AIDS DemoGraphics.

the innocent from the guilty, an ACT UP graphic declares that “the government has blood on its hands,” above a huge bloody handprint. A still more dramatic and imaginative use of blood symbolism was embodied in the infamous “Dannemeyer Vampire.” Congressman William Dannemeyer of California promoted Proposition 102, a California ballot initiative that, if passed, would have required all doctors in the state to report to authorities all those infected, or even suspected of being infected, with HIV. In response, San Francisco’s ACT UP chapter built a huge puppet effigy of Dannemeyer depicting him as a vampire, with a black cape and blood dripping from his fangs. As Gamson reads this action, “ACT UP activates another popular code in which blood has meaning—­the gore horror movies—­and reframes blood testing as blood sucking. It’s not the blood that is monstrous, but the vampire [politician] who would take it.”15 The issues of blood testing and violation of patient confidentiality led ACT UP to take on another corporate antagonist, the insurance industry. The group’s actions against the insurance industry, which sometimes included throwing blood or liquids resembling blood at corporate offices, opened out to a host of efforts to guarantee the privacy of people

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with AIDS, secure their rights to employment and housing, and force the extension of other basic human rights to these individuals.

READING THE “NEW YORK CRIMES” Many ACT UP activists worked in the media or had friends who did, and they understood that the mass media are not neutral reporters of reality but active agents in the social creation of what counts as truth, reality, and news. Not surprisingly, given its location, the nation’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, became an early target. ACT UP undertook a prolonged struggle to get the Times to cover the AIDS crisis more fully, and to reshape the discourse used in that coverage. In the process, group members used some of their more inventive techniques and slogans. They created, for example, a mock-­up of the Times front page, renamed the New York Crimes, in which they detailed how the paper had neglected to cover the crisis. They noted, for example, that during the first year and a half of the AIDS epidemic, when close to a thousand cases had already been reported, the Times carried only seven articles about it, none on the front page. In contrast, ACT UP counted fifty-­four Times articles over a three-­month period about a Tylenol contamination scandal, despite the fact that it involved only seven reported cases of harm to people. The group traced the newspaper’s neglect of AIDS to a long-­standing, deep-­seated homophobia on the part of the management and staff. The last straw for ACT UP in relation to the Times came in June 1989, when the paper published an editorial suggesting that AIDS activist groups were exaggerating the seriousness of the disease. According to this editorial, at a point when a hundred thousand cases had been reported, the disease was “leveling off” because AIDS was “still very largely confined to specific risk groups. Once all susceptible members are infected, the numbers of new victims will decline.” ACT UP’s translation was “Soon all the fags and junkies will be dead, and we’ll be rid of AIDS.” Outraged, ACT UP organized a demonstration in front of Times publisher “Punch” Sulzberger’s Fifth Avenue residence that included painting white outlines of bodies and the inscription “All the News That’s Fit to Kill” (an allusion to the newspaper’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”) on the street in front of the apartment. The organization also

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launched a boycott of the paper that included the brilliant touch of placing stickers on newspaper vending machines that read: “The New York Times AIDS Reporting Is OUT OF ORDER,” with the last phrase printed large enough to discourage potential users of the machines. Another sticker read: “Buy Your Lies Here. The New York Times Reports Half the Truth about AIDS. ACT UP FIGHT BACK FIGHT AIDS.” In addition to the typically catchy, sound-­bite-­length slogans, ACT UP handed out flyers that provided statistics on the paper’s (lack of ) coverage and raised specific questions about AIDS issues the paper had not addressed. In a comparison clearly designed to embarrass the prestigious newspaper, ACT UP pointed out that the Times had sent only one reporter to cover the twelve-­thousand-­delegate Fifth International AIDS Conference earlier that year, while even the tabloid New York Newsday had sent five. Not only that, the Times reporter failed to attend the most exciting event of the conference, the opening ceremonies, which were taken over by hundreds of international AIDS activists. ACT UP’s media assault often focused on terminology, on key words deployed in the AIDS cultural battle. Perhaps because ACT UP’s core constituency of gay people had been historically sensitized to the power of negative labeling, the organization quickly zeroed in on issues of naming. The first and strongest assault was on the expression “AIDS victim,” common in the media. The group argued persuasively that the word victim not only implied passivity but also encouraged a fatalistic sense that the inevitable result of AIDS was death. ACT UP countered with two alternative phrases: the more neutral-­sounding “people with AIDS” and the more pointed “people living with AIDS.” The second of these emphasized that dying was not the sole occupation of those infected with HIV—­people were “living with” the disease. ACT UP understood that images spoke as loudly as words in this context. A year after the founding of ACT UP, the Museum of Modern Art once again became a target when it exhibited a collection of photographs of AIDS “victims” taken by Nicholas Nixon. Nixon’s images were almost invariably of emaciated, darkly lit figures in late stages of AIDS-­ related diseases. From the point of view of ACT UP, they evoked at best pity, not activating anger, and rendered the “victims” complacently silent. They reinforced the message that one died from but did not live with AIDS. In picketing the exhibition, ACT UP once again raised the level

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of awareness in one of AIDS activists’ most sympathetic communities, the art world. A similar struggle involved the expression “risk groups.” Given the environment of prejudice surrounding AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control’s designation of certain people, in particular gay men and intravenous drug users, as members of “high-­risk groups” was bound to deepen the stigma. ACT UP argued that such labeling not only increased stigma­ tization but also worsened the health danger by directing attention away from the actual source of HIV infection—­certain practices, not certain people. As an alternative, ACT UP and other activists promoted the phrase “risk behaviors.” This move helped to break through the censorship that made it difficult to talk about such things as unprotected anal sex. Over time and through numerous demos, boycotts, press releases, articles, and direct pressure on reporters, medical professionals, and bureaucrats, ACT UP succeeded in changing the discourse around AIDS, and that in turn changed the climate for research, testing, and treatment. ACT UP also took on the way in which even the term victim was dichotomized. Well-­publicized cases like that of Ryan White, an adolescent hemophiliac who contracted HIV through blood transfusion, led the media to invent the category of “innocent AIDS victim.” The phrase inevitably, if subtly, suggests its opposite, the “guilty” victim. Given the social prejudices unleashed by the epidemic, it was not hard to figure out who these other, not-­innocent victims were—­queers, drug abusers, and sex workers. The religious right was the most extreme force in this construction, arguing that AIDS was God’s vengeance on sinful people: deviants, the promiscuous, and drug-­addled criminals. But in ACT UP’s analysis, mainstream America embraced an only slightly less vicious version of this kind of thought whenever people unquestioningly accepted wording like “innocent victim.” ACT UP’s assault on this kind of discourse is epitomized by the slogan “All people with AIDS are innocent.” A graphic using this slogan, designed by the Gran Fury collective for a nine-­day campaign of actions in spring 1998, appropriated the caduceus, the image of twin serpents encircling a staff that symbolizes the medical profession. Use of this symbol at once targeted the way victim prejudice had infected the medical community and associated ACT UP’s position with the Hippocratic medical model of treating all patients equally.

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NOT SO COSMOPOLITAN A different kind of media action was directed against a specific article that appeared in the well-­known women’s magazine Cosmopolitan. In January 1988, Cosmo published “Reassuring News about AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be at Risk.” In addition to furthering the notion of AIDS as a “gay disease,” the article contained misinformation that was potentially deadly to anyone taking it as truth about HIV/ AIDS. Clearly aiming to soothe a presumed female readership, the author, a psychiatrist named Robert E. Gould, claimed that straight women had little to worry about, even if they had unprotected sex with infected partners, unless they had vaginal lacerations. Adding racist assumptions to baseline homophobia, Gould dismissed the high incidence of heterosexually transmitted HIV/AIDS in Africa as the result of brutal, near-­rape sexual practices claimed to be typical on the continent. ACT UP’s actions against Cosmo were led by women and marked the emergence of a stronger female and feminist presence in the organization. Women members, especially lesbians, had been meeting among themselves informally for some time, but the Cosmo event catalyzed the formation of a women’s committee in ACT UP. Although they were among those least at risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, lesbians had been deeply involved in AIDS activism from the beginning, for reasons ranging from personal connections with gay men to solidarity in the face of the homophobia that had done so much to worsen the crisis. But the solidarity of women in ACT UP was not always fully reciprocated. The larger numbers, louder voices, and bigger egos of the men in the group often made ACT UP a male-­dominated, sexist organization. Thus, in attacking sexist assumptions in mainstream media, the women’s committee was also addressing ACT UP itself. The women’s committee turned out more than 150 demonstrators at the headquarters of Cosmopolitan in the Hearst Magazine Building on a cold January day in 1988. They called for a boycott of the magazine and its advertisers (handing out a list of the latter), and they followed up with a national media campaign, using the particular issue to raise a wider set of concerns regarding poor coverage of women and AIDS. After being ejected or blocked from appearing on some mainstream television talk shows, the women’s committee turned to direct media action, producing their own video, Doctors, Liars, and Women:

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AIDS Activists Say No to Cosmo. Widely shown on cable television and at video festivals, museums, and universities, the video included information on a range of AIDS issues affecting women. It even gave tips on how to create a demonstration to raise AIDS awareness. Like all ACT UP activities, the video stressed a sense of do-­it-­yourself organizing, free from a stifling desire for central control. At the time of the Cosmo action, the Gran Fury collective produced the poster “AIDS: 1 in 61,” which reads in part: “One in every sixty-­one babies in New York City is born with AIDS or born HIV positive. So why is the media telling us that heterosexuals are not at risk?” The HIV-­positive babies who made up this arresting statistic were found overwhelmingly in black and Latino neighborhoods. The poster, which was produced in both English and Spanish, addressed both neglect of women with AIDS and the racism that often accompanied that indifference: “Ignoring color ignores the facts of AIDS. stop racism: fight aids.” Because of both its ideological complexity and its proximity to the crisis, ACT UP was among the first groups to notice the changing demographics of the disease, and to act on that knowledge. But the group’s ability to address the impact of HIV/AIDS on communities other than the gay community ran up against serious challenges.

KISS-­INS, BALL GAMES, AND OTHER INVASIONS OF PUBLIC SPACE Like the artists of the mural movement, ACT UP’s graphic artists and theatrical demo designers sought to reclaim public spaces. This recla­ mation was crucially important because the long-­standing puritanical practice of keeping sex talk private was proving deadly. While American culture is one of the more sex-­obsessed cultures in the world, using sex to sell everything from cars to household cleansers, certain kinds of sex talk are taboo in certain public arenas. The most obviously relevant silence concerns “deviant” same-­sex relations. Beyond this, America’s sex phobias were limiting delivery of crucial information about HIV/ AIDS. ACT UP’s assault on public spaces ranged from politicizing baseball games to crashing medical conferences to its most notorious variation on the sit-­in tactic, public same-­sex “kiss-­ins.”

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Same-­sex kiss-­ins also demonstrated the continued link between gay/lesbian liberation and HIV/AIDS activism within ACT UP. The first large-­scale kiss-­ins were held in conjunction with the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The materials handed out at the public kiss-­ins clearly articulated the motivations of the participants, including their intent to confront that invisible force of normalization: “We kiss to protest the cruel and painful bigotry that affects the lives of lesbians and gay men. We kiss so that all who see us will be forced to confront their own homophobia. We kiss to challenge repressive conventions that prohibit displays of love between persons of the same sex.” The handout goes on to link this general homophobia to the AIDS crisis: “The Helms Amendment, preventing federal funding for any AIDS educational materials that could be construed to promote lesbian or gay sex, passed in the Senate by a vote of 96 to 2. The federal government has been unconscionably slow to react to the AIDS crisis, a slowness tantamount to condoning the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men.”16 The essence of the kiss-­ins found its way into public spaces via a different vehicle as well. Gran Fury produced a take-­off on a famous Benetton clothing advertisement. The ad, placed on buses circulating throughout New York City, carefully mimicked the style and content of Benetton ads that featured kissing couples, making only two slight alterations: two of the three couples kissing were same-­sex couples, and the accompa­nying copy was not from Benetton but from ACT UP. It read: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed and Indifference Do. Corporate greed, government inaction and public indifference make AIDS a political crisis.” With characteristically brilliant brevity of wit, the images and copy counter the notion that HIV can be transmitted by casual contact, assault homo­phobia, and separately target pharmaceutical corporations, the government, and the general public reading the ad. A different invasion of public space took place during a baseball game in New York’s Shea Stadium. Like the Cosmo demo, it was aimed especially at correcting misinformation about putative heterosexual immun­ity to AIDS, and, like the Cosmo demo, it was organized by the women’s committee. Activists bought out four hundred seats in three large sections of the stands from which they could unfurl banners with

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typically ACT UPitty but site-­appropriate slogans like “No Glove, No Love” (that is, no condom, no sex), “AIDS Is Not a Ball Game,” “Strike Out AIDS,” “Don’t Balk at Safe Sex,” and, most graphically, “AIDS Kills Women” and “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It.” ACT UP also handed out informational “scorecard” flyers that utilized baseball metaphors: “Single: Only one woman has been included in government-­sponsored tests for new drugs for AIDS. Double: Women diagnosed with AIDS die twice as fast as men. Triple: The number of women with AIDS has tripled as a result of sexual contact with men in New York City since the 1984 World Series. The Grand Slam: Most men still don’t use condoms.” Aiming to hit its target audience in their ball(s)park, the action was directed at straight men who refused to take responsibility for safer sex. ACT UP purposely chose to be inappropriate, to co-­opt a space from which politics is supposed (or presumed) to be absent. But in cultural war, symbols like “America’s pastime” are precisely the points where (hetero) normativity is constructed, where the lines between normal, innocent victims of tainted blood get distinguished from virus-­spreading sissies who probably never even played baseball! The actions described above are merely a few among the dozens that ACT UP has performed over the years, from single-­person or small-­ group “zap” actions to elaborate demos with hundreds of people committing acts of civil disobedience.

“FACING” THE CRISIS One of the key questions facing a social movement is how to represent the forces against which the movement is struggling. As sociologist William Gamson points out, this process entails a paradox. On one hand, if the forces against which the movement is arrayed are portrayed too abstractly, both potential recruits and movement members may find it difficult to identify with the struggle. On the other hand, if the movement personalizes the struggle too much by naming particular individuals as opponents, the important insight that structural factors, not just individuals, are the ultimate target is lost. A parallel problem exists on the other side of the equation. If a movement imagines itself too fully in collective terms, the sense of agency in the individual members of the group may wane; they may feel they are replaceable. Conversely, placing

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too much emphasis on individual commitment plays into the process by which the dominant society undermines collective opposition by personalizing and individualizing all social problems. That process, of course, is the very thing against which movements are organized. ACT UP dealt seriously and creatively with both of these dilemmas. A significant part of ACT UP’s power came from the mobilization of anger; recall that its self-­definition included the phrase “a group united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” Direct action is a collective activity, but anger is a very personal emotion. While one may analyze a structure to the point of anger, it is far easier to express anger toward a person than toward a system. ACT UP graphics suggest a very balanced approach to the dynamic of personalization versus emphasis on structural causation. Their targeting suggests an understanding that while political and bureaucratic systems function abstractly, they also depend in part on the decisions of individuals in authority. ACT UP posters present the faces of opponents, associating them through written texts with various “crimes” contributing to the AIDS crisis. President Reagan (“AIDSgate,” “He Kills Me”), Cardinal James O’Connor (“Public Health Menace”), New York mayor Ed Koch (“10,000 New York City AIDS Deaths: How’m I Doin’?”), New York health commissioner Stephen Joseph (“Deadlier than the Virus”), and Burroughs Wellcome CEO A. J. Shepperd (“AIDS Profiteer”) were among those singled out in the early years of ACT UP. That singling out took the form of using the faces of these individuals, but in ways that made them somewhat abstract. Because straightforward photographic representations might risk humanizing opponents in ways that would make it more difficult to sustain anger, the images were variously colorized, blurred, or rendered grainy in ways that abstracted the individuals. The “AIDSgate” poster by the Silence = Death collective, for example, which is credited by some with recruiting many new members to ACT UP at the national demonstration for lesbian and gay rights in the summer of 1987, features a head shot of President Reagan done in a garish green, with demonic red where the whites of the eyes would normally be. Another poster of Reagan made in the same year by Donald Moffett juxtaposes a head-­and-­torso shot of a smirking president in sepia tones on the right side to a red-­ and-­black target-­like set of concentric circles on the left. Over Reagan’s

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chest, in the same color as the red in the target, are the words “He Kills Me.” The phrase at once evokes and trashes the public image of Reagan as an allegedly charming, old-­boy humorist, and pointedly suggests that Reagan’s indifference to the AIDS crisis is deadly. The deadliness is at once general and concrete; the phrase “He Kills Me” personalizes the threat. Where superimposing the target over Reagan might have seemed a violation of the nonviolence code (if not a provocation to the Secret Service), separating the two images makes ambiguous the question of who is the targeted and who the targeter. The implication that “he,” the president, is targeting “me,” the person with AIDS, at the same time evokes an anger that is retargeted at Reagan and his policies. Two posters using images of pharmaceutical CEOs offer a contrast in regard to giving and not giving a face to the opposition. The first features “Mr. A. J. Shepperd, Chairman—­WELLCOME PLC.” Once again a head shot, the face is rendered in abstracted, very grainy black and white, with Shepperd’s name and title appearing in a subliminally threatening diagonal slash across the chairman’s necktie. Stamped in larger letters across his receding hairline are the words “AIDS Profiteer.” A second, quite famous poster eschews giving face to the “enemy.” Again a black-­and-­white image, this one features several petri dishes and a syringe held by a gloved hand in the foreground, with a medical-­masked face behind them. Presented with noir-­style contrast, the lab technician’s facial features are washed out totally into a black backdrop. On the head of the shadowy figure the following quotation appears: “One million [people with AIDS] isn’t a market that’s exciting. Sure it’s growing, but it’s not asthma.” Below the quote is the attribution “Patrick Gage, Hoffman-­ LaRoche, Inc.” This contrast of facelessness with the facefulness of the Shepperd poster makes perfect tactical sense. Where Burroughs Wellcome was a direct target of ACT UP, a company whose policies the group specifically wanted to change, Hoffman-­LaRoche, was, as the quotation suggests, not interested at the time in the “AIDS business.” Thus the point of the attack here is to represent the callous indifference of the pharmaceutical industry in general, so that abstract, faceless indifference is the point. At the bottom of the poster is the statement “This is to enrage you.” Such direct evoking of emotion was a technique commonly used in ACT UP posters, and here it again embodies a kind of postmodern complexity: it at once tells viewers what to feel (“rage”) and

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tells them that they are being manipulated—­“This is [engineered] to enrage you.” Through such complicated yet direct image-­texts, ACT UP posters manage to personalize and generalize, attack individuals and target the structures in which they are embedded, while simultaneously evoking a collective but personal “you.”

ACTING OUT: EXTENDING THE ISSUE FRAME ACT UP has shown amazing adaptability over the years as the contexts of AIDS as disease and social construction have shifted, partly in response to the group’s own efforts. While remaining a predominantly white male organization, ACT UP has developed, with much pushing by people both within and outside the organization, a rich analysis of the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. The list of issues ACT UP has addressed includes housing for homeless people with AIDS, free needle exchange programs for intravenous drug users, AIDS in prison, underfunded public hospitals in the inner city, the spread of AIDS in the Third World, health insurance for low-­income people, and treatment protocols for women, for lesbians, and for people of color (and for people fitting two or more of those categories). Some of this work has been done via ACT NOW (the AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize and Win), a national, and later international, forum created to extend the range of issues addressed by ACT UP and to offer widespread coordination while maintaining a decentralized structure. But coalition building has been far from easy. One way to mark the shifting forces in and around ACT UP is to compare two major national marches in which the group was a significant force. The first, the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, attracted six hundred thousand people and was, among other things, a coming-­out party for ACT UP and for the wider field of AIDS activism. The march was led by people with AIDS, and the event included the first public display of the enormous AIDS Quilt, another, differently inflected part of AIDS cultural activism that marshaled mourning and remembrance as effectively as ACT UP mobilized anger.17 It was also the moment when ACT UP first received national exposure through its colorful graphics, dancing dragon mobile picket line, and large-­scale civil disobedience. AIDS was on the agenda in vari­ous others

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ways throughout the march and surrounding events, and thus the Washington, D.C., rally marks the moment when it became clear how much lesbian and gay rights organizing would be changed by the AIDS crisis. Seven years later, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender March on Washington drew close to one million people. By this time it was clear that both ACT UP and the wider queer movement were increasingly connected to larger circuits of social justice; the linked movements were acknowledging far more fully than before the extent of diversity within their own ranks. There are many reasons for this, including increasing attacks from Christian fundamentalists and others on the right who were using an antigay agenda as a wedge against all strands of progressive social action. The preamble to the march platform states: “The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender movement recognizes that our quest for social justice fundamentally links us to the struggles against racism and sexism, class bias, economic injustice, and religious intolerance. We must realize if one of us is oppressed we are all oppressed. The diversity of our movement requires and compels us to stand in opposition to all forms of oppression that diminish the quality of life for all people.” This preamble and the shape of the march overall were the results of much internal struggle between those wishing for a narrower, simpler “gay rights” agenda and those pushing for this larger vision. And note how those who won out phrased the larger vision. It is the “diversity of our movement” that “requires and compels” this wider understanding. In other words, as more and more people came out, as more and more histories were written, as more and more complicated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies emerged, it was impossible to deny the diversity within and across various gay or queer communities. At the same time, there was a recognition, beyond celebrating and protecting this diversity within, that “all forms of oppression that diminish the quality of life” for one group threaten others. ACT UP was both driven by and a driving force in this dual recognition of internal gay diversity and external connection to other communities. Because AIDS cut its swath widely (but not “indiscriminately”) across the entire gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, and beyond those communities, AIDS activ­ ism was a key site for this transformation. From the group’s beginnings, many in ACT UP were quite serious in attempting to reach out beyond their gay white male and lesbian core

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constituency. Because of their closeness to the crisis, ACT UP’s members were among the first to recognize that the AIDS epidemic had moved beyond the gay community. In trying to assist other communities, however, they ran into external and internal obstacles. One might have expected that ACT UP, with its sensitivity to the need for community-­ specific AIDS education, would have been better prepared for how not only the meanings but also the very course of the disease differed from community to community, especially across lines of race, gender, and class. But those lines proved very difficult to cross. As we have already seen, it took years and much prodding for women within ACT UP to convince men in the organization to take seriously the independent educational and medical needs of women generally and lesbians more specifically. Likewise, ACT UP was slow to understand the differing social factors affecting the course of the disease, and its recognition and treatment, in nonwhite, nongay, and/or poor white communities. AIDS deaths among intravenous drug users were not recorded as such by authorities for some time, partly because symptoms tended to blend in with other “side effects” of substance abuse and were often different from those affecting middle-­class gay men, and partly because the “gay disease” stereotype blinded health officers. As noted above, ACT UP did much to bring this other population of people with AIDS to light, but not always in the most effective or useful ways. ACT UP’s rhetoric of crisis, for example, did not necessarily match the understanding of poor people of color, for whom crisis mode is just everyday life. Many blacks and Latinos in inner cities saw the advent of AIDS not as a transformative event but as one more assault in an ongoing series of assaults on their communities. Where middle-­class white professionals felt a deep sense of entitlement to a health care system geared to their needs, blacks and Latinos were often inured to a system utterly indifferent to theirs. At the same time, both media stereotypes and homophobia, to which communities of color were no more immune than white communities, made gay people of color invisible in AIDS iconography. By stereotype, if you were black or Latino and HIV-­positive, you were a drug user; if you were white and HIV-­positive, you were gay. These and similarly stereotypical assumptions at work both within and outside ACT UP meant that the group’s efforts to reach out to communities

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of color were often received with suspicion. Intensive work on racism within the group, the growing presence of gay and straight people of color in the organization, and a shift in national movement priorities gradually lessened these tensions. But ACT UP has seldom significantly crossed the color line (though by 2002, ACT UP Philadelphia reported that more than half its members were people of color). Nevertheless, many in ACT UP have worked diligently to deepen analyses of the ways in which homophobia, sexism, racism, and class oppression are inextricably interwoven into the AIDS crisis and have argued that all types of oppression must be fought simultaneously if the crisis is to be ended.

(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGIES Attempting to characterize the “overall” ideology of any complex movement is risky business at best, but in the case of ACT UP, offering a generalizing characterization is not only risky but also a violation of one of the ideological principles of the (dis)organization itself. The highly decentralized, profoundly anarchistic nature of ACT UP makes an attempt to characterize its general political position extremely problematic and a violation of the members’ ideologically self-­conscious agreement to disagree ideologically. One student of the movement characterizes the central ACT UP goals as “greater access to treatments and drugs for AIDS-­related diseases; culturally sensitive, widely available and explicit safe-­sex education; and well-­funded research that is publicly accountable to the communities most affected.”18 The life-­and-­death stakes of an initially mysterious and terrifying disease certainly gave the group a very concrete focus. As one member put it: “People have been fighting for social justice in this country for centuries. . . . We’re going to get aerosol pentamid-­nine [a treatment drug for pneumocystis pneumonia] a lot quicker than we’re going to get social justice.”19 Yet even many of the most pragmatic members of ACT UP soon realized that their concrete goals were inseparable from larger issues of social justice. At the other ideological extreme from the pragmatists in the organization, but not necessarily inconsistent with their goals, is the radically “deconstructive” position articulated by members like Cindy Patton: “ACT UP groups do not protest or demonstrate; rather they perform,

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and in their ‘actions’ they identify the unspoken, inaudible linkages in the power system which are obscured by both the unitary notion of power (‘get a government response’) and the network notion of power (‘decentralize’). . . . Coalition, and even agreement, may not be a desirable goal, but only a strategic or tactical moment in denaturalizing identities and the systems of power which construct them in order to control us.”20 For other members, a broad, radically democratic, decentralized but still recognizably “progressive left” perspective was the core ideology of ACT UP. This element, while wary, worried less than Patton about being absorbed back into various power systems and took most seriously the second letter in the acronym, for coalition. Part of ACT UP’s ideology was an understanding that all “cultural texts,” including actions, are open to widely variant interpretations. Applying this analysis to its own actions meant that ACT UP performed “social texts” that were explicitly designed to leave room for multiple interpretations. This was not to promote some “anything goes,” utterly relativistic position—­a common misunderstanding of postmodernism—­ but rather to acknowledge that analyzing the always partly open-­ended nature of communication could make one more effective in challenging dominant rhetorics and the social positionings from which they were articulated. In other words, ACT UP actors challenged universal claims to truth and representation that they believed often embodied not universal but particular straight, white, middle-­class male positions. They opened themselves instead to studying and understanding other, insurgent particularities of race, ethnicity, class, generation, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as their intersections. Crimp and Rolston acknowledge the collective nature of ACT UP graphics and note that the multiple audiences to which they are directed always include themselves: “AIDS activist art is grounded in the accumulated knowledge and political analysis of the AIDS crisis produced collectively by the entire movement. The graphics not only reflect that knowledge, but actively contribute to its articulation as well. . . . They function as an organizing tool, by conveying, in compressed form, information and political positions to others affected by the epidemic, to onlookers at demonstrations, and to the dominant media. But their primary audience is the movement itself. AIDS activist graphics enunciate AIDS politics to and for all of us in the

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movement.”21 This last point is crucial, for it acknowledges that rather than accepting self-­limiting ideas of “preaching to the choir,” ACT UP understands that ongoing internal political education and a willingness to grow and change ideologically are critical to a movement’s success. Indeed, a healthy if not always pleasant fractiousness has been a hallmark of the organization. The strong decentralist structure that allows room for difference has been crucial in ensuring that this contentious ongoing learning process has been more often a resource than a threat. Of course, those who would forestall movements can also be fast learners. And as some critics have argued, a similarly decentralized set of interlocking but semiautonomous forces of domination characterizes postmodern capitalist society, and those forces are not easily challenged.22

OUTSIDE-­IN STRATEGIES, F(R)ACTIONS, AND SPIN-­OFF GROUPS ACT UP was from the beginning known best for its uncompromising, in-­your-­face tactics. Given that its origins lay partly in critique of AIDS service organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which ACT UP believed had gotten too close to mainstream medical and government institutions, and given its confrontational style, this reputation is well earned. But the picture is also more complicated. Many in ACT UP understood that their pressure was making space for insiders in AIDS medical and government bureaucracies to maneuver. This situation, which I call the outside-­in, or push-­pull strategy, is common in many movements. Just as Malcolm X proved a useful foil for Martin Luther King Jr., ACT UP served those very organizations, such as GMHC, that it criticized as too moderate.23 In addition to taking direct action, ACT UP members engaged in letter writing, petitioning, and lobbying. And they often used direct action itself, as had the Civil Rights movement, to force open a process that led to the kind of negotiation more moderate forces had been unable to initiate. The complexity of political factions and fractions within ACT UP is also revealed in the number of spin-­off organizations it generated. These spin-­offs spun in two rather opposite directions: new groups less oriented toward direct action and new radical queer groups that were very direct-­action oriented.

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As we have seen, women in ACT UP had to struggle to get the gay male–­dominated movement to address issues of particular concern to women. The work of women in ACT UP to bring out the issues of HIV-­positive women in general, and lesbians in particular, played a key role in seeding a strong, widespread, and diverse lesbian health movement. That effort has led to increased medical attention to a lesbian demographic with regard to breast cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, and a host of other concerns. Some lesbians frustrated by ACT UP’s gay male focus spun off to form Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM), a “direct action group committed to demanding, securing, and defending absolute reproductive freedom and quality health care for all women.” Like ACT UP, WHAM and other radical women’s health and reproductive rights activists sought more targeted medical research, inclusion of straight women and lesbians in drug trials, as well as better and more widespread health infor­ mation and full reproductive rights for all women. Like ACT UP’s bad cop, good cop routine with regard to more mainstream AIDS advocacy groups, these new health movement groups brought renewed radical energy and pressure to a scene that had become routinized and limited by institutionalization. In another vein, because ACT UP was centrally involved in a politics of scientific knowledge, some members moved ever deeper into the arcane dimensions of medical research, developing personal contacts within the medical field whom they influenced through far lower-­ key tactics (like conversation over coffee) than the image of ACT UP usually conjures. Some in the movement gained through this process a deeper understanding of, if not sympathy for, those who work in AIDS research institutions. Thus, it is not surprising that ACT UP’s growing expertise and increasing intimacy with AIDS bureaucracies led some members to form a spin-­off organization called the Treatment Action Group in 1992. TAG was a far different organization, not only in focus but also in form. A small group formed by invitation only, it eschewed openness and democracy in favor of expertise and traditional political clout. It became a “parallel institution” of sorts, mediating between AIDS bureaucracies and radical activist critique. TAG’s difference from ACT UP is perhaps most dramatically shown by the group’s acceptance of a donation of one million dollars from Burroughs Wellcome. While

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criticized by many in ACT UP for elitism and for growing too close to the enemy, TAG has been credited by others with great success in lobby­ ing the government to release promising AIDS drugs more quickly, to improve the FDA clinical trial process, and to better coordinate research activities at the National Institutes of Health through the Office of AIDS Research. That success, however, could not have occurred without—­ and, indeed, is indivisible from—­ACT UP’s work. But TAG is far more likely to receive official credit for these advances, since the most radical elements in a force field of influence never receive credit from those institutions they influence. Among the spin-­offs of ACT UP that spun rather in the opposite direction, the most notorious is no doubt Queer Nation. Founded in 1990, this short-­lived but highly dramatic and influential group sought to take ACT UP’s confrontational style back into lesbian and gay organizing. Queer Nation took some of the radical energy, internal diversity, and tactics of ACT UP into attempts to empower bisexuals, transgendered people, and others who had been excluded from, marginalized by, or toned down by the mainstreaming of aspects of the lesbian and gay movement. Queer Nation’s signature actions, often aimed at “queering” public places, included kiss-­ins in shopping malls and straight bars, same-­sex weddings on the steps of Catholic cathedrals, and “pink panther” patrols bashing back against antigay violence. Like ACT UP, Queer Nation grew rapidly both in cities around the United States and internationally. Though the contradiction between the inclusiveness implied by queer and the exclusiveness implied by nation wore down many chapters after a few years, the organization’s colorful style and imagi­ native actions did much to bring the category “queer” and some of the theory behind it more fully out into the public sphere. A second, similar spin-­off group, the Lesbian Avengers, founded in 1992, took the energy, style, and direct-­action emphasis of ACT UP into an attempt to radicalize lesbian activism. The group’s handbook for the New York chapter (like ACT UP and Queer Nation, the group was founded in New York City but soon spread nationally) speaks in terms that clearly echo its origins. One section of the handbook is titled “DemoGraphics,” in homage to the ACT UP book of the same name, and the group’s self-­description suggests both its ACT UP style and the targets of some of its actions:

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ACTing UP against AIDS  233 Props, floats, shrines, burning torches, papier mache bombs, plaster statues . . . whatever! Demo-­graphics need to be eye-­catching, meaningful, and visually exciting. . . . . . . We try to never use a cliché or tired old rhetoric. . . . When we built a shrine to the two gay people burned to death in Oregon, our demo posters said, “Do Not Let Them Rest in Peace.” When we dogged the mayor of Denver for 48 hours the signs said “Boycott the Hate State.” When we held our New Year’s Eve Party, the poster featured a picture of seventies Blaxploitation film star Pam Grier, in hot pants, loading a rifle. The poster advertised “Activist a Go-­Go.” Our Valentine’s Day Action honoring Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas celebrated “Politically Incorrect Domestic Bliss.” . . . So whether the theme is whimsical or angry, our slogans have been clear.24

Clearly, the Avengers, like Queer Nation, focused on in-­your-­face confrontations around a variety of issues affecting their community. Both Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers appealed especially to a younger generation of gays, lesbians, and other queers who, raised in a more “out” world made possible by generations of activists who preceded them, pushed further “out,” bringing their defiantly deviant selves out into the streets, the malls, the schools, the talk shows. The various groups that spun off from ACT UP mark both a positive diffusion of energy and internal fault lines in the organization. On the negative side, despite ACT UP’s antihierarchical, decentralized form that could contain many positions, both its failures and its successes created some internally irresolvable tensions that could find resolution only in the formation of new groups. On the positive side, ACT UP set off a chain reaction that radicalized communities and fostered a host of new groups. Indeed, a proliferation of both health advocacy groups and radical queer groups constituted small-­scale “cycles of protest” set in motion by ACT UP.25 Most scholars who have studied ACT UP argue that the group peaked in the early 1990s and declined somewhat in effectiveness thereafter. Urvashi Vaid, one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary movements and a major figure in lesbian, gay, and queer organizing, as well as a sometime member of ACT UP, credits the group with bringing a new generation of activists into their own. And any LGBTQ2+

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activist today owes a debt to ACT UP. But Vaid has also been critical of the lack of follow-­up behind ACT UP’s spectacular actions: Direct-­action activism emerged in part as a reaction to the conservatism of the gay mainstream, and significantly affected gay movement strategy from 1986 to 1992. ACT UP marked the first (and only) time that this strategy took center stage in national gay politics. A new generation of activists, committed solely and principally to being queer and promoting queer freedom, came into its own. . . . [But] the direct-­action strategy focused on the glamorous and neglected the obvious. We sought (and got) media visibility, but after our fifteen minutes in the sun, we were left with another round of silence and the need to repeat the old actions, with diminished effectiveness each time. Our coercive moralism and guerrilla tactics eventually alienated and angered the people whose decisions we tried to shape. Ultimately, our neglect of dull systematic political organizing left us in 1993 without the political capacity to fight the right locally for our policy agenda nationally.26

ACT UP’s very strength—­the imaginative, novel, and telegenic aspects of its demonstration—­became a liability, both because novelty always wears off and because being high on direct action can distract from grassroots “dull systematic political organizing.”

MAINSTREAMING REAPPROPRIATIONS As I have argued throughout this book, one clear sign of the success of a movement is the diffusion/defusion of aspects of its culture into mainstream cultures. In the case of ACT UP, the very brilliance of the group’s graphic sense and its theatrical flair no doubt hastened this process. But this is hardly surprising, since ACT UP’s own analysis of how the process of cultural politics works anticipated that even the group’s opponents would reappropriate ACT UP’s “texts.” The group also understood that the process of reappropriation is not wholly negative. As in the fable of the wolf that ate the tasty stones proffered by the sheep it planned to eat, eventually such consumption limits the mobility and options of the predator. A key example of this reappropriation was the rise of what some have called “AIDS chic.” The most ubiquitous emblem of this was the

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red ribbon worn by many people in the entertainment industry, originally at the urging of an activist group calling itself Visual AIDS. The ribbon moved fairly quickly from being a brilliant device to draw attention to AIDS by associating the fight against it with figures in popular culture to being a complacency-­deepening symbol of how easy it was to feel good about AIDS: just pin on a red ribbon! The more selective and effective versions of AIDS chic took the form of fashion shows, art exhibitions, and musical concerts that raised millions of dollars for AIDS research and treatment. This kind of mainstreaming, as I argued in chapter 6 regarding what we might dub “famine chic,” was viewed skeptically by many in ACT UP but was also recognized as necessary for raising funds that might perhaps be put to more radical uses than the funders may have intended. Surely, the clearest, most ironic example of mainstream appropriation involves the graphics of the Silence = Death Project and the Gran Fury collective, which have been taken up and resignified by pharmaceutical companies. The rise in recent years of ever more specific niche marketing led inevitably to “gay people with AIDS” being moved from “risk group” to “target audience.” As Sarah Schulman articulates it in her important book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, “Advertising relies on a philosophy of niche marketing that has become so precise that Puerto Rican girls, poor alcoholics, Christian fundamentalist rock fans, punks of Arab descent, teenagers wanting cigarettes, and terminally ill gay men all have their own interactive relationship with some area of advertising.”27 In other words, with or without the aid of postmodern theory, advertisers too have learned the virtues of understanding specific “positionalities” and their rhetorical preferences. The powerful images created around anti-­AIDS activism proved too tempting for markete(e)rs seeking to consume people with AIDS. Magazines like POZ, aimed at HIV-­positive readers, complete a circle when they publish pharmaceutical ads that incorporate pink triangles and other aspects of the “AIDS activist aesthetic” to sell their products. In appropriating images that ACT UP activists themselves had often appropriated from mainstream advertising styles, these ads remind us of the ongoing, irresolvable problem of resignification that ACT UP’s postmodern graphic identity so brilliantly embodied. There is no such thing as a radical image or message; there are only radical “contextualizations”

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that in turn become “texts” that can be resignified back into the mainstream. This is not a cause for cynicism, just a caution against complacency and a call for ongoing acts of imaginative engagement.

THE AIDS CRISIS IS NOT OVER As early as 1988, ACT UP felt it necessary to create a poster reading, “The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over,” and ever since the group has periodically had to fight the sense that new treatments, new funding, new political promises have brought the crisis to an end. The mainstreaming of AIDS, its normalization, has brought with it another version of this old problem. Though ACT UP groups are still acting up all over the world, they struggle with a new wave of indifference resulting in part from their successes. Positions considered outrageous when articulated by ACT UP a decade ago seem like common sense today. For those who know nothing of the activist organization, this common sense appears from nowhere, while those who give credit to ACT UP sometimes do so in a romanticizing way that mythologizes the movement’s past at the expense of its present. Consistent with their very process-­oriented sense of social movement, many original members of ACT UP have moved on, and many new positions have been articulated. The development of relatively effective AIDS drug treatments has greatly extended the lives of some people with AIDS, and ACT UP deserves a good portion of the credit for speeding the development of these drugs. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health during the rise of ACT UP, noted in 2002 that activism profoundly changed not only the process of developing AIDS drugs but also the whole federal approach to drug development.28 Sociologist William Gamson observes that “the trick for activists is to bridge public discourse and people’s experiential knowledge, integrating them in a coherent frame that supports and sustains collective action.”29 In this process, for a while, time is on the side of movements. Claims that by definition always initially come from outside some mainstream frame become less strange through multiple iterations. Over time the chances of those iterations resonating with experiential knowledge grow. In the case of AIDS, the terrible, exponential spread of the disease itself meant that more and more people had the opportunity to match

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what groups like ACT UP were saying about AIDS and people with AIDS to their experience with someone they knew personally. This too led to normalization of the disease and, sometimes, to greater sympathy for protesters. But within some of the most deeply affected communities, it also led to a different kind of normalization of disease. In some sectors of some LGBTQ2+ urban communities, where infection rates sometimes exceeded half of the population, a deeply romanticized fatalism set in, one that went so far at times as to stigmatize HIV-­negative individuals in the community as less authentic, thereby undermining safer sex practices.30 Hence, another kind of full circle turned, as attempts to undermine stigma inadvertently contributed to the transformation of stigma into a “red badge of courage” that ironically put more persons at risk. All of the issues ACT UP has faced over the years remain, sometimes in altered but distressingly recognizable form. AIDS “profiteering” has only increased as the numbers of potential “customers” have grown. Attention from the federal government continued to be inadequate under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, gained modest ground under Barack Obama, and became far worse under Donald Trump. Public indifference, for a time lessened by the power of direct action, has reasserted itself in the face of the illusion that better treatment has ended the crisis. Despite advances in HIV/AIDS treatment, crucial issues remain in the United States, and activists continue to address them, including issues of affordability of medications for folks with limited economic resources and funding for ongoing research. In addition, much ACT UP–­inspired activity is now focused on HIV/AIDS in the global South, where infection statistics are staggering and resources are far scarcer than in North America and Europe. Of the almost forty million people in the world diagnosed with HIV/AIDS as of late 2017, almost half were not receiving treatment. Close to 65 percent of those forty million cases were in sub-­Saharan Africa. Roughly one million people died of HIV-­ related illness in 2016 alone.31 Rather than simply enjoying the relative advantages of access to life-­prolonging treatments provided by their often privileged economic and social location, many Northern Hemisphere activists, to their credit, have moved their critique of AIDS policy more directly into the realm of international politics.32 This effort

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is part of a more general sense among participants in many progressive movements that they must work on an integrated set of issues and on a truly global stage, even as they attend to the particulars of their places and the specifics of their issues. As we will see in chapter 9, this process of “globalization from below” represents a crucial dimension of activism nationally, transnationally, and internationally.

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8 NOVELS OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

TOXIC COLONIALISM AND THE NATURE OF CULTURE In this chapter I want to attack the relation of culture to social movements in a slightly different way than in previous ones. I want to connect the strand of activism known as the environmental justice movement to the academic “intellectual formation” called ecocriticism and to a body of fiction treating related themes.1 I am shifting focus a bit to look at a triangulated relationship among a movement, art, and an academic field. I turn my attention here to works by literary and cultural workers that parallel and interact in important ways with a social movement. In this case, the movement in question is the environmental justice movement, the branch of environmentalism that especially addresses issues of racism, sexism, and class inequality as they intersect with environmental issues and environmental movements. In terms of artistic production, I want to look at how literary fiction, especially the novel, has engaged with the movement for environmental justice with assistance from an academic field. Using Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko’s epic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) as my prime example, I will examine the interrelations among literature, the intellec­ tual formation known as ecocriticism, and the movement working for environmental justice. Novels are one of the key art forms through which these relations have developed. 239

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By “intellectual formation” I mean a set of theories and practices stable enough to have a significant influence on social thought, primarily through academic writing and teaching. Intellectual formations arise from different social locations—­from within science, industry, the arts, academe, and, not infrequently, social movements. Indeed, one strand of social movement theory argues that an important dimension of social movements is their engagement in “cognitive praxis” that changes the way we think about the world.2 The concept of “cognitive praxis” (literally, “thought-­action-­theory”) reminds us that consciousness is a material social force. Movements have sometimes been translated into full-­fledged academic fields. We have seen in earlier chapters that ethnic studies arose out of ethno-­nationalist movements of the 1960s, and women’s studies emerged out of the feminist movement in the 1970s. The science/social science field of environ­ mental studies is another, more directly relevant example. The creation of new academic departments is only one of many ways movements shape academia and intellectual life; more often, movements shape the general intellectual context in which scholarly debate takes place. And then the academic formation in turn shapes the movement. Environmental justice movements arose to prominence and received their name in the late 1970s, but the concerns raised by these movements about the role of social inequalities—­related to race, gender, sexuality, class, and more—­in deepening environmental degradation has a much longer history.3 The intellectual formation that I call environmental justice cultural criticism is now part of this movement and acts as a critique of the larger academic field known as ecocriticism, which studies the links connecting literature, culture, and the so-­called natural environment. Ecocriticism arose from the influence of the environmental movement and is the foremost contribution of the humanities to environmentalist thought and action. It directs itself primarily to the field of literary studies, but it also seeks more broadly to give humanities scholarship a place in environmental studies, a field initially dominated by the sciences and social sciences. The overall ecocritical intellectual forma­ tion is now quite elaborate, with several distinct schools or approaches. In addition to dozens of books and hundreds of articles, the formation includes a professional organization, the Association for the Study of Lit­ erature and Environment, which has more than a thousand members;

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several journals, including the association’s house journal, Interdisci­ plinary Studies of Literature and Environment; and numerous academic courses offered in colleges and universities around the country. The field of ecocriticism came into being largely as a result of the rise of environmental movements, especially during the wave of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. But as with any movement-­initiated intellectual formation, its relation to ongoing movements has often been somewhat indirect. Intellectual formations are often seen by grassroots activists as largely irrelevant distractions from the more exciting work of direct-­action politics. But both modes of engagement are important in furthering the work of social change. Especially in the contemporary United States, where higher education has become a form of mass culture, the struggle to bring movement-­generated social critique into universities and university scholarship into movements has grown increasingly important. To be sure, this process, like all processes of movement diffusion, entails losses as well as gains. Often over time academically generated cognitive praxis tends to become more “cognitive” and less “praxis” in orientation. That is, it tends to become more and more tenuously connected to the kinds of action-­oriented questions emerging from the grassroots. But continuing pressure from movements can often ensure that the intellectual formation is shaped and reshaped to meet the changing needs and perspectives coming from the level of movement action. At the same time, movements need to fend off certain forms of anti-­intellectualism that can cut them off from vital resources. The relationship of environmental movements to literary production and the field of academic literary and cultural criticism illustrates how this interaction can work.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND ACADEMIC CRITICISM Environmental justice is the branch of the environmental movement that most fully challenges the ways in which racism, class hierarchy, sexism, heteronormativity, and other elements of social injustice have unevenly shaped people’s experiences of environmental degradation and their access to environmental health and pleasure.4 The environmental justice movement has been developing both within and outside the “mainstream” environmental movement since at least the late 1970s.

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Likewise, ecocriticism has been developing since the 1970s. But until the early twenty-­first century, the two fields of activity were not often placed in relation to each other. Ecocriticism initially had very little to say about issues of race and class in regard to the environment. Conversely, the environmental justice movement largely ignored questions of cultural context, focusing primarily on more obviously relevant areas such as environmental law, science, and public policy. The more recently established field of environmental justice ecocriticism argues that environmentalists need to attend to the cultural contexts in which environmental racism, (hetero)sexism, and exploitation of the working class have developed. Conversely, this body of works challenges ecocriticism to deepen its engagement with the ways literary and cultural representations of “nature” are inextricably entangled with questions of social justice. In this context, both mainstream environmentalism and mainstream ecocriticism are critiqued for the ways they have coded environmentalism as a white middle-­class issue. Environmen­tal justice ecocriticism seeks to bridge several intellectual divides, and in so doing it offers a model of a movement influencing an academic field, while in turn the field seeks to offer resources back to the movement proper. The environmental justice movement gained public attention in the early 1990s, though its origins go back much further. The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held in Washington, D.C., in October 1991, is rightly seen as the moment when the movement came to define itself as a large-­scale national effort. But that moment grew out of countless local efforts over many years prior to the meeting. Moreover, once the concept of environmental justice was established, it became possible to trace the existing links between environmentalism and social justice. At the base for the modern movement was the fact that thousands of people of color and low-­income whites across the United States and around the world had suffered discomfort, disease, and death as the result of environmental inequities. When activists began collecting data to move beyond anecdotal evidence, a clear pattern emerged: the most dangerous toxic chemicals, incinerators, nuclear waste facilities, uranium mines, and other environmental hazards were disproportionately sited in the vicinity of poor white communities and communities of color. These data provided a

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rationale for intense community action, underwriting legal struggles and scientific debates that have been at the core of the environmental justice movement. The environmental justice movement includes many different groups. For example, African American, Asian American, and Latino groups are fighting landfills, incinerators, smokestacks, toxic dumps, and other sources of environmental poisons. Antitoxics campaigns have grown out of the Love Canal fight, led by Lois Gibbs and other working-­ class women, which resulted in the creation of groups like the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (now the Center for Health, Environment & Justice). Native American activists are fighting against the devastating impact of uranium mining and nuclear dumping on tribal lands. Sometimes portrayed as a civil rights movement, sometimes as an environmental movement, the environmental justice movement aims to show that it is both. In all strands of the environmental justice movement, women have played central roles, such that gender must be central to any full analysis. This is even more pertinent in the field of environmental justice ecocriticism, where forms of feminist environmentalism have played a pathbreaking role in linking constructions of nature to social issues. Ecofeminists have also made important contributions by demonstrating that connections between social injustice and environmental damage are not new but centuries old.

WHOSE HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTALISM? Histories of the environmental movement told from the perspective of the white middle class often stress literary origins that are nicely compatible with the rise of environmentalism’s literary branch, ecocriticism. But from the perspective of environmental justice ecocriticism, a very different origin story is possible. The traditional story of modern environmental consciousness often focuses on literary precursors like the English and American romantic poets and on literary naturalists like Henry David Thoreau and, a little later, John Muir. This story then moves into the formation of environmental concerns in the form of “preservationism” and “conservationism” in the early twentieth century.

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But what if the origin story is retold from the perspective of environmental justice?5 Then, alongside the story of Wordsworth appreciating the beauty of Britain’s Lake District, you would have William Blake “appreciating” the devastating environmental impact of England’s “dark satanic mills.” Alongside Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond, you would have tales of New England “factory girls” fighting against the health-­ shattering effects of textile dust and dyes so corrosive many died of poisoning. This story would point out that the romantic, nature-­loving Thoreau was also a radical antislavery advocate and a major figure in the history of civil disobedience. It would also, by contrast, point out that in addition to his environmentalist virtues, John Muir was a racist and an anti-­Semite. When this story enters the twentieth century, the traditional version focuses on the rivalry between “preservationists” like Muir and “conservationists” like Gifford Pinchot and his boss, Theodore Roosevelt. management approach to Pinchot represents a utilitarian, resource-­ nature. In contrast, naturalist Muir, for whom the goal was not management of nature but absolute protection of wilderness, championed the preservationist cause. Most of the U.S. national park system resulted from compromises struck between these two otherwise antagonistic forces. The preservationist branch is perhaps best represented by one of the biggest and longest-­lived environmental groups in the United States, the Sierra Club, and by other major groups such as the National Audubon Society. Environmental justice criticism insists that alongside these attempts to preserve wilderness and wild species, the story must include the environmental hazards faced by workers and slum dwellers in this same period. It points out that sometimes the same Progressive Era activists who fought for protection of wilderness also fought for worker preservation. But it also notes that some of these same wilderness advocates were vicious racists, like Madison Grant, cofounder of the California Save the Redwoods League, who propounded Anglo-­Saxon superiority and championed eugenics campaigns to weed out “weaker” races. While some mainstream environmentalists would say that such “historical accidents” are of no consequence to the truth of those individuals’ environmental vision, environmental justice advocates would say that there

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is an intimate and ongoing connection between the Progressive Era activists’ ideas and their actions that must be addressed. The great wave of environmentalism that arose out of the social movements of the 1960s also has been rewritten in light of environmental justice criticism. Still, more needs to be said about that new environmental movement’s roots in the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights and other social justice movements. Long-­trumpeted conspiracy theories claiming that President Richard Nixon encouraged the environmental movement as a way to distract dissenters from more troubling social issues such as racism and the war in Vietnam are simplistic. Yet there is a parallel truth: environmental movement historians have sometimes distracted themselves from the enabling fact of social justice movements as models for ecological activism. Without the social justice activism that preceded it, the environmental movement that emerged in the late 1960s would never have taken the forms it did or been as strong as it was. The mid-­1960s shift in the movement from wilderness preservation to a number of wider concerns, including air and water pollution, industrial waste, and pesticides, was deeply indebted to the social justice movements of that era. Established groups like the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society broadened their agendas, and more active new groups—­including Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council—­emerged or solidified during this era. All benefited from the social movement activity of the times, and that influence became stronger and stronger as environmental activism branched out further with the antinuclear movement, the green movement, and radical groups such as Earth First! A history of the environmental movement sensitive to environmental justice also recognizes that it was the entrance of human health impacts into the equation that turned a small movement into a mass one. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) served as a catalyst when it drew causal links between the affects of DDT and other chemicals on animals and the likely impact on human beings. Likewise, media stories of pollution, nuclear waste, and atomic tests in the atmosphere played a major role in the development of environmental consciousness. Yet, as this consciousness expanded, the mostly male, mostly white, mostly

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middle-­class leaders of the movement paid little attention to the unequal impacts of these phenomena, failing to note that working-­class soldiers, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders bore the brunt of atmospheric nuclear testing; that pesticides hurt Latino and Filipino farmworkers far more than consumers; and that escape from the degraded conditions of blighted cities was far easier for white suburbanites than for the people of color and poor whites who were left there by “white flight” in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the not-­in-­my-­backyard attitude that prevailed in parts of the mainstream movement directly contributed to further degradation of communities of color and poor white communities when polluters, including the U.S. government, made decisions to locate their environmental wastes in poorer communities with fewer resources of resistance. Thus, it is not simply that traditional histories of envi­ ronmentalism leave out parallel stories dealing with “social justice” concerns, but that without examination of those concerns, the impact of both mainstream environmentalism and more radical strands represented by groups like Greenpeace and Earth First! is distorted.

ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS AND SCHOOLS OF ECOCRITICISM Just as the history of environmentalism was rethought and rewritten in the light of environmental justice questions, so too the story of environmentalism’s literary critical branch, ecocriticism, had to be remade. To understand environmental justice ecocriticism, it is necessary to see it against the background of this wider formation. So let me offer a brief typology of ecocritical approaches as a way of mapping the field. Along the way, by suggesting how each school relates to a part of the environmental movement, I can also say more about the history of environmen­ tal movements generally. Much, if not most, ecocriticism in practice combines two or more of these “schools,” and some strands fit none of these rubrics perfectly. The schools described here correspond roughly to major sectors in past and present environmental movements. This mirrors the environmental movement more broadly, where the same group or individual activist may work on issues that cross more than one environmentalist position. Since all of these schools are still relatively undefined, they can best be

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characterized by the issues they seek to address, rather than by the definitive positions they take.

Preservationist Ecocriticism As mentioned above, preservationism is often seen as emerging in part from a literary sensibility and practice, traced back through Muir to such mid-­nineteenth-­century figures as Thoreau, and sometimes to the romantic poets. A focus on writers already in the canon of “great literature” eased the task of bringing the environment into literary study, but bringing in the wider body of natural history and other forms of nature writing has been more challenging. In ecocritical form, the preservationist strand asks: What can studying literature and nonfiction nature writing do to enhance appreciation and improve stewardship of the natural environment? What can literature and criticism do to help preserve and extend wilderness, protect endangered species, and otherwise assist in the preservation of the natural world? How can literature and criticism strengthen the transcendent dimension of the relationship between humans and nature? Ecological Ecocriticism The school of ecological ecocriticism, which emerged from the second wave of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, builds on the notion of “ecology.” While having a base in biological science, the term ecology became widely used in the movement to signal the interdependent and systemic relationship between human beings and the wider natural world. Its typical documents include Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring, a work that traced the long, “ecological” connection between pesticide pollution, animals, plants, and human disease. The first great event of this new phase is often cited as Earth Day 1970, with its popularization of the “whole earth” image of a globe connected through a web of natural relationships. This branch of the movement spawned a host of new social institutions, including a huge array of movement groups, along with the intellectual formation “environmental studies.” The kinds of ecocriticism growing out of ecological frameworks vary considerably, but they tend to ask questions like these: How can the ecosystem idea (or metaphor) be extended to a poetics of the literary

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system in relation to nature? How can literature and criticism be placed within ecosystems, or be used to elucidate the nature and needs of ecosystems? How can a sense of rootedness in a place, in particular an ecosystem or bioregion, be enhanced in the examination of literary works? How can the insights of the science of ecology be used to analyze literary texts and other cultural representations of the natural world in ways that better connect people to environments?

Biocentric/Deep Ecological Ecocriticism The deep ecology movement arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s and became identified with a position of uncompromising “biocentrism,” as opposed to “anthropocentrism,” which puts humans at the center of and above the rest of terrestrial life. As the name implies, this position claims to take the principle of ecology to a deeper level, by which proponents mean both a deeper spiritual level (the earth as “sacred” space) and a deeper level of commitment to protecting nonhuman creation. The main prophets of deep ecology, figures like Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, argued that nothing less than a new whole earth–­ based worldview would constitute true environmentalism. Translated into ecocritical terms, deep ecological ecocriticism asks questions like these: How can literature and criticism be used to displace “man” and place a natural equality of all living entities at the center of concern? How can literature and criticism be used to show the limits of “humanism” and the benefits of a wider biocentrism? How can the independent existence and rights of the nonhuman “biotic” (living) and “abiotic” (inert) realms be protected and extended through literary and critical acts? How can a deeper, biocentric spirituality be furthered by literature and criticism? Some deep ecologists go so far as to ask how we can return to a preindustrial world where intimate contact with nature is an inevitable part of daily life, and seek out utopian projects of such a past-­future. Ecofeminist Ecocriticism Ecofeminism is a more radically political strand of environmentalism that emerged in the early 1980s. In essence, it argues that the traditional position of women in society has often paralleled the position of “nature” as one of subservience. It argues that both nature and women suffer from

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a comparison in which the latter are deemed closer to the former, and thus further from the higher realm of culture, than are men. Ecofeminists pioneered the approach of linking the sociocultural with the natural, and by identifying issues of gender as inextricably tied to issues of race, class, and sexuality, they have contributed the most of any existing school to the emergence of an environmental justice ecocriticism. Some key ecofeminist texts have also raised interrelated issues of race, class, and sexuality, anticipating and in effect creating environmental justice theory.6 Ecofeminist ecocritics ask: How have women and nature been linked in literature and criticism? How has nature been “feminized”? How have women been “naturalized”? In what other ways has the gendering of nature been written, and with what effects? How are the liberation of women and the liberation of nature linked? How do interrelations of race, class, and sexuality complicate the imagined and real relations between women and nature? Is there a separate, different history of women’s “nature writing” and other writings about nature? A more nuanced analysis could identify many other strands of ecocriticism, but the typology presented above should be enough to give some sense of the variety of the field and the ways in which it has developed in interactive relationship with evolving strands within environmental movements.

WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ECOCRITICISM? How does environmental justice ecocriticism position itself in relation to these other schools? Perhaps the best way to characterize it is, again, through the kinds of questions it addresses. Environmental justice ecocriticism asks: How can literary and cultural criticism further efforts of the environmental justice movement to bring attention to ways in which environmental degradation and environmental hazards disproportionately affect poor people and people of color? How has racism, both in the United States and internationally, made possible greater environmental irresponsibility, and how are the truths about this interrelationship manifested in literature and other kinds of cultural texts?

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What are the different traditions in nature writing by the poor, by people of color in the United States, and by cultures outside the United States? How will an understanding of those differing traditions deepen our capacity to imagine better solutions to environmental problems and the social problems with which they are inextricably intertwined? How have environmental health issues like toxic waste, pollution from incinerators, lead poisoning, and pollution from uranium mining been manifested in cultural texts, and how can criticism further our understanding of the cultural dimensions of these issues? How can issues of worker safety and environmental safety be brought together in cultural criticism in such a way that labor movements and environmental movements can be seen as positively connected, not antagonistic? More broadly, the field asks: How can ecocriticism encourage justice and “sustainable development” in the global South and among Native peoples where racism and imperialism combine to worsen envicritically at existing ronmental injustice? And, finally, looking self-­ mainstream ecocriticism, environmental justice ecocriticism asks: To what extent and in what ways have other schools of ecocriticism been ethnocentric or ignored questions of race and class as they intersect with environmental questions? These and a host of related questions have forged new connections between academic critiques and movement struggles by strengthening a sense of the cultural struggle surrounding the legal and medical battles that have thus far been at the core of the environmental justice movement. They have also led to a new appreciation for literary works that address environmental justice concerns.

TOXIC COLONIALISM AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NOVEL: ALMANAC OF THE DEAD A number of novels and other literary works across a range of genres develop environmental justice themes. Dozens of works of poetry and fictional prose treat environmental justice issues. A wide range of U.S. writers, including Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Linda Hogan, Ursula Le Guin, Barbara Neely, Gerald Vizenor, Alice Walker, Simon Ortiz, Barbara Kingsolver, Joy Harjo, Winona LaDuke, and Karen Yamashita, offer direct critiques of environmental racism in their poetry and fiction.7 With regard to the larger

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meaning of literature, environmental justice ecocritical work also involves reading nonfiction writing about environmental justice, from movement manifestos to Environmental Protection Agency documents, with an eye toward cultural meanings, contexts, and influence.8 Most recently, fiction about the effects of climate change (CliFi, as it has been dubbed) has been added to the mix, with a number of books raising issues of “climate justice” and addressing the fact that the impacts of climate change are falling most heavily on marginalized communities, from Native communities in the Arctic region losing their homes to the waters of the melting ice cap to South Pacific Islander communities submerged by rising sea levels.9 Given limited space, I will concentrate here on a work of fiction by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead.10 An early and particularly rich example of environmental justice fiction, this novel offers lessons that the ecocritical community still has not fully grasped. Silko’s epic narrative has been read as a prophetic text, both in its rearticulation of ancient Native American prophecies and in its anticipation of such social phenomena as the rise of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico. I address both these kinds of prophecy as they form part of the work of Silko’s text. But more centrally I want to show that the novel presaged the emergence of environmental justice cultural criticism, and beyond that created a form of critique that we might call decolonial environmental justice cultural criticism, long before academic critics began to attend to the issues Silko raises.11 My point is that this novel and others exploring similar themes helped to create both the social movement and the ecocritical intellectual formation that address environmental injustices. When I first used the term environmental justice ecocriticism in 1997, I was describing something that was as yet unnamed and just emerging.12 Now there is such a solid body of this work that prominent ecocritic Lawrence Buell has called it the “second wave” of the field and has suggested that it is becoming the dominant form. Silko’s novel models interconnections that have emerged in the network of movements for global justice, and was thus prescient in showing the vital links between decolonizations and environmentalisms on a local/national/ global scale. Movements linking social justice and environmental degradation can now be found all around the world. Environmental justice is

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the most common term used for these projects in the United States, but a variety of other terms have been used to characterize such efforts outside the North American context, including liberation ecologies, subaltern environmentalism, global South environmentalisms, and environmentalism of the poor. These resistive practices share a fundamental analysis that argues that environmental problems cannot be solved unless the drastic political and economic inequalities existing within and between nation-­ states are addressed. The massive network of movements opposing neoliberal corporate forms of globalization (see chapter 9)—­collectively the misnamed antiglobalization movement, which prefers to call itself the movement for global justice—­has greatly shifted the ground of environmentalism. In the context of these global movements for justice, the lines between environmental movements and other movements have grown increasingly and appropriately blurred, both in the overdeveloped global North and in the global South. Even when these movements do not use terms such as environment or ecology, it is clear that they fully understand that the fate of the other-­than-­human world and the fate of human beings are inextricably linked, and that the degradation of certain “primitive” peoples and certain “underdeveloped” places go hand in hand. Key works by Devon Peña and Laura Pulido, as well as anthologies such as Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd’s The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital and Richard Peet and Michael Watts’s Liberation Ecolo­ gies, are rich with examples of how traditional agricultural and stew­ ardship practices have formed alternative epistemological and political bases for critiques of capitalist environmental exploitation.13 For example, movements to maintain traditional land-­based livelihoods and/or to restore traditional lands have ecological implications even when they are couched primarily in terms of resistance to modern, West-­centric forms of “development.” Likewise, the overused concept of “sustainable development” has vast and varied resonances that join economic and environmental struggles around the world. In turn, the varied struggles coalescing into the global justice movement have redounded back on North America in ways that are reshaping U.S. environmentalisms into more fully transnational enterprises, particularly environmental justice movements in Native communities such as those referenced in Almanac of the Dead.

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As I have been showing throughout this book, cultural analysis and cultural resistance play crucial roles in social movements. However, I hope I have also made it clear that this highlighting of the cultural dimensions of social movement struggles is in no way meant to downplay the importance of the political and economic dimensions of such struggles. And in this context, Silko demonstrates a profound understanding of how culture and political economy are inextricably entwined in all efforts to resist oppression. The confluence of massive problems such as global climate change and worldwide poverty makes clear that there can be few environmental solutions that are not also economic solutions, and that those solutions must address the needs of those with the fewest economic resources. Ecologically devastating overconsumption by the wealthier classes is possible only through the exploitation and devastation of the cultures and environments of the poor. Almanac of the Dead presents a massive tapestry covering five hundred years of history, several continents, more than fifty characters, and an extraordinary interweaving of themes, ideas, cultures, ideologies, and discourses. It demonstrates in rich detail the interconnections among commerce, culture, law, landscapes, politics, and aesthetics. Silko’s narrative charts both the intricate machinations of colonial-­capitalist systems and the alliances that resist those systems. The text draws upon the ancient Native belief in the power of stories in ways that align it with the contemporary critical insight that all dimensions of social, cultural, and economic life rely on narration and have a discursive component essential to their ideological work. In the narrative, which Silko claims was in part dictated to her by “the ancestors,” networks of resistance to colonialist capitalism are symbolized by the intersecting forces of the “Army of the Homeless,” a ragtag group of lucidly crazy Vietnam vets of various races fighting gentrification of their Tucson neighborhood, and the “Army of Justice and Redistribution,” an Indigenous-­led band of insurrectionists emerging from the Chiapas region of Mexico (several years before the “real-­life” Zapatistas came into existence). The historical scope and sweep of Silko’s text is of crucial importance in establishing a foundation for decolonial environmental justice analyses. The text works in terms not of years or decades but of centuries. It presents a profoundly historical analysis, one in which history is not a backdrop

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but precisely what is contested. The narrative simultaneously retells history from the point of view of those marginalized in dominant versions and challenges Western notions of linear history by evoking recurring cycles. This long (hi)story of colonialism is crucial because it reveals the creation of the current global division of land and labor along lines of race, ethnicity, region, and gender. This sets the context for the toxic neocolonial conditions the novel exposes and challenges. The colonizing process that labeled some people (and some economic practices) “primitive,” “underdeveloped,” and “inferior” justified, rationalized, and enabled degradation of the land. Neocolonial processes continue to do so today, sometimes less blatantly, but in equally destructive ways. Almanac makes clear that only by telling history properly, only by honoring the ancestors by relating past events from their perspective, can one think and act rationally in the contemporary world. Truthful storytelling handed down through oral tradition is an antidote to the deeply sick, sadistic contemporary world portrayed in the novel. But Silko’s retelling is reinterpretation only from the point of view of the colonizers. When a German interviewer asked Silko in 1995 whether the narrative in Almanac reinterprets Indigenous legends, she answered: No, it’s not reinterpretation. I think their spirit is unbroken because of the oral tradition. If you think, five hundred years, that is how long Europeans are in the Americas, is not a very long time. Because for 18,000 years there is evidence, and perhaps longer, of the Pueblo people being in that land. So for five hundred years of Christianity and the conflict with it, how many generations are this? Not that many. The interpretation of the old stories remains the same because of the oral tradition. It goes back through time so that the immediacy is now. It is very important how time is seen. The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. . . . What is interesting to me about Einstein and post-­Einsteinian physics and some of the discoveries in particle physics is what they have discovered about the nature of time. The curvature of time in space. So I grew up among people whose experience of time is a bit different. In their sense of time five hundred years is not a far distance and that’s why there is no need for the reinterpretation.14

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From the title onward, Almanac of the Dead vividly counterposes the deadly repetitions of death-­infused trauma in the forms of colonialism, war, and personal and economic violence with tribal prophecy, countermemory, and ceremony as a way of structuring the past to make it useful while keeping faith with the wisdom of ancestors. There is no more dominant theme in the novel than the need to return all Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples. Variations on this phrase appear over and over in the novel, beginning even before the text proper in the words inscribed on the map that serves as prologue: “Sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600. The defiance and resistance to things European continue unabated. The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas. Native Americans recognize no borders; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands.”15 But while this theme is blatant from the beginning, each reiteration in the text adds new complexity through context and elaboration. The notion of “returning” or “restoring” all Native lands includes at least three levels: first, returning “home” lands to particular tribes; second, restoring a sense of sacredness to the land and/or communal ownership, rooted in Indige­ nous traditions; and third, most expansively, restoring a sustainable earth in the wake of devastating colonization in the forms of resource extraction, severance of people from place, and capitalist industrialization. This third and most comprehensive definition exists as a synthesis of, and the ultimate trajectory for, the other two meanings. Almanac makes clear that only a thoroughgoing economic decolonization process can undo the social and environmental impacts of the European imprint on the Americas. These same processes continue in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East as well. The relation of land to citizenship and environmental justice also shapes the history of Latino/as and Asian Americans.16 The restoration of Native traditions and homelands is key to the interwoven sustainability of humans and the other-­than-­human environment (though that distinction is itself a dangerous part of colonized thinking). The founding document of the environmental justice movement, the manifesto that grew out of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, the same year in which Almanac of the Dead was published, reads like a summary of the themes driving Silko’s epic. Among the seventeen principles listed in the

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manifesto, the following are particularly striking in their parallels to Almanac’s positionings: “Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.” “Environmental justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water and food.” “Environmen­ tal justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-­determination of all peoples.” “Environmental justice affirms the need for an urban and rural ecology to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and providing fair access for all to the full range of resources.” “Environmental justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures.”17 Almanac ties all these threads together in a critique of toxicity, militarism, and economic exploitation; like the manifesto, it calls for recognition of species interdependence, cultural independence, and the self-­determination of peoples modeled on Indigenous communities intimately rooted in the land. As environmental justice critics have long noted, Western capi­ talist discourse frequently has drawn a symbolic association between subaltern peoples and “waste,” declaring the lands of subalterns to be “wastelands.” From the beginning of the European colonial era to the present, dominant cultures have argued that the lands of Indigenous peoples are underdeveloped and empty (terra nullius) and that the people on them are less than human, less than “civilized.” The wasting of peoples and lands has, as Silko’s map puts it, gone on unabated but always resisted, from the expropriation of Native lands by guns and disease in the sixteenth century to the toxic colonialism of the twenty-­first century imposed on, for example, the Shoshone people, whose resistance to the dumping of nuclear waste on their non-­waste lands Valerie Kuletz has brilliantly chronicled.18 This same critique was at work in the massive protest that began in 2016 against the dangerous Dakota Access oil pipeline that was rerouted onto Native lands (Standing Rock Sioux, Ponca, Santee, Omaha, and Winnebago peoples led the occupation that sought to stop the pipeline).19

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The euphemisms may change (“national sacrifice zones” were later displaced by “national security” rhetoric), but the “wastelands,” or wasted lands, seem inevitably to coincide with the boundaries of Indian reservations (and the ghettos and barrios of others outside the sacred circle of whiteness).20 What remains the same is who is making the “sacrifice” (or being sacrificed) and who is making the decisions. As Native American activist and former U.S. vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke has trenchantly noted: “What happened when the best scientific minds and policy analysts in the world spent twenty years examining every possible way to deal with problem of nuclear waste? They decided the solution was to ship the radioactive stuff thousands of miles from all over the country and dump it on an Indian reservation.”21 (LaDuke is referring to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, a sacred site of the Shoshone people, chosen as the main nuclear waste site of the military–­industrial–­ scientific–­governmental colonizers.) This story of land and waste is embodied in Almanac of the Dead in the juxtaposition of the “giant sacred stone snake” (whose reappearance is among the signs of a coming postcolonial era) with the open-­pit uranium mine on Laguna land. In one of the novel’s many self-­consciously ironic moves, the sacred object, lost for generations, is uncovered because of digging around the mine. At the beginning of the novel, the Laguna character Sterling is banished by his tribal council for unintentionally facilitating the desecration of the stone snake by a Hollywood film crew. The act is associated with a theft of two sacred stone figures that occurred eighty years earlier; this theft functions as a stand-­in for several generations of anthropological expropriation of Native “artifacts” and the ongoing struggle to repatriate thousands of stolen pieces of Indigenous cultures. Sterling’s story frames the novel. His banishment leads him back into the nontribal world, where his role as a gardener suggests a diminished land stewardship. His reappearance at the end of the novel offers a simple, unheroic witness to a revolution that seems to bring the story full circle; Silko is well aware of various ironic meanings of revolution as a full turn of a wheel that brings not justice but just another form of oppression. Almanac reveals that the association of poor whites (“white trash”), nonwhites, and Native Americans with waste must not simply be reversed symbolically and materially through the changing of oppressors

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for oppressed; rather, it must be resisted through new, yet very old, narratives in which land and peoples are intimately connected. To engage in such resistance, one must tune out the white noise of the dominant culture and tune in different voices. As the character El Feo puts it: “The masses of people in Asia and Africa, and the Americas . . . no longer believed in so-­called ‘elected’ leaders; they were listening to strange voices inside themselves . . . voices out of the past, voices of their earliest memories, . . . voices of the ancestors. . . . All across the earth there were those who were listening and waiting, isolated and lonely, despised outcasts of the earth. . . . With the return of Indian land would come the return of justice, followed by peace.”22 To hear these voices, Indigenous peoples and others must struggle to block out the domination resounding in their heads and must fight terrible forces unleashed in the era that Natives in the text call the reign of “Death-­Eye Dog.” Almanac puts forth a spiritual-­social-­psychological theory of human evil that is at once thoroughly Indigenous and resonant with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “death instinct.”23 While the text is concerned with the Death-­Eye Dog/death instinct of the era of European colonization, it does not reductively racialize either evil or resistance to it. Indeed, how could it, since “race” itself is a concept invented by Europeans largely as a rationale for colonization? While the novel depicts the white-­dominated world as deeply disturbed and depraved, Anglo allies form part of the resistance forces. Key among these is the white woman Seese—­she “sees” the ancient vision and “ceases” to be part of colonialism—­who enters the ancient “data” from the almanac onto computer disks. By the same logic, Native cultures are not spared implication in this mode of evil. As the Native character Yeome notes, “Montezuma and Cortés had been meant for each other.”24 Nevertheless, while the “Destroyers” arise cyclically in all cultures, this bloody mode of existence has been brought to icy perfection and death-­delivering efficiency by capitalist modernity. Death-­Eye Dog has gone global in the modern capacity to utterly destroy the environment and humanity with it. The prophetic hope in the otherwise very gloomy tales told in Almanac of the Dead is that the outcasts of the world will soon bring to an end the current, five-­hundred-­year reign of Death-­Eye Dog: the era of colonialism. There is nothing remotely sentimental in Almanac’s vision of Indigenous

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people leading a multiethnic alliance to resist and reverse this ecological, economic, and social devastation. These are not Indians as ultimate ecologists, or New Age Natives closer to “Nature” by virtue of their uncorrupted “spirits.” Healthy communities can constrain, if not wholly contain, evil. But healthy communities are few and far between in the postmodern world, even in its Native portions. In the novel the colonized as well as the colonizers (and those who are both) are subject to the distortions bred of oppression. For every visionary revolutionary like El Feo or Angelita, there are ordinary, culturally confused characters such as Sterling (with his fascination with gangsters like John Dillinger) and utterly corrupted “Indians” as well. The drug trade, in which many of the novel’s Native characters are involved, is both literal cross-­border trafficking and a metaphor for the deeply addictive economic form that is capitalism. The Yaqui character Calabazas, for example, has ancient practical knowledge of the earth and its healing herbs but is also deeply entangled with drug dealing and arms trading. He is far from innocent. His story alludes to another key element of global environmental justice cultural criticism, a critique of corporate colonization in the form of the “biopirating” of everything from Native “pharmacology” to Native DNA.25 Like the imperfectly preserved, arcane almanac that gives the novel its title, in all these characters much has been lost and nothing in their cultures was ever pure. Resistance to colonization is never pretty.

OBJECTIFICATION, COMMODIFICATION, DEGRADATION So, the forces of resistance are far from pure even as they challenge the deeply disturbing, dehumanizing forces arising from colonialist capi­ talism’s increasing objectification, commodification, and degradation of people and environments. The logic of economic objectification (and the text’s strategy of countering it) is apparent even before Almanac officially begins, in the map that precedes the first chapter. Mapping was one of the key objectifying strategies that enabled colonialist expropriation, and thus might seem a strange place for the text to begin. But this map is quite subversive. While it shows that imaginary line called a border, it labels only Mexico, not that other place even farther from God (i.e., the United States, as the environmental justice novel So Far from God by Ana Castillo reminds us). The map is hardly to scale, and

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it is covered with names of characters and pithy encapsulations of prophecies that foretell “the disappearance of all things European” from the Americas and a revolutionary “return of all tribal lands.” This reclaiming of mapping parallels the overall strategy of the text as it uses a Western literary form, the novel, to offer a devastating critique of Euro-­ colonial culture and to weave into this alien literary form the prophetic counterstories of the spiritually present ancestors and their living heirs. The embeddedness of European and U.S. cultures in the logic of Death-­ Eye Dog is apparent in everything from sexual to aesthetic to political practices—­all are reduced to the economic nexus. For example, for virtually all of the European-­descended characters in the novel, sex and procreative impulses take the form of sadism and exploitation, ranging from bestiality to pornographic snuff films to pederasty to spousal abuse. The death logic of objectification and commodification infects even the realm reserved in the West for beauty, as seen in the aesthetic praise and monetary value heaped upon the “Eric Series,” a group of photographs made by an “artist” of his former lover’s remains as splattered about by a suicidal gun blast. This is clearly a slap at the aestheticization of violence in contemporary mass culture, from torture porn films to first-­ person shooter video games. In addition, Almanac, like another great environmental justice novel, Karen Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), uses the lucrative transnational market in human organs harvested from the poor (including babies) to save the lives of the rich as an all-­too-­real marker of the ultimate commodification and exploitation of the human body. What the West calls “Nature” is equally commodified, reduced to an economic resource and denied the wild creative agency (as seen, for example, in Coyote stories) with which the other-­than-­human world is credited in most Indigenous cultures. Almanac dramatizes the fact that current forms of free market fundamentalism have collapsed various kinds of economies (aesthetic, spiritual, textual, and environmental) into one: the commodity. While the novel offers no easy way out of this situation, it is clear that this logic must be broken; the reduction of all things to their economic value in the marketplace must be replaced by a process in which human and environmental needs are at the center. However efficient markets may be in some limited sectors, their proliferation in every aspect of life has been devastating. A new political economy is needed,

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one in which human needs and the needs of the planet are aligned, and prosperity for some is not bought at the cost of poverty for others, alongside environmental collapse. When the text invokes Mother Earth, it is not in innocence but rather in the context of a deep-­seated violence and alienation rooted in a general human capacity for evil accentuated by a death cult called Christianity (and its cousin, capitalism). The “whitemen” who invade the Americas bring this deadly philosophy with them: “Their God had created them but was soon furious with them, throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away. The ancestors had called Europeans ‘the orphan people’ and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.”26 The other name for this wandering, of course, is colonialism, and the text makes clear that only a full global environmental analysis of colonialism’s vicious deployments of racial, class, gender, sexual, and national hierarchies can make sense of the current state of our ravaged world. Almanac offers a nuanced analysis of the ways racism, colorism, sexism, class hierarchies, and nation-­state rivalries have enabled and sustained the expropriation of tribal lands and labor. The specificity of particular Indigenous tribes and their heritage is important in the novel, yet there is also a more general use of “tribal” in reference to any sustainable community. Almanac tells its sweeping story of five hundred years of history, but it does so through a narrative rooted in the most local of tribal ceremonies, tales, and experiences. In the novel, sexual fetishism (first theorized by Freud) and the fetishism of commodities (first theorized by Marx) are set against the spiritual use of the fetish in Indigenous traditions as the creative animation of what the West considers inanimate, a process in which “natureculture” is not divided. While some critics have bemoaned the fact that Almanac is not rooted in Native rites as is Silko’s earlier novel Ceremony, Almanac too is a ceremonial enactment. But its ceremonies are embedded in a much more complex social matrix. The almanac of the title is the lost, scattered ancient almanac the characters in the narrative seek to restore. But it is also the novel itself. Silko’s Almanac enacts an exorcism that requires that the

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evil spirits be fully evoked and dramatized before we can collectively banish them. One example of this relationship between the local and the global illustrates the novel’s prophetic evocation of the global justice movement. Many readers have noticed striking parallels between the imagined rebellion of Native peoples in Almanac that starts in the Chiapas region and the actual Zapatista revolt in Chiapas that began soon after the book was published. In fact, Almanac was widely read in Chiapas in the three-­year period between its publication and the outbreak of the rebellion. And an endorsement from Silko appears on the cover of Subcomandante Marcos’s collection of speeches and essays, Shadows of Tender Fury (1995)—­Silko calls the book “essential reading.”27 Did the book inspire the rebels? Certainly. Did it create the rebels? Certainly not. Was Silko aware of the rebels emerging in the years before they went public? Apparently not consciously so. But the connections clearly represent the kind of often impossible-­to-­trace interactions between fiction and movements that are part of the art of protest.

IDEOLOGICAL STORIES The rewriting of history to allow for an understanding of the world as a narrated process and an understanding of natureculture as one seamless semiotic-­material process is key to Almanac’s version of a decolo­ nizing environmental justice critique. Narrative—­story, history, tales, almanacs—­is not only the medium of Silko’s epic novel but very much its subject as well. The text does not play with texts within texts for some merely literary end, but rather seeks to demonstrate the impact of storytelling on communities, tribes, nations, and worlds. As Fredric Jameson has famously argued, novels can be understood as the narrative form of ideology.28 Almanac shows this is true for resistant ideologies as well as hegemonic ones. It shows that narratives are often superior to ideology in both their capacity to reach people at all social levels and their capacity to be local, in touch with the shape of the land and the lives lived in particular places. Alamanac’s focus on narrative is not naively anti-­ideological, however. The text views stories as closely related to and able to interact with ideological analysis. Perhaps the best illustration of this is its treatment of Karl Marx and the “isms” he spawned.

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The text argues that Marx is best understood as a tribal storyteller, that it was not his systematic ideology that was the source of his influence, but rather the power of the stories he told. The tribal revolutionary Angelita La Escapia thinks of Marx “as a storyteller who worked feverishly to gather together a magical assembly of stories to cure the suffering and evils of the world by the retelling of the stories.”29 A few hundred pages later, Angelita repeats and extends this claim that Marx was “feverishly working to bring together a powerful, even magical, assembly of stories. In the repetition of the workers’ stories lay great power . . . power to move millions of people.”30 Angelita says that many Natives in Chiapas and elsewhere will embrace Marx, but not necessarily Marxism, because his stories make sense to them. Marx’s stories parallel the Natives’ own stories of being enslaved in the mines that dug into their mother the Earth and buried many indios in deep caverns, just as Moloch capitalism ground up even children inside dark satanic mills. The Marx this story turns to is the one who wrote these too-­little-­remembered words: “Even society as a whole, a nation, or all existing societies put together, are not owners of the Earth. They are merely its occupants, its users, and like good caretakers, they must hand it down improved to subsequent generations.”31 Angelita clearly falls in love with Marx, and like many an ardent lover before her, she works to take Marx back from the Marxists, in particular from Bartholomeo, an arrogant, sexist, and racist Cuban adviser to the Native revolutionaries. Bartholomeo’s Marxism is bloodless, mechanical, and without respect for the living or the dead. Almanac argues that Marx’s honoring of the dead through detailed accounts of their murders by the forces of capital showed him to be that rare European, one who communed with the ancestors. Modern resistance stories are often, like Marx’s, transnational, as they are in Almanac, where stories cross many boundaries, especially those between the United States and Mexico; tribal geohistory trumps national borders. But the stories also must be locally specific, even as they speak to larger, global forces. This approach to Marx is typical of the ideological openness of the text. Marxism is both appreciated and severely critiqued in the story. The test of any ideology is not its abstract veracity but its capacity to generate stories that honor the past and liberate energy in the present. The ultimate example of this, as suggested above, is the text’s impact on

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or foretelling of the rebellion in Chiapas. Ideology in the text balances between current local conditions and long global histories, between the great five-­hundred-­year story of struggle against domination of the earth and its Indigenous peoples and current conditions. That is why Almanac’s Army of Justice and Redistribution can succeed only when it listens to the ancestors’ stories about how the long reign of the Destroyers in their European guise is going to come to an end. It will begin as a thousand small rebellions of farmers, peasants, curanderas, and shamans. The forces will be as diverse as the characters Silko arrays in “Room 1212” at the Holiday Inn (healers, dealers, and stealers, charlatans who may be shamans, real Indians, wannabe Indians, descendants of black Indians, enlightened real estate agents, and homeless activists), as diverse as the hundred thousand delegates at the World Social Forum. They will not all embrace exactly the same story, the same ideology, but each will see part of the truth. As Bridget O’Meara notes, diversity and tension among positions is one of the great strengths of the global justice movement, because “any theoretically broad-­based movement can easily suffer the tyranny of entrenched power. [Thus] it is possible that the persistent tensions between ethnic movements and global movements may be the greatest asset of both. While identity-­based efforts continue to draw on specific local knowledge, articulations of communal and individual identity, and traditional ecological relationships, they might also simultaneously challenge, critique, collaborate with, sanction, utilize, and/or transform international attempts to address and mobilize against globalization and global environmental devastation.”32 This kind of creative tension among identities and ideologies typifies the global justice movement at its best. In addition to dramatizing creative tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan, Almanac presents Indigenous and other oppressed peoples as centrally important articulators of an alternative form of globalization that in the years following publication of the text came to life vividly in the global justice movement. Inside and outside Silko’s novel, the position of Indigenous and Indigenous-­identified individuals and groups is at once inside and outside the nation-­state. In Almanac, a focus on Native “free trade” across the U.S.–­Mexico border, going back as it does for centuries, is at once a parody of NAFTA-­style free trade and a serious critique of it. The guns, drugs, healers, dealers, and revolutionaries who cross the border

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with impunity represent a kind of transnationalism that preceded colonization and continued despite colonization; it also presages a truly postcolonial reality. Throughout the text, story lines erase and replace borderlines. The transnational environmental and social justice work of Indigenous activists can offer a stabilizing balance to the transnationalisms of migrants, immigrants, diasporic peoples, and cosmopolitan intellectuals. Indigenous transnationalisms that are deeply rooted in place and carry on traditions that have never in five hundred years acknowledged Western-­defined nation-­state boundaries will play a vital role in earthly survival. Almanac richly proffers these spaces as the most potentially productive sites from which to launch an alternative form of globalization that recognizes ecological boundaries and limits and honors local traditions and rooted practices, yet reaches out to anyone willing to embrace justice for people and the land. The novel may be rooted in the past and profoundly critical of the devastation wrought by modern industrial civilization, but it is not afraid of the new and is more than willing to turn Eurocentric high technology against itself, as in Seese’s transferring of the almanac onto computer disks and as in the actions of Asian character Aw Gee, who, like the “hacktivists” of the global justice movement, turns those computing machines, born of militarism and corporate exploitation, toward the revolution.

You Say You Want a Revolution, Well . . . While various critics have privileged particular articulations of a revolutionary scenario in Almanac, I believe Silko’s evocation of the coming revolution offers no blueprints or predictions as to how events will unfold. In the novel and in interviews, Silko has offered multiple, contradictory, equally possible versions of the form the coming revolution will take, ranging from a revolution in consciousness to nonviolent material struggle to armed rebellion. We do know that the revolutionary forces will be a rainbow: “Nothing could be black only or brown only or white only anymore. The ancient prophecies had foretold a time when the destruction by man had left the earth desolate, and the human race was itself endangered. This was the last chance the people had against the Destroyers, and they would never prevail if they did not work together as a common force.”33 The text ends without showing us any of these events or heroic actions. Instead we return to the quiet

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character Sterling, back on his beloved Laguna Pueblo, where he discovers “why the giant snake had returned now; he knew what the snake’s message was to the people. The snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come.”34 All we know is that the revolution moves from South to North, from Chiapas toward Tucson (and a few years later, in that fictional place called the real world, all the way up to Seattle’s earthshaking World Trade Orga­ nization demonstrations at the close of the twentieth century).35

DECOLONIZING ENVIRONMENTALISMS Neither romanticizing Indians as superecologists nor calling for a retreat to preindustrial technologies is a substitute for the hard work of pro­ tecting or restoring the sovereignty of Native communities and other colonized terrains around the globe, or reanimating Indigenous lands ravaged by uranium extraction, toxic dumping, and military explosions. Silko’s narrative points us toward radical critique of the neocolonial political economy at the dark heart of corporate globalization. Other economic forms are not only possible but also essential, because this form of industrial capitalism is not sustainable. Other worlds existed for thousands of years before the reign of Death-­Eye Dog, and they are nascent in a thousand forms emerging around the globe. Amid the growing discourse surrounding global climate change, increasing awareness of global poverty, and a deep crisis in market capitalism, environmental justice cultural criticism faces an opportune moment to foreground decolonizing processes. From the racism at the heart of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy to the threat to Indigenous peoples in the Arctic due to the melting polar ice cap to the dangerous oil pipelines across sacred Native lands, events arise that continue to dramatize links between environmental and social injustices. I have argued that Almanac offers important insights into the process of decolonizing environmentalisms. By that phrase I mean two interrelated processes: the decolonization of traditional environmentalist movements and the creation of new decolonial environmentalisms that better articulate the links between oppressed humans and exploited environments. A number of strands of cultural theory are contributing to this ongoing decolonization process, including political ecology,

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cultural studies, Marxist theories of the production of nature, racial formation and critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory. (Of course, as Chela Sandoval brilliantly argues, the borders between these theoretical categories are constantly being crossed.)36 The use of materials from these sources is moving environmental justice ecocritical analysis in new directions and helping to build bridges to other movements linked to these critical approaches. Some of this work is already under way in ecofeminist writings, among other places, and environmental justice ecocritics can learn much from feminist analysis of how gender stereotypes like “Mother Nature” have facilitated environmental degradation.37 Since the vast majority of environmental justice activists are women, questions of gender should be very much tied to questions of race and class in this field anyway. Such work would range from tracing the history of racist metaphors like “savage wilderness” and “urban jungle” to examining the class and racial cultural biases that disallow the environmental knowledge produced by nonelites, whether women documenting lead poisoning in the housing projects where they live or tribal elders on reservations observing the effects of uranium tailings on their communities and landscapes.38 This work will also incorporate a rich body of work on the racist history of biology that analyzes ways in which the racialization of science has played into the racialization of environmental science.39 It will also examine the cultural assumptions in various environmental rhetorics, both texts and images, that have enabled environmental racism to flourish, as well as alternative texts and images that have undercut environmental racism.40 Cultural studies approaches to environmental issues are many and varied, and often bring critical questions regarding the nature of language to bear on movement concerns.41 Scholars like Laura Pulido and Devon Peña have demonstrated how to locate environmental justice issues within culturally specific analyses of race, class, gender, and sexuality.42 Neo-­Marxist work on the “capitalist production of nature” remains vital to an understanding of the links between political economy and political ecology.43 Queer theory has been offering vital new approaches to understanding “naturalization” as an oppressive process related to the varied ways in which socially constructed sexual categories shape naturecultures.44 Clearly, much remains to be done if movements are to push beyond U.S.-­centric versions of environmentalism and expose the social

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injustices that blind many people to the roots of ecological devastation. Popular works of great impact such as Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), for example, continue to be premised on the notion that people care more about penguins than they do about fellow humans. There is no need to choose between Spheniscidae and Homo sapiens, however, because our fates are deeply linked. Leaving human injustices out of the picture misses crucial opportunities to move forward the networks of resistance that alone can save this sick and beautiful planet. Almanac of the Dead calls us ceaselessly and comprehensively to create a decolonizing environmentalist criticism embedded in a global justice movement in the name of the dead, who are still with us, and for the sake of those yet to be born. There remains much work to be done to bring some of the vital insights emerging from literature and from academic environmental justice ecocriticism to bear on expanding interlinked movements for socioeconomic justice and environmental health. I have tried to show in this chapter how an academic intellectual formation emerging out of a social movement has evolved alongside that movement with the aid of literary texts. This complex kind of triangulation among art forms, movements, and academic fields takes place in relation to most of the movements surveyed in this book. It is a dynamic that can be vital to the success of movements, but it is not without barriers. These include a tendency of academic discourse to become obscure and insular, and a tendency in movements toward impatience with theory. Overcoming such barriers will improve the work on both sides of the theory/practice line, and in the process further the goals of progressive movements. In the early twenty-­first century, these kinds of alliances are more necessary than ever before, as right-­wing insurgencies are stepping up their attacks on higher education, environmental protections, and marginalized communities.

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9 PUPPETRY AGAINST PUPPET REGIMES

THE “BATTLE OF SEATTLE” AND THE GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT A helmeted police officer kicks a young man in the groin, then shoots him point-­blank with a concussion bullet. A mother pours water from a canteen to wash the pepper spray from her teenage daughter’s eyes and the blood from the gash on her head. A dozen women and men blockade an intersection by forming a human chain, their arms linked by metal tubes. Hundreds surround the intersection to protect their compatriots from assault by police in Darth Vader–­like helmets wielding shields and clubs. Thousands of labor unionists leave behind the leaders of a planned march, turning instead to march to the support of the blockaders. Millions watch on television around the nation and the world, and wonder why the streets of one of America’s most beautiful cities are filled with thousands of people protesting something they call “corporate globalization.” Between forty thousand and sixty thousand people, representing some seven hundred organizations worldwide, took part in the “Battle of Seattle” in November 1999. The immediate target was the World Trade Organization as it tried to hold its ministerial meeting in the Emerald City (a nickname for Seattle stemming from its lush green landscape). But the additional targets were many, the grievances manifold, and the alternative vision that of a “democratic globalization” to set against the 269

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“corporate globalization” embodied in the WTO. The link connecting these hundreds of organizations was what they saw as a drastically unbalanced world economy in which the two hundred richest corporations have twice the wealth of the pooled assets of 80 percent of the world’s population, and in which fifty of the one hundred wealthiest economies are not nations but corporations. I will use the Battle of Seattle as a way to discuss the transnational movement against corporate globalization, in which the protests played a pivotal role. But since the Seattle events cannot encapsulate the whole movement, I will also move backward and forward from that moment in history to trace the trajectory of anti–­corporate globalization activities. Seattle’s mobilization was not the beginning of this new movement against global inequalities, but for many, especially those in privileged seats in the United States, it was their first taste of the strength and variety of the forces arrayed against the global imbalances of wealth, power, rights, and resources. As the Washington Post noted, “The WTO meeting was merely the place where these people burst onto the American public’s radar. Social movements around the world had already linked into grass-­roots networks, made possible by the astounding speed at which they can communicate in the Internet era.”1 Where previous chapters have focused on single, if often quite broad, movements, the global justice movement both brings together an incredible range of U.S. social movements from the second half of the twentieth century and more fully places those movements in a global context while pointing ahead to the twenty-­first century. It is a movement that shows how movements are interlinked both nationally and internationally, deepening a theme stressed throughout this book. At the risk of engaging in cultural imperialism by giving too much emphasis to the Battle of Seattle, I center my discussion on the events of that confrontation because they represent both a moment of con­ vergence for U.S. movements and a moment in which U.S. movements were decentered in the context of a global struggle. Many analysts see Seattle as the site where various related “antiglobalization” movements (as mainstream media call them, although activists prefer to speak of alterglobalization or the global justice movement) felt themselves becoming a single movement. While not all would agree that the shift was

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that dramatic, most agree that the actions in Seattle represent a turning point at which the forces arrayed against corporate globalization took on a new level of self-­awareness and confidence. In addition to being a successful direct action, the Battle of Seattle served as a kind of de facto summit meeting of hundreds of groups critical of the impact of the “neoliberal” economic policies they see as devastating the planet and increasing the chasm between the rich and the poor. From the point of view of activists and other critics, most governments in the world are puppet regimes whose strings are pulled by the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and others enforcing multinational corporate dominance. In that sense, it is fitting that the art form I weave into this story is that of puppetry.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS The citizens of the world assembled in the streets of Seattle were labor unionists and environmentalists, lumber workers and forest activists, students and teachers, farmers and cheese makers, Germans and Ukrainians, Africans and Asians, North Americans and Latin Americans, Johannesburgers and Seattleites, gays and straights, human rights activists and animal rights activists, AIDS activists and antinuclear activists, debt relief advocates and consumer advocates, feminists and womanists, computer hackers and meat packers, children and elders, Indigenous people and white urban professionals, Muslims and Jews, Christians and Buddhists, atheists and pantheists, anarchists and advocates of one world government. Some wore business suits, some overalls, some wore sea turtle costumes, some leather and piercings, some wore almost nothing at all. All wore a look of determination that later shifted wildly between joy and terror, confusion and triumph. By the time the tear gas clouds and pepper-­spray winds had begun to clear in the late afternoon of November 30, 1999, the thousands gathered gradually learned the news that they had accomplished their central goal: they had shut down the convention of one of the world’s most powerful organizations. So how is it that, at a time when many on the left were certain that movements had fragmented into a thousand unconnected, single-­issue constituencies, a single action brought together people from hundreds of

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activist groups, not only from all over the United States but also from all over the rest of the world? What did these people want? And what role did new cultural media like the Internet, laptop computers, and cell phones play in the tasks of mobilizing, carrying out, and publicizing this massive, complicated new network of movements stretching around the globe? To answer these questions, we must first answer another one: What kind of “globalization” were the protesters protesting? Some degree of globalization, in both economic and cultural terms, has existed for at least the past five hundred years (since Europeans set out on their colonial “adventures”). Because of this long history, critics disagree about the extent to which the most recent manifestation of globalization is new, but most agree that over the past thirty-­five years or so certain novel features of a transnational political, economic, and cultural system have emerged.2 Particularly when viewed in combination, these new features represent a significant change in global power relations. The key elements of globalization include the increased role played by transnational organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the WTO; a weakened role for national governments and an increase in the power of multi-­or transnational corporate power; new corporate economic practices that greatly intensify the segmenting of the labor force by distributing various parts of production processes around the globe rather than centralizing them in one nation; and new global communications networks. These various processes are then rationalized through a new version of free market political economic ideology known as “neoliberalism.” Critics of globalization argue that these interlocking institutions and practices have intensified environmental degradation, undermined worker rights and civil rights, exacerbated a worldwide health crisis, and facilitated cultural domination by the corporate media of the United States. They argue that transnational corporations, located primarily in the seven most developed nations (the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Britain), have used organizations like the WTO and IMF to undermine democratic citizenship in order to serve their profit interests. By acting transnationally or globally, these corporations have been able to circumvent basic human rights once guaranteed by national governments and sink standards of worker and environmental protection to the lowest level available—­a “race to the bottom.”

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The main mechanism through which a neoliberal corporate order has been imposed on the developing world has been structural adjustment programs (SAPs). In structural adjustment, a developing nation is obligated to transform its economy to better serve First World corporations if it wants to receive loans from the World Bank or IMF or avoid trade sanctions from the WTO. Corporate globalizers call this a necessary transition. Critics call it multinational blackmail. This process of imposed structural adjustment has included devaluing national currencies, turning government-­run industries over to private corporations, lowering environmental standards, limiting or eliminating workers’ right to unionize or strike for better conditions, and cutting social services, such as child care, public education, health care, and unemployment insurance. Critics argue that although the worst impact of these processes has been vastly increased poverty in the Third World or the Southern Hemisphere, globalization has also rebounded back on the industrialized Northern Hemisphere, hurting workers and virtually all other citizens who are not corporate executives. The collusion of the Democrats with Republican attacks on so-­called big government in the United States, for example, has meant the weakening of basic environmental and human rights in the name of unrestrained corporate profits that might instead be balanced against other social goods. Most observers see the process of corporate globalization as intensifying greatly after the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites in 1989. Critics argue that the collapse of communism brought with it the collapse of health care in the developed world and virtually all other ameliorating social mechanisms in the rest of the world. The presence of an alternative economic system, however deeply problematic it was, forced the capitalist world to provide services, basic rights, and a social safety net that have now been removed. In the developing world, various nationalist and socialist efforts to lessen the impact of unrestrained markets were eliminated through structural adjustment. In the overdeveloped world, similar benefits were eliminated through the deregulation of industry and the shrinking of government services. According to neo­ liberal theory, “freer markets” should increase market power and eventually raise everyone’s level of income. According to critics of corporate globalization, what has happened instead is a “global race to the bottom,” in which countries competing for the most exploitable, least expensive

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labor force have progressively degraded the environment, undercut local self-­sufficiency, lowered the quality of life for most workers, and left more than one billion people without any work at all. The mainstream press describes this movement as “antiglobalization,” but relatively few activists express wholesale opposition to globalization. The activists are more likely to say that they oppose “corporate globalization” and advocate “critical globalization,” “democratic globalization,” or “globalization from below.” Each of these modifiers suggests a key element of the critique: that current forms of globalization are “uncritically” pro-­corporate, that they are “undemocratic” in their lack of representative institutions, and that they are imposed hierarchically from “above” rather than decided on with citizen participation from “below.” Most of the activists say they are not against the global economy, but against the damage to people and the environment done by this particular version of globalization, a version embodied in the current rules set down by the WTO and other representatives of transnational corporate capitalism. The protesters believe there is another way to do it, or rather many other ways to do it, based on the principle that the millions of people currently excluded from decisions that dramatically affect their lives should have a say in what a global network of economies, governments, and cultures should look like. They argue that without economic democracy, political democracy, where it exists, is severely undermined. And they argue that far from bringing democracy with it, as promised, “free trade” has more often undermined democracy in the developing world as governments have used increasingly repressive measures to manage the social disruption caused by structural adjustment.

GLOBALIZE LIBERATION, NOT CORPORATE POWER The movement or movements attacking corporate globalization consist of hundreds of groups targeting a host of specific issues and/or the larger system. Students of the movement(s) generally sort out the overarching positions into three major ones. First are those who seek to reform globalization and its key institutions, like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. Second are those who call for more radically democratic alternative forms of grassroots globalization (“globalization from below”).3 Third are those who call for an end to globalization through one or another process of transition toward smaller-­scale, semiautonomous political eco­nomic

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units.4 Partly it is a question of which level of governance one trusts most. As Jeremy Brecher and his colleagues note: “Some emphasize the need for a global system that provides minimum rights and standards and new forms of global economic regulation. Others emphasize the need to restore the power of the nation state to control national economies. Still others portray localization—­the economic empowerment of local communities—­as the true alternative to globalization.”5 Given this range of positions and the host of differing groups under these rubrics, the issue of whether these efforts can be characterized as a single movement or should more properly be considered a set of movements is open to question. But most participants and observers, especially after the events in Seattle, speak of a single movement with many elements. Indeed, not since the 1960s have so many social movements been able to rally around a common set of concerns. The complexity of the movement also means that it has many origins (and as many origin stories). As Naomi Klein quipped, “The movement began 500 years ago, or on November 30, 1999, depending on who you ask.”6 Most would say that its origins lie in a slow process of linking movement groups and nongovernmental organizations into coalitions. This array of movements and social forces had been combining or “networking” in a variety of ways for at least a decade before coming together in an even larger coalition in Seattle. Important large-­ scale, international grassroots movement activities that set precedents for the Seattle action include the following: • The environmentally focused but multi-­issue Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 • The formation of a broad coalition to fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s • The “Fifty Years Is Enough” protests at the World Bank’s anniversary meeting in 1994 • The International Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 • The international support for the Zapatista struggles in Chiapas, Mexico, and the encuentro convocations the Indigenous activists hosted in 1996 and 1997 • The 1998 campaign of environmentalists and consumer advocates that helped sink the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a draft treaty that sought to loosen controls on international finance

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• The global debt relief campaign coordinated by Jubilee 2000 that during the last half of the 1990s played a major role in bringing about a significant reduction of debt claims against Third World nations

Other international organizing efforts in the 1990s that were important in building elements of the network include the global antisweatshop movement, with its U.S. base on college campuses, and the successful campaign to ban the use of land mines. Groundwork had been laid earlier, in the 1980s, by the international movement against nuclear weapons and by the transnational solidarity movements against South African apartheid and U.S. policy in Latin America. The significant presence in the Battle of Seattle of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) exemplifies the ways in which this earlier movement history folds into the anti–­corporate globalization movement. El Salvador, having been made safe for exploitation by U.S. policy, now has 225 “free-­trade-­zone factories” set up like prisons, with cinder-­block walls topped by razor wire, armed guards, and locked metal gates. The textile factories employ about seventy thousand young women who can be fired if they are seen congregating in groups, must ask permission for their two allowed bathroom breaks a day, and are dismissed if found pregnant after one of the periodic pregnancy tests they are forced to endure.7 The various constituencies (human rights advocates, environ­ mental activists, farmers, workers, feminists, debt relief advocates, and many others) were organized into two main components: nongovernmen­ tal organizations (NGOs) and direct action–­oriented movement groups. The term nongovernmental organization was created by the United Nations to describe all those groups working outside of official government institutions to effect social change. Many, but not all, NGOs are registered as such with the U.N. But the name encompasses a wide variety of groups, both ideologically and in terms of focus, from environment to human rights to women to health advocacy and so on. Some NGOs are more service oriented, others lobby to affect policy, and still others are virtually indistinguishable from direct-­action social movement groups. Direct actionists tend to see NGOs as more moderate and

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formal, if not bureaucratic, and NGOs tend to see direct actionists as disorganized and overly confrontational. Still, the borders between the two types of organizing are often porous. The Direct Action Network (DAN), which coordinated the blockade dimension of the Seattle activities, for example, was sponsored by groups that fell into both of these categories. In the general flow of the movement against corporate capitalist globalization, many NGOs form a mediating space between formal governments and the disruptive power of direct actionists. In an overall strategy, the two sectors often benefit each other, with NGOs proposing much-­needed temporary reforms while the direct actionists push for deeper transformations. But this mutual benefit is not often felt or acknowledged by partisans of the respective modes of political activity.

THE BATTLE(S) OF SEATTLE Both NGOs and direct actionists came to Seattle already organized into various larger networks. Friends of the Earth International, Public Citizen, Jubilee 2000, and Fifty Years Is Enough, for example, provided very important umbrella structures for a wide variety of NGOs focused on trade, Third World debt, the environment, human rights, women’s issues, and many other concerns. The organization Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) played a similar role for direct-­action-­oriented groups from around the world. And many similar, sometimes overlapping, coalitional formations existed for both types of organization. In addition, coalitions organized around issue areas—­agriculture, Indigenous rights, women’s issues—­often cut across the direct-­action/NGO distinction. The weeklong events in Seattle in late November and early December 1999 brought all these forces into a new array. In a sense, the real Battle of Seattle was fought by hundreds of activists logging thousands of hours of organizing time in the weeks and months leading up to the WTO confrontation. That all these diverse elements came together to share ideas and feel their collective strength was already a triumph before the actions began. At the risk of splitting apart an interacting set of simultaneous activities, I will present the “battle” in three acts: education, culture,

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and blockading. To note the simultaneity, I will blend the acts in some parts of my discussion.8

ACT ONE: THE ANTICORPORATE UNIVERSITY Seattle’s “festival of resistance” began officially on Saturday, November 27, marked by prayers, meditation, and education (sides of the action not much covered by the “corporate” media).9 Teach-­ins on dozens of aspects of globalization and social justice, sponsored by groups like the International Forum on Globalization, Global Exchange, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Public Citizen, took place at venues throughout Seattle beginning on Saturday and continuing all week. Local Seattle activists had created an interest in globalization issues in the city through a series of lectures, debates, workshops, and public forums in the weeks and months preceding the WTO conference. This local interest, added to that of thousands of protesters, made every event virtually a sold-­out, standing-­room-­only affair. In contrast to New York Times critic Thomas Friedman’s characterization of the protesters as know-­nothing “flat earthers,” these were well-­informed people hungry for further knowledge. Many of the most prominent intellectuals of the movement against corporate globalization, including Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Lori Wallach, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, José Bové, Naomi Klein, and Walden Bello, were on hand. These people and others play an important role in translating immensely complicated academic discourses on global economics, trade issues, international law, and so on into terms more useful to the movement. Each day of the week was dedicated to a theme that linked at least two issue areas—­for example, Food and Agriculture Day and Environment and Health Day. While education was emphasized, various cultural events—­concerts, street dances, theater—­ and some preliminary direct actions were woven into the more academic presentations. There were talks with titles like “Alternatives to Corporate Globalization,” “The Human Face of Trade,” “The Need to Advance the People’s Resistance against Imperialist Globalization,” “Genetically Modified Organisms,” “Trading Away Public Health,” “Forests, Fisheries, Toxics,” “Global Trade Unionism,” and “Trade Related Intellectual

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Property Rights,” along with others covering dozens of additional dimensions of corporate domination of world trade. The key constituencies brought into dialogue in Seattle included those described below.

Debt Elimination/Economic Development Groups IMF, World Bank, and WTO policies have led most countries in the Third World or the Southern Hemisphere into a vicious cycle of debt. The promised economic development has not come (except for transnational corporations with headquarters in the First World/Northern Hemisphere), and the gap between rich and poor has grown, as revealed by the World Bank’s own statistics. One former World Bank economist has noted that despite “repeated promises of poverty reduction . . . the actual number of people living in poverty . . . increased by almost 100 million” during the 1990s.10 Hundreds of NGOs and movements in the Third World have fought against the “austerity” imposed by international debt and structural adjustment programs. In addition to national and local resistance groups, several large coalitions have formed, such as Jubilee 2000, with its network of Third and First World peoples of color calling for the canceling of debt in developing countries. Between its founding in 1995 and its refocusing in its target year 2000, the Jubilee campaign (named to parallel the “abolition of debt” with the jubilee that came with the abolition of slavery in the United States) gathered more than twenty-­four million signatures worldwide and successfully reduced debt in many countries, though falling far short of its goal of total debt elimination. The other side of this process, the development of alternative “fair-­trade” economic structures, was represented in Seattle by NGOs like Global Exchange and Third World Network. In the United States, Jubilee is led by faith-­based groups, particularly African American ones. It was founded very much in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement and drew upon the legacy of spiritual power and practical organizing of many of that movement’s veterans. In Seattle, Jubilee led the prayer vigil on Sunday, and on Monday the group held an afternoon rally featuring SNCC Freedom Singers veteran Bernice Johnson Reagon and her a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. This was followed by Jubilee’s own kind of blockade. The group’s

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supporters, at least five thousand strong, formed a human chain around the Seattle Expo Center, where WTO delegates were attending a champagne gala with executives from Boeing and Microsoft, major players within Seattle’s financial infrastructure. Engaging in a type of action they had performed in other locations around the world, the demonstrators encircled the delegates in a call “to break the circle of debt.”

Farmers One effect of supposedly “freer markets” has been the further penetration of First World agribusiness into the developing world, and into remaining pockets of family farming in the developed world. Small-­scale farmers throughout the world have fought these efforts, arguing on behalf of the public’s interest in better, safer, and more varied food; food produced with fewer dangerous chemicals; and stores free of genetically engineered “Frankenfoods.” Some small-­scale farmers, including many Indigenous people, have a long history of harvesting medicinal herbs and plants that are now being “discovered” and patented by pharmaceutical companies through a process some have called “biopiracy.”11 French cheese maker José Bové, famous for his verbal and physical assaults on McDonald’s restaurants in his home country, led a similar protest in Seattle. In an act of civil disobedience, he handed out chunks of smuggled Roquefort in front of the McDonald’s at Third and Pine, and talked to assembled crowds about WTO rules that protect fast-­food chains and devastate local producers. Some jostling by reporters led to a broken window on a side door of the restaurant, but the sometimes-­ tense demonstration was kept from exploding by humor and the good-­ natured responses of some local police. Indigenous People Corporate globalization has had a devastating impact on the Fourth World of Native peoples. To many, WTO’s agreements are just one more set in a long line of “betrayals by treaty.” Shaky Indigenous sovereignty is being threatened, from the rain forests of Brazil to the deserts of the American Southwest, wherever “Indians” stand in the way of the profits of pharmaceutical companies, logging operations, or mining conglomerates. Not only are Native herbs and plants being “pharmed,” but also the very DNA in Native bodies is being “harvested,” often without

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knowledge or consent, through blood extraction. Any unusual DNA components found are being cataloged and patented for potential medical profit. At the time of the protests in Seattle, a WTO “free logging” agreement threatening millions of acres of forest on sacred Indigenous lands in the United States and Latin America was under consideration by the corporate globalizers. Native elders and Native activists from all over the world attended the Indigenous Forum held in Seattle, where this key issue was used to strengthen links between Native activists and environmentalists.

Environmentalists Because environmental problems know no national borders, environmen­ talists have long held global perspectives. Those perspectives have been deepened as global institutions like the WTO have weakened or eliminated already inadequate environmental laws in the name of freeing up trade. This process has also taken the form of turning the environment into a product to be bought and sold, not only through biopiracy but also through such actions as selling the water supplies of Third World nations to First World corporations, something Indigenous activists stopped through fierce resistance when it was attempted in the Cochabamba region of Bolivia.12 More generally, environmentalists believe that imposing the industrialization process of the First World on the Third World is far from the best or only route to development. Many argue that more environmentally sound, locally self-­sufficient development will mutually benefit people and the environment. Radical environmental groups like Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, and Earth First! contributed tactical innovations to the movement in Seattle, especially by scaling tall buildings and other structures to hang anti-­WTO banners with messages like “Globalize Liberation, Not Corporate Power.” Human Rights Advocates Human rights advocates, both locally and internationally, played a key role in the coalition because they see the link between structural adjustment and repressive regimes. Nations have to be “made safe” for investment, and this has often meant regimes violently repressing existing resistance movements, even as new ones spring up in opposition to the

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“austerity measures” accompanying investment. Global human rights advocates argue that trade rights have too often replaced the civil rights of workers and dissidents. Groups like Amnesty International, which has more than one million members worldwide, have fought diligently to counter the neoliberal trend toward loosening human rights guarantees. The impact in the United States also includes the human rights abuses embodied in the “prison–­industrial complex” (see chapter 2), the vast growth of prisons, many now privately run for profit, filled dis­pro­ portionately by men and women of color. Many alterglobalization activists view these inmates as political prisoners in the war against corporate greed, incarcerated because they were driven to acts of desperation by a rigged-for-the-rich economy, increasing unemployment, and capital flight from the cities to white suburbs.

Public Health and Consumer Advocates Austerity measures imposed by neoliberal debt policies have severely limited often already very sparse public health funding. In places like Africa, where 70 percent of the world’s forty million people with HIV/ AIDS reside, this has often meant a death sentence for the poorest elements of the population. Thus, many international public health workers align themselves with the alterglobalization movement. Advocates for the rights of consumers have also been active in the movement because they see decisions made by the WTO and other organizations as lowering the quality and safety of food and other products by gutting national standards and safeguards. Consumer advocates have also joined with labor in raising issues about production processes, fighting WTO rules that make it virtually impossible to block the import of products based on the use of exploited or child labor in their production. In Seattle, U.S.-­based advocacy networks like Public Citizen played a key role, as did international public health groups like Doctors without Borders and ACT UP. Women’s Rights Advocates Women’s movements became increasingly globalized throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. One measure of this growth is the ever-­ increasing attendance at women’s world congresses: six thousand in Mexico City in 1975, fourteen thousand in Nairobi in 1985, and thirty

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thousand in Beijing in 1995. The scope of the Beijing conference demonstrated that sisterhood had not only been made “global” itself but also had expanded to address a host of issues on the broad agenda of anti–­ corporate globalization efforts. In the years leading up to the Beijing congress, for example, women’s groups met under U.N. sponsorship to address links between environment and development (Brazil, 1992), human rights (Vienna, 1993), reproductive rights and population (Cairo, 1994), and social development (Copenhagen, 1995). All these issues and many more were on the agenda at Beijing and in the dozens of global feminist networks represented there. Structural adjustment policies affecting the environment have often been felt first by women, leading to the growth of numerous feminist environmental efforts. The search for ever cheaper and more malleable labor forces has played a role in the “feminization of the labor force,” and SAPs (doesn’t their acronym say it all?) have strengthened an existing trend toward the “feminization of poverty” as joblessness and underemployment break up increasing numbers of family households. This poverty, combined with the lowering of human rights standards, has contributed to the proliferation of such insidious practices as the transnational trafficking of women (the selling or trading of women into prostitution or into slave-­like domestic relationships).13 The International Women Workers Forum in Seattle drove home these issues and specifically linked women’s groups and the labor movement.

Labor Workers and labor unions constitute a very significant force in the anti–­ corporate globalization movement. There were more general strikes around the world in the second half of the 1990s than at any time during the rest of the twentieth century, including during the worldwide depression of the 1930s.14 This newly militant international labor movement has also inspired many in the United States. A steady decline in union membership and the power of workers over the past several decades due to weak leadership and complacency has begun to be reversed. Long-­standing attempts to play off workers against environmentalists and to blame the loss of “American jobs” on low-­wage Third World workers are being challenged. An alliance of environmentalists and steelworkers pioneered by activist Judi Bari in the redwood country

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of California proved the wedge needed to open a dialogue between these once antagonistic forces. The coming together of labor and environmentalists in Seattle symbolized a new generation unwilling to make a devil’s bargain between jobs on the one hand and clean air, safe water, and a livable environment on the other. In the aftermath of Seattle, the AFL-­CIO Executive Council passed a new resolution emphasizing rights of workers in the developing world, the need for debt relief, and reform of WTO policies that drive down U.S. wages too.15

Students Students have been a key component of protest movements for many, many generations, and so it is with the movement against corporate globalization. Students are a special force because they have the time to reflect and do research, are less socialized into complacency, and have less to lose in terms of family income. The most visible student activists in the anticorporate movement have been those associated with United Students against Sweatshops (USAS), which has branches on the campuses of more than 150 U.S. colleges and universities. Like most elements of this new movement, students combine close attention to the local with a global perspective. USAS, which is part of the wider antisweatshop movement, began when students investigated the production processes behind the T-­shirts and other clothing bearing their schools’ names and logos. Most found that built into the slick Yale bulldog or Penn State lion was the exploited labor of a Third World worker. They discovered that this might be true even if the label said “Made in the U.S.A.,” since many textile manufacturers set up shop in places like Saipan, an American “protectorate” in the Pacific that is technically U.S. soil but where wages are low and labor conditions are horrendous. Increased numbers of sweatshops in U.S. cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York offer another indication of how some shots taken at the Third World ricochet to hit the First. The creation of the Center for Campus Organizing, an umbrella group for students fighting on a variety of fronts, including unionization of student workers (teaching and research assistants), suggests how the antisweatshop movement has expanded outward. In Seattle students became the most dynamic force for the blockades and for the cultural actions entwined with them.

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ACT TWO: PUPPETRY AGAINST PUPPET REGIMES AND THE CARNIVAL AGAINST CAPITAL One of the claims made by the global justice/alterglobalization movement is that virtually all the governments in the world, in both developed and developing nations, have in effect become “puppet regimes,” a description long used to suggest a hidden or invisible hand directing those claiming to be independent politicians. “Invisible hand” is also the phrase that eighteenth-­century economist Adam Smith used to describe the unregulated workings of the capitalist free market (although, unlike his greedier proponents these days, Smith believed in a “moral economy” that would sometimes require restraining capitalism). Today these two senses of the invisible or hidden hand work together as WTO, IMF, and World Bank puppeteers direct the global economy with the aid of puppet politicians beholden to their neoliberal, free market ideology. It is therefore especially fitting that some of the most dramatic artistry in Seattle came in the form of radical puppetry, although, unlike their less scrupulous targets, the activist puppeteers had their hands out in the open for all to see. Political puppetry has a long history around the globe.16 In the European tradition, dating back to medieval times, puppets that started in service to church-­sanctioned morality tales were transformed over time into characters in bawdy working-­class satires of propriety. The giant puppets that have become part of contemporary demonstrations can also trace their origins to the church, in the form of religious figures in procession. But once again, these giant symbols were reclaimed as part of a lower-­class resistance that drew upon the folklore of gigantic creatures of good and evil, dragons, monsters, and pagan devils. Folk carnivals celebrating spring, Mardi Gras, and the Feast of Fools all had elements of subverting authority through satire, with giant papier-­mâché or wicker images of kings and nobles burned in effigy. This legacy of an irreverent people’s puppetry was revived in the United States in the 1960s by the Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont. Having passed through various twentieth-­century avant-­gardes like Dadaism, cubism, and Russian revolutionary art, the new radical form of puppetry played into the anarchic spirit of the 1960s counterculture to nurture and spread politically subversive resistance to the Vietnam War and commentary on a host of other social issues. Other strands of

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radical theater in the United States, like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Teatro Campesino (see chapter 4), as well as European political dramatists like Dario Fo, unleashed a renaissance of theatricality that played into social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most imaginative uses of giant puppets occurred in 1981 at the Women’s Pentagon Action, a feminist and environmentalist critique of the militarism then being unleashed by the Reagan administration. The action was divided into four stages billed as the “mobilization of emotions”—­“Mourning,” “Rage,” “Empowerment,” and “Defiance”—­with each stage marked by a giant puppet symbolizing the dominant concept guiding that part of the demonstration. The action culminated with hundreds of women surrounding the Pentagon, the seat of the U.S. empire, symbolically reclaiming it for the people against the military–­industrial complex.17 In Seattle, a newly visible period of radical puppetry began thanks especially to the efforts of a group of cultural activists calling themselves Art and Revolution. Founded in 1996 by David Solnit and a handful of other art activists, Art and Revolution grew into several independent chapters around the country. By the time of the Battle of Seattle, the radical puppeteers had honed their skills in integrating giant papier-­ mâché figures into small demonstrations. On this new, grander stage, puppets and protests were truly woven together from the beginning of the organizing. They were never seen as adornment, but rather as key actors in creating the meaning of the events. Weeks before the events of late November, Art and Revolution began training and planning for a variety of cultural interventions into the protests. Together with many other progressive art activists, they brought theater, dance, and, above all (literally and figuratively), puppetry into the Seattle battle. One part of the group helped bring a number of artists of color, especially hip-­ hop artists and dancers, to the city. Alli Chagi-­Starr, one of the coordinators of the dance actions, called her dance company the Emma Said Dance Project, after anarchist theorist Emma Goldman’s famous (but apocryphal) remark, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”18 Art and Revolution and like-­minded “artivists” infused the Seattle protests with a host of aesthetic forms designed to set a carnivalesque tone for the whole action. And nothing contributed more to that spirit than the giant puppets. Art and Revolution allied with many other radical

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The Bread and Puppet Theater inspired modern progressive protest puppetry. This event was in New York City in 1982. AP photo; copyright Associated Press. Reprinted with permission.

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theatrical groups, like the pioneering Bread and Puppet Theater and the Wise Fool troupe, to form a collective of radical “puppetistas” who performed “puppetganda” and played a key role in making and distributing the various kinds of puppets that were ubiquitous over the course of the demonstrations. At the convergence center set up for the protests, dozens of people worked day and night to fashion the giant puppets. In the egalitarian spirit of the events, anyone wishing to help create the puppets was welcomed. Art and Revolution had been at the center of the organizing from the beginning. Collective members had long insisted that “art shouldn’t just be an ornament, but rather an integral part of the movement. Everything is theatrical. Traditional protest—­the march, the rally, the chants—­is just bad theater.”19 Thus training for the action included not only civil disobedience tactics but also hands-­on work in puppetry. The “DAN Handbook for N30,” the key organizing document for the blockade, reflects this cultural emphasis: In this ever-­shrinking world where corporations are attempting to homogenize us into passive, unquestioning consumers, our culture is our greatest weapon of resistance. Traditional demonstrations and protests, while essential, oftentimes alienate the general public, are disregarded by corporate media, bore many of the participants, and are ignored by policy makers. Taking to the streets with giant puppet theater, dance, graffiti art, music, poetry and the spontaneous eruption of joy breaks through the numbing isolation. . . . We must strive to use all our skills in harmony to create an enduring symphony of resistance. The cacophony against capital will be deafening when nine days of large-­scale street theater preparations culminate in the largest festival of resistance the world has ever seen. We will make revolution irresistible.

The cultural resistance began several days before the main blockade and continued throughout the “battle” despite, as we will see, rather critical reviews from certain helmeted representatives of the Seattle government. The streets were festively filled with three hundred children in sea turtle costumes to protest the 150,000 turtles caught in nets each year by shrimpers, as well as dancing Santas, jugglers, stilt-­walkers, fire-­ eaters, clowns, drag queens and kings, wood nymphs, Statues of Liberty with “Stop the WTO” pins, self-­described “radikal cheerleaders” chanting

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jingles like “Ho, Ho, Ho, the WTO’s got to go!” and, above them all, the thirty-­foot-­tall puppets. Few things signify a carnival atmosphere better than huge puppets. Their scale draws the eye, and they are highly photogenic objects for journalists. At the same time, their gigantism embodies a notion of collective strength in keeping with the power in numbers of demonstrations. Like murals, puppets change the scale of things, offering a sense of something bigger at play. Puppetry, usually associated with children, can also have a disarmingly friendly impact, even when the images portray far-­from-­friendly acts of economic violence. In fact, in Seattle and many subsequent demonstrations puppets were explicitly deployed as peacekeepers to help defuse possibly violent encounters. Puppets are literally larger than life, and in addition to performing thematically, they often provide stunning visual markers to orient marches and demonstrations. Solnit explained the effect this way: “In the streets, the widespread use of arts and culture actually gave us power in the situation because the police were on unfamiliar terrain. People were doing lockdowns with [other] people dancing next to them and giant puppets mixed with blockades, so it became clear that we were about life and celebration. The police had their own theatre of dressing like Darth Vaders with projectile weapons, clubs and pepper spray.”20 The contrast between the festive, playful protesters and the frighteningly equipped police initially seemed to increase the amount of sympathy for the resisters. While festivity runs the risk of being read by observers as a lack of seriousness, when tied thoughtfully to strategic acts of civil disobedience, as it was in Seattle, a carnival atmosphere can serve to undercut the notion that protest is a grim, forbidding, and negative affair. At its best, it embodies a hopefulness in the face of massive, global social problems that cannot be solved without faith in a different future, faith that, in the movement’s slogan, “another world is possible.” Many puppets and costumes parodied the military-­corporate culture that the street festival was offering itself as an alternative to: General Warren D. Struction, under the banner “Incredible Feats of Stupidity,” dramatized that “free trade” includes selling U.S.-­made weapons to every repressive regime in the world; a giant tennis shoe handed out flyers about the joys of sweatshops; a red devil with a chainsaw looked around for trees to clear-­cut. Some particularly adventurous protesters

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WTO = Death. Courtesy of Linda Wolf.

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also scaled the city’s skyscrapers to attach huge banners making pointedly humorous observations on globalization. One of the most memorable, placed atop a 170-­foot-­tall construction crane, consisted of two gigantic arrows, one labeled “Democracy” and the other “WTO.” They pointed in opposite directions. The cultural resistance actions in Seattle built upon a growing tradition of “festive resistance” on the left, much of it connected to the reclamation of public space. One key part of this movement has been the network Reclaim the Streets (RTS). Begun in the United Kingdom, RTS groups have spread their style of political-­cultural action in the

WTO protesters on high. Scene from This Is What Democracy Looks Like.

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streets around the world. As one activist notes, “By the time of Seattle, RTS-­style protest had taken hold of the activist imagination.”21 The average American probably has two images of the antiglobalization movement: people dressed in black who break windows (the tiny, unrepresentative black bloc), and colorful giant puppets that represent the creative, seriously playful best side of the protests.22 Andrew Boyd remembers that there “was one sublime moment in Seattle when [I] realized that the wild yet focused energies in the streets could never be resolved into a folk song—­we were now part of Hip-­Hop nation. The rhythms of the chants were rougher, more percussive. The energy was fierce and playful.”23 A range of youthful (and not so youthful) subcultures, including ravers, grungers, postpunks, Rastas, neohippies, and hip-­hoppers, partied together against the consumer culture that is consuming the globe. Whether they identified with any of these subcultures or not, young people especially brought a new power to the actions. Inspired by books like movement activist Naomi Klein’s No Logo, many were fed up with their bodies being turned into billboards for exploitative clothing lines, their jobs subject to McDomination, their culture Disneyfied, their schools “branded” and sold out to corporations like Channel One.24 And they were fed up with their own unintended complicity in the ways all these phenomena form part of America’s “CocaColonization” of the rest of the world. As one participant from Boston put it, “We were in Seattle for the world and for justice. But we were also there for ourselves, to create a new culture.”25

ACT THREE: MARCHES, BLOCKADES, AND THE ACTION FACTIONS Monday, November 29, designated as Environment and Health Day, brought further education through teach-­ins, lectures, workshops, and open forums. It also saw the first march of the infamous sea turtle brigade. The march got under way at noon, led by Ben White of Earth Island Institute alongside steelworker Don Kegley, followed by hundreds of children, youths, adults, and elders in costumes representing one of the hundreds of animal species threatened with extinction by WTO poli­ cies. Thirty-­five hundred people—­university students, union activists, and street theater players—­joined them in the streets. Traffic came to a

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stop as the turtles danced in the streets. Drawing upon the gentle energy of “turtle power” invoked by organizer White, the action was a peaceful one, with everyone, apparently even the police, enjoying the events.26 All these educational and cultural events and smaller marches were a vital part of the action, but what most people think of as the Battle of Seattle began on Tuesday morning, November 30. Two main events were planned for that day, an AFL-­CIO–­sponsored, labor-­centered rally and march scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m., and the direct-­action blockade of the delegates organized by the Direct Action Network. In solidarity with the labor march and the protests, the longshoremen’s union had closed down virtually every port on the West Coast for the day, one of the largest work shutdown actions in decades. The original plan for the labor march called for participants to join the block­ aders after the rally, but a last-­minute deal worked out with the Clinton administration, purportedly giving labor a “seat at the table” for future global trade discussions, split the labor march off from the planned direct action. The rally in Seattle’s Memorial Stadium, featuring speeches by leaders from a host of local, national, and international labor unions, drew between thirty-­five thousand and fifty thousand participants and went off with only minor hitches. The event, especially in association with the wider array of issues represented in Seattle, was viewed by many as an important moment of revitalization for a beleaguered and complacent labor movement that had once been the core element of U.S. progressive politics. The Direct Action Network, coordinator of the WTO blockade, was a coalition formed in the months leading up to “N30” (as activist shorthand designated this protest). DAN was sponsored by a range of environmental, student, labor, debt relief, solidarity, and animal rights groups, including Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network, Project Underground, Ruckus Society, Mexico Solidarity Network, Fifty Years Is Enough, Institute for Social Ecology, Adbusters, National Lawyers Guild, War Resisters League, Earth First! (Seattle), Industrial Workers of the World, Green Party of Seattle, Animal Welfare Institute, Center for Campus Organizing, and of course Art and Revolution. Peoples’ Global Action, the largest international network of grassroots activists, and steelworkers joined with environmentalists in the recently formed Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment also endorsed the action.

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Turtle Power! Courtesy of Linda Wolf.

The central features of the DAN blockade were developed and openly publicized months in advance. Everyone in the world seemed to know what to expect, except, apparently, the Seattle Police Department. The plan was to shut down the WTO meeting by nonviolently preventing delegates’ access by blockading key streets and intersections around the Convention Center. The organizers believed they had agreement with police on two key elements: that the blockaders would be arrested without violence, and that medical personnel and legal observers would not be arrested at all. On both counts police actions proved otherwise. The handbook that DAN produced for the action announced the activists’ vision:

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Puppetry against Puppet Regimes  295 Thousands of people theatrically processing through Seattle with giant images and puppets graphically showing the economic and ecological devastation left in the wake of global capital. Mass nonviolent direct action and blockades shutting down roads and arteries leading to the ministerial of the WTO. Simple theater skits for people on the streets breaking down corporate globalization and showing glimpses of the world as it could be—­global liberation. Reclaiming the streets with celebration: Mardi Gras style marching band, street parties, West African dance, sounds of topical spoken word and hip hop.27

Again, as this description makes clear, the puppets and other theatrical elements were not add-­ons to the protests but at the very heart of the effort to effectively convey the activists’ messages and mobilize their nonviolent troops as troupes. The structure of the blockade of the streets of downtown Seattle followed the network model of the movement overall. It is no accident that the main coordinating group called itself the Direct Action Network. The actions were built around a web of affinity groups, each consisting of eight to twenty people, who chose their own modes and sites of action within an overall plan agreed to by the consensus (unanimous agreement) of representatives from each of the affinity groups. The essence of the plan was to form a wall of humanity between the Convention Center hotel where most of the WTO delegates were staying and the Paramount Theater a few blocks away, where the opening session of the WTO ministerial was scheduled to be held. Participant Paul Hawken has noted that while the Direct Action Network hoped that fifteen hundred people would show up, close to ten thousand did. Thousands more eventually joined the two thousand people who began the march to the Convention Center at 7:00 a.m. from Victor Steinbrueck Park and Seattle Central Community College. The protesters “were composed of affinity groups and clusters whose responsibility was to block key intersections and entrances. Participants had trained for many weeks in some cases, for many hours in others. Each affinity group had its own mission and was self-­organized. The streets around the Convention Center were divided into 13 sections and individual groups and clusters were responsible for holding these sections. There were also ‘flying groups’ that moved from section to section,

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backing up groups under attack as needed. The groups were further divided into those willing to be arrested and those who were not.”28 Near Seattle Community College, the Denny Street warehouse became the assembly ground, or “staging area,” for much of the direct-­ action protest, especially for the substantial contingent of young people. As one observer notes, “The Denny Street warehouse was far more than a meeting place; it was part factory, part barracks, part command and control center, part mosh pit. Later on it would become an infirmary.”29 The blockaders included priests, rabbis, monks, ministers, steelworkers, lawyers, doctors, and professors, but the majority were students and other youth. The ranks of those intentionally risking arrest were especially heavy with youthful protesters. In addition to drums, a boom-­box sound track was provided by the likes of British postpunk band Chumbawamba, the metal-­rap group Rage Against the Machine, and such local Seattle groups as the Farts, accounting for that “mosh pit” atmosphere in the Denny warehouse. Hip-­hop, punk, and rave music scenes were increasingly being drawn into the movement, and Seattle was no exception. On Tuesday morning, November 30, the street actionists were up early, before the police. Most report that the atmosphere was tense but still festive as the day began with a march. As left journalist Alexander Cockburn reports: “Steelworkers and Earth First!ers led the way, carrying a banner with the image of a redwood tree and a spotted owl. The march featured giant puppets, hundreds of signs, the ubiquitous sea turtles, singing, chanting, drumming and nervous laughter. There was an atmosphere of carnival to the gathering. New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Juarez on the Day of the Dead. A carnival with an ominous edge.”30 Cockburn found himself next to a group of black men and women trailing behind the Rap Wagon, a white van with a powerful sound system blasting a “nasty improvised rap called ‘TKO the WTO.’” The atmosphere of carnival was dampened but not dissipated by midmorning when brutal police assaults on the nonviolent blockaders began. Around 10:00 a.m., Cockburn and a friend found themselves at one of the key intersections, Sixth and Union. A band of about 200 protesters had occupied the intersection and refused to move after the police gave an order to disperse. About ten minutes later, [a black armored personnel carrier, misnamed

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Puppetry against Puppet Regimes  297 Peacekeeper] arrived. Tear gas canisters were unloaded and then five or six of them were fired into the crowd. One of the protesters nearest the cops was a young, petite woman. She rose up, obviously disoriented from the gas, and a Seattle policeman, crouched less than 10 feet away, shot her in the knee with a rubber bullet. She fell to the pavement, grabbing her leg and screaming in pain. Then, moments later, one of her comrades, maddened by the unprovoked attack, charged the police line, Kamikaze-­style. Two cops beat him to the ground with their batons, hitting him at least 20 times. As the cops flailed away with their four-­foot-­long clubs, the crowd chanted, “the whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.” Soon the man started to rise and he was immediately shot in the back by a cop who was standing over him, cuffed and hauled away.31

Cockburn adds that “the so-­called rubber bullets are meant to be fired at areas of the body with large muscle mass. Like the thighs and ass. But over the next two days Seattle cops would fire off thousands of rounds without exhibiting any caution. Dozens of people, none of them threatening the cops with harm, were shot in the back, in the neck, in the groin, in the face, in places that the ammunition’s manufacturers, ever conscious of liability questions, warn could cause severe trauma or death.”32 To their credit, members of the Seattle Fire Department did not join in this melee; they refused an order to use fire hoses on the protesters, perhaps with images in their heads of the fire hoses used on Civil Rights activists in the South in earlier decades. Instead of the attempts at arrest that the protesters had been led to expect, the pattern of police assaults was repeated again and again throughout the day and into the night. But using a variety of techniques, sometimes retreating, then reappearing, affinity groups successfully held all intersections and key areas downtown. When they were gassed, sprayed, shot, clubbed, or pushed back, new affinity groups would quickly replace them. Not all encounters with the forces of global law and order entailed violence. A group of students from Portland’s Lewis and Clark College worked the intersection of Fourth and Olive, on the periphery of the blockade, and though threatened by police and occasionally stung by drifting tear gas, they were not directly assaulted or arrested. Midmorning, however, they were asked by coordinators to move to Fourth and

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Pine. Amid the noise of traffic and street celebrations, the affinity group held a twenty-­minute meeting in the middle of the street before agreeing to relocate. When they arrived at the new intersection, they found the police presence there was much more dramatic. Soon a tractor with a huge scoop in front appeared and headed toward the affinity group. As one of the students, Sarah Joy Staude, later recalled: “We got all of our supporters in line in front of it. The driver claimed he was lost.” Their protective strategy apparently worked, and police were soon diverted to other hot spots in the action.33 The central focus of the blockade was the Paramount Theater, the site chosen for the opening ceremonies of the ministerial. As Hawken reports: “Police had ringed the theater with Metro buses touching bumper to bumper. The protesters surrounded the outside of that steel circle. Only a few hundred of the 5,000 delegates made it inside, as police were unable to provide safe corridors for members and ambassadors. The theater was virtually empty when U.S. trade representative and meeting co-­chair Charlene Barshevsky was to have delivered the opening keynote.”34 WTO head Michael Moore and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s representative, were both locked in their rooms unable to leave and were said to be apoplectic in the face of the blockade’s success. The level of violence directed against the nonviolent protesters grew throughout the day. When a small splinter group, the Black Bloc, broke some windows in the downtown shopping center, strategically targeting stores with direct connections to the worst excesses of globalization, the violence against protesters finally had a cover story, but not a very convincing one. About the best one can say on behalf of the forces defending the WTO against democratic citizens is that they had been lied to by their superiors, taught to believe the protesters were terrorists, capable of unleashing chemical warfare or worse.35 In point of fact, all the chemical warfare came from the side of the forces of “law and order,” in the form of tear gas and the most excruciatingly painful pepper spray ever used against nonviolent protesters. The pepper spray used in the action, MK-­46, is manufactured by a company named Defense Technology, also known as Def-­Tech. As Cockburn notes, the company cautions that the chemical should be used only defensively and should not be sprayed at range closer than three feet.

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Throughout the action, police used the pepper spray offensively and shot right into the faces of protesters.36 Hawken describes the effect such abuse of the spray had on one protester: “When I was able to open my eyes, I saw lying next to me a young man, 19, maybe 20 at the oldest. He was in shock, twitching and shivering uncontrollably from being tear-­gassed and pepper-­sprayed at close range. His burned eyes were tightly closed, and he was panting irregularly. Then he passed out. He went from excruciating pain to unconsciousness on a sidewalk wet from the water that a medic had poured over him to flush his eyes.”37 This was not an isolated event. Fortunately, protesters and sym­ pathetic bystanders showed great generosity and cooperation. Hawken recalls that “as I tried to find my way down Sixth Avenue after the tear gas and pepper spray, I couldn’t see. The person who found and guided me was Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, and probably the only CEO in the world who wanted to be on the streets of Seattle helping people that day. I could hear acutely. When your eyes fail, your ears take over. What I heard was anger, dismay, shock. For many people, including the police, this was their first direct action. Demonstrators who had taken nonviolence training were astonished at the police brutality. The demonstrators were students, professors, clergy, lawyers, and medical personnel. They held signs against Burma and violence. They dressed as butterflies.”38 Arrayed against this apparently threatening butterfly brigade were a great many perhaps overequipped law enforcement personnel: The police were anonymous. No facial expressions, no face. You could not see their eyes. They were masked Hollywood caricatures burdened with 60 to 70 pounds of weaponry. These were not the men and women of the 6th precinct. They were the Gang Squads and the SWAT teams of the Tactical Operations Divisions, closer in their training to soldiers from the School of the Americas than to local cops on the beat. Behind them and around were special forces from the FBI, the Secret Service, even the CIA. The police were almost motionless. They were equipped with US military standard M40A1 double-­canister gas masks, uncalibrated, semi-­automatic, high velocity Autocockers loaded with solid plastic shot, Monadnock disposable plastic cuffs, Nomex slash-­ resistant gloves, Commando boots, Centurion tactical leg guards,

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Puppetry against Puppet Regimes combat harnesses, DK5-­H pivot-­and-­lock riot face shields, black Monadnock P24 polycarbonate riot batons with Trumbull stop side handles, No. 2 continuous discharge CS (ortho-­chlorobenzylidene-­ malononitrile) chemical grenades, M651 CN (chloroacetophenone) pyrotechnic grenades, T16 Flameless OC Expulsion Grenades, DTCA rubber bullet grenades (Stingers), M-­203 (40mm) grenade launchers, First Defense MK-­46 oleoresin capsicum (OC) aerosol tanks with hose and wands, .60 caliber rubber ball impact munitions, lightweight tactical Kevlar composite ballistic helmets, com­ bat butt packs, .30 cal. 30-­round magazine pouches, and Kevlar body armor. None of the police had visible badges or forms of identification. The demonstrators seated in front of the black-­clad ranks were equipped with hooded jackets for protection against rain and chemicals. They carried toothpaste and baking powder for protection of their skin, and wet cotton cloths impregnated with vinegar to cover their mouths and noses after a tear gas release. In their backpacks were bottled water and food for the day ahead.39

The vinegar cloths, unfortunately, got much use. So much tear gas and pepper spray were used, and so many concussion grenades and rubber bullets were fired, that the Seattle police force ran out and had to seek out more from around the region. There was a brief lull in the afternoon, but then the assaults began again. The labor march, which many hoped would join up with the direct actionists, was diverted away from them by the parade leaders. But many rank-­and-­file marchers felt closer to the more active form of protest, and thousands marched instead into the blockade zone to add support. According to Tico Almeida, “Eventually, the marchers split in two directions: tens of thousands heading towards the WTO meeting with the hopes of ‘shutting it down’; and other tens of thousands favoring a peaceful sit-­down protest in the streets surrounding the hotel where many of the WTO delegates were stuck waiting while the events played out further downtown. This second action was particularly important because it created a safe protest option for families who had brought children, for senior citizens, and for those who hoped to reform, but not [abolish] the international trade system.”40 Through all the assaults, the protesters held onto their objectives at both sites. By late afternoon

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word reached the streets that the ministerial session had been canceled for the day. To the surprise of almost everyone, the protesters had won. The victory was soon overshadowed, however, by another action taking place away from the blockade. The notorious Black Bloc, a black-­ clad group of women and men identified with the anarchist political tradition and a “nix it, don’t fix it” attitude toward globalization, had begun to break windows and spray-­paint slogans on certain carefully chosen global businesses. Unlike the vast majority of protesters, who had committed to absolute (no property damage) nonviolence, the police knew well in advance that this was the intention of the small Bloc. DAN had requested that the Bloc not hold its action on the same day as DAN’s, precisely to avoid the muddling of issues that came in its wake. Some in the corporate media seized on the events to try to discredit the whole protest action with talk of “chaos in the streets” and “senseless, random violence” all over the city. But what exactly had happened? Seattle participant-­observer Cockburn asks, “In the end, what was vandalized? Mainly the boutiques of Sweatshop Row: Nordstrom’s, Adidas, the Gap, Bank of America, Niketown, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Starbucks. The expressions of destructive outrage weren’t anarchic, but extremely well targeted. The manager of Starbucks whined about how ‘mindless vandals’ destroyed his window and tossed bags of French Roast onto the street. But the vandals weren’t mindless. They didn’t bother the independent streetside coffee shop across the way. Instead they lined up and bought cup after cup. No good riot in Seattle could proceed without a shot of espresso.”41 Seattle mayor Paul Schell and some mainstream reporters noted the relatively small number of “anarchists” (always said to be from Eugene, Oregon, never from Seattle, where some in fact resided), but in a curious rhetoric. They argued that this “handful” of people “ruined” the protest. Ruined it for whom? Who was so quick to see in these relatively few acts the “ruin” of a week of articulate, pointed, and successful (in shutting down the WTO meeting) protests? Who, if not the corporate media, made the choice to concentrate on these acts? The Black Bloc actions heightened the level of police violence and divided the protesters. The crowds thinned out in the evening, but a presence was maintained by a couple of thousand activists. Seattle authorities made a decision to drive them out, to enforce a 7:00 p.m. curfew put in effect through a declaration of emergency. The protesters

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were forced into the nearby Capitol Hill district, where police assaults were so indiscriminate that many bystanding residents of the area were gassed, sprayed, or clubbed. The next day, December 1, the police set up a “no-­protest zone,” twenty-­five blocks square and of dubious legality, around the ministerial sites. The wave of protesters attempting in the morning to reassert their blockade were met at the edge of the zone by police promising to use lead, not rubber, bullets this time. Later in the day, steelworkers organized a march along the waterfront to protest police brutality and reassert the freedom to assemble. They invited students and environmentalists to the podium to talk about what had happened. Sporadic street skirmishes continued for the next several days. Police violence continued as well, but gradually lessened as the police were advised by city officials to change their tactic to the one the protesters had expected from the beginning—­arrest. There were eventually more than six hundred arrests during the ministerial protests, of which only two came to trial and ended in convictions. Violence against protesters continued in jail, where more than three hundred incidents of abuse were reported. At one point a ring of demonstrators surrounded the courthouse to protest the treatment of the activists and express support for those continuing the battle in jail. In the wake of the police violence and abusive treatment in jail, Chief of Police Norm Stamper was forced to resign. Years later the government of Seattle was still awash in a sea of lawsuits, including one in which the city was forced to pay a $250,000 settlement to protesters for arrests made in the “no-­protest zone,” which was ruled to be illegal.42 But no legal victories will remove lasting marks from the bodies (or the minds) of those whose “festival of resistance” was met by vicious suppression. Journalist Peter Costantini, who writes for MSNBC News and Rome’s Inter Press, summed up his surreal experience of Seattle this way: In more than three decades of protesting and covering protests in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, I had never been gassed. Finally, in my 50th year, the Seattle Police Department helped me lose my lachrymogenous virginity as photographer Casey Nelson and I strolled cluelessly up Pike Street, looking for anarchists or diplomats to interview. As our lungs burned and eyes gushed, some wit on a balcony of a highrise condo cranked up a

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Puppetry against Puppet Regimes  303 powerful sound system and blasted [Jimi] Hendrix’s deconstruction of “The Star-­Spangled Banner” over the melee below. I looked around, but Oliver Stone was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Francis Ford Coppola had a hand in the festivities—­I could almost hear Robert Duvall rasping, “I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning.” Whoever produced it, the premise was implausible: laid-­back, flannel-­clad, latte-­swilling, overcast, exports-­ driven Seattle—­ goosed by a generous dose of international organizing—­looses a psychotropic shit storm that leaves the pin-­ striped proconsuls of the WTO dumbfounded and, with the connivance of frustrated Third World envoys on the inside, thwarts their plans for a new Millennium Round of trade talks.43

ASSESSMENTS Virtually all the protesters viewed the Battle of Seattle as a success, but they differed somewhat about the nature or source of the success. Most agreed with Costantini that one major success was that the protests seemed to have emboldened delegates from the global South to assert themselves against dominant Northern Hemisphere proposals in the ministerial. But people differed as to which protesters, and which tactics, were key to the victory. Labor activist Tico Almeida saw it this way: “In the end, I think it was the series of teach-­ins and marches and peaceful protests—­at times with slightly different messages, but with a common goal of democratizing the global economy—­that made the ‘Battle of Seattle’ such an important event. Those who focused only on broken glass, tear-­gas and rubber bullets missed the story entirely.”44 In contrast, Cockburn was among those who believed the “street fighters” were the key to the protest’s impact: Beyond the wildest hopes of the street warriors, five days in Seattle brought one victory after another. Protesters initially shunned and denounced by the respectable “inside strategists,” scorned by the press, gassed and bloodied by the cops and national guard: shut down the opening ceremony; prevented Clinton from addressing the WTO delegates at Wednesday night gala; turned the corporate press from prim denunciations of “mindless anarchy” to bitter criticisms of police brutality; forced the WTO to cancel its closing

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The question of whether or not property destruction constitutes violence, and whether or not it can be an effective tactic, has been an issue in the direct-­action movement at least since the Seabrook nuclear power protests of the late 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, after the exhilaration wore off, the question of violence again took center stage. For the mainstream press, the primary issue was the broken windows downtown. For domestic and international human rights groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International, the primary issue was the police violence against peaceful protesters. For the movement, the prime issues were tactical and strategic: Were the acts of property destruction responsible for negative coverage in the mainstream media, or were they the only way the events got any press coverage at all? Most insisted that before any discussion, the window smashing had to be put in perspective. By most estimates, the number of “rioters” was somewhere between thirty and one hundred, out of a total number of protesters in excess of fifty thousand. And even among those thirty to one hundred, a significant number were Seattle petty criminals not involved in the protest, but merely jumping on the bandwagon as looting opportunists.46 In the wake of the WTO protests, David Solnit had this to say about a “diversity of tactics” that includes street fighting and property destruction: “Where diversity of tactics has replaced action agreements [entailing a commitment to nonviolence] in the U.S., the effect has been that mass actions are less massive, less strategic, less frequent, with less public support, and more vulnerable to infiltration, repression, and corporate media distancing the public, and the alliance of groups and constituencies participating have become smaller.”47 Solnit also thoughtfully addressed the issue of openness in organizing, noting that having nothing to hide lessens the ability of government agents to sow discord within the group or plant lies about the intentions of its actions. Secrecy

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within a group breeds paranoia that can be utilized by police and scares away potential recruits. The largest and most effective demon­strations and direct actions historically have been organized in clear, open ways. Worry that such actions become too “orchestrated” is to miss the point that well-­directed orchestras are remarkably effective in generating harmonious communication, the ultimate point of any action. This kind of open organizing does not preclude a degree of improvisation in movement actions, but it does help to ensure that a common logic and a clear set of strategies and tactics will guide protesters. To switch musical metaphors, the best jazz improvisations take place within carefully constructed tunes. In the Battle of Seattle, for example, the overall objective to shut down the WTO meeting was clearly laid out in advance, but affinity groups were given a good deal of leeway in terms of how they supported the achievement of this objective. And their creative actions greatly prolonged the blockade that stopped the convention.48 Whatever credit or discredit one gives to particular elements in the action, it is clear that Seattle was a turning point in the corporate alterglobalization movement(s). Paul Hawken goes so far as to offer a rather daunting historical parallel: the “American revolution occurred because of crown-­chartered corporate abuse, a ‘remote tyranny’ in Thomas Jefferson’s words. To see Seattle as a singular event, as did most of the media, is to look at the battles of Concord and Lexington as meaningless skirmishes.”49 While the “Seattle espresso party” has not yet proved to be a match for the Boston Tea Party in historical significance, it is clear that the Battle of Seattle was no isolated happening. Rather, it was a pivotal moment both in terms of strengthening connections among the component groups of the actions and in terms of the use of new media to spread the word about what had occurred in the Emerald City. For U.S. activists, it also proved a key step in moving beyond so-­called identity politics. As one participant phrased it, people bring their identities to the movement, but the identities are not the movement. The worldwide proliferation of groups involving dozens of ethnicities, sexualities, genders, and religions in a dizzying array of combinations means that no one identity can stay centered for long. After Seattle, it seemed, at least, that the U.S. left mantra of “race, class, gender, sexuality” had been truly melded into a more complex configuration on a global scale.

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A NETWORK OF NETWORKS The organizational pattern through which the disparate groups and interests were linked into the Battle of Seattle and into a movement was essentially a network of networks. Naomi Klein relates that structure to a new medium of communication: “What emerged on the streets of Seattle . . . was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet—­the Internet come to life.”50 Networks can be more or less formal and more or less permanent, but they generally tend toward the informal and impermanent. As the net (or web) metaphor suggests, networks are organized horizontally, not ver­ tically or hierarchically, and their lines of connection can shift quickly from one path to another. As Klein, one of the most prominent figures in this network of movements, writes: Despite this common ground, these [anti–­corporate globalization] campaigns have not coalesced into a single movement. Rather, they are intricately and tightly linked to one another, much as “hotlinks” connect their websites on the Internet. This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organizing. Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the Internet, what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and labored manifestoes are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information-­swapping.51

Klein’s analogy is useful, but perhaps a bit too tidy. It ignores, for example, that the network pattern had been a tried-­and-­true structure for many direct-­action movement groups since the late 1970s. It is also not a universally accepted structure among all components of this (non) movement. Some worry that the structure mirrors the chaos engendered by, and works to the benefit of, the current system of domination that social theorist Manuel Castells calls “networked capitalism.”52 But Klein’s analogy does point to a crucial cultural dimension of the movement. The connection between the movement and new cybercultures of

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the Internet is undeniable. Like the flow of information on the Internet, movement networks form and re-­form in many different configurations depending on the need. Social scientists who have long attempted to divide the landscape precisely into SMOs (social movement organizations), SMSs (social movement sectors), and SMIs (social movement industries) will no doubt be given many headaches by this form of organizing, but it may be only a difference in scale, not kind, from earlier intermovement structures. Some activists suggest that the structure of the network is itself a model of what “globalization from below” might look like. No one denies the great complexity of the global economy, but all alterglobalization activists deny that management by corporate executives and their ministerial representatives is the only way to run it. For these activists, the organizational power of groups able to reach various kinds of short-­and long-­term agreements suggests the capacity of ordinary citizens to manage global problems while maintaining local autonomies. Meanwhile, the “global culture” of the Internet does not replace local cultures, but it does supplement them in ways that may prove crucial to the success of the movement. This does not mean that national and ethnic specificity ceases to exist, but that these formations are changed and challenged. As cultural critic Lisa Lowe has noted, “The current global restructuring—­that moves well beyond the nation-­state and entails the differentiation of labor forces internationally—­constitutes a shift in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural practice that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism.”53 Ethnicities are at once for sale as commodities, sites of resistance to white, male European domination, and easily crossed boundaries in the new economy. For ethnicities to remain sites of resistance, they cannot be trapped in essences and outmoded versions of nationalism, nor can they be lost in cyberspace. They will need to be “strategically translated,” in Rey Chow’s terms, sites where “difference” resists appropriation by capital and becomes instead resistant intercultural connection. Movements will continue to be one of the key sites where cultural translations occur without fully succumbing to the market logic of capitalism. Arguments will continue as to how far to take the movement/ Internet analogy, but no one denies the importance of new media to the

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Seattle events and to the movement overall. The movement in its current global form would not be possible without the low-­cost, instantaneous communication and rich research possibilities of the Internet. The Internet provides groups with access to hundreds of corporate and government documents vital to understanding and strategizing against neoliberal policy, and it is the only mass medium currently available without a built-­in bias toward the status quo, though that bias can be pushed not only to the left politically but to the right as well. Participation in Seattle was mobilized through an extensive Internet campaign in tandem with face-­to-­face organizing. Hundreds of listservs and thousands of personal e-­mail addresses were utilized from around the globe. Typical of the many calls circulated around the world online was this one from Peoples’ Global Action, which called activists not only to Seattle but also to local support actions worldwide (of which there turned out to be dozens): The November 30th global day of action would be organised in a non-­hierarchical way, as a decentralized and informal network of autonomous groups that struggle for solidarity and co-­operation while employing non-­authoritarian, grassroots democratic forms of organisation. Each event or action would be organised autonomously by each group, while coalitions of various movements and groups could be formed at the local, regional, and national levels. A strategy that may be useful at the local level is that various groups co-­operate in creating a surrounding atmosphere of carnival and festivity as a setting for their various actions.54

PGA also authorized and encouraged translation of the call into many languages and posting to any and all relevant online bulletin boards, websites, and listservs. The great face-­to-­face encounter that was Seattle demonstrates the continued importance of direct person-­to-­person contact, but it was made possible by the virtual contacts of cyberspace. The use of desktop computers to mobilize for the event was matched by the use of the then-emerging new media technologies (laptops, camcorders, cell phones, PalmPilots and other personal digital assistants, and so on) during the event.55 This web of alternative communications also proved a spur to another kind of new media action, showcased in cyberspace but linked to Seattle: the “virtual sit-­in.” Coordinated by a British group calling itself

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the Electronic Hippies Collective and supported by “hacktivists” around the world, this new medium of protest consisted of thousands of visits to the official WTO website, with the goal of tying up its traffic, much as a traditional sit-­in might tie up access to an intersection, a lunch counter, or a politician’s office. Pioneered by groups like Electronic Disturbance Theater, the virtual sit-­in has become a component of many actions, along with other kinds of electronic civil disobedience. The Electronic Hippies claim to have mobilized more than a hundred thousand blockading “hits” on the WTO website per day on the first two days of the Battle of Seattle, thus allowing virtual participation in a symbolic attempt to replace corporate-­ministerial speech with the free speech of ordinary citizens of the world. A related, more controversial practice, the creation of fake or “shadow” websites, was also used around the Seattle actions. These sites mimic the designs of official sites like the WTO’s main site, but have their own, rather different content. One site, for example, using as its URL the acronym of WTO’s predecessor organization (www.gatt.org), announced that the Seattle ministerial had been canceled (days before the actual shutdown). (Later one of these shadow sites announced, “The WTO Secretariat approved a schedule by which the WTO in its current form will be disbanded and transformed into the Trade Regulation Organization [TRO], whose charter will be based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”) This practice has been used often against corporations through such acts as putting a Nike logo on one’s site so that when viewers click on it, it leads them to a site critiquing Nike sweatshop practices. The problem with creating fake sites, however, from the point of view of some activists, is that the practice can set up an endless cycle of disinformation that ultimately undermines not only the official information of the corporate globalizers but also the credibility of the protesters’ own counterinformation. It may be seen as hypocritical for a movement that faults the lack of “transparency” (bureaucrat talk for openness and accessibility of information) in organizations like the WTO to use such tactics. And now, in the era of “fake news,” such websites, when not overtly and clearly satirical, would merely further contribute to political unreality. Another kind of new media played an unexpected role in the Battle of Seattle. When police managed to shut down part of the Direct

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Action Network’s communications system, the protesters improvised by going out and buying a cache of cell phones.56 Used by activists spread strategically around the demonstration sites, the phones proved essential for such tasks as coordinating blockades, informing protesters of police positions and tactics, and letting protesters know when reinforcements from the labor march would arrive. Independent media reporters also took advantage of cell phones as a means of filing their reports.

WILL THE REVOLUTION BE CYBERCAST? Black nationalist rapper-­before-­the-­fact Gil Scott-­Heron opined in 1968, at the height of a worldwide wave of social movements, “The revolution will not be televised.” Computer “hacktivists” in Seattle thirty years later agreed with Scott-­Heron that the mainstream media would not televise their revolution, so they were determined to “cybercast” their worldwide web of a revolution themselves. In doing so, they set in motion a growth and coordination of independent media that perfectly paralleled the growth and transformation of the movement overall during and after Seattle. One month before the Seattle events, a group of alternative media organizations, independent journalists, and activists conceived the idea of a space where they could write, edit, and disseminate their own coverage of the protests. The main impetus came from another network, in this case one of independent media groups such as Free Radio Berkeley, Deep Dish TV, Paper Tiger Television, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Media Island International, Radio for Peace International, and Free Speech TV. They combined the traditional media of print, photography, video, and audio with Internet savvy to create the Independent Media Center (Indymedia) and its interactive website, which allowed users not only to read, watch, and listen to stories but also to post their own works of media. According to the website’s monitors, during the week of the Seattle protests the Indymedia site received more than one million hits, more than CNN or Fox during the same five days.57 During the action, the Indymedia website streamed live video and audio from nine webcams overlooking key points of protest activity; the images and sounds of the events unfolding in the streets of Seattle were available to a worldwide audience. Up-­to-­the-­minute written reports

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and digital still images, some sent directly from the streets via laptop computers and PDAs with wireless modems, were available as well. A daily half-­hour video was produced and fed via satellite to community access TV centers. And a webcast radio station, Studio X (Voices of Occupied Seattle), provided live running commentary and reports from the field to a global audience. Adding to this rich media mix were several micropower broadcast stations, one operating in Seattle and one beaming in a signal from the nearby Olympic Peninsula. These broadcasts could be picked up anywhere in the world by anyone with a computer and Internet access. Local support actions in dozens of cities around the world got information from the Indymedia website about what was going in Seattle and sent in reports on what linked protesters were doing in London, Berlin, São Paulo, Prague, Johannesburg, and many other cities. Recognizing that Internet access was not available to everyone, the Indymedia collective found ways to distribute its reporting to those without computers. As one member, Jeff Perlstein, recalls, the group was greatly concerned about the “digital divide”—­that is, the inability of many of the world’s poor to connect to the Internet. Thus, from the beginning, Indymedia “set about [to link] high and low technologies, or old and new technologies.” The website was “the backbone of our distribution” but not the only option. The collective used the Internet to send audio files around the world, which could then be downloaded and broadcast to millions of listeners on local radio stations. Digital text files were printed out in the forms of flyers and newsletters, which circulated the old-­fashioned way—­from hand to hand.58 Indymedia also put out a daily newsletter in print, both locally and in key sites around the world. To their credit, the protesters seemed to know when not to use networked computing. At the action site, there was no bank of com­ puters that might have tempted protesters to get caught up in a circle of narcissism. People seemed to realize that the face-­to-­face encounter should be just that for participants, and that the mediated version was for those who could not, or chose not to, attend. In the wake of Seattle and in several subsequent actions, video footage of the events recorded by independent media was used in court cases involving charges of police brutality and illegal arrest, as well as in

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movement documentaries. Much of the media content created during the Seattle actions remains available online and thus continues to offer an alternative to mainstream, corporate media reporting on the events. More important, following the Seattle events, more than fifty autonomous but linked Indymedia branches were established on six continents, and all major actions since that time—­such as those in Quebec, Washington, D.C., Genoa, Prague, and New York—­have been covered live online by independent journalists. The Indymedia network of sites became a major source of information, linking activists and providing a sophisticated, easy-­to-­use alternative to CNN and other corporate media. Indymedia collectives worked by consensus and were open-­access publishers, so that anyone who wished to post news stories on their sites could do so. The emphasis was on reports from the grassroots ignored by the mainstream media’s search for “leaders” and known authorities. Many of the groups ran workshops for anyone wishing to learn more about computers and the other com­ po­nents of independent media, or for people without Internet access who just needed to use their resources. In both the content and the process of its creation, Indymedia sites offered a rich alternative to the

Independent media on the job. Scene from This Is What Democracy Looks Like.

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homogenized information provided by traditional news outlets. Operat­ ing on “copyleft” (as opposed to copyright) principles, the groups made both the content and the innovative software used on their sites freely available for recirculation by anyone. Indymedia centers also used open-­source programs, the free alternatives to costly corporate software, and in so doing supported the movement to keep the Internet itself from falling fully into corporate hands. If corporate media have their way, the Internet will be turned into a broadcast medium like television rather than being allowed to remain the relatively open-­ended, interactive medium it is today. Moving to more and more sophisticated broadband production would also make the cost of putting content online prohibitive for all but the wealthiest media companies. The struggle to keep this crucial organizing medium relatively free has become an essential component of the movement against corporate globalization generally. As Indymedia “code warrior” Ana Nogueira has observed, Indymedia had “boundless potential for breaking the corporate media blockade” of information.59 Indymedia folks also realized that since the only motive driving corporate media is profit, they could sometimes sneak their messages onto that stage by offering “exclusive” material. They found more and more ways to get their views into the mainstream while maintaining their independence and their base in the everyday lives of those whose voices never make it onto CNN, CBS, or even PBS. Few activists forget that, as Iain A. Boal puts it, the new media’s “liberatory functioning as a tool for ‘organizing from below’ flourishes in the shade of its dominant use as essential support for the global transmission of administrative, military and commercial intelligence, and the enhanced surveillance of labor.”60 The Indymedia activists in Seattle were not among those naive utopian technological determinists who see the Internet as the world’s savior. Rather, they understood that the Internet—­as is now clear with the rise of right-­wing web cultures—­is a site of struggle where, with mobility, flexibility, imagination, and daring, they might actually be able to gain some tactical advantages over their often stodgy, bureaucracy-­bound opponents. Hacktivists, camcorder commandos, data dancers, code warriors, digital deviants: a new media culture of resistance became a vital part of the movement during the Seattle events.

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But this Indymedia revolution and the social media revolution that followed did not lack for critics and problems. For one thing, despite significant efforts to make the web truly worldwide, it remains a North-­ dominated sector and contributes to a suspicion in the Third and Fourth Worlds that the movement against corporate globalization is too much controlled by First World activists. The problem of access is also far from solved. Moving beyond dependence on the Internet and openness to more widely available media like radio is only a start. The extra­ ordinary situation of relatively equal access by forces of opposition to a medium dominated by corporations is of great importance. That some Indymedia sites looked as professional as the CNN site was a great gift in the struggle over control of information. But it lulled the movement into two kinds of complacency. First, it distracted from the ongoing need to contest for the rest of the electronic public sphere. It is not enough to offer an alternative; there also must be serious efforts to engage the still-­dominant mainstream corporate media, like television. Second, it blinded folks for a time to the changing new media landscape. As I mentioned above, much corporate energy is currently being directed toward the transformation of the Internet into a broadcast, as opposed to an interactive, medium. As this process intensifies through things like the Trump Federal Communications Commission’s decision to end net neutrality, it will be more and more expensive, and therefore more and more difficult, for alternative information efforts to compete for the attention of what will increasingly become “viewers” rather than “users.” None of these problems is insurmountable, but much movement energy needs to go into surmounting them. Bottom line, while the activists in Seattle found the Internet useful in numerous ways for organizing actions and disseminating information, face-­to-­face communication and face-­to-­face interactions on the ground were the heart of the movement’s achievements. As we will see in the next chapter, the same has remained true for movements in general as new social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have added to the repertoire of activist communication media.

THE BATTLES CONTINUE What were the effects of the Seattle protests on the immediate adversary, the WTO, and what was the impact on the movement(s)? There is

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no doubt that the “tear gas ministerial” was a disaster for the corporate trade advocates. Third World delegates, emboldened, as many reports indicate, by the presence of so many dedicated activists, including so many Americans, raised objections to the millennial round that doomed the agenda of the dominant nations of the Northern Hemisphere.61 The WTO has, arguably, never fully recovered from the battle, and subsequent protests mounted at the sites of its meetings as they have moved around the world have kept the organization and its allies often on the defensive. In the immediate wake of Seattle, virtually all the coalitions and groups involved reported an upsurge in interest and activity. The movement against genetically engineered foods, for example, was able to turn out more than a thousand protesters for an FDA hearing in Oakland, California, in December 1999, the largest antibiotechnology action to date. Large-­scale actions for the movement followed in rapid succession in Washington, D.C., Quebec City, Cancun, Prague, and Genoa, all involving thousands of protesters. Like the Seattle action, they were often met by police violence, much of it even more brutal than what occurred in the Emerald City. Testimony to the effectiveness of this series of actions has come from some unexpected sources. For example: “It is the trade unionists, students, environmentalists—­ordinary citizens—­marching in the streets of Prague, Seattle, Washington, and Genoa who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world.”62 These are not the self-­ serving claims of an activist, but the frank assessment of former World Bank economist and Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz makes clear that, whatever they may say publicly, the major world financial and trade organizations have been deeply shaken by the protests.

INTERNAL TENSIONS In the wake of the battle, Chicana feminist activist Betita Martínez asked, “Where was the color in Seattle?” and her question continues to echo in the movement. Subsequent efforts to bring communities of color more fully into the U.S. wing of the movement have proved only partly successful.63 Several factors account for this, including failure to fully confront white privilege within the movement and the far greater

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cost of the arrest strategy to people of color, given their treatment by the prison system. In a related critique, some activists began to wonder if parts of the movement were falling into the classic trap of direct action—­ the need to make each new demo larger, more spectacular, more militant than the last. Some also asked if the “action-­hopping” protesters were becoming an elite corps of direct-­action tourists, leaving behind the millions without the means to travel the world to engage in protest. Thoughtful critics like Chris Dixon reminded the “action junkies” that the strength of a movement is its grassroots, and those roots grow best in home soil.64 Ratcheting up the stakes so the movement would consist only of those who could join globetrotting actionists would be a disaster. These summit actions have also sometimes drawn attention away from local protests, which have taken place in more than one hundred countries.65 Most activists continued to work in their particular corners of the world on the particular issues most immediately relevant to them: farmers on genetically engineered crops, workers on labor rights, environmentalists on toxic waste, students on the sweatshops that produced their college T-­shirts. All agreed that the powerful coming together in Seattle and similar actions elsewhere had been important in invigorating the movement, in giving activists worldwide a sense that they are part of something larger, a movement, not a series of isolated issues. But such actions, critics argued, are part of the movement, not the essence of the movement. Yutaka Dirks offered related criticisms in regard to plans to protest the summit meeting of the G8 (or Group of Eight, the world’s eight most industrialized nations) in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, in June 2002. Dirks, like Dixon, questioned the efficacy and the accessibility of jet-­set protesting. “If we are serious about changing the world,” she wrote, “about putting a halt to the latest phase of capitalist globalization, we need to re-­evaluate our strategies. The distance between community based struggles and the ‘summit hopping anti-­globalization movement’ needs to be addressed. We need to reflect on our past organizing.” Noting that the people most affected by globalization are the least likely to be able to follow protests around the world, she called for more focus on local organizing, especially working with poor people and people of color: “We need to listen to and learn from those most affected by globalization, those who are talking about the racist/sexist/oppressive

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ways we have been organizing. We need to take the work of organizing in inclusive ways and confronting oppression within our movement seriously.”66 Dirks went so far as to ask protesters not to travel from distant countries to participate in Kananaskis. She made the classic argument that mere mobilizing undercuts serious organizing. As it turned out, a small, festive gathering in Alberta did balance local and global concerns (becoming “glocal,” as some call it) and also avoided assaults by the “Blue Bloc” (the police). The protesters held a series of nonviolent, imaginative actions, many focused on local issues, and greatly embarrassed local officials who had spent millions of dollars on unneeded defense forces. Another key development in the movement, and one that also moved away from a reactive focus on the summits of the globalizers, was the creation of the World Social Forum. The WSF first met in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, partly as a symbolic challenge to the World Economic Forum of corporate leaders and trade ministers. In 2002 the second WSF meeting in Porto Alegre drew 12,274 delegates representing close to 5,000 civil society organizations and movements (political parties and military units are not allowed), plus another 50,000 participant-­ observers.67 All thought of “shadowing” the WEF was replaced by a focus on the movement’s plan. The WSF has become an annual event, the major countersummit of the “movement for global justice,” as many now call it. This important renaming clearly suggests a move from defense to offense, from reacting to globalization to building alternatives. The global justice summit is formed, like its predecessors, as a network of networks, not a hierarchical organization. The WSF does not itself take positions (beyond its charter); rather, it serves as a place for movement groups to meet on an annual basis to educate, assess, strategize, network, and plan. The WSF charter reads in part: “The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests, with the complicity of national governments. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens—­men and women—­of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples.”68

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Within these broad principles, there is certainly a wide array of ideological positions, running the gamut from anarcho-­capitalism to Zapatismo. But ideological certainty is largely anathema to the WSF, both because of a predominant spirit of experimentalism and because of a commitment to respect local conditions. The sheer complexity of ethnicities, positions, and ideas within the forum makes it unlikely that any one faction will dominate, but sectarian efforts to do so will no doubt continue. The choice of Porto Alegre, site of a regionalist and localist challenge to Brazilian central state power, represents a continuing commitment to a diversity of solutions focused on particularities, even as the WSF expands global networks of transformation. Over the decade following the WSF’s founding, the global justice movement had many local and regional successes, and the power of global injustice forces like the IMF and WTO was diminished by challenges not only from the left but from the right as well, especially after those forces’ neoliberal policies nearly destroyed the global economy in 2007–­8.69 But the movement also met increasingly brutal police suppression. Even those seemingly harmless giant puppets were attacked by police forces.70 War, recession, and a highly unstable U.S. political scene complicated the movement’s work.

TERROR! GREED! CORRUPTION! THE NEW MILLENNIUM BLUES: FROM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TO WORLDCOM TO WORLD DOM In the wake of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, in the words of activist-­journalist L. A. Kauffman, “all has changed.” Already aware of how profoundly the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would affect the movement, Kauffman published an article under that title on September 17, 2001. She observed that a great symbol of corporate world trade had been transformed into a symbol of innocent victimhood: The September 11 attacks definitively interrupted the unfolding logic of the movements for global justice. The IMF/World Bank protests in D.C. were going to be simultaneously broader, more diverse, and more intense than any demonstrations in recent U.S. history. The AFL-­CIO was pouring unprecedented resources into

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Puppetry against Puppet Regimes  319 the events, mobilizing its membership on a massive scale, and faith-­based and non-­governmental organizations were activating thousands of people who had never come to a globalization protest before. Meanwhile, more and more people were embracing the philosophy of “diversity of tactics,” shifting away from the strict nonviolence guidelines that have been the hallmark of large-­scale direct actions for two decades, and agreeing to respect those who chose to engage in more confrontational or property-­ destroying tactics, so long as they didn’t directly endanger other protesters. “Diverse tactics” are clearly off the table for the time being, especially in New York and Washington, where the sound of breaking glass connotes death and devastation, and the masked uniform of the Black Bloc will only inspire fear. And with the world’s greatest symbol of global capitalism having been reduced to a smoldering mass grave, it’s going to be diffi­ cult for a while to present anti-­capitalist critiques in a way that will resonate broadly, and not seem to justify an unjustifiable atrocity. Our movements’ vision of global justice is needed now more than ever; we will simply need to take great care in presenting that vision in a way people can hear. . . . Action is essential: May it be prudent, strategic, and effective.71

It is hard to imagine two groups more different than the al-­Qaeda terrorists and the nonviolent global justice activists, but a conservative administration in the United States quickly passed the “Patriot Act”—­a law so sweeping that it promised to turn all dissent into a pretext for the terrorist label. In the rest of the world, the movement had a bit more room to move tactically, but a particularly brutal suppression of demonstrators in Genoa, Italy, in the summer of 2001 that left one person dead and hundreds injured had already put the European branch of the movement into a reassessment phase when the September 11 attacks shocked the world. In February 2002, the sixty thousand activists from around the world who attended the second World Social Forum in Porto Alegre reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to nonviolence. In March 2002, close to two million people protested in Rome over labor issues, and half a million in Barcelona protested an international trade meeting.72

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One key sign of the shifting post–­September 11 tactics occurred during the protests in Barcelona on March 15–­16, 2002. Both the terrorist attacks and the death of protester Carlo Giuliano, along with severe injuries to hundreds more, during the Genoa protests a year earlier had convinced protesters that a new approach was necessary. The Spanish anarchist union CGT, never a group to fear confrontation when useful, put out a call to “walk out on the script, for using direct action and civil disobedience as mechanisms for struggle that go beyond violent confrontations with the police.” They argued that “we have to regain the furiously festive and subversive nature of our activity, breaking military frameworks (summit-­blockade-­clash with police) the powers want to confine us to.”73 When half a million protesters held a two-­day festival involving more than twenty-­five decentralized actions and no confrontations with police occurred, the new vision was solidified. The streets had been reclaimed, the educational process had gone on, and the gathered ministers knew of yet another city where they were not welcome. They felt the force of half a million people not buying into their rhetoric of free market globalization. In the United States and around the world it was clear that street fighting was a recipe for disastrous amounts of repression. More imaginative tactics became the order of the day. Instead of breaking windows at Starbucks, what if demonstrators tied up the company’s business for hours by forming long lines in and around its stores, requesting fair-­ trade espresso when they made it to the counter, and then leaving very slowly when they couldn’t get it? Similar large actions in clothing stores could make the same point about labor conditions in the textile industry. That situation is so pervasive that traditional boycotts would be hard to put into effect; other than going naked, there is virtually no way to avoid sweatshop-­produced clothes. Indeed, at the protests in Alberta in June 2002, some demonstrators shed their clothes under a banner reading “I’d Rather Be Naked Than Wear Gap Clothes.” This action was modeled on an earlier clothing-­optional party organized by antisweatshop activists at the University of North Carolina. Liza Featherstone saw that action as an example of a larger tendency, noting that the “militant, theatrical and often campy direct action [tactics] . . . of early nineties groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation have clearly influenced the new crew of student activists.”74 This spirit, uncompromising but

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imaginative enough to draw media attention and riddled with serious humor to disarm authorities, is the mode most likely to be effective at this historical moment. It is also likely that the tactical reconsideration forced upon the movement by the September 11 attacks will keep the moderate, policy-­oriented branch and the direct actionists in closer contact. Property damage tactics had the potential to drive a wider wedge between these two components of the movement, which too seldom saw their work as mutually supportive.75 The U.S. branch of the movement returned to life when between seventy-­five thousand and two hundred thousand people (estimates ranged widely) protested peacefully in April 2002 in Washington, D.C., against the IMF and World Bank. The aftermath of Seattle continued to be one that empowers groups. The corporate media often speak of the alterglobalization movement as nothing but a “laundry list” of disconnected issues. But just the opposite is the case. Seattle and subsequent events turned a laundry list of groups focused on the environment, genetically engineered foods, human rights, consumer protections, women’s rights, labor issues, poverty, and debt relief into a far more coherent force focused on a common enemy—­neoliberal policies underwriting corporate power. At the same time a host of U.S. groups gained a greater sense of connection, those groups began to see themselves as small parts of a larger, worldwide movement. The way for these connections had been paved by several generations of activists, from Civil Rights and Black Power groups linking to African anticolonialism to Chicanos/as/xs expanding “America” southward, from U.S. involvement in international campaigns against nuclear weapons and against apartheid to ACT UP’s move beyond the United States. But the movement for global justice has taken this process much further out of iso­lation and into a truly international perspective. Seattle was important in demonstrating resistance inside the nation most responsible for the horrors of corporate globalization, but the lesson learned has been that U.S. groups must often follow the lead of those most affected by U.S.-­engendered policies. To do otherwise is to add “movement cultural imperialism” to the long list of problems to be overcome. The crisis of September 11 was quickly followed by a different crisis that turned instead to the benefit of the movement. Corporate scandals around Enron, WorldCom, and a host of other companies seemed to

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confirm what protesters had been saying about the hypocrisies of neoliberal free trade. Though as yet “corporate terrorism” has not been added to the list of targets in the “war on terror,” the practices that led to worldwide depression in 2007 might deserve that label, as the Occupy Wall Street movement suggested a decade later.

THE BATTLE TO TELL THE STORY OF THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE: A HOLLYWOOD TWIST A different kind of legacy from Seattle came in mainstream cinematic form. Irish actor-­director Stuart Townsend wrote and directed a full-­ length film version of the WTO protest. Townsend’s Battle in Seattle, starring his then paramour, Charlize Theron, as well as André Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Rodriguez, and others, was released in 2008. While agreeing that a basically sympathetic mainstream portrayal of the alterglobalization movement was better than nothing, activists involved in the production were disappointed in many aspects of the film. Direct Action Network stalwart David Solnit tells a fascinating story of how he and other Seattle activists tried to shape the film in ways that would better reflect the spirit of the action. Solnit observes ruefully that the DAN budget for the Seattle action was $10,000, while the budget for the film was $10 million, low by Hollywood standards but a budget that “could fund 100 shutdowns.” When the movie finally appeared (in limited release and reaching only a modest audience), the Seattle activists who had worked on it offered the following assessment as part of their own publicity for the movie: “In fall ’08, a major motion picture, Battle in Seattle, will be seen across North America. It’s a huge improvement over corporate media lies, but won’t tell the motives or thinking of the people who shut down the WTO. Only we [who took part] can do that.”76 To tell a more accurate story, they created the WTO People’s History Collective website (http://www.realbattleinseattle.org). A visual story closer to the actual events is also told well by several documentaries, including This Is What Democracy Looks Like (directed by Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000) and 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle (directed by Rustin Thompson, 2000). But perhaps the best way to get the story of the Seattle events is to explore the rich set of

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resources on the University of Washington WTO History Project site (https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist) and then write your own.

WAR AND PEACE(S) Despite the complexities offered by the post–­September 11 situation in the United States and around the world, the movement for global justice continued to grow into the twenty-­first century, taking with it the legacy of a half century of extraordinary social movement action on behalf of economic, social, and environmental justice. Alongside this growth, American power also flexed its muscles as never before. The U.S. war on Iraq generated the largest antiwar movement in the history of the world, largely organized through the global justice movement’s networks. On February 15, 2003, to cite one example, between eight million and eleven million people demonstrated across the globe against the then impending war. This massive response, the largest “focus group” (as President George W. Bush dismissively called it) ever assembled, rested to a great extent on the cyber-­and face-­to-­face networks forged by the movement(s) for global justice. Public opinion in 189 of the world’s 191 nations was against U.S. intervention in Iraq (Israel and the United States the only exceptions), suggesting that U.S.-­based activists have much work to do to catch up with the rest of the world and to fight the clouding of domestic vision that accompanies imperial power (see the online bonus chapter). While stopping the war proved impossible in the face of the determination of a U.S. president contemptuous of the views of anyone beyond his small circle of advisers, the actions mobilized against the war strengthened the worldwide forces aligned to create rich new alternatives to the ecological devastation, brutal poverty, and human exploitation produced by neoliberal capitalism run amok. By the end of the seemingly endless war in Iraq, opinion in virtually all political camps, left, right, and center, confirmed what the prewar protesters had claimed: that the war was a senseless mistake, begun on falsified evidence, that could only worsen the situation in the Middle East. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, and several thousand U.S. and coalition soldiers, along with the proliferation

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of terrorism around the globe, was a terrible price to pay for this knowledge. Whether the masters of war learned from that experience is still an open question. But antiwar movements will no doubt be even stronger the next time the United States trumps up false claims to push for invading another country because it stands in the way of the economic interests of corporations bent on maximizing profits.

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10 #OCCUPY ALL THE ARTS

CHALLENGING WALL STREET AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY WORLDWIDE No true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which put profits over people, self-­interest over justice and oppression over equality, run our government. —­“Declaration of the Occupation of New York City”

There can be no political freedom without economic justice. —­Occupy Wall Street protest poster

You are walking along Fifth Avenue in New York one night on the way to visit one of the world’s most famous museums, the Guggenheim. Suddenly, you look up at the facade of the Frank Lloyd Wright–­designed building, and it is emblazoned with the shimmering words “1% Museum.” You look around to see if Batman has arrived in Gotham. Then it dawns on you: you’ve heard much talk of the 1 percent from those protesters down near Wall Street, and you ask yourself, What does that have to do with this museum? In most chapters of this book I have isolated one art form and a single movement to examine the particular qualities of each. But just as in the previous chapter I have shown how many movements joined together as part of a global movement, in this chapter I am making a parallel gesture, setting aside the useful but somewhat artificial focus on 325

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a single art form in order to look at how social movements typically put into play a panoply of aesthetic-­cultural forms and formations. Sometimes these forms reinforce one another, sometimes they offer differing but compatible perspectives, and occasionally they even offer contradictions in messaging (which may be either useful or damaging, depending on the context). Using the Occupy Wall Street encampment for economic justice as my example, I will look at how one movement coordinated the use of virtually all the cultural forms surveyed in the preceding chapters, while also adding in some new digital art forms. Given the constraints of space, I will concentrate mostly on the Occupy movement in New York City, where it all began, but I want to make clear that Occupy Wall Street became just one node in a series of Occupy movements and moments that expanded all around the globe into more than nine hundred cities, with ripple effects still felt many years later.

THE MOVEMENT OF THE SQUARES While Occupy Wall Street is the most common name for the events that arose starting in New York City in the fall of 2011, the wider Occupy movement began before and carried on beyond that particular time and place.1 OWS sits in the middle of a set of movements that made 2011 a milestone year in the history of social protest. From union protests in the Wisconsin capitol building in midwinter to the Arab Spring revolutions (in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere) to the “European Summer” (especially anti-­austerity protests in Greece and the indignados movement in Spain) to the “American Autumn” (Occupy Wall Street and related protests), 2011 represents a series of events that arguably equal the protest cycles of the revolutions of 1848 or the worldwide May 1968 student-­led revolts.2 To one degree or another, all of these parts of “the movement of the squares,” as they are sometimes collectively called, arose because of the massive growth of income inequality over the preceding decades.3 That is one reason that a number of veteran movement activists, especially those in the alterglobalization movement surveyed in the previous chapter, played significant roles in Occupy. The alterglobalization movement laid the groundwork for Occupy by documenting the great impoverishment brought about by neoliberal (supposedly “free market”)

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economic policies on a global scale. So-­called austerity programs did their greatest damage in the global South, but by 2011 economic distress was being felt increasingly in the overdeveloped Northern Hemisphere as well, including the United States. Occupy Wall Street arose in response to this enormous set of economic problems. The initial call for an occupation of Wall Street was put forth by the magazine Adbusters as one of many such provocations from that “culture jamming” journal. That it touched off the huge events that became the Occupy movement surprised the Adbusters editors as much as it did the rest of the public—­ the only explanation seems to be that it was the right message at the right time. Still, the call would never have led to a significant occupation had it not been for the work of longtime activists, especially those in the global justice movement, who turned the vague idea of an anti–­Wall Street demonstration into a true occupation lasting several months and spreading to dozens of sites across the United States and to 950 cities in eighty-­two countries around the world.4 It is impossible to assess this worldwide impact within the confines of this chapter, but by looking at the origin site of the movement, we can clearly see that Occupy offered a powerful set of arguments at just the right time. The “right time” clearly included coming in the wake of the massive protests of the Arab Spring, many of which involved occupations, such as the Egyptian demonstrations centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. A number of activists who had either taken part in or been journalistic witnesses to the events in the Middle East also participated in Occupy.5 Concerns about income inequality had been deepened by the previous summer’s revolts in Greece, Spain, and Brazil against the impact of “austerity” programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank that led to environmental degradations and diminished economic prospects for millions of people. Income inequality had been growing for several decades in virtually every country on earth, with the wealth gap in the United States the highest among the ten most industrialized countries. While the United States is unrivaled in terms of total wealth, the nation’s income gap between the rich and the poor is greater than that of 70 percent of countries around the world. Particularly striking is the gap between the top 1 percent of earners and the remaining 99 percent. In the 1980s, the top bracket held about 9 percent of all U.S. wealth, but by 2017 the figure was close to 25 percent. That such a tiny fraction of

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the population controlled fully one-­quarter of all the money in the country was unprecedented. This same pattern has been repeated in similar or worse form in virtually all nations around the globe under neoliberal regimes. Economic disparities have disproportionately affected young people, a constituency historically among the most prone to protest. In the United States, income levels for most people were largely stagnant from 1979 to 2007 and then took a deep dip during the 2008 worldwide financial crisis. The exception was that top 1 percent of earners, who saw a staggering 275 percent growth in their assets over the same period. And, of course, it was that figure that gave rise to the slogan that more than any other gave Occupy its identity and coherence: “We are the 99 percent!”6 In the history of political sloganeering there has seldom been a more apt and effective phrase than this one, which seeks to rhetorically unite 99 percent of the population against the remaining 1 percent. Such a declaration has the potential to unite folks across lines of gender, race/ ethnicity, age, occupation, religion, region, education, and dozens of other social variables. Of course, in practice, such a coalition has proved quite fragile to maintain. Nevertheless, particularly in its early stages, the 99 percent movement was wildly successful in putting the case against income inequality on the social agenda of the nation in ways that shifted debate and at times shifted ideological lines. Homeowners facing foreclosure, students with massive debt, the unemployed, the underemployed, the underpaid—­all felt income inequality viscerally, and many had come to feel that the “hope and change” offered by President Obama had been false hope and too little change. Many felt they had no real place to voice those feelings and no convincing framework to explain them. OWS gave them a platform and some sense of the roots of the problem. Polls taken during the OWS action showed that close to 80 percent of Americans believed that income inequality was growing and that those in the top income bracket were disproportionately and unfairly reaping the benefits. Half a decade later those sentiments remained largely unchanged, with 75 percent of Americans polled in 2015 saying that the economic system is rigged in favor of the wealthiest. The occupation landed on a small plot of land a couple of blocks from the major Wall Street firms. That space, Zuccotti Park, was quickly rechristened Liberty Square in homage to Tahrir Square and the other

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spaces in the movement of the squares that preceded this new insurgency into the heart of the global economic empire. Given the relatively short duration of the Occupy encampments, roughly September to December 2011 for OWS and not much longer for most others, some have characterized Occupy as more of a moment than a movement. But the protest had all the elements of a movement, and it clearly drew upon a host of movement organizations. Moreover, not all effective movements last long. The most common observation about Occupy, that it “changed the conversation” about income inequality in the United States and elsewhere, is the very definition of the “reframing” work central to most social movements. Occupy may have been short-­lived, but millions in the United States and beyond were moved, emotionally and ideologically, by the economic arguments the activists made. And the repercussions are still being felt years later. As witness and participant Rebecca Solnit has written: “Some Occupy encampments lasted well into 2012, and others spawned things that are still with us, coalitions and alliances and senses of possibility and frameworks for understanding what’s wrong and what could be right. It was a sea change, a watershed, a dream realized imperfectly (because only unrealized dreams are perfect), a groundswell that is still ground on which to build.”7 During the 2016 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders in particular (but also, in a perversely distorted way, Donald Trump) brought attention to economic inequality issues not previously high on the agenda of either major political party.8 How did Occupy Wall Street, and the wider Occupy movement, bring about this shift in political awareness? The answer is complex, but much was accomplished through artful forms of protest. Those forms were also shaped by and helped to shape the changing nature of social protest in the Internet era.

DIGITIZING DISSENT: FROM INDYMEDIA TO SOCIAL MEDIA As Paolo Gerbaudo has noted, the transition from the alterglobalization movement (charted in chapter 9) to related subsequent movements like Occupy included an important change in communication media: “Where self-­managed activist internet services like Indymedia and activist mailing lists were the media of choice of the anti-­globalisation movement, contemporary activists are instead shamelessly appropriating corporate

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social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.”9 One of the advantages of corporate social media is that they afford activists greater opportunities to converse with communities that are not yet politically engaged. Sociologists have long noted the key role played by “social networks” (organized lines of connection among individuals) as recruitment sites for activism. Think of the crucial roles played by church congregations and black colleges in the Civil Rights movement. But finding and gaining the attention of new networks has historically been a very difficult task. By definition, such groups tend to be rather inward-­looking and exclusive. New media social networks, by contrast, are generally more permeable. This means that a clever image or slogan deployed by a movement can circulate quickly far beyond the realm of already commit­ ted progressive activists, entering into dozens of nonpolitical and quasi-­ political spaces via the intricate webs of relations enabled by social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Once one social media user discovers a post and decides to share it, in literally only seconds that post enters the purview of other users’ entire networks—­of teachers, knitters, book clubbers, Harry Potter fans, gamers, or whatever. However, as Gerbaudo and many others have also noted, the rise of what some have dubbed “hashtag activism” has a number of limitations as well. One downside of this instant communication is that the very speed of its dissemination often overwhelms thoughtful exchange of ideas, reducing politics to memes and simplified slogans. Another problem is that the most often used sites—­Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—­are commercially driven, so they may shape content in ways that can distort activist messaging, for example, with nearby links to ads and other irrelevant and even politically antithetical materials. They also lack privacy safeguards, since many new media corporations cooperate with government surveillance under programs like PRISM.10 This has led some critics to suggest that independent social media should predominate in actions, as they did in the Indymedia era.11 As the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election shows, corporate sites will sell space to anyone, regardless of political ideology or truthfulness of presentation. Moreover, in a world where many already feel a deep sense of placelessness, of displacement (almost one-­third of all people in the world live outside their countries of origin), the use of new digital media can inadvertently intensify a lack of connection to real spaces. That is

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one reason that geographically grounded social spaces like Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park take on extraordinary importance as places where face-­ to-­face democracy can flourish.12 The 2011–­12 wave of protests, including Occupy, revealed the complexities and contradictions of movements’ use of digital media. The importance of new media in recent movements is undeniable, but it has also been exaggerated at times through labels such as “the Facebook Revolt” and “the Twitter Revolution.” That is as silly as calling the French Revolution “the Salon Revolution,” or the American Revolution “the Broadside Revolution.” And some of this exaggeration has seemed to suggest that the Internet is inherently on the side of liberation movements. But if it was not already clear that there is nothing inherently progressive about the Internet and social media as a force, it is now unmistakably obvious in the wake of the rise of right-­wing extremism in the United States (Trump), Europe (Brexit and Jean-­Marie Le Pen), and elsewhere. New media, just like the older media of television and film, can be used to circulate all manner of ideas from across the political spectrum. While initially it was primarily progressives who saw the political potential of new media, in recent years right-­wing extremists have taken advantage of these media to unite disparate reactionary groups around the globe in mutually reinforcing digital networks, often by using deeply dishonest but effective propaganda (fake news). Occupy art activists certainly felt the contradictions inherent in using digital media largely controlled by giant corporations, and they struggled to find a balance between movement-­based networks (like Occupii, N-­1, and Diaspora*) and commercial communication networks. Most movements need to find a balance between the wide dissemination of information made possible by the always somewhat distorting corporate media platforms and the greater message control, accompanied by a narrowing of audience, offered by movement-­centered, noncommercial media. Movements also need to strike a balance between useful vigilance and disruptive paranoia in recognizing that online activ­ ity leaves digital footprints that authorities might use to their advantage. Movements have always been closely scrutinized and infiltrated by the state and other authorities. This is not a new problem, but it has been deepened by new technical capabilities. The heightened degree of surveillance under which movements currently operate gives activists

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even greater reason to assume that their work is known to authorities and not waste time worrying about infiltrators. Secrecy breeds dissension in movements in any event, and government agents can easily play upon such dissension. At the same time, activists and movement allies need to be vigilant in documenting state abuses of surveillance powers and need to work tirelessly to restore privacy as a social and political right for all citizens.

ASSEMBLING THE 99 PERCENT Zuccotti Park initially seemed a singularly uninspiring place to site a protest, let alone one that would end up echoing all around the globe. It was not the first choice of organizers; it became the Occupy site only after police blocked a couple of the more welcoming places initially targeted. Zuccotti is nothing more than a half-­acre rectangle of granite slabs, wedged between huge skyscrapers, covered randomly by additional large blocks of granite that are meant to serve as seats for picnickers but look like nothing so much as elongated coffins. The only green areas disrupting the stony ground are small plots encircling the forty or so twenty-­foot-­tall honey locust trees that arise incongruously from the concrete. At one corner of the site stands a seventy-­foot orange-­red piece of public art by Mark di Suvero titled Joie de Vivre. Consisting of what appear to be steel girders on end arranged rather like a tripod, the sculpture was an object of both love and scorn among protesters, whose pursuit of life’s joys had an equally colorful but less hard-­edged quality. In another corner of the park is a life-­size bronze sculpture of a businessman with a briefcase on his lap, open to reveal papers and a cell phone. (In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, rescue workers actually approached the ash-­covered sculpture, at first unaware that the man was not a real human being.) During the occupation, this lonely figure was severely outnumbered by folks doing a rather different kind of business than is common on Wall Street. A round of granite blocks near the western edge of the park was dubbed a sacred space and became the site for an infamous, incessant drum circle. (In October, in an ominous development, the New York Police Department added a panoptic surveillance tower to the park.)

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The park, built in 1968, was originally called Liberty Plaza Park, a name not referencing political liberty so much as the nearby One Liberty Plaza street address. In 2006, Liberty Plaza was rebuilt (it had been damaged during the 9/11 attack on the nearby World Trade Center) and renamed for John Zuccotti, then chairman of the multibillion-­ dollar real estate firm that owned it, Brookfield Office Properties. The fact that the park was privately owned and thus did not fall solely under the jurisdiction of the city proved initially important in limiting government control when the protest began. Unbeknownst to most people, including most OWS activists, the site has a revolutionary history. During the events leading up to the American Revolution in 1776, a coffee­ house on the site of the current park was a venue for radical organizing by the Sons of Liberty. These American revolutionaries held a huge anti–­ Tea Tax rally outside that venue in 1773, one of the first major acts of rebellion in the colonies.13 In September 2011, few dared hope that the site would once again set loose the spirit of rebellion against unjust economic conditions. The anticonsumerism journal Adbusters had been issuing calls to protest on Wall Street for some time. In May 2011, it helped generate a march on the citadel of U.S. finance in which some ten thousand people participated. Over the summer of that year, longtime grassroots activists, especially folks in the global justice movement, joined by newly minted Internet activists associated with the hacker group Anonymous, worked to try to bring an Arab Spring–­like protest to U.S. soil. Various protest calls were sent forth, some met by virtual silence and some resulting in small gatherings of the already committed. A renewed Adbusters call in mid-­July to occupy Wall Street on September 17, a date chosen for no greater reason than that it was the editor’s mother’s birthday, seemed likely to be equally ineffectual. But instead, a new rhetoric around terms like “the 99 percent” proved to be the match that ignited the fires carefully laid by previous activists. Not unlike the lunch-­counter sit-­in in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 that set off a massive surge of protest all across the South, the tent city set up in mid-­September in Zuccotti Park soon reverberated around the country and the world in unexpected and unpredictable ways. One week into the action, on September 24, NYPD deputy inspector Anthony Bologna was caught on

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cell phone video pepper-­spraying a group of writhing and screaming young women protesters who had already been corralled into an orange plastic pen. That day more than eighty protesters were arrested in one of many early attempts to destroy the occupation. But the brutality of the police attack backfired. Images of the young women, ironically first published under a salacious headline by the tabloid New York Daily News, were followed up by circulation of the video on mainstream media. This brought greater attention, a spike in participation, and, for a while, a bit more caution from the police. Soon images of the small tent city in the now renamed Liberty Square were flashing around the globe, sparking hundreds of similar encampments. The on-­the-­ground occupation was quickly paralleled by an online version. As Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder describe it: “Another crowd assembled in a range of online spaces. Moving between the physical and the virtual, participants navigated a hypercity built of granite and asphalt, algorithms and information, appropriating its platforms and creating new structures. As they posted links, updates, photos and videos on social media sites; as they deliberated in chat rooms and collaborated on crowdmaps; as they took to the streets with smartphones, occupiers tested the parameters of this multiply mediated world.”14 There was also often a live video feed from the site to let people around the world see for themselves what was happening in real time. A transgender security expert, Justine Tunney, registered the domain name OccupyWallSt.org in mid-­July, and once the occupation got going the site became something of an official source of information, sometimes garnering fifty thousand views a day. The Internet occupation was important in bringing folks into the movement who would have found physical occupation and the risk of arrest too high a price to pay. Most important in this process perhaps was the creation of the Tumblr site “We Are the 99 Percent,” with its handwritten personal messages of outrage and concern at rampant economic inequalities in an era of fabulous wealth accumulated by the few.15 As with much of the action, there was in the Tumblr site a creative tension between digital delivery and crude, handmade, individualized content. The site eventually came to include more than two hundred representative personal stories about life under tough economic conditions in the United States.

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Before long the inhospitable concrete park was efficiently divided into zones reflecting both the internal needs and the outreach focus of the occupation. These consisted of practical areas designated as Kitchen, Sanitation, Comfort, Library, Medical, and Security, while strategic groups like Media Outreach, Information, Music, and Arts held other spots. At the eastern end of the park, a curved set of steps forms a space adaptable as a kind of small amphitheater. It was here that the New York City General Assembly, the political heart of Occupy Wall Street, held most of its gatherings. This particular assembly had started in early August as a small group of rather contentious activists from the global justice and related movements. Not long after the kickoff of Occupy on September 17, the assembly found itself suddenly consisting of hundreds and then thousands of participants.16 This proved exhilarating but also logistically complicated and at times confusing. Using a consensus process in which all participants theoretically had equal voices and even one strong objection could defeat a proposal, the General Assembly held daily meetings lasting several hours to discuss the meaning(s) of the occupation, debate possible demands, and organize ongoing events. Partly in response to the initial Adbusters call for “one demand,” the assembly spent much time discussing what that demand might be. Debated ideas included the following (among many others): impose a Tobin or Robin Hood tax to limit speculative financial dealings like those that caused the 2008 recession; end the legal fiction of “corporate personhood,” in which corporations have the rights of a person but few of the responsibilities of personhood; restore the Glass–­Steagall Act, which until 1999 restricted banks’ ability to gamble with investor funds; overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which effec­tively ended any limits on campaign contributions by corporations and the wealthy; institute full employment; end or radically change the Federal Reserve System; and forgive debts engendered during the lead­up to the 2008 financial crisis. None of these ideas rose to the level of consensus, and it became clear that needed reforms, as a start to introducing wider systemic changes, were too numerous to reduce to a single focus. Many pointed to the bigger picture, to the creation of a new “green economy,” one based on a decentralization of real economic power to local communities.17

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Movements are many things, and one of their important but too little acknowledged functions is as educational institutions.18 As one OWS participant-­observer put it, “They came for a protest and arrived at a school, a school of a sort that they didn’t know was a school until they started learning its lessons.”19 Occupy was not educational in the (misguided) common sense of imparting knowledge from a teacher to students. It was closer to the original Latin meaning of educatio, to draw forth. Dozens of ideas and interpretations—­some complementary, some contradictory, some both at once—­floated around the occupation. What they all had in common was that they placed nondogmatic, experimental ideas about economic and social class on the nation’s agenda. The People’s Library on-­site eventually had a total of 5,554 volumes. Some books provided analysis of politics and economics, others just offered respite from the rigors of occupying such an inhospitable place.20 Occupy functioned as an educational institution not only for participants but also for millions of Americans who started to think more deeply about the political economy of the nation and the world economic system as a result of hearing those voices arising from Liberty Square and other occupied spaces. The sites were also crucially schools of democracy in that the very structure of the occupations and their decision-­making processes were teaching a new way to live politically.21 The common name applied to the kinds of analysis that swirled around Occupy is political economy, a term that recognizes that economic reality is always largely determined under capitalism by political decisions that are almost never subject to citizen control. If the largest single determinant of quality of life, the economy, is placed outside the political, it matters little what else can be politically decided. As global justice movement activists have long shown, these days the more apt phrase might be economic politics, in the sense that the former ever more deeply shapes the latter. Occupy sought to expose the myth of the “free market” that uses the claim that only an unregulated economy brings freedom and prosperity by pointing physically and symbolically to the sites where supposedly absent regulation is skewed daily to the benefit of the world’s 1 percent. As one participant-­analyst puts it: “Rather than appeal to or engage the nominal representatives of the government, the narrative and tactic of OWS was to go ‘directly’ to the symbolic home of global capitalism.”22 The point was to remind folks where the real

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power lies, to make it clear that money drives politics not merely in the obvious sense of campaign finance but in every possible arena. Denied access to bullhorns or other amplifying devices by the police, participants in General Assembly meetings and other events relied on the natural human voice and the “people’s microphone” (a method in which the words of speakers are repeated row by row from the front to the back of the assembly, so that everyone can hear). The human voice here put the lie to the exaggerated claim that life today, especially among young people, takes place only online, only in digitally mediated spaces. As one participant described this process: “Imagine the quiet of people listening, and the sound of the repetition of the words of the person speaking. Imagine the power of direct democracy moving through your body along with thousands around you.”23 Relaying one person’s speech through another and then another and then another literally embodies a sense of collective responsibility for political discourse. Many celebrities and celebrity activists (Lupe Fiasco, Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Slavoj Žižek, Cornel West, Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Kanye West, Tom Morello, Mark Ruffalo, Judith Butler, Yoko Ono, Talib Kweli, and many others) came to the site and spoke, but their voices were transformed into something less and more than their celebrity. Their voices were taken over and overtaken by a community. Likewise, several generations of experienced U.S. activists, along with current activists recently involved in the movements in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere, were listened to attentively in the assemblies. But their voices too were reembodied via the people’s mic. Their impact rested in their words, not in the automatic authority of the speaker’s place in the social order. In size if perhaps not always in political sophistication, the assembly meetings resembled nothing so much as the activity that took place at the ancient Athenian Agora, the site often portrayed as the seat of Western democracy. Like the five hundred citizens chosen by lot to take part in the governing of the ancient Greek city-­states, the several hundred regulars of the OWS General Assembly included not only left-­ leaning activists but also a somewhat random sample of U.S. citizens, more than half of whom had never participated in a demonstration before.24 In addition to offering a visible challenge to the abandonment of politics to a class of professional politicians, the encampment offered a counterpoint to the increasing loss of public spaces. The Athenian

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Agora was also a marketplace, but over the past few decades marketplaces too have been privatized, and most interaction now takes place in private shopping malls, where political organizing is specifically outlawed. The presence of the protesters on privately owned park grounds symbolically challenged the diminution of public political space. Over the course of the two months, thousands endured harsh conditions in the encampment, a harshness intentionally aggravated by the NYPD, who confiscated the generators used to power heaters that offered the only buffer against often-­chilly fall nights. While the General Assembly meetings were the heart of OWS’s ongoing attempt to articulate a different economic vision, and the encampment itself was the core message of dissent from the existing system, both in New York and elsewhere the Occupy movement moved out from camps to an array of protest sites in order to highlight key issues or bring issues to appropriate sites. These included demonstrations in front of banks, at major Wall Street firms, at sites of evictions, and in front of New York’s city hall, where a “Bloombergville” encampment had earlier focused on the lack of low-­income housing. The central fact of economic inequality allowed for countless more specific protests in all the sectors, addressing all the ways in which that inequality shapes the everyday lives of citizens. Each city where Occupy set up sites had its own local issues, its own examples of the devastating impact of an economic system that works only for the few. By September 21, solidarity encampments had already arisen in London, Madrid, San Francisco, Toronto, Athens, Sydney, Milan, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Algiers, and many other cities. Occupy had struck a chord. To name just a couple of events flowing from OWS: on October 5, thousands of Greeks found new energy and took to the streets in Athens, where Syntagma Square had seen numerous demonstrations over previous months, to protest another round of bank bailouts and cuts to social services; and on October 6, about five thousand people marched in Portland, Oregon, in support of low-­income housing and programs for the homeless. Over the course of the New York occupation, there were almost daily big and small marches around the city, including a massive one featuring more labor unions than had acted in unison in years. Several unions offered important financial support to OWS.25 On October 20, dozens of Occupy Harlem protesters were arrested for civil disobedience

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in a protest aimed at unfair foreclosures and evictions, among other issues. On November 1, Occupy Oakland called a citywide general strike in support of protesters injured in a police crackdown and managed to shut down the Port of Oakland. On October 1, more than a thousand Occupy supporters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to bring their message to a different borough. More than seven hundred demonstrators were, as so often happens, arrested on trumped-­up charges that were later dropped. The action on Brooklyn Bridge, itself a work of architectural art that has been a favorite subject of numerous poets and visual artists, might be folded into the massive project of putting art into protest that occurred in Liberty Square and in sites of protests all around the city and the globe. In a work paying homage to Walt Whitman, author of the classic “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a young occupying poet wrote this about the march across the bridge: What better way to pay back Walt Whitman than to honor his song at the crossing to Brooklyn, to march across the bridge over the waters he crossed so many times, the bridge that poets have embraced as a symbol, . . . of democracy, of the great crossing of humanity from tyranny to freedom. They are here Walt and I am with them, the African father pushing his daughter in a stroller, she holding a sign that proclaims she too will fight for her future, the old man singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” with wit and irony, the veterans who know only too well of betrayal, the young girl with bright fiery hair whose strong voice chants, “We got sold out, banks got bailed out!” the unshaven college boy who has slept in the park for two weeks seizing the future with determined hands, the middle aged lady, vibrant and experienced, rallying us to raise our voices, the mother and daughter holding a sign that reads—­ America, Can you hear us now! All ages, all races, all voices, songs and chants overlapping, strangers becoming comrades.26

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OCCUPY ALL THE ARTS The image of a ballerina balanced atop Wall Street’s Charging Bull sculpture is arguably the most iconic one to emerge out of the Occupy movement. This image, which accompanied the initial call from Adbusters is often credited with touching off the movement. The origin story is far more complex than that, but it is fitting that such an aesthetically rich image should come to symbolize Occupy, since the events were thoroughly saturated with artistry at every turn. Journalist-­participant Nathan Schneider, while documenting the messy reality and often flawed nature of the Occupy movement’s efforts, nevertheless concluded that OWS was a thing of beauty, viewing the occupation as “a living work of art [that] brought every aspect of life into sharper focus. It was a utopian act, but in the form of realism. With artists in charge, Occupy Wall Street was art before it was anything properly organized, before it was even politics. It was there to change us first and make demands later.”27 Yates McKee, the author who has most comprehensively and carefully studied the role of the arts in Occupy campaigns, notes that the core participants were largely “students, . . . artists, writers, designers, programmers, and other ‘creative workers’ in their 20s and 30s living under conditions of precarity and indebtedness that had been exacerbated by financial crisis.”28 There were people from all walks of life and a surprisingly diverse range of political ideologies in the movement, especially in the early stages. But young “creatives” played a predominant role throughout. McKee makes clear that artists were at the heart of the mo(ve)ment but counters the idea that they were from the fringes of society. Rather, he shows how the story of art workers parallels that of many other social groups experiencing economic distress. What makes the work of Occupy’s artists particularly relevant is that they sought not merely to deploy an array of art forms but also to redefine and restructure the political economy of the art world. OWS artists highlighted the ways in which the art world enacts the same inequalities found throughout the wider society. The world of rich patrons, fancy galleries, outrageously priced artworks, and museums showcasing the work of only a handful of fabulously successful artists is a microcosm of the larger economic system that pits the 1 percent against the other 99 percent. Moreover, speculation in the “art market,” in which often aesthetically

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tasteless or indifferent super-­wealthy patrons treat artworks as just another commodity, perfectly parallels and mimics the kind of stock market and financial market speculation that caused the Great Recession of 2008. If creative workers were somewhat overrepresented in OWS, their story is very much the story of all the other workers in the United States who have found themselves in ever more precarious circumstances, even as the wealth of the richest members of the population has grown exponentially. Occupy artists embedded their critiques of the 1 percent in a truly impressive range of objects and forms. Even the mainstream media noticed how important art was to the occupation. In reference to the movement’s take on racism, a CNN correspondent noted that “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool.”29 The location of the initial occupation in the city generally viewed as the art capital of the United States certainly somewhat exaggerated the aesthetic dimension, but in practice most movements rely on a range of art forms to communicate internally and with the wider world. The breadth and depth of artistic activity around the New York occupation was untypical only in degree, not in kind. OWS used all of the art forms covered in this book so far (music, poetry, puppetry, murals, graphic arts, and so on), and to these it added newly emergent art forms like augmented reality and wall projection illumination. Occupy Wall Street was singularly artful even before the occu­pa­ tion began. On September 1, 2011, more than two weeks prior to the official start of OWS on September 17, a group calling itself the Arts and Culture Working Group made a first attempt to occupy Wall Street, during which nine of the twelve original group members were arrested for civil disobedience. Over the course of the next several weeks the Arts and Culture Working Group came to include hundreds of artists working in all aesthetic modes, from poetry to music to puppetry to virtual-­ reality art. The collective quickly grew so large that it needed to branch off into smaller “guilds,” eventually including the Performance Guild, the Music Guild, the Puppetry Guild, the Poetry Guild, and more. One of the founding members of the Arts and Culture group, Alex Carvalho, offered this succinct and clear-­eyed vision of the mission of the guilds: “You need to change the aesthetics. You need to change the symbols, the images people use as a backdrop to frame the conversation.”30 Social

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movement theorists use this very language of “framing” to talk about the impact of movements. Movements work to realign our images of reality, and as we have seen throughout this book, artists, as consummate image shapers, often play a major role in these reorientations. Not since the days of the HIV/AIDS protest group ACT UP (see chapter 7) had so many artists and art forms been brought to bear on one site of protest. And while their goal was a wider one of societal transformation, along the way involvement in OWS led many art workers to rethink what art is or should be in the twenty-­first century. This included a critique of the celebrity artist system that involved Occupy protesters placing so-­called high art alongside more do-­it-­yourself amateur productions. For example, in intentional contrast to the more slickly manufactured graphic designs that were also an important part of the demonstrations, many marchers and occupiers held up placards consisting of images and words painted on plain cardboard. (One part of Liberty Square was set aside for the creation of these signs, including many made on boxes from the hundreds of pizzas from area pizzerias donated by participants at other protest sites in Egypt, Spain, and Greece; by local unions; and by just plain folks from all over.) One of the more pointed ones reminded onlookers that the government and taxpayers in U.S. culture at large seem not to value art very highly. It read, “This sign would be more creative but you’ve stopped funding the arts.” The placard perhaps also hinted that the only value of art acknowledged by those with real wealth and power, the 1 percent, is the value defined solely by obscene prices they pay to privatize what should be public. Of course, the placard holder was being overly modest in that, contrary to what its words asserted, the sign was indeed quite creative, representing a clear, clever message. The DIY artistry at the heart of Occupy sought to counter all the forces of elitist and commodified art, and to reclaim once-­ radical artists from earlier eras for the new insurgency. Those offering less-­polished DIY art worked alongside profes­ sionals in the art and culture guilds in the spirit of full egalitarianism. The movement’s devotion to “horizontalism,” as embodied in consensus decision making and avoidance of permanent leaders, carried over into the guilds.31 In movement spaces, no favoritism was shown to so-­ called known artists as opposed to unknown ones. As McKee has documented, a number of politically rich avant-­garde artistic movements

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and contemporary practitioners fed into Occupy.32 But no hierarchy of high art versus popular art, poets versus versifiers, or graphic artists versus gallery artists was maintained. In the art world as microcosm analogy, this represents a critique of the extreme class divisions of the wider social order. Even among other capitalist industrialized nations, the United States stands out for its extraordinarily wide wage gap. In Norway, for example, the wage gap is 48 to 1, meaning that the average CEO is paid 48 times what the average worker earns. In Japan, the gap is 67 to 1, and in the United Kingdom it is 84 to 1, but in the United States the gap is a whopping 354 to 1.33 Even if one is a strong believer in capitalist incentives, it is hard to justify the system as practiced in the United States. The kind of extreme greed represented by this ratio lies at the root of the forces that led to the Wall Street–­induced worldwide recession that hit in the fall of 2008. Not long after the formation of the Arts and Culture Working Group, a second group calling itself the Arts and Labor Guild was formed. The members’ goals included protesting unfair conditions among art handlers, gallery workers, and art production staff. The group called attention to the vast disparity between the 1 percent of artists who succeed in the art world and the 99 percent who labor in obscurity and often in economic marginality, as well as to the gap between highly paid artists and their support staff, who often work for minimum wage. Now named Arts & Labor, the group describes itself in its mission statement as “dedicated to exposing and rectifying economic inequalities and exploitative working conditions in our fields through direct action and educational initiatives. By forging coalitions, fighting for fair labor practices, and reimagining the structures and institutions that frame our work, Arts & Labor aims to achieve parity for every member of the 99%.”34 Since the events of OWS, Arts & Labor has morphed into an organization working for new and stronger artists’ unions, alliances, and collectives. Alongside the energy in design coming from the streets, with those handmade signs of corrugated cardboard and other makeshift materials, the working group Occupy Design also brought the work of more than 350 graphic artists to bear on spreading movement ideas through placards, posters, postcards, banners, and more. Some designs were taken up by the various Occupy sites around the country, and others spread in

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meme form online around the globe. Some Occupy Design collectives continued for years afterward to support and disseminate protest art across a wide range of issues reflecting the numerous concerns raised within occupied spaces, including ecological, economic, and human rights concerns.35 It made perfect sense for OWS to target arts and culture venues, given that those institutions rival Wall Street itself as a source of financial activity in New York City. Museums and galleries, opera houses and pop music venues, modern dance and ballet performances, Broadway shows, skyscraping architectural wonders, media culture centers like Rockefeller Center—­these were the heart of both local and tourist life in the city. Thus, not surprisingly, the city’s well-­known museums became key venues in and around which Occupy raised questions about art for the 99 percent. Early on, “Occupy museums” became a slogan, and soon an Occupy Museums guild was formed. These “centers of art detention,” as novelist Ishmael Reed once dubbed museums, proved to be rich targets for several varieties of aesthetic guerrilla actions.36 The spirit of Occupy Museums spread rapidly around the globe, and occupy encampments arose in front of many of the world’s most famous museums. One of the founders of the guild overlaid the rhetoric of Wall Street neatly with that of the art world: “The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on the false scarcity and propaganda concerning the absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitist of elite.”37 The Occupy Museums guild in New York offered a very clear analogy between Wall Street and the city’s elite sites of art detention. The group describes its origins and continuing work as follows: We saw a direct connection between the corruption of high finance and the corruption of “high culture.” For example, MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art] shares board members with Sotheby’s auction house, where the value of art is synonymous with speculation. . . . Sotheby’s auction house locked out their unionized art handlers, refusing to pay them health care during a year of record profits. . . .

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#Occupy All the Arts  345 So we began to occupy museums in New York City. We danced and chanted at their doors, and held open assemblies on museum steps to free up a space of dialogue . . . for the 99%. More and more people joined us. Museums must be held accountable to the public. They help create our historical narratives and common symbols. They wield enormous power within our culture and over the entire art market. We occupy museums because museums have failed us.38

As this excerpt from the Occupy Museum website suggests, in addition to targeting museums the guild went directly after related sites like Sotheby’s art auction house, host of the most high-­profile elite art sales. For example, in solidarity with the art handlers’ union, Teamsters Local 814, Occupy Museums rallied in front of the auction house in support of a call for a living wage for the folks who enable the physical circulation of artworks. (After repeated rallies, the union won a much-­improved contract in May 2012.)39 While the Occupy Museums movement helped strengthen labor unions in the art worker sector, attempts to shame museums as sites of art incarceration met with more mixed results. For example, at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, one of the oldest museums in Europe, a young German architect, Alexander Beck, sought to artfully enhance an Occupy encampment on-­site. Beck installed twenty-­eight bright white, modern, minimalist tents in front of the museum, adding them to the small, ragtag group of occupier tents that had been there since the opening of the museum’s then current exhibition of elite contemporary art. Erected in guerrilla fashion at sunrise, the lovely, uniform white structures were adorned with words representing basic evils of contemporary life, such as “greed,” “profit,” “excessive pride,” and “inequality,” in a symbolic protest that strategically appropriated the codes of contemporary art to occupy a prime site on the museum lawn. Fearing that this massive overnight increase in the size of the protest camp would justify their instant eviction, the occupiers, as Beck later recounted, came to the unanimous decision to declare both parts of the camp, the makeshift original encampment and the well-­ordered tent city, a “total work of art.” As the journal Arts Monthly characterized the action, “The incongruity of the two adjacent tent villages, one reflecting the image of anarchic creativity associated with global protest movements, the other mimicking

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the clean and orderly aesthetics of museum modernism, created a disconcerting semiotic spectacle. As a result, susceptible members of the public were at risk of assuming that this prominently sited intervention . . . was actually part of the official exhibition.”40 Perhaps to intentionally increase this confusion, the curator of the exhibition inside the museum released a statement that sought to co-­opt the protest by suggesting that it was part of the show. This response could be seen as either deepening or taking the sting out of the protest.41 In any event, the Kassel protest was just one of many around the globe in which activists sought to raise issues about the containment of art in limited, elitist spaces and the decontextualization of revolt that can occur when critical art is commercialized and incorporated into depoliticized places.42 Occupy Museums carried out dozens of events in New York and in Occupy sites around the world.43 It continues its fight to this day.44 In an elaborate game of point/counterpoint, museums in turn sought to co-­opt some of the energy of the movement. Within days of the first substantial media coverage of Occupy, MoMA as well as the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the New York Historical Society, and a dozen other museums sought to collect Occupy memorabilia, a move that, in effect, consigned and confined the events to memory, to history, even as they were unfolding. Museums, after all, imagine themselves as progressive, avant-­garde spaces, not sites promoting economic inequality. But the spirit of Occupy could never be fully contained within museum walls. A related intervention into history and reality arose from a collective calling itself ManifestAR (AR for augmented reality). This group of digital artists made its name originally through a guerrilla intervention into MoMA in which it created a virtual exhibition, accessible by smartphone, that overlay one of the museum’s own exhibitions. As it did with Occupy, MoMA responded by incorporating this antiexhibition into its own exhibition. It became difficult to tell just who was co-­opting whom in this process. ManifestAR continued its guerrilla work by connecting with Occupy. For example, it created a smartphone app that overlaid images on Wall Street office buildings, satirizing the exploitative business going on inside. Among the virtual overlays was one of money falling from the New York Stock Exchange’s ceiling, an homage to a “zap

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action” carried out by the Yippies in 1967, when Abbie Hoffman and others tossed money down from the exchange’s balcony onto the trading floor in order to watch brokers scramble for a little more cash. Another related image covered the exchange with the image of a slot machine, suggesting that the stock market is just Las Vegas for the 1 per­ cent. And as in casinos, the image suggested, the games are rigged to the advantage of the house.45 Augmented-­reality apps have great potential to add progressive commentary to all manner of public sites. Apps offered from a variety of online and face-­to-­face spaces could present critical image overlays at all kinds of venues widely visited by the public. Imagine, for example, an intervention into the controversy over Confederate statues that would make rich narratives available to statue viewers, robbing the sites of their continued function of whitewashing the history of slavery. Or imagine any number of roadside historical attractions with signs telling hegemonic stories challenged by a tourism app offering an alternative people’s history. Augmented-­reality projects remind us that all spaces are virtual, all spaces are mediated, and, in this sense, virtual spaces are just as real as any other. The physical occupation of Zuccotti Park and the Internet occupation are separable only if we privilege face-­to-­face relations or fail to remember that cyberspace is very much grounded in the real material forces of production (like those Chinese factories churning out iPhones and Dell laptops) and that cyberspace can be entered only from somewhere, no matter how mobile, in the so-­called real world. Augmented-­ reality projects should also remind us, however, that our reality is constantly being surveilled and augmented by distorting forces of state and corporate propaganda. A related, different kind of overlay art was (and still is) practiced by The Illuminator, a collective of performance artists and technologists who perfected the use of what they call “the bat signal” mode of projected art. The group “hacked” a 2002 Econoline 350 diesel van, installing a periscope platform that can push a large projector through the roof; the projector can then be maneuvered into position to splash images on the sides of buildings and other surfaces. During Occupy, The Illumina­ tor traveled around to emblazon messages on the very buildings where the 1 percent do their work. This included buildings occupied by the

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elites of the art world. For example, the group projected the words “To Be Bailed Out You Have to Be Arrested First” on some prominent Wall Street firms and “1% Museum” on the face of the Guggenheim. As one of the members noted, “The bat signal is really simple. It’s big and [easily legible culturally]. . . . It’s a call to arms and a call for aid, but instead of a superhero millionaire psychopath, like Bruce Wayne, it’s ourselves—­ it’s the 99% coming to save itself. . . . We are our own superhero.”46 As with murals, a bat signal’s impressive size makes it hard to ignore. Illuminating combines some of the iconic features of muralism with a much more mobile and easily changeable messaging capacity. The Illuminator can literally go anywhere and project onto anything. And it can do so without fear of being charged with property damage. By literally overlaying its messages onto the very targets of critique, The Illuminator undermines the hegemonic meanings of these sites. The group is also part of an effort to reclaim once-­public spaces that have been privatized as a result of the increasing corporate domination of politics. As its website notes, “The collective has engaged in hundreds of projection-­ interventions in public spaces, transforming the street from a space of passive consumption into a site of engagement, conflict and dialogue.”47 The field of visual arts nicely illustrates the complicated interactions between the spirit of egalitarianism and collective power in the movement and the efforts of some established artists to contribute to the movement. Important dialogues arose when somewhat superheroic (to use The Illuminator’s term) artists started to engage with Occupy. They found that they had to do so under a set of conditions that was different from what they were used to. The case of Shepard Fairey is illustrative. The influence of the movement on him can be seen in two images that represent how an artist used to working in the individualist mode most often celebrated in U.S. art culture was able to learn from collective critique. In the first image, Fairey modified his well-­known silkscreen poster portrait of President Obama above the word “Hope” with an image done in the same style and colors but featuring a figure in a Guy Fawkes mask (associated with the hacker collective Anonymous) wearing a “We Are the 99%” button. Below the figure were the words “Mr. President, We HOPE you are on our side.” Some in the movement read

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the poster as an attempt to co-­opt Occupy for the Democratic Party or an individual politician. In response to this critique and in dialogue with activists, Fairey changed the design to indicate that “We [the 99%] Are the Hope,” making clear that hope arises from collective, direct action, rather than from any one politician or from electoral politics alone as currently practiced in the United States. Fairey’s case can stand for the experience of any number of artists who under the influence of Occupy came to rethink their role in the wider society. A different Fairey contribution comments in a complex way on the relation of art to social movements and on the play between the serious and the humorous in much Occupy art. The poster “You Are Invited” offers an invitation to join the “Occupation Party.” Those words sit below an image clearly evoking a young female revolutionary from the Black Power era, replete with an iconic 1960s-­style Afro. As one reporter read it, “The poster’s retro look recalls a militant past, almost startling in our new millennial moment, and surely is meant as a challenge to the idea that as a society we are anywhere near ‘post-­race’ enlightenment.”48 The poster also humorously takes a shot at mainstream media coverage with a box resembling the rating box on a movie poster that contains the description “GA: General Assembly. This is not just hippies sleeping in the park. This is the first Constitutional Convention of the new Millennium.” The artist no doubt meant that last word to resonate with and speak to the generation of young people being labeled millennials. Another artist whose life and work was changed even more dramatically than Fairey’s by Occupy was Molly Crabapple. Her studio happened to be near Zuccotti Park, so the movement initially came to her, as it were. But she soon came to it. Crabapple’s apartment became something of an impromptu salon for Occupy activists, and her work became ubiquitous, leading Rolling Stone politics and economics writer Matt Taibbi to call Crabapple “Occupy’s greatest artist.” That claim probably had a personal angle, given that the “vampire squid” theme in Crabapple’s most well-­known Occupy artwork was drawn from Taibbi’s famous comment that Goldman Sachs was “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”49 Crabapple’s version of the vampire squid image went viral and spawned many variants, including “Octopi Wall Street!,” Pacific Northwest artist Ray Troll’s clever riff on the theme. Since this

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attempt to single out an artist ran against the grain of the Occupy movement, Crabapple, to her credit, always sought to keep her work in dialogue with the wider community of occupiers. Many of her illustrations were in fact merely translations of cardboard placards created by occupiers, which she turned into eye-­catching images suitable for distribution at rallies and online as memes. In addition to her banner work, Crabapple created pieces in her own inimitable graphic style, such as her poster “Our Lady of Liberty Park.”50 In her version, Lady Liberty is a woman of color surrounded by

“Octopi Wall Street!” poster by Ray Troll, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

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dozens of banners bearing OWS slogans, her long blue gown forming some of the central tents of the occupation: the People’s Library, the Medical tent, the Media tent, and the Info tent. Liberty has to be actively won by each new generation, and whatever else they hoped to achieve, the encampment participants were offering a reminder that liberty itself (and Liberty herself ) is on the side of practicing the art of dissent against a soul-­crushing system of unequal justice. Crabapple’s poster also alludes to the work of another great New York artist, graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, creator of the brilliant Holocaust work Maus, in which Nazi cats hunt Jewish mice, aided at times by Polish collaborator pigs. In Crab­ apple’s case, the occupying mice are being harassed by policing pigs directed by the famously fat cats of Wall Street. The harassment alluded to included hundreds of petty arrests, but, as one of the placards in the poster proclaims, ultimately, “You can’t arrest an idea.” Crabapple’s transformation from a solo artist to an encampment community artist can stand in for the experiences of many artists in New York and elsewhere whose work was deeply redirected by encounters with Occupy. As Crabapple expressed it: “Before Occupy I felt like using my art for activist causes was exploitive of activist causes. . . . What Occupy let me do . . . instead of just donating money to politics or just going to marches, [was] . . . to engage my art [directly] in politics.”51 Her story is as unique as her eclectic visual style, but it does ably represent a larger transformation of the art world.52 Crabapple consistently praised and supported the work of other Occupy artists, noting that it “was passionate, accessible, unironic—­art that bled and took sides. It was art out of the gallery and into the streets, into life. I hope it presented an alternative, a good strong alternative to detached, ironic uber-­ expensive art whose primary purpose is to fill up an oligarch’s loft.”53 In the wake of OWS, Crabapple’s continuing commitment to political art can be seen in her pieces on the war in Syria and her commentary on the Michael Brown shooting, one of many efforts linking Occupy to the Black Lives Matter movement. Occupy also surreptitiously enlisted some of the superheroic artists of history, the kind with works selling to one-­percenters at Sotheby’s for millions of dollars. One example of such appropriation art serves to demonstrate how Occupy used long-­famous artists to spread its messages around the world in meme form. In this case, the meme arose

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“Our Lady of Liberty Park,” by Molly Crabapple.

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from an Occupy-­inspired protest at the University of California, Davis, where the movement connected to issues of student debt, rising tuition, and the privatization of much public education. Updating Georges Seurat’s famous nineteenth-­century painting of peaceful picnickers in a Parisian park, the image inserts a police officer dousing the innocent park inhabitants with pepper spray, an allusion to a gratuitous attack on nonviolent student protesters that took place on the UC Davis campus that fall. In the actual event, in a fine display of nonviolent civil disobedience, the offending officer and his cohorts were quickly surrounded by student demonstrators who collectively chanted “You can go” until the officers were forced to leave the scene. Numerous meme versions of the event, appropriating the works of dozens of other renowned artists, covered the web in the days following—­a pepper-­spray Rembrandt, a pepper-­spray Bosch, a pepper-­spray Picasso, and so on. The pepper-­spray meme went deeply viral, with not only art-­centric versions but also dozens of others using images drawn from pop culture to carry the message of police brutality far and wide.54

Not surprisingly, given Zuccotti Park’s proximity to Broadway and the long-­standing notion that protest is a kind of political theater, the Drama Guild was a lively manifestation of Occupy arts. In contrast to the extremely high cost of access to performances on Broadway, the guild offered free street theater. As the guild stated in its “Broadway Broadside”: “In a time when downtown theaters are rapidly losing their spaces, being turned into high-­end fashion stores, Occupy Broadway is a symbolic attempt to regain the space of theatre as an accessible, popular art form, bringing it back to where it all started—­in a public space, for the common citizen. We are using public space to create a more colorful image of what our streets could look like, with public performances, art, and music. Through this movement, New York re-­imagines itself as a work of art, rather than a retail shopping mall.”55 One ambitious artist sought to place Occupy in the long history of drama and dramatic protest. Zoe Beloff put together a project she called “The Days of the Commune,” a performance art piece involving protesters and ordinary New Yorkers rehearsing in full costume a play

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by Bertolt Brecht about the 1871 seizure of Paris by the working class.56 In solidarity with OWS, Beloff understood that it was important to enact a revolutionary theatrical moment in this time and place—­that is, in Occupy time and on the street, not in a Broadway or even an Off-­ Broadway theater. As with all the other art forms, the Theater Guild’s commitment to horizontalism was clear as it sponsored spontaneous amateur street theater and performances by freelance clowns and jugglers, as well as pieces by professional companies like the Foundry Theatre, the Living Theatre, and the Urban Research troupe and by longtime activists and performance artists like the Yes Men. Harking back to the previous chapter, another significant kind of performance was brought into Occupy by the Puppetry Guild. Among the puppets making an appearance during OWS were a burlap twelve-­ foot Lady Liberty, connecting Liberty Square to the iconic statue in New York Harbor, and a representation of Martin Luther King Jr., linking Occupy to the long tradition of nonviolent protest. For the city’s Halloween parade, the guild developed a skit in which the superhero Unemployed Man took on the giant Wall Street Slot Bot 3000 money-­ eating cyborg, representing the New York Stock Exchange. Later, a not-­ flattering puppet of Mayor Michael Bloomscrooge appeared in an Occupy reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. (The Illuminator also projected the image of a ballot box stuffed with money onto Mayor Bloomberg’s residence.) Throughout the fall of 2011, a ubiquitous mustachioed “fat-­cat” capitalist Monopoly game figure representing the 1 percent could be seen in a host of parades, both those organized by OWS and those sponsored by the city.57 Poetry and spoken-­word performances were prominent in the Occupy movement as well, including an open-­mic session in Liberty Square every Wednesday. Like the other art guilds, the Poetry Guild practiced complete egalitarianism. During its weekly poetry assemblies, the names of those who would perform were chosen at random, with no preference given to Pulitzer Prize–­winning poets over novices. The first poetry assembly included more than fifty performers, and the numbers grew from then on. Soon an anthology of Occupy poetry was created. Initially, the poems were collected in a binder that was kept in a corner of the

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People’s Library. It was added to regularly over the weeks of occupation and eventually found a second home online, where it came to include poems sent in from all over the globe. The anthology was, like the occupation, open to anyone who wished to contribute, from established poets to first-­time authors. A lovely image by Crabapple adorned the binder’s cover. The anthology predictably drew snark from Forbes magazine, the Us magazine of the 1 percent, whose reviewer selected out and lampooned particular bits as sophomoric drivel. Certainly, it is not hard to find examples of Occupy poetry that fall far short of Blake, Byron, Shelley, Yeats, Ginsberg, or Adrienne Rich, but that is of course to miss the point. Recall that all the writers just named were revolutionaries as well as poets—­they no doubt would have forborne a few less-­than-­ heroic couplets for the sake of radical change. Some well-­known poets, like Geoffrey O’Brien and one-­time U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, both of whom had their ribs whacked by Berkeley police during the destruction of the UC campus Occupy site, offered their whole bodies, not just their bodies of work, to the cause.58 (In a brilliant response to the eviction, the next day UC students attached dozens of helium balloons to the Occupy tents so that they floated legally above the now-­outlawed campus grounds, an act that might itself be considered a work of Occupy performance art.) For those not able to be present at an occupation, a high-­profile Occupy Writers campaign published a statement signed by hundreds of prominent authors offering their support to “Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” But perhaps closer to the weird, magical spirit of Occupy arts is what happened when police came to break up the Liberty Square encampment on November 15: During the raid, Stephen Boyer, a poet, friend and OWS librarian, read poems from the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology aloud directly into the faces of riot police. As they pushed us away from the park with shields, fists, billy clubs and tear gas, I stood next to Stephen and watched while he yelled poetry at the top of his lungs into the oncoming army of riot police. Then, something incredible happened. Several of the police leaned in closer to hear the poetry. They lifted their helmet shields slightly to catch the words Stephen was shouting out to them, even while their fellow cops continued

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#Occupy All the Arts to stampede us. The next day, an officer who was guarding the entrance to Zuccotti Park told Stephen how touched he was by the poetry, how moved he was to see that we cared enough about words and books that we would risk violent treatment and arrest just to defend our love of books and the wisdom they contain.59

While hardly a typical police–­protester encounter, this story reminds us that the impacts of protests are always impossible to predict or fully understand. Virtually all modern movement cultures are immersed in music, and Occupy is no exception. Occupy music can be divided into three levels: music on-­site, a fund-­raising album, and songs written about the movement. Undoubtedly the most commented-­upon sounds that emanated from within OWS came from the (in)famous drum circle. The drumming can stand in for a number of the problems faced by OWS. On one hand, it served for a time as the heartbeat of the encampment, a feeling caught by the name of a group that sought to bring order to the circle, Pulse. But the constant beat of drums from the circle led to noise complaints from surrounding neighbors and led some occupiers to fear it would be used as an excuse for eviction. It also drove many occupiers a bit nuts. This led to a failed attempt within OWS to negotiate a limit to the hours during which the circle would be active, a process that highlighted the difficulty of finding agreement on regulating any aspect of the occupation, given that a single recalcitrant person, perhaps even an infiltrator with ill intentions, could disrupt the community by preventing consensus.60 Beyond the drum circle, music was everywhere around and within the movement, in the form of occupiers playing their own instruments as well as sounds emanating from ubiquitous digital music players. The long history of protest music—­from the labor songs of the nineteenth century to the freedom songs of the Civil Rights movement to the rock beats of 1960s protests to punk beats to Riot Grrrl to conscious hip-­ hop—­filled the air around Liberty Square. Part of the importance of music in a movement is to keep up a spirit of festivity, of carnival, and carnival is about the revolution within the revolution, the revolution that happens not in the future but now. Occupying a space under constant

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rumored threats of a violent police shutdown is wearing. Long-­term encampments almost inevitably shift from joy to exhaustion. Without infusions of pleasure, a kind of manic to depressive turn is likely. In that context, music, a force that has always been key to taking folks out of themselves into other places, other spaces, can play a vitally reenergizing role. Music has hypnotic, ecstatic qualities that few other art forms come close to matching. The eclectic mix of music in and around Occupy eventually found its way into a fund-­raising album, the four-­record set Occupy This Album: 99 Songs for the 99%. The contents of the set suggest something of the range of moods driving the movement, with artists ranging from the well known to the little known. Hip-­hop is predominant, but electronica, indie rock, spoken word, neopunk, and neofunk are also represented, along with classic rock and traditional lefty folk music. The album’s ninety-­nine tracks include songs from more than a dozen genres, with artists ranging from Willie Nelson to Ace Reporter, Jackson Browne to Patti Smith, DJ Logic to Girls Against Boys, Lucinda Williams to Jasiri X, Deborah Harry to Yo La Tengo, Yoko Ono to Toots and the Maytals. The mix includes a spectrum from expected classics like Bob Dylan’s “The Time They Are a-­Changin’,” sort of sung by filmmaker Michael Moore, to widely hailed newer songs like “We Can’t Make It Here,” written and performed by James McMurtry with Steve Earle and Joan Baez, to songs written explicitly for Occupy like Third Eye Blind’s “If Ever There Was a Time.” In addition to those who contributed songs to the album, a number of recording artists created songs and videos in support of Occupy. Once again, the range was breathtakingly broad, from rapper MK-­Ultra to Miley Cyrus to Hawaiian singer Makana (who managed to infiltrate a “world leaders dinner” at a meeting of Asia-­Pacific Economic Cooperation, a forum for Asian Pacific CEOs, to sing his “We Are the Many,” with lines like “We’ll occupy the streets / We’ll occupy the courts / We’ll occupy the offices of you / ’Til you do / The bidding of the many, not the few”).61 One of corporate America’s tricks these days is to attempt to isolate consumers of music into particular niches, the better to sell them stuff and keep them in safely insulated social spaces. But these lines have been breaking down somewhat, with a large boost from the Internet, as reflected in the varied music around Occupy, which echoes something of the mix of people who made

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up the movement. It also, however, suggests something of the difficulty of harmonizing so many disparate voices of dissent.62 Those disparate voices are perhaps best represented by a little-­appreciated art form, the sign. Banners, placards, and posters were of course endemic to the protest. Every day, Liberty Square was filled with occupiers holding up signs, ranging from modest to elaborate, for passersby and the ever-­present media to see. A sampling of these signs suggests something of the passion, humor, and creatively articulated ideas at the heart of the movement. “I’ll Believe a Corporation Is a Person When Texas Executes One” neatly combined a critique of the death penalty with satire directed at the devastating protections corporations get under the fiction of “personhood.” “Yes We Can, but You Didn’t” and “Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall” expressed the disappointment many felt that President Obama, in bailing out Wall Street in 2008 without also bailing out its victims, had squandered the goodwill of the citizens who put him in office. “Wall Street Is Nero and Rome Is Burning” (with “Burning” in flaming red) conveyed the sense of urgency felt by those in precarious economic straits. The naked protester holding the sign “Wall Street Is Screwing Us, So Take Off Your Clothes” embodied its message. “We Are Not Short on Resources, We Are Long on Thieves” pointed to the falseness of claims about the scarcity economy. “Foreclose on Banks, Not People” captured the terrible impact of the financial meltdown on the thousands who lost their homes. “Building a Better America: 1% at a Time” rewrote a Bank of America slogan to make clear who the bank was truly working for. “America: Work Hard and You Too Can Buy a Politician” pointed to the false claim that the wealthy work harder than the rest of us and to the political influence that wealth enables. “Lost My Job, Found an Occupation” played on words to encapsulate the story of the many left out of the affluence embodied by Wall Street. “I’m So Angry I Made a Sign” offered a humorous critique of the angry protester cliché. And finally, offering an amusing homage to a queer movement slogan and making fun of Occupy’s alleged lack of a single message: “We’re here, we’re unclear. Get used to it.”63 The infusion of a wide range of arts into Occupy was especially important for two reasons. First is the simple fact that individuals respond

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differently to different art forms, such that a wider range of artistic expression will reach a wider range of people. And second, given a growing “protest fatigue” and mainstream media’s unwillingness to cover the same old marches and demonstrations, it is clear that to attract con­ tinued media coverage, movements need to offer artfully constructed events. A truly creative event can catch the media’s attention and become part of the news cycle in a way that more ordinary protest actions cannot. In contrast to the only other element of protest that seems always to catch the press’s attention, violent clashes, artful acts can actually communicate ideas and engage folks thoughtfully. Movement activists seem to be increasingly aware of the need for artfulness, as suggested by a proliferation of rich, useful books and websites that document, analyze, and suggest how to make creative protests.64

OCCUPY EVERYTHING?! One banner prominent at one of the Occupy sites proclaimed, “Occupy Everything.” Everything? Utopia means “no place,” so by definition there can be no utopian place. There can, however, be utopian moments, and as testimony from participants makes clear, Occupy was decidedly one of those moments. Hannah Arendt called it “public happiness,” Civil Rights workers spoke of a “freedom high,” historian Wini Breines writes of “prefigurative moments,” movement theorist Hakim Bey posits “temporary autonomous zones.” All these converge on the age-­old tradition of carnival, the throwing off of social constraint, the toppling of hierarchies. Carnivals are temporary, and everyone knows it, but everyone also forgets it in the midst of the experience. Waiting for the future of freedom is a lonely, empty process. It kills revolt, kills the spirit. Emma Goldman had it just right: if I can’t dance in it, I want no part of your revolution. Freedom has to happen now. You don’t need to wait for a future, and you can even Occupy the past, as a prominent banner linking Occupy to the Paris Commune of 1871 suggested. In 1968, they shouted, “Demand the impossible”; in 2011, they said, “Demand nothing.” And both of those things translate into “Occupy everything.” Politics and economics journalist Taibbi, originally dubious about Occupy, had this to say when he finally understood what it was all about:

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#Occupy All the Arts There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-­term model for a new economic system. But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.65

This utopian spirit was clearly at play in the OWS critique of the New York–­centered art world. A reporter for BBC News remarked, “There has been so much art centered around the Occupy experience that it is . . . possible to ask whether we are seeing the emergence of an Occupy ‘style’—­a tangible artistic movement in response to this major political event in American life that could upset the world of the white-­walled galleries.”66 Shaking up the art world was of course only one of the many things accomplished by Occupy. But it is important to remember that all movements fail. All of them. Was the French Revolution a success, leading as it did to the Terror and Napoleon? Was the Civil Rights movement a success? It brought a great deal more freedom to African Americans, but as the events of recent years have so brutally made clear, it did not even come close to bringing real justice or full equality. All movements fail, so the much-­asked questions about Occupy—­What did it accomplish? Is Occupy dead—­are moot. Looking back at the first image associated with Occupy, the ballerina balanced atop the raging Wall Street bull, we might see it as perhaps unintentionally predicting that such a balancing act would be impossible to sustain for long. Participants in serious movements never achieve their visions, except briefly in carnivalesque moments, and after the “freedom high” of those moments wears off, the hoped-­for new world looks too much like the old. But it is not the old world. For if all movements like this fail, all movements like this also succeed. They succeed in enacting a deeper sense of freedom. They reawaken what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called “natality,” the sense of new birth, of new human possibilities. That is no small thing. And movements also

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create ripples, echoes, resonances that travel through space and time for many, many years. When asked what he thought of the French Revolution two hundred years after it had taken place, a Chinese politician correctly observed that it was too soon to tell. And so too the less grand but important echoes of the Occupy movement will be felt for generations. They certainly could be felt in New York when activists creatively took over the streets in the name of justice for African Americans gunned down or choked to death in the name of law and order. Despite the fact that Occupy did not engage people of color as effectively as it should have, or perhaps because of that failure, groups like Black Lives Matter have drawn upon the energy generated in Liberty Square, as have many others fighting for social equality and justice in both movement and electoral arenas. Alex Carvalho of the Occupy Arts and Culture Working Group has argued that the General Assembly, the space in which the gathered protesters enacted democracy, was a work of “performance art.” In an important but limited sense, the arts of Occupy can be said to coalesce into Occupy as art, into a massive, messy, memorable piece of performance art.67 In keeping with the double meaning of this book’s title, Occupy itself can be seen as a work of artful protest that was protest as art form. But if Occupy was a work of art, I would contend that the refusal of Occupy to identify leaders or to put forth so-­called concrete demands could be read in Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse’s sense of art as negation, negation of what is in the name of what can as yet not be imagined. The utopian prefigurative elements of Occupy—­its anticonsumerism, communalism, and consensus—­must be set against the stark reality of some sexual harassment, racist insensitivity, petty squabbles, and sometimes squalid living conditions. At times, Occupy was in some ways not a very pretty work of art, but it did generate beautiful trouble and spark the imaginations of millions around the world. Veterans of Occupy continue to draw from its moment in their work across the globe.68 Citing the great historian Michelet, who argued that the only true monument to the French Revolution would be an empty space, W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that the image of revolution coming out of Occupy should not be an image of Liberty Square full of protesters, but rather

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one of an empty Zuccotti Park, a space yet to be imagined, yet to be lived—­a world where revolutionary love has driven back reactionary fear and hatred.69 We are as yet far from that place, but we will never get there without the kinds of acts of radical imagining that tiny space unleashed.

CRITIQUES AND LEGACIES The very form that made Occupy a success also created serious issues for the movement. The main medium of this protest, occupation, is a long-­standing form in the history of social movements. To mention only a couple of examples, there was the important Women’s Encampment for Peace and Freedom at Greenham Common in England in the early 1980s and the occupations of proposed nuclear power plant sites in the 1970s and 1980s.70 But in the case of Occupy both the mode and the particular venue, Zuccotti Park, were rather more accidental than planned aspects of the protest. On the one hand, the choice of an occupation, as opposed to a march or a single civil disobedience action, was the genius of the movement. It set the stage for a sustained set of actions that received a great deal of attention from both mainstream and alternative media, including media generated within the occupation itself. On the other hand, in short order maintaining the com­plicated occupation sites came to take a significant amount of time away from actual protests. Alongside the arts guilds highlighted above, there were also working groups responsible for food, sanitation, medical supplies, personal comfort, finance, and so on; while crucial, the work of these groups was largely inward-­looking, not aimed at the wider world. With a good deal of help from a hostile city government, the physical deterioration of conditions at the original Wall Street site offered authorities a convenient excuse to shut it down. Zuccotti Park was invaded and destroyed in mid-­November 2011, and similar attacks took place around the country, with more than seven thousand occu­ piers arrested in 122 different U.S. encampments.71 The destruction of the New York site, like so much police activity these days in relation to protest, was illegal. Protesters sued the NYPD and in 2013 won a $366,700 settlement for violation of their First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.72

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In addition to the difficulties of sustaining the infrastructure of an occupation, the choice of the term occupation itself proved deeply problematic, in that, as some activists in the movement pointed out, it echoed the European colonization process as well as the current Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.73 This critique of terminology was folded into a larger critique of the movement’s failure at times to deal seriously with issues of race and racism. While focused centrally on economic issues, most in the movement understood that economic inequality is inseparable from issues of race/ethnicity, gender, region, age, and a host of other social markers, with impacts stretching across all aspects of society, from tuition debt to housing costs to drug policies to prison conditions. But in practice, Occupy often failed to connect deeply to communities of color or to articulate clearly the uneven effects of income inequality across these differing social markers. In addition, sexual harassment and even sexual assaults occurred in some of the Occupy locations. This was in part due to the almost absolute openness of the sites, the reluctance to refuse anyone the right to take part. But the racism, sexism, and heteronormativity endemic to U.S. society (and almost every other society on earth) were present at the encampment. Some came from recruits who had yet to be sensitized to these issues, some came from agents provocateurs seeded by the police, some came from a number of mentally ill persons seeking shelter or purposely directed to the occupation by city authorities. But experienced activists were not immune either. The People of Color Working Group within OWS was deeply critical of aspects of the predominantly white protest and the failure of many activists to understand and make more effective outreach to communities of color, whose economic distress long predated the recent recession. As one member phrased it, “The People of Color Working Group was founded to help unify, through this one movement, the diverse communities that have been affected by economic inequality in different ways, with full awareness that this process of unification would require what has been missing from the Occupy Movement: greater participation, perspective and leadership of people of color with an explicit commitment to racial justice.”74 In response to these critiques as well as to events emerging from Occupy sites like Oakland, California, where people of color often led the struggle, occupiers came to support a number of initiatives intended

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to address the economics of racism directly, including Occupy the Hood, the Audre Lorde Project, and the Movement for Justice in El Barrio. As Rebecca Solnit notes, OWS “built alliances around racist persecution, from the Trayvon Martin case in Florida to stop and frisk in New York to racist bank policies and foreclosures in San Francisco, where a broad-­based housing rights movement grew out of Occupy.”75 Other connections to movements led by people of color, including, most fully, Black Lives Matter, were made after Occupy, though not always unproblematically. Serious issues around race, gender, and sexuality within OWS and other Occupy sites limited the overall impact and marred the movement, as they mar most every other aspect of life in the United States.76 The very power of the idea of “the 99 percent” at times had the unintended consequence of erasing key social differences. Occupy was also frequently criticized for not offering concrete proposals. Many occupiers defended this in principle on the grounds that to do so would be to narrow their message of the need for total transformation to a new political economic model, and/or that it would short-­circuit a wider conversation on what needed to change. It would also have driven away some participants. This attitude, however, to some extent kept such con­ versations vague and unnecessarily separated long-­term transformation from short-­term steps to get there. The occupiers did indeed start a vital conversation, but movements need to offer alternative visions, and they need to offer participants concrete things to do to move those visions forward. That did not happen as much as it might have in Occupy, in no small measure because the task of building a different kind of economy is a massive one, and decades of hegemonic discourse have instilled the false idea that there is no alternative to capitalism, as well as the false notion that capitalism and freedom are the same thing. Still, the discussion pushed along by OWS opened up vital questions about alternative economic systems. In particular, the arguments made by figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and the Sanders presidential candidacy, would have had nowhere near the support they found among U.S. citizens, especially young people, without the precedent set by Occupy.77 The utopian moments of Occupy are a very real part of its story and a key element of its legacy. They are also romantic overlays atop an

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often messy, chaotic, fractious, humanly imperfect, hopelessly contradictory set of events. That messy truth must also be told, and the criticisms learned from. One common critique of the Occupy movement is that it was leaderless and therefore, presumably, directionless. Much of this critique comes from journalists who were frustrated that they were unable to find any single authority to speak definitively for this type of movement. And the criticism misses the fact that for several generations now, most progressive social movements have sought to be seriously democratic, to model true egalitarianism within their own ranks in order to prefigure what a different kind of society might look like. We can see this as far back as the group leadership form Ella Baker helped SNCC develop (see chapter 1), and it has if anything become even stronger in more recent movements, including the alterglobalization movement, where neoanarchist critiques of hierarchy have played a crucial role. It would surely be a mistake to toss out this profoundly important idea. But it would also be a mistake not to acknowledge inevitable problems with the idea in practice. As far back as second-­wave feminist theorist Jo Freeman’s article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” keen sympathetic observers have noted a tendency in such antiorganizational organizations to efface hidden hierarchies and unacknowledged influencers (aka leaders).78 The fact that many, if not most, contemporary social movements do not coalesce around permanent organizational forms or around recognizable leaders does not mean they are unstructured or leaderless. In the face of a similar critique, Black Lives Matter activists have responded with “We are not leaderless, we are leaderful,” in the sense that everyone has the opportunity, if not the obligation, to lead. Consensus process decision making and refusal to embrace charismatic leaders have been key positive aspects of recent movements. Indeed, they have often been the very essence of what these movements seek to create—­a real democracy in place of the current oligarchy of the wealthy—­and they have often been essential to movement success. As sociologist Francesca Polletta has ably documented, these structures have enabled much of what progressive movements have accomplished over many decades.79 Still, one of the key issues faced by this form of action remains this tendency to render invisible certain informal but powerful organizing functions. In theorizing about contemporary movements, Paolo Gerbaudo, while

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very sympathetic to antihierarchical forms, warns about these invisible power structures. He uses the interestingly aesthetic concept of “choreographing” to describe the many ways in which certain small groups of individuals can have a major directing influence on a movement scene. Like dance choreographers, these indirect directors are not visible as guiders on the stage of action, and they do not have absolute control over the dance or the dancers, but they nevertheless exert considerable influence on the movements in which they participate. In the particular case of OWS, Gerbaudo notes that those possessing highly developed skills in digital communication came at times to play leadership roles in the actions. He argues not that this attempt to democratize leadership should be rejected but that a more honest acknowledgment of informal leadership would enhance the health of movements.80 The use of consensus process, in which every single person assembled must agree before an action or position can be taken, certainly played a role in the failure, if it was one, of OWS to put forth specific demands. Respect for the rights of every individual participant was an absolute. However, in a context where new people were joining constantly, and where only an imperfect process was in place to ease new folks into the spirit and rules of the group, some amount of stasis was inevitable. As an experiment in true, radical democracy, Occupy was perhaps overly ambitious in the hope expressed by some folks that it might unite people across the whole political spectrum, from right to left. For the “We are the 99 percent” claim to have substantive meaning, something like that hope would have to be realized. But such a process of political realignment would take years, not days or weeks. In the meantime, a better internal education process might have made for smoother assembly meetings and more forward momentum. Experienced organizers attempted to offer that education, but many occupiers viewed efforts to streamline the process as interference or as a violation of principles rather than as practical adaptations.81 The philosophy behind wariness about leadership and the use of consensus process, sometimes referred to as horizontalism (in contrast to vertical hierarchical relationships), has deep roots and real value.82 These ideas are sometimes traced back to origins among the anarchists of the nineteenth century, or to the collectives of the Spanish Civil War, and as this book has shown they have clear precedents in the U.S. Civil

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Rights movement and a number of subsequent organizing efforts. But some critics have pointed out that the extreme individualism promoted by these positions can become a kind of mirror of the consumerist individualism these movements are challenging. They have suggested that the collective power that movements bring is undermined when excessive concern with the individual’s power ignores the wider social forces shaping us as individuals. True individualism comes not from giving all persons equal power, but rather from the collective creation of the conditions in which truly open discourse about political values can take place. Movements have to be very savvy in distinguishing between what might be called false individualism, or neoliberal individualism, and the true individualism that can emerge only through collective deliberation and contestation. In political theory, the concept of “possessive individ­ ualism” refers to the kind of acquisitive person created under capitalist liberalism, a person defined largely by market choices that shape identity.83 That kind of possessive individualism is not easily thrown off, even by ostensible radicals, and while individualism in these movements is seldom consumerist, a kind of possessive individualism of ideas may be equally damaging. But throwing off that kind of possessive individualism is precisely the point of the processes used in the General Assembly and its ilk. Horizontalism does not mean suppressing all difference. Indeed, it must include the opposite: letting as many differences as possible flourish. That is precisely how consensus process, properly carried out, works. It increases a sense of personal responsibility in the context of collective effort. But that (educational) process takes time to unfold. The narcissistic individualism of “all opinions are equal” and my opinions cannot be challenged “because they are mine” is undermined during consensus decision making in which variously articulated opinions are meant to be displaced and synthesized into something new. Certainly, the various Occupy guilds acknowledged differences in skills in organizing and carrying out actions. But some leadership went unacknowledged, and unacknowledged leadership is unaccountable leadership. It is crucial to put limits on leadership and to encourage frequent rotation of leadership roles, to ensure that no hidden barriers to leadership hinder the emergence of the broadest array of talented people. But that is not the same as denying that leading takes place, or

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denying that different people have differing leadership skills (as the division into various guilds and working groups makes clear). Some of the most thoughtful and dedicated participant-­observer activists have come to see denial of informal leadership as a major problem for contemporary progressive movements.84 Make no mistake, there are very good reasons to be wary of leadership taking on destructive forms. Early in the twentieth century, sociologist Robert Michels posited what he called the “iron law of oligarchy,” which afflicts even the most democratic of organizations. There is indeed real danger of leadership becoming entrenched, unaccountable to constituencies, corrupt, complacent, and/ or out of touch with the people the leaders claim to represent. But organizations cannot avoid these dangers by denying the existence of lead­ ership. Rather, they must acknowledge and limit the equally iron law of emergent leadership. Hidden or unacknowledged leadership is even more dangerous than the visible kind. A related critique faults Occupy for an alleged imbalance of “expressive” politics over “strategic” politics. The most careful of these analyses recognizes the importance of attempting to embody in one’s mode of organizing the change one seeks in terms of a more fully democratic citizenry but suggests the limits of that approach. Occupy, the authors argue, “should renegotiate the tension between self-­expression and strategic institutional action, and between movement itself as a goal and movement goals. In short, we argue that mistaking an anti-­institutional style of participatory democracy and self-­expression for both real democracy and radical capitalist critique undermines political power—­and ulti­ mately results in less progress towards participatory democracy as the movement becomes politically less relevant and less able to bring about societal change.”85 This critique misses the point, made brilliantly by Noël Sturgeon, that these particular movement practices themselves enact political-­theoretical positions and contain an alternative concept of power. They also educate participants and onlookers about the hollowness of our current representative democracy in ways that spur deep engagement.86 Nevertheless, a problem for radically democratic movements such as Occupy is the belief that anything less than total transformation is somehow a loss or a selling out. Hence, any partial measures, any gestures toward legislative change, or even any appeals to the deeply flawed

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electoral system seem to negate the profound experience of offering one’s whole self to a new way of being. But that is a false dichotomy. All successful radical change movements have understood that there is no contradiction between mitigating moments of reform and a much larger ultimate transformation. Without some tangible results, potential supporters lose interest. That is why the Black Panthers, hardly a group that can be accused of being compromising liberals, worked daily on bringing small changes to the communities in which they worked. That is why not all Occupy participants fell into this trap of expressive politics, or what Slavoj Žižek calls “falling in love with yourself.”87 That is why some in Occupy put pressure on specific government sites, like housing offices and city halls. Likewise, those Occupy activists who went on to work for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign had grasped the important insight that elections matter, something those who sat out the 2016 campaign learned too with the clarity of hindsight as they witnessed the devastation wrought by a candidate who hijacked their economic agenda and twisted it into racist scapegoating. Despite its various limitations, Occupy proved to be a significant rejuvenation of progressive protest, not only about the key overarching question of economic justice but also about a host of other issues. Putting nondogmatic political economy at the heart of movements is a major accomplishment that must be built upon, because it connects to and shapes all other issues. Direct outgrowths of Occupy included Occupy Our Homes, a movement directed against evictions and mortgage fraud; Strike Debt, aimed at student debt issues; and Occupy Sandy, a grassroots aid effort in the wake of the hurricane that hit New York and New Jersey in 2012. More broadly, as activist, journalist, and movement historian L. A. Kauffman summarizes in her excellent book Direct Action, “Occupy created a new sense of political possibility . . . and veterans of the encampments fanned out across the country [and the world] to launch or support an extraordinarily diverse range of activist initiatives, most of which had the kind of concreteness and pragmatism that Occupy itself [was often criticized for having] spurned.”88 The final test for the actions growing out of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and other twenty-­first-­century progressive movements would be to find a way to translate these movements’ socioeconomic arguments into electoral victories while keeping the pressure on the Democratic

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Party through ongoing activism beyond the electoral arena.89 This strategy of combining insurgent nonviolent movements with electoral organizing, as Paolo Gerbaudo argues convincingly in The Mask and the Flag, would provide the most effective antidote to the right-­wing pseudopopulisms that have arisen not just in the United States but around the globe.90 Backlash and renewed insurgency have been part of social movement cycles throughout the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. In yet another turn on that spiral road, the Trump regime’s reactionary backlash quickly generated a massive resistance movement embodied in events like the 2017 Women’s March (the largest such march in U.S. history), the emergence of the #MeToo/Time’s Up movement against sexual predation, and the rise of hundreds of new local progressive community groups.91 Whether greater equality and fairness prevail in the world or our future holds even greater domination by economic elites will depend in no small measure on how artfully those currently denied justice and dignity and their allies use nonviolent protest and the arts as key weapons for change.

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CONCLUSION

THE CULTURAL STUDY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS The stories I have told about the ten major social movements that make up the core of this book are based in general assumptions about how movements work—­how they arise, how they develop, and how they shape the wider society. I have made some of these assumptions explicit in the individual case studies, but for the most part I have addressed them only implicitly. So, in this concluding essay I will try to offer a more general picture of how movements work by looking at the large body of social movement theory that has developed over several decades. The dynamics of movements should be of interest not only to scholars but to activists (including scholar-­activists) as well, who hopefully can use this knowledge to make their movements more effective. First, I will briefly sketch and comment on some of the major schools of movement theory that have shaped movement studies and my own analyses. Then I will suggest some of the ways I think these various approaches can to a certain extent be synthesized. But this overview is decidedly not meant as a total theory of how movements work. In my view, there are too many different kinds of movements and dif­ fering paths of development to fit into one overarching framework. My comments will be most relevant to the particular set of movements covered in this book. The great variety of movements argues against viewing them through a single lens, no matter how complexly crafted. In any claim to name the essential features of all movements there is a danger 371

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not only of reductively shoehorning differing types of movements into one paradigm but also of inadvertently missing the ongoing creativity of movements, missing their ability to shape-­shift in response to new conditions.

SCHOOLS OF MOVEMENT ANALYSIS What we now call social movements have existed throughout human history. Some historians argue that a modern form of movement emerged only in the era of industrialization, but others see continuities going back centuries into things like peasant revolts. While thinking about movements has therefore no doubt a much longer history, the academic study of movements arose primarily in the twentieth century.1 The approach known as collective behaviorist is generally cited as the first major school of movement thinking to emerge from modern social science. Collective behaviorist scholars linked movements to such things as riots, crowds, and mass hysteria. Shaped in part by the recent memory of the fascist movements in Germany, Italy, and Japan, and by the conformist mood of the 1950s, when this school arose to prominence, this approach stressed the irrational dimensions of movements and often saw them as potentially dangerous, temporary aberrations in the otherwise smooth-­flowing social system. While parallels between movements and other forms of collective behavior can be illuminating and are still studied, the generally dark, irrationalist view of movements originally stressed by this school of thought has been superseded by more complex and varied approaches that recognize the rational nature and positive contributions of many movements. The next major approach to emerge was the resource mobilization school. This branch of movement analysis developed from the 1960s onward, partly in response to a more positive view of movements in that major era of protest. This school stressed the ways in which movements are shaped by and work within limits set by the resources (especially economic, political, and organizational resources) available to a group and the organizational skills of movement leaders in utilizing those resources. It was also primarily interested in direct, measurable impacts of movements on political issues. This meant that resource mobilization scholars were less interested in what they saw as the identity-­shaping

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and consciousness-­related dimensions of movements, which they often characterized as vaguely “expressive” (expressive is a word often used dis­ mis­sively to suggest that particular elements of culture are merely decora­ tive add-­ons, not substantial factors). A related third school, the political process camp, incorporated much of the resource mobilization approach into one that emphasized the waxing and waning of political opportunities as key to movement success or failure. A political process approach, for example, might stress the role of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in opening up political possibilities for a new movement, and would view the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 as the key evidence of the relative success of the movement. Resource mobilization and political process models remain very influential in the body of scholarship on movements, and with good reason. In each of the preceding chapters I have tried to acknowledge the structural factors emphasized by these approaches. But these schools were increasingly criticized, beginning in the 1980s, for relying too exclusively on structural political and economic forces—­that is, for failing to address how the resources and political opportunity structures on which they focus were actually translated into action. They sometimes acted as if these forces shaped movements automatically, apart from actual human intervention. Critics argued that these approaches neglected the processes by which activists become aware of and act upon political opportunities, and the processes by which people are persuaded to gather up and put to work the various resources needed to develop and sustain a movement. The first important school of analysis to seriously address some of these cultural dimensions is known as frame alignment theory. Emerging in the mid-­1980s from a branch of sociology interested in the ways in which individuals interact to create their basic values and worldviews, this approach examines the ways in which movements draw upon and seek to shift the mental frameworks through which people decide what is morally right and socially justifiable. Movements need to evoke existing cultural values and then persuasively connect those values to the grievances held by the people seeking change. Think of the way in which the Civil Rights movement claimed to be expanding the value of human equality announced in the nation’s founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Movements

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seek to realign existing cultural frames so as to create a picture of their movement attractive enough to recruit members and draw support from the wider society. These theorists stress that these realignment processes are a subset of the general ways in which people interactively (“intersubjectively,” in their terms) craft their beliefs and values. Realignment entails identifying “grievances” (areas where the political system has failed) and creating new moral and political value frameworks that require social change to address those grievances. If frame realignment analysis opened up the conversation about cultural factors in the rise and development of movements, the 1990s saw a flood of new participants in that conversation. In that moment, two forces converged to open up cultural approaches more fully. One was the rise of so-­called new social movement theory, developed initially by European scholars. New social movement theory arose partly to help explain a host of new movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that did not seem to fit the classic Marxian model of social change driven by class conflict, the model that had been predominant in much previous European social theory. The newness of the putatively new social movements was said to consist of such things as a greater emphasis on group values and lifestyles and less emphasis on social class, partly because most of these movements emerged from middle-­class rather than working-­class constituencies. Environmentalist, feminist, antinuclear, and nonconsumerist lifestyle movements were among a set of new social movements that were aimed at issues not reducible to economic deprivation. While initially used to study this particular subset of movements, new social movement theory offered insights on issues of consciousness and identity that were seen as adaptable to the study of virtually any kind of movement. The second major force that helped to open up cultural approaches is what was dubbed the “cultural turn” in U.S. social sciences, prompted especially by analyses coming from interdisciplinary fields such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, American studies, and cultural studies, all fields that paid particular attention to cultural matters, and by the rise of cultural theory in two prominent forms, poststructuralism and neo-­ Marxist cultural theory.2 Like new social movement theory, all these trends stressed the interaction of cultural forces with material forces—­or, rather, saw these forces as inseparable. The confluence of European new

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social movement theory and this cultural turn in U.S. social science led to a host of new cultural approaches to movement analysis that gained greater prominence in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. These new cultural theories looked at things like storytelling in movements, the role of emotions, the creation of collective movement identities, the persuasive languages developed by movements, and the use of dramatic rituals and performances. A few words about each of these: Various kinds of narrative analysis examine the structures of the stories told within movements and the stories that circulate from movements out into the wider society. Nar­ rative analyses look at how movements draw upon existing cultural stories, alter those stories to fit their needs, and invent new stories throughout every aspect of movement activity. These stories may be long-­range ones, rooting the movement in a history of struggle, or they may be stories of victims and/or heroic resisters, intended to inspire activists. It is apparent to any observer that one of the key facts about most movements is that they arouse strong emotions, for and against them, yet until recently emotional affect was seen as too subjective to be measured and understood. Seeking to overcome the emphasis on dangerous emotions in collective behavior, new approaches on the important terrain of affect analysis have been developed over the past few decades to show more precisely how movements draw upon and reshape the emotional lives of participants and observers alike. One key aspect of European new social movement theory that was widely adopted was an emphasis on collective identity, an approach that looks at both how social identity groups can be recruited into movements and how new social identities (like Chicano/a/x or transgender) form within movements and can spread later into the wider society. The classical field of rhetoric (the art of persuasion) also entered the cultural analysis repertoire more fully in the wake of the cultural turn. Rhetorical analysis has long examined one key component of many movements, public speeches (such as “I Have a Dream”), but it also looks at other kinds of persuasion at work in movements, especially verbal persuasion but also the roles of images, gestures (including dance), sounds (including music), and other symbolic systems. A different, related set of discourse analyses arose out of new cultural theories collectively labeled “poststructuralist” and/or “postmodernist.” More fully than traditional rhetorical analysis, these

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approaches focus on languages as systems that use us as much as we use them. They focus on language as an underlying determining system, and on the material conditions through which words and nonverbal communication acts are performed. They ask about the relative cultural authority of who represents what counts as social truth, and they note the inevitable constraint on our beliefs, feelings, and actions in every context, including that of radically transformative movements, due to deep language structures of which we can never be fully conscious. Last but not least, dramaturgical and performativity analyses look at the ritual actions (like sit-­ins and rallies) prominent in movements and focus on movement events as particular manifestations of the theatrical presentations of power dynamics that pervade all of social life. Some of these ritual performances serve to create solidarity within movements, while others are aimed primarily outward to express the values and demands of movements to the wider world.3 Even from these very basic summaries of highly complex theories (and others could be added), it should be obvious that many of these approaches overlap and to some extent complement one another. No one of them alone can capture the full scope of movements as political and cultural phenomena, but they offer a powerful set of analytic tools to further our understanding of how movements rise and develop. Before I turn to trying to put some aspects of these various approaches together, it is important to look at a concept that to a great extent underlies them all: culture.

CONCEPTUALIZING “CULTURE” Critic Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, claims that culture is probably the most complicated word in the English language.4 Recent arguments in cultural theory have only deepened those complexities. It is not surprising, therefore, that students of movements have not used the term culture in consistent ways. That is one reason they are not likely to come to consensus about the role of culture in movements. Culture is one of those concepts that political theorists describe as “essentially contested”—­that is, it is a concept that matters so much to a given society that it is subject to more or less constant debate.

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In the wake of the cultural turn in the social sciences, a few scholars began to try to synthesize the most relevant portions of the traditional approaches with more recent strands of culture theory. Addressing the realm of U.S. sociology, Amy Swidler argues that part of the problem was that sociologists had been drawing primarily upon one general theory of culture, Max Weber’s, to the neglect of what Swidler views as a more promising strand of theory, that of Marcel Mauss. Swidler asserts that Weber’s rather thin theory of culture helps account for empirical sociology’s relative neglect of cultural factors. Even those schools of movement analysis (like frame analysis) that do examine cultural factors, she argues, are limited by certain Weberian assumptions about the centrality of narrowly rational, goal-­oriented individuals and the beliefs they hold. They give far too much credit to individual, rational actors as opposed to cultural systems that shape people collectively. Swidler argues that Maussian approaches (in which she includes most cultural studies work) can lead to much useful empirical research by focusing not on fuzzy notions of culture as “ideas in people’s heads” but rather on structural elements of culture—­culture as embedded in institutions, behaviors, and discourses that transcend and deeply shape individual ideas and actions. Swidler suggests four overlapping targets for work that takes culture seriously as a set of systemic, not vaguely “expressive,” factors. First, focus on culture not as individually held beliefs but as structures embedded in practices relatively independent of the beliefs held by individual actors. Second, focus less on culture as what actors themselves really think and more on culture as their “knowledge of how others will interpret their actions.” Third, focus on “public contexts in which cultural understandings are brought to bear,” functioning, again, above the level of individual belief in ways that unite diverse actors. Fourth, and finally, focus on cultural institutions as sites that set limits and possibilities for movement activity.5 Swidler’s four key target areas, though certainly not covering the entire range of frameworks and sites of cultural importance in movements, offer a suggestive bridge from traditional structural approaches to cultural approaches. There is no doubt a danger, in certain versions of such work, of moving too far in the direction of structures to the neglect of the ways in which, in even the most controlled social situations, individual actors are capable of some degree of free agency and/or are driven by uniquely personal configurations of

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psychological forces, but all of Swidler’s four foci are key to any full understanding of the cultural forces working through movements. Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier also address and try to synthesize competing intellectual frameworks of cultural analysis in an essay that has the added advantage of grounding its arguments in a particular set of movement case histories. They offer this suggestive summary of some of the main schools relevant to thinking about the movement/ culture matrix: Major approaches to the analysis of culture advance different concepts, based on distinct epistemological frameworks, for analyzing the relationship between symbolic forms and the structure of social relations. For functionalists, culture is conceived as values and norms, while Marxists and neo-­Marxists analyze culture as ideology and class consciousness. Symbolic interactionists emphasize intersubjective meaning, focusing on the subjective dimension—­ beliefs, goals, normative expectations, states, and motivations—­ that underlie social interaction, while dramaturgical approaches think of culture as ritual. A new generation of cultural theorists, influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, construe cul­ ture as discourse.6

While, like my brief descriptions of schools of movement analysis above, these are inevitably somewhat reductive characterizations of the various theoretical approaches, Taylor and Whittier go on to show through analysis of feminist groups that despite their bases in “distinct epistemological frameworks,” each of these approaches offers insight into how movements work that can to some degree be synthesized. While efforts like Swidler’s and Taylor and Whittier’s certainly have not ended disputes about the nature and role of culture in movements, they have helped to clarify points of tension and have offered grounds for arguing more carefully about those differences. One part of these general conceptual dilemmas is confusion in thinking about culture in movements, which sometimes arises through slippage between the two most common meanings of culture: culture as a particular social arena (the high culture of the arts, mass-­mediated popular culture, and homespun folk culture) versus culture as the meaning patterns in whole ways of life (as in “American culture”). Culture in

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the broader sense shapes all overarching arenas of life, not just the cultural arena (in the more limited sense) but the economic, social, and political arenas as well. The social, the political, the economic, and the cultural (in the narrow sense) are all shaped by the meaning-­making processes we call “cultural” in the larger sense, but these processes function in varying ways in each of these arenas, and in none are they the sole determining forces. Various material and institutional forces—­especially, I would argue, economic activity—­have impacts that while always interpreted culturally cannot be reduced to those interpretations. As French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s careful work on the specificity of the cultural “field” (more or less synonymous with my use of “arena”) makes clear, it is only semiautonomous in relation to the other major arenas/ fields. And, crucially, all these fields are intricately connected in what Bourdieu calls the overall “field of power.” Put succinctly, all fields—­ within the broadly social, economic, political, and cultural fields—­meet in, shape, and are shaped by this “field of power.”7 Keeping this schema in mind can help us remember that these various arenas/fields are not ultimately separable. In general terms, each of these major arenas has its own set of cultural norms and practices. And, in addition, each of these arenas has numerous smaller cultures and subcultures within it, each as well with specific sets of norms of thought and behavior, some formal (like laws), most informal (like habits). Take the political arena, for example. We can talk at the broadest level of a global political culture, then we can talk a bit more specifically of a national political culture (French or Italian politics), then we can talk of things that are a bit smaller, like the culture of a particular political party, and then still smaller cultures like the culture of congressional staffers—­and so on down to ever more narrowly defined cultural spaces. And, most relevant to issues at hand, analysts can examine the cultural processes at work within a given social movement as its movement culture. In our metaphorical rendering, we can think of cultures as nested like Russian matryoshka dolls, each with an ever smaller one inside. But unlike those dolls, cultures do not have perfectly defined boundaries; the nature and boundaries of cultures are always contested, always argued about. Cultures are never neatly segregated and bound entities; rather, they are best conceived as partially overlapping, mutually interacting,

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internally contradictory, and nested entities with far from wholly distinct or unchanging boundaries. In recent scholarship, cultural essentialism—­ the conceptualization of individual cultures as internally consistent, neatly bordered entities—­has largely given way to an acknowledgment of the role analysts play in “inventing” cultures through highly selective representations of what count as the cultures of particular demographically constituted groups. Such selective representation occurs not just for outside observers but also within any given cultural context. This means any culture (or subculture) is an internally contested formation, a fact that is perhaps even more obvious in relation to movement cultures, since they tend to be consciously and openly contentious not only in relation to the dominant culture they seek to change but also in their internal debates over things like movement values and the best strategies and tactics to employ. Cultures exist not as natural facts but as true fictions constituted by regimes of representation invoked in everyday life and scholarly investigation alike. All representations of a culture, whether by cultural insiders (emic) or outsiders (etic), are true fictions in the sense that, however empirically grounded, they occur from particular, limited, debatable points of view. Cultural contexts are never simply given, never simply presented, but must be represented in ways that are subject to questioning, both by group members and by outsiders and scholarly observers. That cultures are contested does not mean that they are up for definitional grabs by anyone who comes along. Many cultural contexts are highly fluid and changeable, especially in the current era, but they are not infinitely malleable. Claims about any given cultural phenomenon have dominant and subordinate forms, a fact that gives rise to frequent questioning of who gets to speak for a culture. Individuals and groups claiming to speak for a culture have more or less privileged access to the authority and means to enforce their claims, and there are always varying degrees of access to the dominant means of representation. On the contemporary scene, important cultural claims are most often filtered through mainstream, corporate mass media, and more recently through various digital forms of new social media. Those media terrains themselves are always contested in terms of ideology (think CNN versus Fox News), but they never represent the full range of possible political and cultural notions. Hence, insurgent movements often offer alternative

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positions that they believe to be underrepresented or not represented at all by any branch of corporate media. This position argues that culture (as meanings, beliefs, ways of life) is constructed by social “texts” or “discourses” at work in all the arenas of society (economic, political, social, cultural), with increasing power rooted in the cultural institutions and practices of the culture industries dominated by major old and new media corporations. For example, an upsurge or downswing in the national economy is materially affected by the way in which the political economic data are interpreted through “texts,” whether they be debates in economic journals, the speeches of politicians, the comments of TV pundits, or the jokes of comedians. This does not shift all focus away from things like economic activity. In Raymond Williams’s terms, the political economic event is not absolutely determinative, but it is determining; it does not create one, inevitable response, but it does limit the range of possible responses. This means, in practical terms, that the cultural analysis of social movements can never be isolated from these other levels. And vice versa—­cultural representations always play a role in creating social, political, and economic realities, but the underlying reality of receiving a smaller paycheck or defaulting on a mortgage does not disappear. That all levels of cultural representation need to be understood as agents of change or resistance to change, rather than simply as side effects of supposedly more fundamental shifts in economics or politics, does not erase those other fundamental factors. While purely cultural, purely social, purely economic, and purely political domains do not actually exist, it is nevertheless useful at points to deploy these distinctions, to mark their borders. For one thing, culture can be a more or less politicized terrain, and any governmental or socioeconomic activity can have more or less cultural contestation embedded in it. It would be a great irony for any student of social movements to insist on these absolute distinctions, since no force has done more than social movements to challenge the borders separating these arenas. Much social movement activity has demonstrated, insisted upon, and enacted a political critique of culture and a cultural critique of the social, the economic, and the political that challenges these boundaries. Marxist movements seek to politicize the economy, civil rights movements attack racist cultural institutions, women’s movements and

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LGBTQ movements insist that the “personal is political,” that private realms are public, and so on. Political economy, cultural politics, social cultural studies—­these and similar border-­crossing terms help remind us of the dangers of isolating these domains even when we may need to focus more fully on one or another of them.

THE FIELD(S) OF POWER Bourdieu’s notion that all fields of social activity meet in the field of power inevitably raises the question, What is power? In the analysis of movements, whether by insiders or outsiders, much depends on the con­ ception of power that is assumed. As social movement theorist Steven Buechler notes, modern conceptions of power tend to fall into two broad categories that cause confusion when not made explicit: Much confusion about the political dimension of social movements may be traced to inconsistent definitions of the term “political” and the underlying conceptions of power implied by such definitions. As an initial sorting device, we may distinguish between at least two senses of “the political.” The term “state politics” will be used to refer to the more conventional type of power struggle in which social activism is directed toward influencing state policy and leaders, including broad revolutionary challenges to the political order. In this conception, power is centralized and hierarchical, although it can be challenged under the right circumstances by sustained opposition. The term “social politics” will be used to refer to a less conventional type of power struggle in which collective action is directed toward altering power relations inscribed in diverse social institutions and cultural practices, including the seemingly “personal” aspects of everyday life. In this conception, power is diffuse and decentralized, and challenges to this form of power take a wider variety of tactical, strategic and expressive forms. Both types of politics contain a mixture of oppositional and transformative elements that qualify them as “political.”8

Buechler is here trying to balance more traditional notions of power with those developed by recent theorists who argue that state-­level politics can exist only when built up from a host of micropowers that exist across a whole range of social sites. The balance he seeks is a conception

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in which the levels he dubs “state politics” and “social politics” interact constantly. Neither top-­down nor bottom-­up theories of power alone can account for the complex flows of power through a given culture.9 With regard to the concept of “social power,” Buechler seems to be drawing primarily upon discourse analysis as formulated in the works of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s concept of discourse offers a more expansive method than that used in traditional forms of rhetorical analyses. In his conception, micropolitics are embedded in the discourses that pervade every aspect of society, from the most intimate personal levels to the interactions of governments. Discourses in Foucault’s formulation set deeply structured (and therefore mostly invisible) limits on what can and cannot be thought or articulated. Discourses are always subject to certain interactive, mutually influential engagements and contradictions. Because they are manifold and contradictory, they limit the possibility of fully stabile social formations. But they do not create unlimited freedom, and they also limit the possibilities of pure resistance. Power for Foucault is rooted in discourses that do not float free, as some mistaken critics of his work assume, but rather are embedded in specific iden­ tities, institutions, material practices, and variably empowered social locations.10 The dynamics of ACT UP offer particularly cogent examples of how this conceptual problematic works itself out in movements. The graphic artworks and other practices of ACT UP were frequently directed simultaneously at the political economic realm in the form of federal drug-­funding policy, at the socioeconomic realm in the form of nongovernmental institutions like pharmaceutical corporations, and at the cultural realm in the form of discursive practices in the mass media and in aesthetic texts. Few in ACT UP argued for exclusive focus on only one of these levels—­although, as we saw in chapter 7, internal debates did emerge around which of these targets was most important, and eventually spin-­off groups sought to focus more intensely on one or another of these arenas. ACT UP’s experience suggests that a continuum across state, social, economic, and cultural “politics” often exists not only among different movements but also within particular movements. Some movements may fit relatively neatly into one location on this continuum, but more often analysis must attend to considerable slippage in a given movement along this continuum. Clearly, this task becomes even more

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imperative when the movement being examined is a complexly coalitional one addressing a range of issues, like the movement against corporate globalization (see chapter 9). As second-­wave feminist Gloria Steinem once quipped, “Culture is the name they give to the politics that wins.” This neatly encapsulates the now commonplace theoretical insight that culture often functions for those in power as a space to be legitimated as “transcending” politics, and it also suggests why insurgent groups must insist on the opposite, that the cultural realm is shot through with the political. But revealing the political uses of culture is not the same thing as proving that all culture is “merely” politics. What needs to be analyzed is the process through which some cultural texts are politicized—­by those in power or by those challenging that power. One must also remember that the political uses of aesthetic texts never exhaust their meanings. As I have argued about the role of music in the Civil Rights movement (see chapter 1), movement cultures function best when they both express and move beyond ideology. Ideologies—­in the sense of elaborated key ideas and values—­ are crucially important to any movement. But they are also often points of contention that pull movements apart. As I have shown in a number of the preceding chapters, the very vagueness of “culture” that has kept many social scientists from examining it seriously as a movement force is precisely one of its virtues when it serves to link activists together despite competing ideas. Clarity around conceptions of power is crucial not just to the analysis of movements but to the internal self-­understanding of movements as well, especially with regard to their targeting of various potential arenas. Movement self-­understanding is an evolving (cultural) phenomenon because, as one group of veteran activist-­theorists notes, “no movement is born knowing what it thinks, what it wants, and how to achieve its goals. . . . [But] any movement develops a self-­understanding, whether a tacit set of assumptions expressed primarily in action, a formalized theory, or something in between.”11 With regard to ACT UP, for example, a strict poststructuralist theorist might look at the range of the group’s activity and declare that it offers evidence that a Foucauldian-­Derridean cultural politics can challenge state power (contra those who claim that it has “merely cultural” impacts). In contrast, a more traditionally trained empirical theorist might argue that pragmatically oriented voices within

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ACT UP “saved” that group from the irrelevance of a cultural politics by directing some of its actions toward state power. An ideologically and methodologically less purist position would suggest that an ideological mix within ACT UP itself left these questions strategically unresolved in ways that may have contributed to the group’s various successes. To argue, as much so-­called cultural analysis of movements does, that material conditions do not tell the whole story is far different from leaving them out of the story altogether. The power to name reality for others has always been a component of exploitation. That it is more so today is at best debatable. This is the kind of argument that draws attention away from, for example, the material conditions of the production of personal computers and focuses exclusively on the information flows made possible by the computers and their networks. In place of the swing between fully determining material conditions (naive structuralist bias) and free-­floating/flowing information (naive discursive bias), the most useful theories, like those of Donna Haraway, use terms like material-­discursive to conceptualize the complex of social interactions.12 Not only do “ideas become a material force when they are gripped by the masses” (Marx), but also, in various more subtle, daily ways, language as a material force is always entangled with institutions and extralinguistic structures—­reducing these to disembodied “signs” leads to analytic confusion or incoherence.

MOVEMENT CULTURES With these general conceptual schemas and caveats in mind, we can turn to talk more specifically about the roles that culture plays in protest movements. Thinking about these roles can be divided into three main elements: the cultural contexts that give rise to a movement, the movement culture that forms at the center of the movement, and the impact of the movement in turn on the wider culture. These three processes, of course, do not take place in some neat line of causality, but instead interact throughout the life and afterlife of a given movement. I want to start at the center of the movement/culture dynamic, with those discourses and practices that make up what is generally called a movement culture. This is the culture formed by the most committed participants, the core of the corps. Movement cultures consist of specific

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variants of the same elements that make up any cultural group—­shared values, styles, behaviors, languages, traditions, symbols, and related forms of group definition. A given movement may be analyzed in terms of one overarching culture (Chicano/a/x movement culture) or in terms of smaller nested cultures that differ in specifics of style, value, and/or ideology (the minister-­driven culture of the early Civil Rights movement differed in all these ways from the student-­driven culture that developed later in the movement, for example). A movement-­specific ideology or set of beliefs is perhaps the most conscious marker of a movement culture, but much of a movement culture may be unspoken, invisible, or taken for granted. Tangible markers of a movement culture might include such things as special ways of talking (a shared slang, or movement-­ specific slogans), rituals or ritualized behaviors (singing in a circle, a special kind of handshake), uniforms or stylized clothing (ethnicity-­ specific clothing, overalls to mark sympathy with poor farmers), symbols (a black panther, an Aztec eagle), material culture objects (buttons, masks), movement lore (stories of past victories and defeats, jokes about an opponent’s follies), and identification with tradition (revival of a suppressed or forgotten ethnic custom or refusal to use the dominant culture’s language). And, of course, cultural form in the narrower sense of the arts plays a central role. This is especially true of particular movement-­identified forms of artistic expression (black freedom songs, Chicano/a/x murals), but it is also true to a lesser but important degree for any work of art experienced in the context of a movement culture (passing around a print of Picasso’s Guernica in an antiwar movement group meeting, sharing the kind of environmental justice novel discussed in chapter 8 with a movement reading circle). The key work of a movement culture is the generation of the group’s social vision—­the articulation of grievances and the steps needed to redress those grievances. The basic form of this work is what one school of analysis calls the frame alignment process, the process of shifting cultural understanding first within and then outside the movement to reflect the movement’s analysis of the problem(s) and solution(s). This is never less than a complex process, but in the kind of multi-­issue movements covered in this book, frame alignment seems a weak way to describe a set of transformations involving vast changes in thought, emotion, moral values, and whole ways of being. Movement cultures shape

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not only the particular articulations of framing ideas and ideologies but also a participant’s whole being, deeply shaping embodied experience at conscious and nonconscious levels. This is especially true of movements that seek not just to create new ideas but also to enact those ideas through their own movement’s cultural interactions (prefigurative—­ attempting to model a future society). This is where works of visionary art that go beyond the level of ideas can prove especially effective and affective. In a less extensive and intensive but important way, other cultural practices provide a grounding force of solidarity that allows often complex and contentious debate to flourish. Things like dancing together and working together on the creation of a giant puppet provide respite from debates about ideals and tactics and also help reinforce a sense of the collective, a sense of solidarity that can lessen the tensions that arise from differences. One of the more important aspects of movement cultures that includes but goes beyond the direct discussion of ideas or frames of intellectual reference has been labeled collective identity formation. As noted above, a whole branch of the new social movement school of analysis began the elaboration of this process.13 Identity transformation is a com­ plicated phenomenon, one inadequately theorized by such concepts as identity politics. Movement-­bred identities are neither true selves to be defended nor disabling essences to be avoided. They are strategically necessary creations that change as movements change. It is primarily from outside movements or in moments of movement decline that such identities are turned into static forms defended in absolutist terms. Much social science study of social movements is still based in a “rational actor” model of the individual subject. Whatever limited utility this model of identity may have had for understanding the modern, industrial actor, it has far less application to the postmodern, often digitally embedded subject of most recent social movements. Identities are not frozen forms into which new content can be poured. Nor are they individual creations. All identities are to some degree collective identities. This is particularly clear with regard to movements that reclaim and to a degree re-­create traditionally marginalized identities (ethnics of color, lesbians, and so on), but it is equally true that white males have always practiced and continue to practice identity politics—­they have just had the power to act as though their identity is universal.

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Social movements have been and remain among the key forces transforming/creating new cultural identities (transgender movements are a recent example). The egalitarian spirit inside the movements surveyed in this book was a particularly rich source for ongoing experiments in identity formation and transformation. A more nuanced understanding of the construction of identities within movements can benefit future movements, but it can also explain more generally the nature of contem­ porary culture, where the social construction of identities is more widely recognized and the struggle over identities is arguably more intense than in previous eras. Tracing the means by which cultural identities are created is therefore of growing importance. In our time, both traditional mass media and emergent new social media play increasingly active roles in these identity constructions, and thereby in movement identity formation as well (as stressed in chapter 10 on Occupy). The move from print to broadcast media to networked computing and other new media has shaped identity generally and movement identities specifically. And by looking at identity formation in movements, we can learn a great deal about these complex processes. Alongside and entwined with new media, movements have been major forces in the creation of the contemporary emphasis on identities.14 At the same time, a proper understanding of social movement identities can be a useful corrective to the limits of so-­called identity politics. The inherent paradox is that “identity politics” can exist only when identities are in question. Identity becomes an issue only when it is no longer presumed, no longer taken for granted. This means that identities emerging from self-­conscious political struggles are always unstable formations. This should be clear immediately from reflection on the evolution and proliferation of identities over the past few decades. To illustrate this simply through self-­naming, one could show how a seemingly stable racial signifier changes through the politically evolving sense of self embodied in a succession of terms: Negro, black, Afro-­American, African American, member of the African diaspora. Each of these successive identities could be shown to indicate not only ideological shifts but also the conflicting influence of various interacting class, gender, national, regional, and sexual identities. Assertions of essential “black” identity in the face of these changes, embedded as they are in shifts in racial formations of the culture at large, have never gone unchallenged,

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particularly when they have emerged in the dynamic context of a movement. Attention to these movement-­driven transformations has been one key to understanding race as a social construction rather than a biological reality. Much attention has focused rightly on the collective identities produced in movements, but less attention has been paid to how cultural forms in and around movements help shape movement identities that later become available as general, cultural identities in the larger society. The Black Power movement and its aligned black arts cultural formation, for example, invented a militant black self that eventually became widely diffused as a key element of a more autonomous, empowered “Afro-­American” identity. As I have suggested with regard to the Black Panthers, this process included something like the transformation of some tough street-­corner hustlers into “badass revolutionaries,” a move that carried over into parts of the wider black community, strengthening self-­esteem and raising the level of resistance a notch even among those not consciously self-­identifying as political. These issues are particularly important if, as Sidney Tarrow has argued, we are becoming a “movement society” in which social movements play an increasingly central role in, among other things, defining collective identities.15 Movements are surely one of the main sources for the phenomena that have led some postmodern theorists to claim that identities are more fluid and variable than ever before. One need not embrace this notion uncritically to agree that movements as sources of identity are likely to continue to be a major social force. In terms of the nested set of cultures surrounding and interwoven into any given movement culture, organizational cultures have often been of particular importance. The nature and functions of the formal and informal organizations present in any movement are of crucial importance internally but also in the ways movements interact with surrounding cultural contexts. Internally, organizational structures always to some degree embody or represent the values as well as the tactics of movements. These factors in turn shape who speaks for movements and what movements emphasize in their public acts and comments to the media. In the movements surveyed in this text, organizational cultures have often been the subject of much debate. Sometimes differing organi­ zational cultures coexist peacefully in a movement and can be recognized

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as complementary. At other times, organizational difficulties can tear a movement apart. Most often, differences exist in a terrain somewhere between these extremes. In the Civil Rights movement, for example, tensions arose when the charismatic, top-­down, minister-­centered work of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was challenged by the more group-­centered horizontal leadership model of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The challenge to organizational structures in SCLC by SNCC reflected not just a difference in tactics but a broad difference in philosophy regarding how power works and who is or is not going to be empowered via the social transformation the movement desires. For a time, the two approaches managed to work more or less in independent harmony, but eventually they went their separate ways. Debate about organizational cultures has become endemic to the tradition of left and progressive movements and has played a profound role in the cultural relations in these movements, from the Civil Rights movement to arguments about the role of leaders in the Occupy movement (chapter 10), Black Lives Matter (chapter 2), and most others. Various culturally shaped differences arising from factors like age/generation, social class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender have all played a role in the formation of and clashes among organizational cultures within movements and in movement cultures overall. A corollary of these clashes surrounds the question of the extent to which certain movement roles should be professionalized, as opposed to being performed by rotating volunteers. A crucial element in the making of movement cultures is that they recruit from and to some extent transform existing social networks and/ or subcultures. While isolated individuals join movements, much of the crucial process of movement recruitment occurs through formal and informal social networks. These networks vary in size and cohesiveness, from families to transnational organizations. Movements benefit greatly when they can recruit people who are already organized in networks such as those that form around churches, neighborhoods, schools, clubs, unions, civic organizations, and a host of other social and recreational commonalities. Church networks, for example, have been equally important to progressive causes such as the Civil Rights movement and right-­wing ones like the antiabortion movement. Social networks can be more or less political in nature, but even partially political networks

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like labor unions undergo some degree of transformation when they become part of movements, as was the case when the United Farm Workers expanded to become a larger movement. In the era of new social media, social networks have both proliferated and become more accessible to movement organizers. The relative openness of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter makes it easier for movements to tap into networks of potential recruits. A subculture is a special, more fully developed or elaborated type of social network. Subcultures may be ethnic, class based, generational, aesthetic, religious, or otherwise social in various combinations. Like networks in general, they can be more or less overtly political in orien­ta­ tion. But subcultures differ from movement cultures proper to the extent that they do not always centrally employ strategies that directly challenge the existing political, economic, or social system. In traditional terms, some subcultures may function more instrumentally (with direct social impacts), while others take more expressive or aesthetic forms that do not directly challenge dominant culture. But these dimensions are never fully separable, as evidenced by the fact that supposedly merely expressive subcultures have often been drawn into more overtly political action. Some subcultures, like the one surrounding punk rock, for example, contain disruptive elements that lend themselves well to support of social movements. In this case, some punk strains have moved to the left, identifying with anarchist elements of the global justice movements, while other strands, like the skinheads, have lent support to reactionary and even fascist movements. Some subcultures are, rhetorically at least, overtly oppositional (and sometimes therefore called countercultures) with regard to the dominant culture, while others are content to be alternative, in a live-­and-­let-­live sense. The fields of cultural studies and sociology have both done much to explore the nature and meaning(s) of subcultures.16 But each has shown some of the biases that mar its work generally in relation to movement study. That is, some cultural studies work presumes a degree of political contestation built into primarily aesthetically oriented subcultures that exaggerates their political impact (with every rock song and video somehow seen as resistant). Conversely, much of the sociological study of subcultures has had far too little to say about the symbolic challenges that even relatively nonpolitical subcultures do sometimes offer in opening up alternative visions that can

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facilitate recruitment into more directly political movements. As I have suggested in my discussion of anti-­apartheid rock concerts (chapter 5), for example, the often quite superficial rebelliousness that is built into rock music performance can lend itself to a deepening by movement activists into something truly oppositional politically. Subcultures have often been especially rich recruitment networks for movements. This was true, for example, of certain elements of the hippie subculture with regard to the anti–­Vietnam War and student movements of the 1960s, and it is true for certain hip-­hop subcultures in relation to Black Lives Matter. At times, movements become almost indistinguishable from subcultures in their degree of elaboration, and in doing so make more active the symbolic challenges implicit in many subcultures. At other times this process can reverse itself, such that a movement culture evolves into a less overtly active subculture. While often criticized by activists as a devolution, at times—­as Verta Taylor points out with regard to groups during the “doldrums period” of the women’s movement—­the transformation of a movement community into a subculture with a less overtly political agenda can provide an “abeyance structure” that keeps movement values and goals alive until a new phase of more overt movement activity can emerge.17 One particular kind of subculture that plays an obviously vital role in, among other things, moving through doldrums is the activist subculture. Activist subcultures, made up of people who work in a number of different movements, form over time. Members of activist subcultures can bring vital tactical, strategic, and other kinds of knowledge and can provide a sense of continuity across movements that address differing aspects of the wider terrain of social change. Activists from labor unions, from long-­ standing groups like the NAACP, and from the socialist and communist parties of the 1930s played a key role in conveying strategy and tactics to the new Civil Rights movement, both individually and through institutions like Highlander Folk School. In turn, activists from the Civil Rights movement carried the master protest frame of that movement into the women’s, gay, student, antiwar, and other movements of the 1960s. Likewise, alterglobalization activists played key roles in the early stages of Occupy. Activist subcultures can also, however, be sources of ideological and/or generational conflict when longtime activists fail to note and

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respect cultural differences and differences in historical context in their work with new movements. In both the Civil Rights movement and Occupy, tensions arose that were partly generational, the result of activist subcultures trying to transfer knowledge to a new context. Negotiating the process of finding a respectful mode of internal education between long-­standing and new activists is often a crucial aspect of movement success. Because subcultures exist, by definition, in some degree of distance from mainstream cultures (with the prefix sub-­ suggesting their lower status from the point of view of the dominant), they always exist as potentially political forces. Rastafarian religious subculture in Jamaica, for example, always had the potential to be turned from alternative to oppositional to openly political form, but it took the influence of the new black nationalist movement cultures of the late 1960s and the conscious work of figures like Bob Marley to bring forth that potential. Subcultural force has to be mobilized or folded into social movements to reach its full disruptive potential. Ethnic subcultures have played particularly important roles in recent movements, but they too are not automatically politically oppositional (as arguments about the virtue or vice of relative cultural assimilation make clear). Ethno-­racialized people in a U.S. context can be said in some sense to form an overarching subculture due to their marginalization within white-­dominant America, but these larger formations never translate fully into a movement culture. To take but one example from this book, in chapter 4 we saw how selected elements of Mexican and Mexican American ethnic sub­ cultures were adopted and adapted by and for the movement culture of the Chicano/a/x movimiento. And the adoption of the politicized ethnic label Chicano, in place of a more neutral or assimilated term like Mexican American or Hispanic, itself sought with some success to claim this movement-­bred identity as the definition of the ethnic group more broadly. But that identification was not adopted by all members of this ethno-­racial demographic. The political meaning of subcultures is also shaped by the degree of tolerance for alternatives that exist in a given society. In totalitarian or highly controlled societies, any form of subcultural activity (religious, aesthetic, ethnic) can be perceived as threatening. Conversely, more open, putatively democratic societies can tolerate a great deal of subcultural

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activity. Indeed, they use this openness to diversity of style and ideology to bolster their claim to being wholly just societies. But at the point where subcultures become serious threats to the dominant culture’s economic or political system, that tolerance disappears. When that point of threat is reached, however, subcultures can sometimes be politicized rapidly. This process was at work, for example, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969 when police, by pushing some “queers” too far, drove an underground subculture to the surface, helping to ignite a gay liberation movement. While occasionally an entire subculture may transform into a movement culture, more often only some members of a given subculture come to the conclusion that they wish to expand their subculture into a wider frame, or that the existence of their sub­ culture can be sustained only by political action. This situation varies greatly from society to society even within the democratic West. The United States, for example, has had fewer and far less elaborated sub­ cultures than England or Western Europe. This helps to account for the greater emphasis placed on subcultures as movement cultures or sites for the launching of movements in the work of European new movement theorists like Alberto Melucci.

CULTURAL FORMATIONS, AESTHETIC IDEOLOGIES, AND MASS MEDIA(TION) In addition to their connections with networks and subcultures, movement cultures (with their relatively well-­ defined, ideologically self-­ conscious, but usually narrow core constituencies) are linked in various degrees to cultural formations (with their more diffuse, less ideologically conscious, but often broader constituencies) that shape and are reshaped especially by the art forms that play through movements. Cultural and intellectual formations form a kind of large penumbra around movements. They may begin in the arts or in other intellectual circles and move closer to the orbit of a movement, or they may be largely generated by a movement, or, as is most often the case, they may interact dialectally with a movement, such that the question of who is the chicken and who is the egg becomes irrelevant.18 Like subcultures, cultural formations can have wide or narrow agendas in terms of opposition to dominant cultural forms, but unlike fully formed movement

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cultures, they may consider their first concerns to be aesthetic or academic, rather than directly political. Often, however, especially in recent decades, formation discourses include a questioning of these dichotomies (for example, as chapter 10 shows, many art formations were drawn into and changed by the Occupy movement in part because they already believed art and politics cannot be fully separated). Although they may seemingly precede the rise of a movement culture, formations can often be shown to have some part of their origins in previous social movements. Folksingers in the 1960s, for example, whether they knew it or not, acknowledged it or not, owed the existence and much of the content of their cultural formation to the People’s Songs movement of the 1930s Communist Party USA. For some intellectual/cultural formations, like the field of ecocriticism and environmental justice novels as they were both shaped by strands of environmentalism (see chapter 8), the connection between movement and formation is more parallel than directly overlapping. At other times, cultural formations are virtually coextensive with a movement culture, as was the case with what Michael Denning has called the “cultural front” formation that emerged out of the radical labor and communist movements in the United States in the 1930s, and as was the case with much of the black arts formation of the 1960s. The 1960s also spawned intellectual formations, including women’s and ethnic studies, that closely aligned initially with the movements that sparked them and then later evolved in broader directions not as closely tied to movement-­defined goals. Cultural formations also can be shaped or reshaped, both quite directly and less so, by emergent social movement cultures. Many protest songs arise from outside movements but in close connection to them, for example. At other times these formations develop more slowly and indirectly over time in ways that may or may not acknowledge their debt to an original set of movement ideas and practices. While writers like Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston acknowledge a strong debt to women-­of-­color feminisms, other writers may not acknowledge or recognize such a connection, yet any close analysis of their work would reveal the impact of the movement. On some occasions, parts of a cultural formation can be absorbed fully into a social movement culture (as with those European Dadaists who joined the communist movement), but usually the process is more mixed, as in the case of rap music,

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which has a range from more overtly political “message” rap to implicitly oppositional forms to co-­opted commercial modes. When analyzing a given cultural formation, Michael Denning argues, it is useful to distinguish between “cultural politics” and “aesthetic ideologies.” He uses the term cultural politics to name the complex of political and institutional affiliations, “the politics of letterheads and petitions, the stances taken by artists and intellectuals,” and the history of the cultural-­political institutions in which the new formation is embedded. Aesthetic ideologies, on the other hand, refers to the politics of form, the actual aesthetic practices, the genres, styles, and conventions that emerge to embody aspects of the general cultural politics.19 Depending on the degree of autonomy insisted upon by the artists and intellectuals involved, the cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies may be closely aligned or widely diverging. Some politically committed artists see their art as a “weapon” in the struggle, some equally committed ones insist that their politics and their art are fully separable, and most find positions between these poles. Frequently within the same cultural formation (and certainly in the same movement culture) there are several different aesthetic ideologies that need to be sorted out and judged against specific aesthetico-­political criteria. Judging forms ranging from ephemeral works of agitprop to aesthetically complex works by the same criteria has often led to dismissive evaluations of all political art. In the 1930s, for example, the leftist cultural front contributed significantly to both major works of art like the film Citizen Kane and ephemeral works designed only for a very specific audience of workers on a picket line. Similarly, the movements and cultural formations of the 1960s produced street theater meant to be effective for a few days and also contributed to the creation of brilliant works of literary art by writers like Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich that will be read for hundreds of years. This raises the difficult question of the relation between politics and aesthetics. There is no space to tackle that extremely complicated terrain here, but let me offer a general principle on which scholars as different as Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu agree: the logic of politics and the logic of aesthetic objects seldom, if ever, perfectly coincide. In Bourdieu’s terms, the economies of culture and the economies of politics overlap and interact in a variety of ways, but they are never simply coextensive. Each “field” is subject to internal rules and regularities that

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are peculiarly its own. As mentioned above, the fields meet in that overarching terrain he names the “field of power,” but the meeting points in the field of power never exhaust the meanings of serious works of art, and political meanings have their own, differing forms. Put differently, any aesthetic text can be put to political ends, and all aesthetic texts have political implications, but no aesthetic text is reducible to its political meanings. Political meanings are not given, they must be interpreted. And acts of interpretation are always grounded in the social relations of readers/audiences, including movement actors and movement observers as interpreters. Two paradoxical observations by important thinkers of the political-­ aesthetic dynamic can perhaps reinforce this point: “The [ideological] tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense” (Walter Benjamin), and “The conflict between politics and art . . . cannot and must not be solved” (Hannah Arendt). Benjamin reminds us that form and function are always intertwined, and Arendt reminds us that the meanings of significant (i.e., not just instrumental) works of art always exceed their ideological reduction. As I will discuss in the section below on the various roles played by the arts in movements, one crucial role of aesthetically complex, serious art (as opposed to more purely instrumental forms) is to critique and transcend ideology.20 Aesthetically rich texts are always both ideological and more than ideological. They offer deep cultural resonances (think of old spirituals in the Civil Rights movement) and they can remind activists, who often are tempted by the pressures of political struggle into ideologically reductive positions, that the full lived complexity of cultural life cannot be reduced to any ideological system. While movements can be quite culturally creative, culture in movements is never pure, never purely the creation of a movement. Various mainstream cultural forces continue to play through movement cultures. For one thing, it is neither possible nor desirable to invent a full culture out of hand (not every element of mainstream culture is ideologically “tainted”). For another, it is impossible to remain isolated from the continuing flow of mainstream culture (even deeply separatist movements maintain some reliance on the dominant system). The midmovement adoption of some elements of a movement culture by the mainstream

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may require the movement culture to reshape itself to retain its resistant otherness. For example, white youth participating in SNCC’s Freedom Summer adopted blue jeans to express solidarity with poor black farmers. But when jeans became widely fashionable in the late 1960s, they ceased to function as a marker of movement cultural solidarity. Conversely, one way to keep mainstream culture at bay is through appropriation via parody. Movements frequently take elements of mainstream culture and put movement twists on them. For instance, the appropriation and parody of mainstream music is found in many movements. Another example is ACT UP’s use of mainstream advertising techniques, a practice elaborated into a full-­fledged movement unto itself in the form of groups like Adbusters and others of the “culture jamming” school of social action.21 This process of appropriation and counter­ appropriation can become quite elaborate over time. Nike Corporation, for example, at the height of protests against its allegedly exploitative labor practices, invited consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader to appear in one of its television ads, presumably on the calculated gamble that audiences would infer that any corporation hip enough to feature one of its prime critics in its advertising could not be all bad (Nader refused).22 Clearly, like the boundaries between and among the political, the social, the economic, and the cultural, boundaries between subcultures, cultural formations, and movement cultures are in practice often quite fluid. No cultural form can remain wholly oppositional or become wholly co-­opted; context is everything in terms of the political valence of any cultural text. In any full examination of cultural activity in and around social movements, it is analytically useful to work through something like this range of more or less distinct components, and to give the name movement cultures to those contexts that most explicitly and fully turn cultural forms into sources for wider social change. In the life cycle of a given movement—and in terms of larger cycles of protest—cultural formations, subcultures, and movement cultures undergo various processes of evolution and interaction. Much of this dynamic can be analyzed well through Raymond Williams’s notion of “residual, emergent, and dominant” cultural processes.23 Cultural formations, subcultures, and movement cultures all draw upon elements from each of these three stages of cultural evolution. The Civil Rights movement, for example, drew upon a residual folk cultural form, the spiritual,

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and turned it into a major resource for the movement. The Black Power movement, on the other hand, harnessed an emergent pop cultural form, soul music, that better suited the purposes of its work in urban arenas. On a different scale, the black liberation struggle overall can be said to have shifted gears to the Black Power phase when the Civil Rights movement had passed from an emergent into a dominant movement culture form that was felt as a constraint on some current and many new members of the movement community. At that same historical moment, however, as the Civil Rights repertoire of nonviolent resistance tactics was passing from dominant to residual for some black activists, it was being translated into emergent movements for human rights among women and LGBTQI2+ folks. Similar logics are at play in the ways in which subcultures and cultural formations move in and out of movement culture orbits. Sometimes a movement culture can revive a cultural formation or a subculture, as Occupy seemed to reinvigorate the art scene in New York. And sometimes an emergent subculture or cultural formation can reinvigorate a movement culture. Often this process is so mutually reinforcing that it is difficult to tell which force is the dynamic one in the relationship, but making that determination is less important than understanding how the forces work in a symbiosis that furthers the aims of both. Cultural context always matters. Take, for example, the protest songs of Bob Dylan. The meaning and resonance of his songs varied greatly from when he sang in the context of movement culture of SNCC in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1964 to when he sang later that year at the March on Washington where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to when he sang in the context of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 as part of the folk revival cultural formation to when the songs went out to the wider mass culture via radio and vinyl. Each of these contexts no doubt worked to support the Civil Rights movement, but each location did so differently, with a more or less direct impact. The most direct impact, when Dylan sang to SNCC workers and three hundred local farmers in Greenwood, reached the smallest audience, while the least direct impact, via record album and radio play, reached the largest. In that sense, we could play off depth of impact versus breadth, with no need to offer a value judgment as to relative importance. Each mode, from face-­ to-­face to mass-­mediated, had and continues to have a role to play.

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The case of hip-­hop can likewise illustrate something of the complicated interactions among movement cultures, cultural formations, and subcultures. Hip-­hop began in the 1970s as an urban subculture on the streets of New York. To a significant extent, some of its texts drew upon Civil Rights and Black Power discourses to understand and articulate the devastating economic conditions faced by those living in the so-­ called black and brown ghettos. Hip-­hop then fairly quickly evolved into a wider cultural formation and then into a veritable culture industry. But, as detailed in chapter 2, hip-­hop never completely lost its connection to movement cultures and subcultures such that it was not difficult when the Black Lives Matter movement emerged for activists to connect to the hip-­hop cultural formation, not only inspiring movement-­ supportive work by major existing artists like Kendrick Lamar but also bringing forth texts from within the new movement culture by activists like the brother and sister of police-­slain Eric Garner. Further out from the movement culture, but intimately woven into it, is the realm of mass culture and the mass media that enable it. Communication scholars use the term mediation to describe the ways in which ideas, images, and other aspects of cultural exchange move through and across various modes, from face-­to-­face to ever wider circles, out to the widest terrain of mass media. The Civil Rights movement is generally seen as the first movement to be shaped significantly by the (then relatively new) medium of television. And ever since, movements have found it important to think about how mass media portray their activities. How major news organizations represent an emerging movement’s work can make or break that movement, and over time a complex dance of representation and counterrepresentation evolves between activists and media professionals. In most movements, including all of those surveyed in this book, the role of media spokesperson is a significant one. Movements can never fully control how they are portrayed by mass media, but savvy interactions with reporters are of great importance. Just as movements develop framing narratives, so too do media organizations fit protests and other movement activities into certain typical frames. Part of the job of contemporary activists is to learn how to anticipate and shift these media frames to more accurately portray their movements’ intentions and meanings.24 As traced especially in chapters 9 and 10, the rise of new media social networking capabilities has added

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a significant new dimension to movements’ media portrayals, with both positive aspects (with regard to movement self-­representation) and negative aspects (with regard to manipulation and fake news).

DEGREES OF MOVEMENT CULTURE ELABORATION While all movements develop some type of movement culture, such cul­ tures can be more or less intensive or elaborated, more or less bounded or porous, and therefore more or less important to a movement’s work. Movement cultures seldom correspond fully to any single movement organization. More often they include what Steven Buechler has termed “social movement communities”—­“informal networks of activists with fluid boundaries.”25 Often they bleed out into more amorphous but influential formations like the “cultures of solidarity” that Rick Fantasia sees as feeding into the labor movement.26 John Lofland offers a schema for measuring movement culture intensity that, whatever the merits of its particulars, provides a useful starting point for thinking about the component parts and qualities of such that make movement cultures more central or less central to the movement in general.27 Lofland divides the terrain of movement culture into six dimensions: values, objects (material culture), stories, occasions (particular rituals, events), roles (specialized to create, perform, and disseminate movement ideas and values), and personae (modelers of movement identities). He further suggests that each of these elements should be examined for intensity across six qualities: sharing (how widely the elements are held in common), distinctiveness (how close or distant from mainstream culture or other movement cultures), scope (narrow to wide focus of cultural alternatives offered), elaboration (degree of complexity of interaction among cultural elements), quantity (sheer volume of objects, forms, ideas), and expressiveness (degree of emotional depth evoked in group members). A model like this can generate a continuum between extremes of strong and weak movement cultures and can help isolate the impact of degrees of movement culture strength on other aspects of movement activity. In what ways, for what kinds of movements, is a strong cultural base important? In what ways, and for what kinds of movements, is a strong cultural base less important or even counterproductive? A “consensus movement,” for example, might be

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adversely affected in its search for the broadest possible constituency by a developed cultural formation, while, conversely, strong cultural bases often have been crucial to the recruitment of people to ethnic movements. Sometimes the intensity of movement culture furthers a movement’s diffusion, and sometimes it hinders diffusion. In the case of the Civil Rights movement, one could argue that it did both. While the African American musical culture examined in chapter 1 traveled into other movements—­“We Shall Overcome,” for example, became virtually universally available—­that change of context undercut much of the music’s specific power and may at times have strained race relations when its use was seen as white appropriation (one factor in the rise of separatist black movements). One key area of movement intensity where the arts are especially important is in promoting an understanding of the central role that emotions play in life and in the life of a movement. Movements can be more or less intense in terms of their emotional resonance, but all movements mobilize emotions. Recall that the collective behavior school, in linking movements to things like mob actions and riots, codes emotion primarily negatively as irrational. Several forces have brought about a new understanding of affect that has significant implications for movements. First, feminist movements have done much to reveal the sexist bias that has coded emotion as feminine and therefore less significant than putatively more masculine thought and reason. Second, and arising partly from this feminist critique, affect theory has become an important area of social movement analysis, one that has given emotions a more central and balanced role in movements.28 Third, the field of social psychology has helped movement theorists move beyond dismissing emotions as too personal or individual to warrant study. And finally, recent developments in the field of neuroscience have deepened understanding of the complex mental processes of emotional life, showing that the thought/ emotion dichotomy is oversimplified and misleading. Put simply, neuro­ science seems to be learning that emotions are thoughtful (cognitive, not merely reactive), that all thought is emotional, and that both arise from similar, physically embodied processes in which emotions are essential to all supposedly higher mental functions like abstract thought.29 These four factors combine to argue for a continued rethinking of emotions

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as they influence all facets of society, but they are particularly relevant to social movements, given movements’ often quite dynamic and strategic use of emotionality. In this work, there is of course a danger that emotions as a movement force will be treated reductively or instrumentalized, as opposed to being treated in their full complexity. And in this approach there will always be a (creative) tension between individualizing and structural approaches to emotions. We can link emotions to what Raymond Williams calls structures of feeling.30 Williams argues that our supposedly subjective emotions are as collectively structured as other aspects of our social life, that those structures differ in relation to a host of social factors (age, gender, race/ ethnicity, and so on), and that they change historically. They also of course range immensely across ethno-­national culture borders. Movements themselves have been one key force in reshaping emotions in ways that bring about new sensibilities, new structures of feeling that, like other aspects of movement cultures, spread out into the wider world in a variety of ways. While no doubt in danger of being read reductively, my reference to movements’ mobilization of emotions above is meant to counter the notion that emotions are somehow beyond our control, something that we undergo rather than direct, as both narrow rational actor theories and reductive forms of discourse analysis can sometimes suggest. That we are not in full conscious control of our emotions is of course true, since much of our emotional life takes place via subconscious processes we can never fully know or consciously direct (neuroscientists discuss “feelings” as the way we become partly conscious of these complex affective processes). But because emotions are inherently thought-­filled, and because we are highly self-­conscious creatures (in a positive sense), we can learn to shape our emotions to a considerable degree as individuals, and movements can do so as well. When the Women’s Pentagon Action scripted its protest into four sections, each built around a dominant affective context—­“Mourning,” “Rage,” “Empowerment,” and “Defiance”—­ it gave a particularly clear example of how a movement can learn to channel emotions in positive and affective (in the larger sense) ways. This case is particularly illustrative, since it precisely names a process that turns an inchoate and potentially destructive feeling (rage) into a directed,

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pointed action (defiance). (It is no accident that this was a women-­only demonstration, since in our cultural context, while historically coded as too emotional, women in fact generally are socialized far better than men in how to understand and use emotionality.) Some degree of this process of learning to use, rather than only being used by, the deep emotions that are often the original catalyst for someone to join a movement can play a key role in sustaining a movement and making it successful. And the arts offer one of the most profound forces for understanding affect that humans have developed.

SOME ROLES PLAYED BY THE ARTS IN MOVEMENT CULTURES As I have tried to show throughout this book, the arts and related cultural forms function within and around movement cultures, and in relation to the wider culture that movements seek to influence, in a wide range of ways. The set of movement-­related texts that can be labeled “artistic” represent many different forms, from the ephemeral to the profound. The various roles listed below are biased toward the narrowly functional end of the spectrum of what the arts do in movement cultures, but in the subsequent commentary I suggest something of the vital, less immediate dimensions of movement culture texts. I offer ten primary roles here, but I am sure there are others I have not thought of. Sometimes these roles work independently, but more often they overlap and interact in various configurations within any given movement culture. • Encourage. Help individuals to feel the strength of the group. Singing in mass rallies can move a person out of the individual self to feel that strength. • Empower. Help individuals to feel their own strength. Responsibility for performing a movement text (say, taking part in the painting of a mural) can empower an individual to feel his or her own particular commitment more deeply. • Harmonize. Smooth differences among diverse constituencies. Cultural forms can sometimes cut across lines of age, class, region, even ideology, providing a sense of overarching connection that, at least for a time, subordinates differences.

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Conclusion  405 • Inform internally. Express or reinforce movement values, ideas, and tactics. Movement cultural texts provide information in compact, often highly memorable and emotionally charged ways, both to educate new recruits and to refocus veterans. • Inform externally. Express movement values, ideas, and tactics to potential recruits, opponents, and undecided bystanders. Movement cultural texts can often be effective and affective means of promoting movement ideas to people outside the movement. This can take place either directly in the moment of action (through a chant or song) or in more indirect form, such as the formation of a traveling movement culture group (like SNCC’s Freedom Singers or the feminist art movement’s Guerrilla Girls). • Enact movement goals. Create art that actively intervenes directly to achieve movement values. This might take the form of creating ecoactive art that helps restore an ecosystem or painting a mural that improves the appearance of a neighborhood. • Historicize. Invent, tell, and retell the history of the movement. This might range from writing and sharing songs like “The Ballad of the Sit-­Ins” to self-­producing a documentary about an action, like Indymedia’s This Is What Democracy Looks Like: The Battle of Seattle. • Transform affect or tactics. Set a new emotional tone (for example, diffuse tension from anger to focused resistance, or from fear to calm resolve) or redirect the attention of the group (use a song or a giant puppet to signal a new stage of a demonstration). • Critique movement ideology. Challenge dominant ideas, values, and tactics or undercut tendencies toward dogma by evoking emotions and meanings not reducible to narrowly ideological terms. • Make room for pleasure. Provide respite from the rigors of movement work through aesthetic joy.

While most of these roles for the arts should be easy to grasp, the last two, related roles—­the contra-­ideological and the purely pleasur­ able—­may need explication. In using the term role in this context, I know that I risk implying a narrowly instrumentalist, functionalist, reading. On the one hand, I welcome this because I wish to counter the idea that the arts are merely added on to more important movement work. Not only a strand of movement theorists but also some hard-­nosed critics inside movements are often impatient with aspects of movement

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cultures they see as “merely expressive”—­that is, without any direct relevance to the “real struggle” at hand. This tendency often manifests itself as the insistence that all participants behave at all times in a manner consistent with movement goals and values. In movement practice, this can evolve into a rigid kind of political correctness that will eventually end up in a perfect movement of one person. Within social movement theory, this approach has largely been rejected as naive instrumentalism—­ the reduction of culture to decoration. In trying to counter the decorative, vaguely expressive limit placed by some on the role of the arts, I do not want to limit myself on the other side to an idea of the arts as narrowly practical in importance. While many artful texts do play vital, practical roles in movements, that is not their only function. They can have key roles to play precisely in undermining the merely functional and in countering a movement’s own limitations. Movement growth is often dependent on two things: an openness that allows novices a space to learn, and veterans a space to escape from, movement ideology; and a capacity to shift values, strategies, tactics, and even goals, which can be nurtured by cultural play that undermines ideological rigidity. Periods of plain pleasure divorced from the context of struggle can play a vital role in preventing a problem endemic in movements, burnout. Movements can be quite stressful environments, given the intense emotions that struggling against the dominant culture can evoke. Pleasurable activities with no discernible connection to activism can help to relieve that stress. At the same time, as is perhaps abundantly clear given the prominent role that political satire has been playing in U.S. politics in recent years through The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Full Frontal, This Week Tonight, Saturday Night Live, and other politically engaged entertainment shows, subversive humor can sometimes provide relief from the stresses of activism while also offering significant political education.31 While some hard-­core types dismiss humor as unserious, I take the opposite view: no one lacking a sense of humor should be taken seriously. Humor can also play a key role in the dimension that I call counterideological, which includes not only direct attack on limited ideas in movements but also that broader aesthetic capacity (noted above) to give voice to a fuller complexity of lived experience, a greater depth and

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breadth of being than can be conveyed in slogans, manifestos, or any of the other vital discourses emerging from the strategic level of movements. Serious art, even in humorous form, can take us beyond the quotidian parts of our lives within movement cultures and beyond them. I want to underscore a key factor in the roles played by the arts in movements suggested by some items on the above list, a factor that might be called the social relations of cultural production. In his excellent book Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States, William Roy points out the limitations of reading cultural texts without attending to the social relations in which the texts are embedded and through which they are interpreted or experienced. In contrasting the role of music in the old left’s People’s Songs movement of the 1930s with the way music worked in the Civil Rights movement, he reinforces my argument in the first chapter of this book that music is most effective when deeply rooted in social interactions and relations, as opposed to when a singer performs for a passive audience. Roy’s argument that there is a big difference between being part of an audience for cultural texts and being a participant in the creation/sharing of those texts is illustrated in every chapter of The Art of Protest. Think not only of the group singing in the Civil Rights movement but also of the collectives that created murals in the Chicano/a/x movement, the various art-­based affinity groups in ACT UP, and the guilds in Occupy. This is not to downplay the importance of cultural texts aimed at audiences outside a movement, but works of culture created collectively within a movement are often even more crucial. These social relations of cultural production are a large part of how culture works in movement contexts above and beyond the specific functions cited in my list.32 To critique a metaphor often used to disparage parts of movement culture, preaching to the choir is sometimes not a bad idea. Choir members need to hear the sermon too. And if they want to teach the wider world to sing, they need to know the meanings behind their songs well. As should be clear from my title onward, I have centered this book’s analysis on the arts as key elements of movements, and obviously I believe that the arts play a crucial role in shaping movement cultures. This is true not just for the allegedly snowflake-­ridden left but for right-­ wing movements as well. The neofascist white power movement, for

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example, has a very elaborated music culture that plays a significant role in recruitment and indoctrination of members.33 But the arts are only one element making up the cultural universe of movements, and all of the functions cited above can be applied as well to other not formally aesthetic elements of movements. While I have used examples from the arts to illustrate roles above, these roles can also be thought of more generally as roles played by the wider range of cultural activities in movements beyond the more specialized aesthetic variety. In the realm of verbal expression, for example, it is important to note that works of verbal art sit somewhere along a spectrum in movements from individual slogans, chants, and memes to media statements to manifestos expressing full-­fledged ideological elaborations. Likewise, with regard to the spectrum of dramatic enactments in movements, elaborately staged works of theater or performance art exist alongside more everyday rituals (such as the chanting of slogans) and gestures (like idiosyncratic hand signals in meetings) as well as ritualized acts of civil disobedience (like sit-­ins). And, of course, marches and rallies are ritualized activities that play vital roles in group cultural cohesion, as well as in signaling the wider culture. When opponents claim that mass arrests and other events are “staged,” they are not wrong, but they precisely miss the point. Staged activities can, of course, function both for the sake of internal solidarity and as ways to symbolically deepen the movement’s engagement with wider publics. In an unfortunately inelegant acronym (WUNC), the great movement historian and theorist Charles Tilly succinctly named four central elements of movement messaging in large-­scale public displays: worth, unity, numbers, and commitment. These elements nicely summarize the point of much movement theatricality broadly construed.34 My argument includes the notion that the more movements can understand their own performance as performance, the more they can achieve a certain degree of aesthetic distance, the more successful they are likely to become. Part of my argument about the Black Panthers (in chapter 2) is that if they had developed a more complete aesthetic understanding of their real-­ life performances, they might have had greater impact and not become trapped in their own dramatic story lines. Put more generally, sometimes real art can teach greater artfulness in the larger sense of thoughtful strategies.

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MOVEMENTS IN CULTURE By movements in culture, I mean the processes by which movements emerge from and return to broader cultural contexts. I have noted some of the ways this happens in previous sections, so here I want to pull some of those notions together and add some new ones. As I have suggested, movements emerge out of given general sets of cultural contexts and then evolve specific sets of cultural features (movement cultures). As a third step, they often diffuse (circulate, spread) novel moral values, behaviors, styles, ideas, material objects, social practices, and identities back into the wider culture.35 Even among the most conservative “consensus movements” (like Mothers Against Drunk Driving), the very act of stepping outside conventional politics to express a grievance opens up possibilities for re-­viewing the wider culture. As we move across the spectrum toward ever more deeply oppositional or radical movements, that re-­viewing and questioning process grows more intensive and extensive. Over the course of a movement and in its aftermath, elements of the movement culture are diffused (spread) back into the wider culture in a number of ways. One prominent scholar, Marco Giugni, goes so far as to suggest that “it is perhaps precisely in being able to alter their broader cultural environment that movements can have their deepest and lasting impact.”36 Another influential figure in movement scholarship, Doug McAdam, seems to agree and suggests a key reason: “Given the entrenched political and economic opposition movements are likely to encounter, it is often true that their biggest impact is more cultural than narrowly political and economic.”37 This diffusion of movement culture back into mainstream culture can indeed be the most important impact a given movement may have. Yet it is among the least studied aspects of movements, and it is not difficult to see why. Culture is a messy business; it is clearly a less easily measured object of analysis than Supreme Court rulings, legislation, or income patterns. But for social scientists to ignore a whole terrain and its impact just because it is not easily quantifiable seems, well, highly unscientific. One key reason culture may be a more fruitful avenue for change than politics or economics is that cultural institutions tend to be relatively more open and less defensive than these other realms. Indeed, since at least the rise of modernism in the arts, innovation has been an imperative in much cultural production. Particularly since the early

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twentieth century (with its proliferation of isms—­symbolism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, and so on), this has meant a very active search for new cultural forms that, in addition to opening up alternative visions, has sometimes contributed directly to creativity in social movements. That is why cultural formations have so often aligned with movements. At the same time, culturally disruptive aesthetic movements can be co-­opted through a process of cultural appropriation that cuts out the politically disruptive elements (as, for example, when punk was divorced from its rebellious working-­class origins and turned into a fashion statement for elites who wore safety pins in their earlobes alongside their diamond earrings). The impact of a given movement culture on the putative cultural mainstream is often obscured, because the mainstream, at least in a democratic society, by definition positions itself as flexible, open but stable, a system that changes without the need for disruptive movement activity. As I have suggested in several chapters, movements almost never get much credit for the political, social, and cultural changes they help bring about. And when they see such changes, they often dismiss them as co-­optation because the changes never amount to the full transformation the movements desire. The changes are almost always highly mediated, indirect. And when they are direct, they tend to be superficial, since often only those movement forms and norms that are seen as nonthreatening are openly adopted (as when, for example, Black Power cultural forms were reduced to Afro hairstyles and a preference for pseudo-­African dashiki dress styles). Nevertheless, even these defusing (power-­lessening) appropriations often carry with them supplemental elements of the more politically charged contexts in which they initially appeared (a white kid’s initially superficial musical interest in rap might just spark a deeper political understanding of racism). Perhaps the clearest examples of these processes arise from contemporary women’s movements. Anyone comparing gender norms in the 1950s with those in the twenty-­first century would see an immense change at every possible level. The impact of feminism, significant as it has been on legislation and on formal institutions, is still greater at the level of personal interaction. Most of the differences in gender norms between the 1950s and today bear the imprint of feminist ideas. Yet only a very small proportion of the individuals affected by those changes

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would call themselves feminists or ever had direct contact with a women’s movement group. A widely used women’s studies classroom experiment reveals how this process manifests itself. The professor writes on the board a list of women’s movement issues: equal pay for equal work, equity in sports access, right to reproductive freedom, equality in male–­ female personal relations, better rape prevention and victims’ rights, and so on. The instructor then asks who in the class supports each of these items. In most classrooms, even in relatively conservative communities, the response to virtually all the items is one of overwhelming support. Then the professor asks the next question: How many of the students in the class are feminists? The hands raised, even in relatively liberal communities, are usually very, very few. Every one of the issues listed emerged out of feminist social movement struggle, yet virtually no one among those supporting the issues identifies with the movement that put them forth. This story illustrates what I call the paradox of diffusion and defusion. The ideas of the women’s movement have been diffused with striking success out into the wider culture, but they have been detached from their movement origins (and, in varying degrees, defused from their most challenging forms). Just as it is axiomatic that movements seldom get credit for changes they force upon government and nongovernment institutions, it is axiomatic that changes in norms initiated by social movement activity pass through enough levels of mediation to make the origins of those changes invisible. The underlying reason is the same in both cases: most institutions, whether political or cultural, are invested in their own stability, while movements thrive on engendering instability. Movement cultures are diffused into the wider culture on several different levels, reflecting the layers of culture within movements themselves. In the broadest sense, we can talk about culture being diffused through folk culture (as was the case with some Civil Rights music), popular culture (as in the case of rock music’s relation to the anti-­apartheid movement of the 1980s, discussed in chapter 6), and/or high culture (as in the case of the profusion of feminist-­inflected poetry, detailed in chapter 4). So, the central paradox is that the energies of radical movement cultures and the cultural forms they generate have their greatest impact

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when they are diffused in a less overtly ideological way into the larger social arena via cultural movements. But that impact can be largely defused (can lose its power to explode dominant ideas) unless self-­consciously ideological social movements continue their work.38 This ongoing, irresolvable, creative tension between defusion and diffusion can be a key point of study for the cultural analysis of movements. Movement cultures are partly implicated in, not wholly immune to, these processes of appropriation, co-­optation, and defusion. But, as many chapters of this book have shown, they are also one of the primary means of resisting the forces that would reduce all culture to economic exchange in the course of instantiating a tragically unequal and unjust globalized capitalist system. As the new media struggle around the Battle of Seattle (discussed in chapter 9) and the Occupy movement (in chapter 10) illustrate particularly well, the diffusing and defusing of movement texts entails an increasingly intricate dance involving mainstream media, social media, and various forms of alternative media in and around movements. The increasing speed and intensity of processes that commodify or otherwise appropriate dissent has complicated the articulation of cultural politics and alternative political cultures. Given these tendencies, it seems crucial to understand more fully the processes by which movements help create contexts of cultural reception and produce alternative cultures that can better resist co-­optation. While it is important to be as precise as possible in characterizing the impacts of culture on movements and movements on culture, we should not let a supposed “rigor” often bordering on rigor mortis underplay the most significant impacts of movements. Sometimes movement cultures are most effectively diffused into the wider society through a general transgression of cultural codes. Swidler puts it this way: “Even without conscious efforts at publicity, one of the most important effects social movements have is publicly enacting images that confound existing cultural codings. From the punk subculture’s deliberate embrace of ‘ugly’ styles . . . to the Black Panthers’ display of militant, disciplined, armed black revolutionaries to the New Left spectacle of middle-­class college students being beaten by the police . . . altering cultural codings is one of the most powerful ways social movements actually bring about

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change.”39 While the particulars of each of these cultural code transgressions matter, there is also a more general level on which the extrainstitu­ tional nature of movements and the disruptive nature of their practices constitute an ongoing message that the status quo is open to change. Nevertheless, such messages are usually far more potent when embedded in movements explicitly calling for sociopolitical change. Several theorists have suggested that the impacts of certain movements can at times come less from the particular grievances or issue con­ cerns they diffuse into the wider society than from a more general set of processes labeled “prefiguration,” “symbolic action,” “direct theory,” and “social texts” that speak beyond their particular issues. All movements, even the most consensus-­oriented ones in societies that legitimate certain kinds of protest, offer some degree of symbolic challenge to the dom­ inant order just by their existence outside normalized political activity. But clearly the degree and kind of symbolic challenges offered by particular movements vary immensely. Wini Breines has analyzed, for example, how the “prefigurative politics” of the New Left of the 1960s was embodied in the movement culture as it attempted to enact within itself the radically different values and forms it sought to create throughout the wider world.40 By “prefigurative,” Breines means a symbolic enactment of a wider vision of a radically changed society. Francesca Polletta has further elaborated the study of prefigurative elements in movements as an integral part of their work, especially the ways in which the decision-­making practices of some movements are meant as a challenge to the limits of supposedly democratic political systems.41 In a related vein, movement scholar Noël Sturgeon has offered a deep semiotic reading of the organizational structures (like small-­scale affinity groups and consensus process) of the antinuclear direct-­action movement of the 1980s. She argues that movement structures not only expressed movement values but also embodied the movement’s theories about social change. Sturgeon offers the term direct theory to characterize the way in which the movement’s organizational form embodied a point-­by-­point theoretical and symbolic alternative to the dominant order’s notions of legitimate power.42 Italian movement theorist Alberto Melucci has written of the “symbolic challenge of movements,” in which movement cultural codes counter the cultural codes of the dominant society through

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sometimes direct, sometimes indirect semiotic warfare that goes beyond the particular issues on which the movements are focused.43 In my own earlier work Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers, I have argued that movements both create new “social texts” and are themselves “texts.” A movement is at once a site from which particular alternative stories about the culture emerge and a kind of metanarrative about an alternative way to live in the wider world.44 Though differing in emphasis and case study examples, all these theorists have shown how movement cultures become messages of resistance and embodiments of alternative social arrangements that resonate beyond their core issues.

HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS Much of the most important cultural action in movements occurs on that notoriously fuzzy terrain called consciousness. Movements generate new ways of thinking, new ways of being, new norms of behavior, new styles of living (as opposed to mere “lifestyles”), all of which contain an element of what has historically been classified as the “subjective.” Some of these new ways of being are eventually expressed in the formal political realm of parties, elections, legal decisions, and legislation, but more often they are embodied in indirect ways for which movements seldom get the credit (from the society at large or from scholars of movements). Beneath the more studied level of formal ideologies, or even elaborated cognitive “frames,” are levels of often contradictory but always socially meaningful layers of consciousness that neither empiricists nor historical materialists and social constructionists are very comfortable with. One need not devolve back to a naive notion of individualism to understand that socially constructed subjective experience is embodied variably in particular persons even when those persons are subject to broad social-­discursive patterns. To leave these dimensions unexplored is to do damage, even violence, to movements and to the deeply aggrieved lives out of which movements often arise. Recent social and cultural theories have given us better tools to challenge simplistic dichotomies between objective and subjective, the materialist and the idealist. The meaning-­making processes of culture are neither independent of nor narrowly dependent upon material conditions. In not taking seriously qualities like pride,

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dignity, hope, faith, self-­esteem, and related elements of consciousness, or reducing them to “merely” psychological or subjective factors, we may miss key dimensions of a movement’s impact. We may also rob subordinated groups of one of their most valuable resources—­their ability to see themselves differently from how they are seen by their oppressors. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is in relation to the most extreme cases of material deprivation. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James C. Scott demonstrates convincingly that even in the most extreme conditions of deprivation and unfreedom—­slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, rigid caste cultures, concentration camps, prisons—­ people have shown an amazing capacity to control their consciousness and resist the imposition of dominant views. Scott shows, moreover, that the “hidden transcripts” in which this resistance is concealed often take a cultural form, as folktales, songs, jokes, and theater.45 These hidden transcripts should be respected on their own terms as carved-­out bits of subjective but no less real freedom. They also should be attended to by activists and scholars alike as potential sites for the emergence of unhidden resistance in movement form. Surely we do a disservice to movement actors when we fail to acknowledge that part of their experience takes the form of putatively “merely subjective” transformations not easily visible in external structures or behaviors. Not only is it possible to talk about a more (or less) subjectively free member of an oppressed group, but it is also often essential to do so if we are to understand how change happens (or fails to happen). Pride, dignity, self-­worth arise through struggle even when particular goals may not be met. A change in the inner transcript can be as important as a change in policy, law, or economic circumstance. Movement activists and analysts should be encouraged to become skilled not only in interpreting explicit movement culture texts but also in getting at the “hidden transcripts” in the interstices of cultural documents. These are not individual experiences but “structures of feeling” every bit as efficacious as political or economic structures.46 The “freedom high” experienced by many activists working in the southern Civil Rights struggle, for example, proved to be a materially important force in propelling the movement forward. But at less intense levels, movement actors and even those who experience a movement at a distance can have their conscious and subconscious experience of themselves and

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the world altered profoundly in ways that are never translated into overt, visible actions. An elderly “Negro” who watched with deep pride those Black Panthers marching on the seat of state power in Sacramento in 1968, or, decades later, an older black woman who watched as Black Lives Matter activists protested police brutality—­neither may have ever joined a movement, but the lives of both were changed for the better through an enhanced sense of self-­worth. At the same time, any argument that so-­called subjective factors have become more important than ever in our putative “information age” must be made with caution. Without that caution, we get statements like this: “In the contemporary context, we can define exploitation as a form of dependent participation in the information flow, as the deprivation of control over the construction of meaning. The true exploitation is not the deprivation of information; even in the shantytowns of the cities of the Third World people are today widely exposed to the media, only they do not have any power to organize this information according to their own needs. Thus, the real domination is today the exclusion from the power of naming.”47 This is hyperbole bordering on nonsense. The “real” power is the power of naming? This takes the now self-­evident insight that cultural coding is important and turns it into a claim that cultural coding is the only important power. The material conditions of those shantytowns are unimportant? Does the lack of hygiene and nutrition, or the opportunity to go to school or the material quality of schools, play no role in the conditions in which power is organized? This particular kind of analysis does great disservice to the power of serious discourse analysis, and to the important task of respecting the lived experience of marginalized peoples.

BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT Reading social movement theory, I am sometimes reminded of the Sufi tale of “The Visually Challenged Persons and the Pachyderm” (aka “The Blind Men and the Elephant”). My revisionist version would go something like this: Once upon a time, a group of social movement theorists went on a safari together. Their search took them out on a dark, moonless night, and they spread out across the jungle. When they returned to camp, each had encountered an elephant, and all were eager to report

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their findings. The first to speak was a collective behaviorist. He had heard an elephant charging through the jungle and, after having nearly been trampled, declared that elephants are dangerous, anarchic things, prone to rioting and mob actions. The next safarist, a resource mobilization theorist, walked right into the side of a sleeping elephant. She declared the creature to be a solid, well-­organized thing, rather like a carefully built wall. A third theorist, from the political process camp, followed an elephant as it moved about its habitat, and declared that the most interesting thing about elephants is how their behavior is determined by the shifting opportunities for food found in their part of the jungle. Another theorist, a fanciful thinker from the social constructionist school, became fascinated by the elephant’s large, fanlike ears. She opined that elephant ears function rather like satellite dishes, taking in information about the jungle, processing it in uniquely elephantine ways, then transmitting it anew into the wider jungle. Throughout these reports, one theorist, of the historical materialist persuasion, was looking mildly perturbed. When his turn came, he declared it self-­evident that the elephant’s large, tree-­trunk-­like legs are the foundation on which all other elements of elephantness ultimately depend. Finally, a social movement theorist focused on the arts spoke, eloquently describing the loud but lovely trumpet sounds emanating from the elephant’s trunk. This theorist felt certain of having begun to decipher the most important aspect of the elephant, declaring that in essence elephants are singers, artfully shaping the jungle purely through the power and beauty of their song. Clearly, those tree-­trunk legs, the massive torso, satellite-­dish ears, and unpredictably whiplike tail are merely secondary enablers of the performance. Meanwhile, as daylight broke, a whole herd of elephants walked by unnoticed as the scholars debated their respective theories. My revision of the famous Sufi allegory is meant to acknowledge succinctly some of the rich body of work done on movements over the past half century. But it is also a cautionary tale about the beastly complexity of movements, suggesting that no one will ever capture one (alive) for their particular, private movement zoo. The Sufi tale, in my reading, is not a call for a total theory of elephants (or movements) but rather a call to respect the integrity of the creature and to recognize the inevitable partialness of perspective. Likewise, the summary I have offered in this essay is not meant to add up to a total theory of movements, or

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even of the role of the arts in movements. In my view, the great variety of movements, and the differing conditions in which they arise and evolve, makes any attempt to find their essence both futile and dangerous. The danger lies both in misunderstanding the complex, varied dynamics of movements and in inadvertently missing (or indirectly stifling) the creativity of movements, missing their ability to shape-­shift in response to new conditions. In this brief overview essay, I have tried to give some sense of the complicated forces that surround and work through social movements. I have stressed cultural factors in this summary because until recently they have been less emphasized, and because I use art as the focus to introduce the ten movements I discuss in this book. But in each chapter I have tried to show that the other forces that have more often been studied in relation to movements—­organizational patterns, political pro­cesses, eco­ nomic resources, leadership styles, and so on—­are also extremely important. These are crucial aspects of movements and must remain part of any full agenda for analyzing movements. In these reflections, I have noted a number of ways in which recent cultural theory has argued that social, economic, and political forces cannot be understood apart from the cultural processes through which they take on meaning. These divisions themselves—­social, economic, political, cultural—­are, after all, socially constructed, cultural concepts, not real things neatly dividing the world. Given the focus of this book, I have concentrated on some of the many ways that artistic and cultural texts, among other material-­discursive practices, have played and continue to play important roles in movements. My goal has not been to argue for these particular forms as more important than other forces and discourses, but rather to see them as one crucial part of this larger set of factors. Material-­discursive means precisely that political economy, organizational structures, social institutions, and other forces are always intertwined with even the most seemingly ethereal forms of discourses. In suggesting something of the wide range of relevant theory and method that can help us better understand movements, I hope to encourage anyone interested in these issues to use my endnotes and the companion website to delve more deeply into what I could only touch upon here in quick, abstract outline.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books are collective projects, but one of this scope is more than usually indebted to a host of people who helped make it possible. The map that eventually became the territory of this book was first produced with the aid of a Mellon Fellowship at the Humanities Center of Wesleyan University. During my year there I was particularly grateful for the support of Richard Ohmann and for the friendship of Paula Rabinowitz, the other “mellow felon” that cycle. At a crucial later stage in the project, I received similar support from the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Center codirectors Gail Hershatter and Chris Connolly provided a brilliantly stimulating environment, and Hayden White quite literally gave me the space to work. The Fulbright scholar program offered me the chance to work out some of the ideas in this book with a bright group of students and faculty at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. I am indebted to Margit Mayer and Bruce Spear for their intellectual stimulation and hospitality during my stay there at the John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien. Among my many supportive colleagues in the American studies program and English department at Washington State University, I would especially like to thank Joan Burbick, Alex Hammond, Alex Kuo, Victor Villanueva, Sue Armitage, and Shawn Michelle Smith for their friendship and inspiring examples of committed scholarship and pedagogy. Among my friends in the Santa Cruz diaspora, I especially 419

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thank Katie King, Chela Sandoval, Barry Schwartz, Zoe Sofoulis, and Don Beggs. A number of graduate students at Washington State also gave support and insight as the project evolved. I note in particular the influence of Christina Castañeda, Ednie Garrison, John Hausdoerffer, Sarah Hentges, Azfar Hussain, Melissa Hussain, Jennifer Mata, Lori Saffin, Allyson Wolf, and Tony Zaragoza: their scholarly activism and activist scholarship gives me hope for the future. Many of these chapters began as presentations at national meetings of the American Studies Association, my larger academic home, and I am grateful for the work of scholars Hazel Carby, Michael Cowan, Michael Denning, Paul Lauter, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Alvina Quintana, Jan-­Michael Rivera, Vicki Ruiz, George Sanchez, Steve Sumida, and Robert Warrior, among many others who make those conferences such stimulating intellectual sites. Lauter and Carlo Rotello also provided crucially important critical readings of the first edition’s manuscript. I thank Aaron Kreuter and Mickayla Deveau of York University, who provided many useful comments for this second edition, as well as Jeff Kuure and Blair Beauchesne for their technical work on the companion website. A less direct but more fulsome debt is owed to hundreds of cultural workers for justice (for me, Bernice Johnson Reagon was the paradigm and remains the paragon), who created the committed “art of protest” my work attempts to reflect and reflect on. This book is a tribute to these indefatigable cultural workers, in the hope that I have done at least partial justice to their brilliant, unceasing efforts. Closer to home, two people played an immense role in this book. Scholar-­activist Noël Sturgeon, both as a model of engaged intellectual-­ political labor and as my most trusted consultant on the substance of this work, is owed an incalculable debt. Hart Sturgeon-­Reed, who grew from infant to teenager to adulthood during the production of this book and its new edition, inspires me with his intellectual acuity, lightens my life with his wit, and reminds me constantly of why we must struggle to leave the next generation a better foundation from which to fight the good fight for social, economic, environmental, and cultural justice. The love and support of my sister, Linda Ware, my late mother, Alice Reed, and my niece, Michelle Spencer, have also been crucial to the

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world out of which this writing has emerged, as has my connection to a host of wonderful relatives in the Reed–­Sturgeon network. Finally, many thanks to my original editor, scholar-­activist Richard Morrison; my second edition editors, Danielle Kasprzak, Laura Westlund, Rachel Moeller, and Anne Carter; copy editor extraordinaire Judy Selhorst; and all the other folks at the University of Minnesota Press who helped bring this book and the companion website out into the wider world.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. See Charles Tilly, “From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements,” in How Social Movements Matter, ed. Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 253–­70. 2. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 3. I am paraphrasing these lines from Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again”: “O, let America be America again / The land that has never been yet / And yet must be—­the land where every [one] is free.” 4. Stewart Burns’s rich book Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (New York: Twayne, 1990), which includes a fair amount of information on the cultural dimensions of the three movements it covers, is a partial exception to this claim, and was an inspiration in the early stages of my work on the first edition of this book. I would also mention a book I did not know at the time of the first edition, Mark Mattern’s Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), as well as subsequent works like Deborah Barndt’s excellent collection Wild Fire: Art as Activism (Toronto: Sumach, 2006). 5. Among more recent books seeking greater understanding of the cultural dimensions of movements, I would mention the especially wide-­ranging and rich collection edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, and Joachim Scharloth, Protest Cultures: A Companion (New York: Berghahn, 2016). 423

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6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 7. For another example of this process, see William G. Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). Roy compares the music of the Civil Rights movement with the People’s Songs movement led by the Communist Party USA starting in the 1930s. 8. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 64. 9. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 11.

1. SINGING CIVIL RIGHTS 1. Kerran L. Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!”: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Garland, 1995), 46–­47. I am most indebted, as is anyone writing about music in the movement, to the life and work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose engagement in singing struggle inspired not only this chapter but this book as a whole. Reagon’s particular contributions to the ideas in this chapter are cited in the notes below as appropriate. For other relevant studies of the role of music in movements, see Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues; and Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 2011). 2. The standard biography of King remains David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986). 3. The best history of SNCC is Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See also Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 4. On women in the movement, see Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Bettye Collier-­Thomas, ed., Sisters in Struggle: African-­American Women of the Civil Rights–­Black Power Movements (New York: New York University Press, 2001). A longer-­range view can be found in Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters:

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Notes to Chapter 1  425 Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement, 1830–­1970 (New York: Touchstone Books, 2002). For biographies of three key women, see Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley, 1998); Cynthia Brown, ed., Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, Calif.: Wild Trees Press, 1986); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Plume, 1994). 5. See, for example, John D’Emilio, “Homophobia and the Trajectory of Postwar American Radicalism: The Case of Bayard Rustin,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 80–­103; and John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). While lesbians of color like Audre Lorde and June Jordan have brilliantly connected racial, gender, and sexuality oppression in their writings, and the contributions of the Civil Rights movement to gay liberation have been much noted, there is much more work to be done on the less explored contributions of gay men and lesbians to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. 6. For rich discussions of nonviolence as a powerful tool for change, see Gene Sharp, The Power of Nonviolent Action, 3 vols. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1974, 1975, 1985); Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Praeger, 1993); and Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 7. On the Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Center), see Frank Adams with Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-­Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1975); Myles Horton with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990); and John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–­1962 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988). 8. For a brilliant analysis of the ongoing influence of the labor-­centered popular front social movement that emerged in the 1930s and continued well into the 1950s, see Denning, The Cultural Front. For a rich analysis of the dynamics of race, gender, culture, and labor in the 1940s, see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 9. Quoted in Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–­1965: A Study in Culture History” (PhD diss., Howard University, 1975) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975), 159. 10. See Doug McAdam, The Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–­1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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This pioneering book on the “political process model” of social movement analysis focuses on the Civil Rights/Black Power movement. 11. Quoted in Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–­68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 78. 12. It is important to understand that King was educated in nonviolence by Lawson, Rustin, Smiley, Farmer, and others, because he is sometimes mistakenly credited with inventing a tradition he was in fact translating, although with telling brilliance and effectiveness. In this, as in many other matters, King’s genius was that of a rhetorician, a persuader, and an inspirer, more than that of a strategist. 13. The most important study of the role of church culture in the movement is Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). 14. Baker’s thoughts on organizing, including gender implications, are brilliantly and usefully summarized in Charles Payne, “Ella Baker and Models of Social Change,” Signs 14 (1989): 885–­99. 15. The work of these activists anticipated what academics now call “critical pedagogy.” In the history of this school of teaching theory, Brazilian Paulo Freire has often overshadowed the U.S. homegrown critical pedagogues Clark, Horton, and Baker. On the connections between these traditions, see Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 16. Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” 24. 17. Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 106. 18. On the boycott, see Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 19. Quoted in Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” 15. 20. On the sit-­ins, see Carson, In Struggle. 21. Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” 106–­8. 22. Quoted in Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 72. 23. See Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 24. Quoted in Seeger and Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom, 82. 25. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 262. 26. Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement (New York: Oak, 1963), 74.

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Notes to Chapter 1  427 27. A visual record of these lynching “texts” can be found in James Allen, ed., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000). 28. Quoted in Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 101. 29. See Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 34–­35. 30. Joyce Ladner, cited in Payne, 54. 31. Payne, 15. 32. Quoted in Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 127. 33. Quoted in Seeger and Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom, 77. 34. Quoted in Seeger and Reiser, 61. 35. Both parodies in Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 263. 36. Payne, 261. 37. Quoted in Payne, 146. 38. Quoted in Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 46. 39. Sanger, 106. 40. Quoted in Seeger and Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom, 85. 41. Quoted in Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” 16. 42. Quoted in Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 171. 43. Carawan and Carawan, We Shall Overcome, 71. 44. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 63. 45. Quoted in Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 163. 46. Quoted in Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 9. 47. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 263. 48. Carawan and Carawan, We Shall Overcome, 69. For more on religion, see Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 91–­94. 49. Quoted in Seeger and Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom, 61. 50. Bob Zellner, quoted in Carawan and Carawan, We Shall Overcome, 92. 51. John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Harvest Books, 1999), 268–­69. 52. Bob Cohen, quoted in Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!,” 19. 53. Social movement theorists use the term master frame of protest to describe this process of the ideas of the Civil Rights movement spreading to other movements. (Given the historical context of slavery, this is a highly unfortunate term.) Some of the movements that owe a debt to the Civil Rights movement are covered elsewhere in this book, but I have not been able to address them all, so I want to cite here two good sources on a couple of movements

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that I have not found an opportunity to highlight. Of the literature on the Asian American movement, Daryl J. Maeda’s Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) does the best work on cultural dimensions of the movement. And on the movement by Puerto Rican Americans, see Sonia Song-­Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). This latter study represents a growing number of books looking at the interrelations among racial-­ethnic movements in the 1960s and 1970s. 54. On Ricks and Carmichael, see Carson, In Struggle, 209–­10.

2. DRAMATIC RESISTANCE 1. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1970; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1991), 161–­62. For a video clip of the capitol action, see “1960’s and the Black Panther Party: RealVideo History,” BobbySeale.com, accessed June 26, 2018, http://bobby seale.com/sixtiesvideo.html. 2. The scholarly literature on the Black Panther Party is extensive. The best overall history thus far is probably Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Regional studies are also adding to the Panthers’ story. See, for example, Andrew Witt, The Black Panthers in the Midwest: The Community Programs and Services of the Black Panther Party in Milwaukee, 1966–­1977 (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Lucas N. N. Burke and Judson L. Jeffries, The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). 3. When Shakespeare had one of his characters declaim that “all the world’s a stage,” the playwright was drawing upon a traditional notion of theat­ rum mundi (theater of the world) that was already hundreds of years old. What made the 1960s stage unusual was the power of the still-­emerging medium of television to make the world stage truly projectable across the world. 4. William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–­1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 195. 5. Van Deburg, 10. 6. Otto Kerner et al., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) (New York: Pantheon, 1988). The notion of “black rage,” described as a survival mechanism of blacks in which individuals take on parts of the violent stereotype imposed by the dominant society, was popularized in

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Notes to Chapter 2  429 the 1960s; see Price Cobbs and William Grier, Black Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1969). 7. For many of Malcolm X’s key speeches, see his By Any Means Necessary: The Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). 8. Mance Williams, Black Theater in the 1960s and 1970s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 20–­21. 9. Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Liberator (July 1965), 4–­6. 10. Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 92. 11. For a summary of Bullins’s years as a radical playwright, see Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 168–­89. 12. Williams, Black Theater, 25. 13. Huey P. Newton, “Bobby Seale,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 46. 14. Williams, Black Theater, 116–­17. 15. Angela Y. Davis, “Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 317–­33. 16. For the Ten-­Point Program of the Black Panther Party, see “History of the Black Panther Party,” Black Panther Party Research Project, Stanford University, accessed July 28, 2018, https://web.stanford.edu/group/blackpan thers/history.shtml. 17. In Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970), 19. 18. Quoted in Foner, xvi. 19. In Foner, 133–­34. 20. In Foner, 268. 21. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 63. 22. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 307. 23. Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” in Hilliard and Weise, Huey P. Newton Reader, 169–­70. 24. Newton, To Die for the People, 152–­55. 25. Panther efforts to raise money by staging performances in the homes of rich white sympathizers are chronicled cynically by journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic and Mau-­Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

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26. Details of the COINTELPRO activities and their ongoing impacts can be found in Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). Specific COINTELPRO work against the Panthers is illuminated in Winston A. Grady-­Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners,” in Jones, Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), 362–­89; Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988); and Huey P. Newton, War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996). This last book by Newton is based on his PhD dissertation, completed in 1980 in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 27. In Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 19. 28. Cited in Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. 29. The cases of some of these imprisoned Panthers are still being fought, both inside and outside the courts. In the late 1990s, Geronimo ji Jaga (Elmer Pratt) was released after twenty-­seven years in prison when his murder conviction was overturned on appeal. The fates of former Panther Mumia Abu-­Jamal, currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole, and several others still behind bars remain uncertain. Despite the congressional Church Commission’s findings of countless illegalities in the operation of COINTELPRO, no one in the FBI or any other law enforcement body has served a day in prison for the crimes committed against the Panthers and other groups, including the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The Patriot Act, passed by Congress in the hysterical aftermath of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, swept away generations of constitutional rights and may give rise to another wave of law enforcement repression of legitimate protest that is likely to become riddled with the kind of gross illegality and injustice found in COINTELPRO. 30. Singh, “Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country,’” 62. 31. For an exaggerated but cautionary view of this decline, focusing especially on the personal pathologies of Huey Newton, see Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of a Panther (Reading, Mass.: Addison-­Wesley, 1994). For a critical analy­sis of the limitations of Pearson’s book, see Errol Anthony Henderson, “Shadow of a Clue,” in Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, 197–­207. 32. Ollie A. Johnson III, “Explaining the Demise of the Black Panther Party: The Role of Internal Factors,” in Jones, ed., Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), 408.

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Notes to Chapter 2  431 33. For assessments of the role of women in the Panthers, see Kathleen Cleaver, “Women, Power, and Revolution,” in Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, 123–­27; and essays by Regina Jennings, Trayce Matthews, and Angela D. LeBlanc-­Ernest in the “Gender Dynamics” section of Jones, Black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Elaine Brown also addresses this topic extensively in her autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1994). For a particularly incisive discussion that places gender issues within the context of a local study, see Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). The classic broader critique of black male sexism during this period is Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1978). 34. For more on the international relations of the Black Panther Party, see the memoir by Party Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Panther on the Prowl (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 35. On the rationale for the survival programs, see Foner, Black Panthers Speak, sec. 9. 36. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 308. 37. Kobena Mercer acknowledges the contagious power of the Panther vision and the ways in which that power was defused and even used by the right. 38. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 85. 39. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 36. 40. See Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 232–­52. For similar arguments, see Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 41. The best book on early rap and hip-­hop culture remains Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 42. For a reading of Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” in the context of a brilliant analysis of the limitations of current forms of black nationalism as black community “common sense,” see Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Com­ mon Sense.” 43. Davis, “Black Nationalism,” 317–­24. Excellent discussions of black nationalism in rap can be found in Rose, Black Noise; Errol A. Henderson, “Black Nationalism and Rap Music,” Journal of Black Studies 26 (November 1996): 309–­ 39; and Kristal Brent Zook, “Reconstructions of Nationalist Thought in Black Music and Culture,” in Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and

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Mass Movements, ed. Reebee Garofalo (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 255–­ 66. See also Min Paul Scott, “How Hip Hop Destroyed Black Power,” Hip Hop News, FNV Newsletter, April 23, 2002, http://www.daveyd.com/hiphop destroysblackarticle.html. Scott portrays white hip-­hop producers as the “new missionaries” buying the black natives with Courvoisier and gold chains. 44. The use of the “all lives matter” phrase has been widely critiqued, and the purported intent of the message has been refuted in a number of ways. See, for example, George Yancy and Judith Butler, “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?,” Opinionator (blog), New York Times, January 12, 2015, http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. Perhaps the simplest refutation comes from Garza, who asserts that there was always an implicit admonitory “too” at the end of the original phrase; that is, black lives matter too, not just those lives that have always seemed to matter. For an excellent scholarly introduction to Black Lives Matter and the wider movement, see Keeanga-­Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 45. On the failure of governments to count homicides by police accurately, see Jon Swaine and Ciara McCarthy, “Killings by US Police Logged at Twice the Previous Rate under New Federal Program,” The Guardian, December 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us. 46. See the Movement for Black Lives website, https://policy.m4bl.org. 47. In 2017, the FBI identified an effort by some white supremacist groups to infiltrate U.S. law enforcement organizations, but the agency never did a systematic study to determine how widespread or successful this practice has been. While far more widespread racist sentiment that falls short of outright advocacy of white supremacy is no doubt a larger factor in racist incidents involving police, the possibility of this infiltration deserves further investigation. See Allegra Kirkland, “Report: FBI Finds White Supremacists Infiltrated Law Enforcement,” Talking Points Memo, January 31, 2017, https://talking pointsmemo.com. 48. On the prison–­industrial complex, see Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Julia Chinyere Oparah, ed., Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison–­Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). See also the 2016 documentary film 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay. 49. For a comparison of the popularity of BLM and the earlier Civil Rights movement, see Elahe Izadi, “Black Lives Matter and America’s Long History of Resisting Civil Rights,” Washington Post, April 19, 2016.

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Notes to Chapter 3  433 50. See Alvin B. Tillery Jr., “Poll Finds That Majority of African Americans View Black Lives Matter as an Effective Movement,” Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, Northwestern University, October 17, 2017, https://www.csdd.northwestern.edu/research; and Jonathan Easley, “Poll: 57 Percent of Americans Have a Negative View of Black Lives Matter Movement,” The Hill, August 2, 2017, http://thehill.com. 51. Simone Sebastian, “Don’t Criticize Black Lives Matter for Provoking Violence. The Civil Right Movement Did, Too,” Washington Post, October 1, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com. 52. For example, see Brittney Cooper, “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Cosmopolitan, September 8, 2015, https:// www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a45930. 53. The SNCC Legacy Project’s endorsement of BLM, dated July 29, 2016, can be found on the Black Lives Matter website, http://blacklivesmatter .com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/BLM-Support.jpg. 54. For the major guiding principles established by the movement, see “What We Believe,” Black Lives Matter website, accessed June 19, 2018, https:// blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we-believe. See also “Platform,” Movement for Black Lives website, accessed June 19, 2018, https://policy.m4bl.org. 55. Rahiel Tesfamariam, “Why the Modern Civil Rights Movement Keeps Religious Leaders at Arm’s Length,” Washington Post, September 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com. 56. Two versions of the video, one “clean” and one “dirty,” can be found on Beyoncé’s website, accessed June 19, 2018, https://www.beyonce.com. 57. See Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter Co-­founder to Beyoncé: ‘Welcome to the Movement,’” Rolling Stone, February 11, 2016, http://www.rolling stone.com/culture/news/black-lives-matter-co-founder-to-beyonce-welcome -to-the-movement-20160211. “Money where her mouth is” references the reported donation of $1.5 million to the movement by Beyoncé and her spouse, Jay-­Z. For just one additional sample reading of the video, from a seemingly unlikely source, see India Hill, “7 Reasons Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ Music Video Is a Powerful Statement during Black History Month,” Teen Vogue, accessed June 19, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/gallery/beyonce-formation-music -video.

3. THE POETICAL IS THE POLITICAL 1. Among the most important and useful social scientific and historical studies of the women’s movement are Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: Longman, 1975); Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess,

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Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement across Three Decades of Change, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1994); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–­1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992). Stacey Young offers an important critique of the limits of social science approaches to the women’s movement in Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. chap. 4. Katie King likewise offers important analyses of the power struggles at play in defining and telling the histories of feminisms in Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s Movements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 2. The body of traditional social science work that has tried to analyze this process is the movement “frame analysis” school, represented by David Snow and Robert Benford. See, for example, David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 51 (August 1986): 464–­81. 3. One of the best long-­range studies of the women’s movement(s) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is Steven M. Buechler’s Women’s Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990). See also Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). 4. Key texts in the emergence of feminist positions among women of color include the following: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Chela Sandoval, Women Respond to Racism: A Report on the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, 1981 (Oakland, Calif.: Center for Third World Organizing, n.d. [1982]); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, Conn.: Feminist Press, 1982); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983); Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-­Inclusive Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 131–­50; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); and Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990).

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Notes to Chapter 3  435 5. See Ednie Kaeh Garrison, “The Third Wave and the Cultural Predicament of Feminist Consciousness in the United States” (PhD diss., Washington State University, 2000). 6. Ferree and Hess, Controversy and Coalition, 49. 7. See King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels. 8. Buechler, Women’s Movements in the United States. 9. See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. 10. See Nancy A. Naples, ed., Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1998), especially the essay by Sherna Berger Gluck with Maylei Blackwell, Sharon Cotrell, and Karen S. Harper, “Whose Feminism, Whose History? Reflections on Excavating the History of (the) US Women’s Movement(s),” 31–­56. 11. Frances M. Beal’s essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” appears in both The Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade [Bambara] (New York: New American Library, 1970), and Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 340–­52. 12. The classic popular critique of this redomestication is Betty Friedan’s immensely influential book The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963). 13. See, for example, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 14. On the origins of the “women’s liberation” strand in other movements, see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 15. The best study of the 1960s white radical student and antiwar movement known collectively as the New Left remains Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–­1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Also useful are Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973); James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam, 1993). The latter two books are good on the New Left but wrongheaded about the role of the women’s movement and black radicalism, blaming them for mistakes made by the New Left itself. Gitlin’s earlier book, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), is insightful on the New Left and is one of the best studies yet done of the impact of the media on an emerging movement.

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16. For a later example of these recurring dialogues, see Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, eds., Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1981). 17. Hull et al., All the Women Are White. 18. Kennedy’s self-­description can be found in the biographical notes of the contributors to Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful, 597. Connections between the women’s liberation movement and the New Left, Civil Rights, antiwar, nationalist, and anticolonial struggles can be found throughout those notes, as well as throughout the analyses in this classic collection. 19. Some feminists, like Catherine MacKinnon, have claimed that CR is the feminist method of making social change, but I believe Patricia Yaeger is closer to the mark in arguing that it is one among several major feminist methods. See Patricia Yaeger, Honey-­Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). MacKinnon’s claim for the centrality of CR is made, among other places, in her influential, controversial essay “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Discussions of the relative usefulness of consciousness-­raising include historical arguments as to what CR originally was, ranging from claims that it was little more than personal venting (relating CR to “encounter” or therapy groups) to arguments that it focused on revolutionary strategy (relating CR to Maoist criticism/self-­ criticism cadre sessions). For an analysis of the ways in which consciousness-­ raising has been written and rewritten from various interested feminist political standpoints, see Katie King, “The Situation of Lesbianism as Feminism’s Magical Sign: Contests for Meaning and the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1968–­ 1972,” Communication 9 (1986): 65–­91, revised and expanded in King’s Theory in Its Feminist Travels. On the nature and history of CR, see also Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in the Women’s Movement (New York: Times Change Press, 1970); Nancy McWilliams, “Contemporary Feminism, Consciousness-­Raising, and Changing Views of the Political,” in Women and Politics, ed. Jane Jaquette (New York: John Wiley, 1974); and Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. chap. 1. In my own work, I have addressed the role of CR as public ritual; see T. V. Reed, Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 20. Cade, Black Woman, 9. 21. Among the still relatively few local studies of the women’s liberation movement, see especially Nancy Whittier’s study of Columbus, Ohio, Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement (Philadelphia:

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Notes to Chapter 3  437 Temple University Press, 1995). In addition to its admirable localism (outside New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco), the book shows clearly how the women’s movement persisted as a force through several generations, from the 1960s through the 1990s, in great part through institutions, practices, and structures that might best be labeled cultural. 22. Cellestine Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation (New York: Tower, 1970). King analyzes this text astutely in Theory in Its Feminist Travels, 126–­30. 23. King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels, 127. 24. As important as these feminist groups were, they were ultimately only as strong as the diversity within them. And many were not very diverse racially. During the early years of the feminist movement, women of color’s preference for struggling within ethnic nationalist movements left many feminist groups all white in composition. While questions of racism are addressed in the radical, white-­centered anthologies, for the most part a full encounter with racism in the women’s movement was delayed by these separated (and often separatist) lines of development. In recent years, CR has been implicated in the essentialism debates, because it seems to have been based on naively empirical notions of a common “woman’s experience” that glosses over differences of race, class, nationality, and sexuality. These critiques have come especially from feminist theorists influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern forms of cultural theory that emphasize the value of “decentered,” radically open-­ended identities. These critiques have been crucial for the development of feminisms, but there is another way of formulating them, especially given that consciousness-­raising has proven at least as important for women of color as for white women. As argued perhaps most cogently by feminist historian Joan Scott, “experience” is not an adequate base of knowledge because it is not the site of personal truth, but rather the site of the impact of ideology on a subject individual. This is certainly “true,” but it is only a problem if one assumes that personal truth is what people claim when talking about their “experience.” Critiques of CR should be aimed more at limited experiences, rather than at the limits of experience-­based theorizing per se. Another feminist theorist deeply influenced by poststructuralism, Teresa de Lauretis, comes to a more useful conclusion, stating that “experience” is always the starting point for a consciousness-­transforming process of analyzing the representations and self-­ representations that make up an ongoing process of collective/individual identity formation. See Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–­40. On the reconceptualization of women’s experience as ongoing meaning-­making process, see Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. chap. 6.

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25. Essentialism in this case means positing some unchanging womanly essence (biologically given or cross-­culturally embedded), as opposed to a view of women’s identities as changing, culturally relative social constructions. Two books that offer particularly useful examinations of the question of essentialism in feminism are Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). Among other interesting attempts to mediate the essentialist/constructionist debate, see Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-­structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13 (Spring 1988): 405–­36; and several of the articles in the special issue “The Essential Difference: Another Look at Essentialism,” Differences 1, no. 2 (Summer 1989). Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad implicates CR groups and “cultural feminism” in the rise of essentialism. For a rethinking of this claim, see King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels. 26. Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman, Guide to Women’s Publishing (Paradise, Calif.: Dustbooks, 1978), quoted in Kim Whitehead, The Feminist Poetry Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 18. I am indebted throughout this section to Whitehead’s work. See also Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry (London: Pandora, 1995). 27. King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels, 122. 28. Audre Lorde, Zami (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1982); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1983). 29. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), 116. 30. Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul; Cade, Black Woman; Smith, Home Girls; Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings of North America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Diane Yen-­Mei Wong and Emilya Cachapero, eds., Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); and Evelyn Tortow Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (New York: Crossing Press, 1984). 31. Young, Changing the Wor(l)d. 32. See Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978); and Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990). The best treatment of the strengths and weaknesses of this school of feminism is Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997). 33. See Trinh T. Minh-­ha, Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Gayatri

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Notes to Chapter 4  439 Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Wor(l)ds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988). Many of the founding essays in this line of critique are gathered in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 34. See Whitehead, Feminist Poetry Movement. 35. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 117. 36. Whitehead, Feminist Poetry Movement, 3. 37. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, eds., No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973). 38. Howe, preface to the revised and expanded edition of No More Masks! (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), xxxi. Howe served as sole editor of this revised edition, the subtitle of which, An Anthology of Twentieth-­Century American Women Poets, acknowledges the historical and national boundaries of the collection, in contrast to the earlier subtitle, An Anthology of Poems by Women. 39. Howe and Bass, No More Masks! (1973), xxviii. 40. Laura Chester and Sharon Barba, eds., Rising Tides: Twentieth-­Century American Women Poets (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), i. 41. Louise Bernikow, ed., The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–­1950 (New York: Random House, 1974). 42. Stacey Young in Changing the Wor(l)d details how feminist editors and publishers, by carefully brokering this process, continue to move work originally associated with movement contexts out into wider public spaces and then into more mainstream locations. 43. Statistics from Joan and Chesman, Guide to Women’s Publishing, cited in Whitehead, Feminist Poetry Movement, 19. 44. The reaction against feminism in the 1980s is accessibly chronicled in journalist Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Anchor, 1992). 45. The best study of the term third-­wave feminism and its variant meanings is Garrison, “Third Wave and the Cultural Predicament.”

4. REVOLUTIONARY WALLS 1. George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–­1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2. On the popular front social movement and its long-­range cultural impact, see Denning, The Cultural Front.

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3. See Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. The work of Mexican American activists before the Chicano generation is also chronicled in Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–­1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–­1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); and Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4. See Carlos Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 1989), 51. 5. Among the most important works on the Chicano/a movement are Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power; Ernesto Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!” (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–­1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ignacio M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Ignacio M. García, United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1995); Reies López Tijerina, They Called Me “King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights, trans. and ed. José Angel Gutiérrez (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001); Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio Esquibel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001); Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-­Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Angie Chabram-­Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race but I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—­Chica-­Nos (Girl, Us) Chicanas—­into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–­96; F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996); and Ernesto Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Discussion focusing on Chicanas in movement history and in their own “herstory” can be found in Alma M. García, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul. On Chicanas in longer historical context, see Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez strategizes the future of Chicana/Latina activism in De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-­colored Century (Boston: South End Press, 1998).

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Notes to Chapter 4  441 6. I am profoundly indebted to the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California, not only for the mural photographs reproduced here and for much of the information about the murals but also for SPARC’s role as a major force in the production and preservation of murals. SPARC is a major ongoing resource for the creation and study of murals and other public art, one deserving of support from anyone who values radically multicultural public art. See the center’s website, http://sparcinla.org. SPARC also put together the most useful single resource on Chicano/a murals, Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, eds., Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Venice, Calif./Albuquerque, N.M.: Social and Public Art Resource Center/University of New Mexico Press, 1990); together with Eva Cockcroft, Signs from the Heart: Slide Set, with educational text (Venice, Calif.: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990). Other important resources on Chicano/a murals and the community mural movement include the following: Eva Sperling, “The Story of Chicano Park,” Aztlán 15, no. 1 (1984): 79–­103; Judith F. Baca, “Our People Are Internal Exiles,” interview conducted by Diane Neumaier, in Cultures in Contention, ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985), 62–­75. Connections among Chicano/a, Latino/a, and Latin American muralism can be found in Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Tomás Ybarra Fausto, “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Levine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); and Jeffrey J. Rangel, “Art and Activism in the Chicano Movement: Judith F. Baca, Youth, and the Politics of Cultural Work,” in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-­Century America, ed. Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 223–­39. The role of murals in the wider context of Chicano/a visual arts is explored in the record of the crucial Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) exhibition of the early 1990s, cataloged in Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yabro-­Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–­1985 (Los Angeles: UCLA Wright Gallery, 1991). The exhibit is brilliantly analyzed in Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art inside/outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Contextual studies of the wider community mural movement and multicultural contemporary art can be found in Alan W. Barnett, Community Murals (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984); John Weber and Jim Cockcroft, Toward a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (1977; repr., Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Erika Doss, Spirit

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Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); and Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990). Angie Chabram-­Dernersesian also addresses Chicana art in relation to the movement in “I Throw Punches for My Race.” See also Raúl Villa, Barrio-­ Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), for a brilliant analysis of murals in the context of geographic displacement and resistance. 7. See Yolanda Broyles-­González, El Teatro Campesino in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 8. For studies of each of these regional variations on a movement theme, see note 5, above. 9. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Lib­ eration (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 10. Theorizing around this notion of moving from “representation” to “articulation” can be found in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); Miami Theory Collective, eds., Community at Loose Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). 11. For extended discussion of various kinds of multiculturalism, from conservative to critical/left, see David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), especially the essays by Peter McLaren, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and the Chicago Cultural Studies Group; and Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially the essays in Part I.

5. OLD COWBOYS, NEW INDIANS 1. The most complete study to date of “red power” activism is Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996). Some of the key movement documents of the era are collected in Alvin Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, and Troy Johnson, eds., Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). The most immediate coverage and firsthand accounts of Indian activism can be found in Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973: In the Words of the Participants (Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1974). Results of the U.S. Senate investigation of the events of Wounded Knee II are included in Wounded Knee Massacre: Hearings before

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Notes to Chapter 5  443 the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-­fourth Congress, Second Session, on S. 1147 and S. 2900, February 5 and 6, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976). Additional accounts of Wounded Knee and Native activism include the following: Edward Milligan (He Topa), Wounded Knee 1973 and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 (Bottineau, N.D.: Bottineau Courant Press, 1973); Rolland Dewing, Wounded Knee II (Chadron, Neb.: Great Plains Network and Pine Hills Press, 1995); Robert Burnette and John Koster, The Road to Wounded Knee (New York: Bantam Books, 1974); Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Viking Press, 1983); Mary Crow Dog, as told to Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Grove Weiden­ feld, 1990); Stanley Lyman, Wounded Knee: A Personal Account (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Russell Means with Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Troy Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); John William Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 2. Powwow Highway, dir. Joanelle Nadine Romero and Jonathan Wacks (Handmade Films/Warner Bros., 1989); Thunderheart, dir. Michael Apted (Tristar Pictures, 1992); Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, dir. Frank Pierson (Turner Films, 1994 [made for television with video release]). 3. One exception was the relative commercial success of the inde­pen­ dent Indian-­made film Smoke Signals, dir. Chris Eyre (Miramax, 1998). This film by a Cheyenne-­Arapaho director was scripted by Sherman Alexie (Spokane-­ Coeur d’Alene) and starred Indian actors Irene Bedard, Evan Adams, Gary Farmer, and Tantoo Cardinal. The film was initially seen as a breakthrough for Native American film production, but the subsequent experiences of the director and screenwriter in trying to find significant Hollywood backing for subsequent projects were not encouraging. Mainstream filmmaking continues to be inaccessible to Native directors. On the other hand, a small but rich and thriving Native American/First Nations film movement exists. In 2018 alone, eight Indigenous-­made fiction films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In the arena of Native documentaries, Alanis Obomsawin’s film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) does a superb job of portraying the AIM-­style confrontation that took place between Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) protesters and Quebec police and the Canadian army in 1993. 4. The complexities of Native aesthetics and cultural politics are ably presented in two important works: Beverly Singer, Wiping the Warpaint off the

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Lens: Native American Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Steve Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 5. Of the voluminous literature on Native representation in the tra­ ditional Hollywood film, the following works are among the most useful: Peter C. Rollins and John O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Michael Hilger, From Savage to Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film (London: Scarecrow Press, 1995); S. Elizabeth Bird, Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998); and Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). The longer historical context for these portrayals is presented in Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). See also the documentary Reel Injun (2009) by Cree director Neil Diamond and Catherine Bainbridge. 6. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 127. 7. See Johnson, Occupation of Alcatraz. 8. For discussion placing the 1973 Wounded Knee events in the context of Native Americans’ long struggle to get the U.S. government to acknowledge the injustice of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, see Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn, The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 9. Michelle Dishong, “New York Times Coverage of the Occupation of Wounded Knee” (master’s thesis, Washington State University, 1996). 10. Quoted in Dishong. 11. “Trap at Wounded Knee,” Time, March 26, 1973, 67. 12. See James Stripes, “A Strategy of Resistance: The ‘Actorvism’ of Russell Means, from Plymouth Rock to the Disney Studios,” Wicazo Sa Review 14, no. 1 (1999): 87–­101. 13. Andrea Smith, “For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life,” Ms., November–­December 1994, 44–­45, reprinted in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol Adams (New York: Continuum Press, 1993). 14. See Tom Holm, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), which looks at the forty-­three thousand Native Americans who served in Vietnam. 15. David Seals, Powwow Highway (1979; repr., New York: Plume Books, 1990); David Seals, Sweet Medicine (New York: Orion Books, 1992).

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Notes to Chapter 6  445 16. On sexism in AIM, including the death of Aquash, see Devon Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). 17. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane. 18. Digital studies scholar Kristin Arola presents a recounting of just such a chance encounter involving a Native father and son in jail together: “A strange thing happened on that last day while we were in that cell, strange to me anyway, . . . as strange as meeting your father, who you never knew, at seventeen, in jail. The strange thing was that while we were in there on the TV comes this movie called Lakota Woman, it was about the American Indian Movement, and the siege at Wounded Knee in the seventies. We stood there watching that movie. Father and son. Two orphans of their tribe, arms resting on cold, gray, jail cell bars.” Quoted in Kristin L. Arola, “It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood,” in Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment): Bodies, Technologies, Writing, the Teaching of Writing, ed. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012), 223. 19. On the North American First Nations/Native Idle No More movement, see the movement’s official website at http://www.idlenomore.ca. On the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, see the articles collected on the website of The Guardian, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ dakota-access-pipeline.

6. “WE ARE [NOT] THE WORLD” 1. For more perspectives on the politics of rock and other music in movements, see Mark Coleman, “The Revival of Conscience,” Rolling Stone, November 15, 1990, 69–­80; Robin Deneslow, When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989); Simon Frith, ed., World Music, Politics, and Social Change (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989); Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There Rock after Punk?,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 111–­23; Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Reebee Garofalo, “Nelson Mandela, the Concert: Mass Culture as Contested Terrain,” in Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Santa Cruz, Calif.: New Society Publishers, 1990), 340–­49 (see also an expanded version in Garofalo, Rockin’ the Boat); Reebee Garofalo, “Understanding Mega-­ events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It?,” in Garofalo, Rockin’ the Boat, 15–­36; Michael Omi, “A Positive Noise: The Charity Rock Phenomenon,” Socialist Review 16, no. 2 (1986): 107–­14; Bob Geldof, “Bob

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Geldof: An Interview,” by Rob Tannenbaum, Rolling Stone, November 15, 1990, 74–­80; Neal Ullestad, “Rock and Rebellion: Subversive Effects of Live Aid and ‘Sun City,’” Popular Music 6, no. 1 (1987): 67–­76; Bob Geldof with Paul Vallely, Is That It? (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986); Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991); Michael Jarrett, “Concerning the Progress of Rock and Roll,” South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 4 (1991): 803–­18; Mattern, Acting in Concert; Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues; and Rosenthal and Flacks, Playing for Change. 2. The Paterson Pageant, held in Madison Square Garden in June 1913, was a benefit performance uniting Greenwich Village artists and actors with striking workers from the textile mills of nearby Paterson, New Jersey. Led by the anarcho-­syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or the Wobblies), the strike had gone on for months, and the union was running out of money for the families of workers. The pageant took the form of a thousand workers, the majority of them women, reenacting key scenes of their strike onstage in the arena for a paying audience. If not the first example of a modern political benefit, it was certainly among the most imaginative and dramatic. 3. While I concentrate in this chapter on the anti-­apartheid movement, of equal importance at this historical moment was the movement seeking to alter U.S. involvement in Central America. On this topic, see Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Often linked together as “solidarity” movements, the two movements had considerable overlap in membership. 4. In crude terms, in each debate one side is represented by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school and the other is represented by the cultural studies theorists of the Birmingham school. On the former, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen, 1978). On the latter, see Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996). Much of the best work these days avoids these dichotomous positions. For a brilliant work of theory that remains among the most useful attempts to combine these positions, see Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–­48. Jameson argues persuasively that even the most commercialized, reactionary texts of mass culture offer, despite themselves, utopian longings that, since they cannot be filled by current capitalist society, engender social discontent that has the potential to be turned in progressive directions.

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Notes to Chapter 6  447 Some of the complex questions surrounding the issue of cultural imperialism are taken up in Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore, “World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Thesis,” Socialist Review 20, no. 3 (1990): 63–­80. For a general introduction to the topic, see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London: Pinter, 1991). 5. The name Band Aid ironically captures the fact that these efforts were but a patch over the hemorrhaging wounds on the body of the African continent. 6. United Support of Artists for Africa, We Are the World (Columbia Records 40043, 1985). 7. Recent scientific evidence also suggests that the drought that drove the famine may have been worsened by tiny particles called aerosols from the industrial world. 8. See Zoë Sofia (Sofoulis), “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sex-­Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism,” Diacritics 14 (1984): 47–­59. 9. See Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (New York: Verso, 1988). 10. For a discussion of Geldof ’s political education, see Geldof, Is That It? 11. See Geldof, “Bob Geldof.” 12. Artists United against Apartheid, Sun City (Manhattan/Capitol Records EP ST53109, 1985). 13. The video is The Making of “Sun City” (Karl-­Lorimar home video 012-­VHS, 1986). 14. Steven Van Zandt, speech read in The Making of “Sun City.” 15. See Garofalo, “Understanding Mega-­events.” 16. Quoted in Dave Marsh, Sun City: The Making of a Record (New York: Vintage-­Penguin, 1985), 80. 17. On the postmodern nihilism of MTV, see E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987). 18. Marsh, Sun City. 19. On connections to the local movements, see especially Garofalo, “Understanding Mega-­events.” 20. Ullestad, “Rock and Rebellion.” 21. On the U.S. anti-­apartheid movement, see Tony Vellela, New Voices: Student Activism in the ’80s and ’90s (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Christine A. Kelly, Tangled Up in Red White and Blue (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); and Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the

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United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75, no. 3 (1997): 855–­83. 22. Garofalo, “Nelson Mandela, the Concert,” 341. 23. Quoted in Garofalo, “Understanding Mega-­events,” 26. 24. Quoted in Garofalo, “Nelson Mandela, the Concert,” 346. 25. See Deneslow, When the Music’s Over, 282. 26. Cited in Garofalo, “Nelson Mandela, the Concert,” 346. 27. For an analysis of Amnesty International’s rock concert tour as commodification of transnationalism, see Deena Weinstein, “The Amnesty International Tour: Transnationalism as Cultural Commodity,” Public Culture 1, no. 2 (1989): 60–­65. 28. On this development, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999). 29. See Weinstein, “Amnesty International Tour.” 30. Most critics see rock as a politically ambiguous force that most often serves domination but also contains a self-­mythologizing dimension that leaves it more open than most mass-­mediated discourses to intervention from the left. These issues are much contested among critics of rock. 31. The relational, contextual rather than stable nature of these two discourses is suggested by the fact that many of the same personnel played on both We Are the World and Sun City, while their musical codings were unmistakably different. In addition to the works cited in note 4 above, see Jarrett, “Concerning the Progress of Rock and Roll,” for a discussion of the logic of the rock/pop dynamic. 32. See Weinstein, “Amnesty International Tour.” This general position is perhaps most identified with French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, who sees no possibilities for resistance left in a fully self-­imploding system of simulated cultural representations with no connection to history or material reality. This partial truth pays far too much attention to what is on computer screens and far too little to the production-­line workers in the global South whose material conditions enable those screens to exist. 33. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 56–­57. 34. This analysis builds on the work of Andreas Rauh, “Grunge, from Local Scene to Global Phenomenon” (master’s thesis, Washington State University, 2003). 35. There is a growing body of literature on “celebrity activism” and the related phenomenon of “commodity activism,” much of it highly critical. While there is much to learn from these critiques, they often fail to distinguish

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Notes to Chapter 7  449 among a variety of kinds of celebrity involvement or to understand the pragmatics of activism where some celebrity involvement can prove vital. For a range of views, see Liza Tsaliki, Christos A. Frangonikolopoulos, and Asteris Huliaras, eds., Transnational Celebrity Activism in Global Politics: Changing the World? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Lisa Ann Richey, ed., Celebrity Humanitarianism and North–­South Relations (London: Routledge, 2016); and Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-­Weiser, eds., Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

7. ACTING UP AGAINST AIDS 1. For an excellent history of ACT UP that pays special attention to emotional mobilization, see Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 2. Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990). Another art form of great importance to AIDS activism is theater. See, for example, Sarah Schulman, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 3. Crimp and Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics, 13. 4. Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), 161. 5. Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification” (1987), in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 31–­32. 6. Treichler, 70. 7. Joshua Gamson, “Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement ‘Newness,’” in Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis, ed. Michael Burawoy et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 35–­57. 8. On the connection between antiqueer and anticommunist hysteria, see, for example, David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 9. Crimp and Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics, 20. 10. Gould, Moving Politics. 11. Cited in Gamson, “Silence, Death,” 47. 12. Crimp and Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics, 29. 13. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Anchor, 1995), 95–­96. 14. Gamson, “Silence, Death,” 48. 15. Gamson, 49.

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16. Crimp and Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics, 55. 17. While many in ACT UP were critical of the quilt for its alleged passivity, it has proven a brilliantly effective and affective device for increasing awareness of the epidemic and personalizing the crisis for those outside its reach, and for assisting the mourning of many within the crisis. For an astute analysis of the NAMES Project and the AIDS Quilt, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 18. Gamson, “Silence, Death,” 39. 19. Quoted in Gamson, 39. 20. Patton, Inventing AIDS, 163n16. 21. Crimp and Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics, 19–­20. 22. Among those noting that global capitalism has taken on a “networked” form is Manuel Castells, The Information Age, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Noël Sturgeon makes this point more directly in relation to movements in her essay “Theorizing Movements: Direct Action and Direct Theory,” in Cultural Politics and Social Movements, ed. Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 35–­51. 23. For a more complicated view of these interactions, see Vaid, Virtual Equality, 102. 24. From the Lesbian Avengers’ original handbook; see “The Lesbian Avengers: Action Outline,” available on the ACT UP website, accessed June 20, 2018, http://www.actupny.org/documents/Avengers. 25. The term cycles of protest is most closely identified with social sci­ entist Sidney Tarrow. Several of the elements in Tarrow’s definition of cycles seem to fit ACT UP’s influence: “a rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors; a quickened pace of innovation in new forms of contention; new or transformed collective action forms; a combination of organized and unorganized participation; and sequences of inten­ sified interaction between challengers and authorities.” See Sidney Tarrow, “Cycles of Protest,” in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, ed. Steven M. Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke Jr. (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1997), 441. 26. Vaid, Virtual Equality, 94. 27. Schulman, Stagestruck, 104. On the phenomenon of marketing AIDS, see also Alana Kumbier, “Resignifying AIDS” (master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 2000). 28. Fauci was referring specifically to Larry Kramer, the subject of the article in which he was quoted, but his comments more properly reflect the influence of countless ACT UP activists. See Michael Specter, “Public Nuisance,” New Yorker, May 13, 2002.

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Notes to Chapter 8  451 29. William Gamson, “Constructing Social Protest,” in Buechler and Cylke, Social Movements, 228. 30. This romantic fatalism is analyzed in Sturken, Tangled Memories, 165–­67. 31. “HIV/AIDS: Basic Statistics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last updated December 18, 2017, http://www.cdc.gov. 32. See, for example, Eric Sawyer, “An ACT UP Founder ‘Acts Up’ for Africa’s Access to AIDS,” in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (London: Verso, 2002), 88–­105. See also Mandisi Mbali, South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Robert Lorway, AIDS Activism, Science and Community across Three Continents (New York: Springer, 2017).

8. NOVELS OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE 1. For an excellent introduction to the range of ecocritical approaches, see Ken Hiltner, ed., Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (New York: Routledge, 2015). 2. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). 3. For a rich treatment of this history, see Dorceta Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s–­1900s (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 4. The literature on environmental racism and environmental justice is extensive. Among the works most useful in an ecocritical context are the following: Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Robert D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Press, 1994); Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Equity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990); Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles against Multinational Corporations (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Annie L. Booth and Harvey M. Jacobs, “Ties That Bind: Native American Beliefs as a Foundation for Environmental Consciousness,” Environmental Ethics 12, no. 1 (1990): 27–­43; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Devon G. Peña, ed., Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Devon G. Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.–­Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas

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Press, 1997); Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons, ed. Michael Goldman (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 120–­ 43; Daniel Faber, ed., The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1998); and Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Robert Gottlieb’s excellent history of the environmental movement, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), was among the first to show how a history of workplace safety issues can and should be seen as an environmental issue that can link the labor and environmental movements; this work offers a striking image of how a more democratic environmentalism can bridge the racial, class, and urban/rural divides that have limited progress. 5. I am indebted throughout this section to Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring; and to Marcy Darnovsky, “Stories Less Told: Histories of U.S. Environmentalism,” Socialist Review 92, no. 4 (1992): 11–­54. 6. The literature on ecofeminism is vast. A few works particularly relevant to the interrelations between ecofeminism and environmental justice include Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993); Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997); Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures; Karen Warren, ed., Ecofeminism: Women, Nature, Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Gwyn Kirk, “Ecofeminism and Chicano Environmental Struggles: Bridges across Gender and Race,” in Peña, Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics; Catriona Sandilands, The Good-­Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Christina Holmes, Ecological Borderlands: Body, Nature, and Spirit in Chicana Feminism (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 7. For specific titles by these authors as well as others working this terrain, see “Environmental Justice Cultural Studies: Environmental Justice Literature,” CulturalPolitics.net, accessed July 1, 2018, http://culturalpolitics.net. 8. Joni Adamson’s groundbreaking book American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001) combines excellent close readings (including of Silko) with accessible theoretical insights and a personally grounded narrative that connects theory, movements, and experience. Other important works that contributed to the initial emergence of the field of environmental justice ecocriticism

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Notes to Chapter 8  453 include Evelyn C. White, “Black Women and the Wilderness,” in Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West, ed. Teresa Jordan and James Hepworth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Kamala Platt, “Ecocritical Chicana Literature: Ana Castillo’s ‘Virtual Realism,’” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Kamala Platt, “Chicana Strategies of Success and Survival: Cultural Poetics of Environmental Justice from the Mothers of East Los Angeles,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 48–­72; Joni Adamson, “Toward an Ecology of Justice: Transformative Ecological Theory and Practice,” in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, ed. Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998); Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); and Glynis Carr, ed., New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2000). In the last-­named volume, see especially the essays by Julie Sze on Karen Yamashita, Benay Blend on Chicana writers, Charlotte Walker on Alice Walker, and Greta Gaard on Linda Hogan and Alice Walker. Much of the best early work is also collected in Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 9. See Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly, eds., The Earth Is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change (Fairbanks: ARCUS, 2002). For a quick introduction to climate fiction, see John Abraham, “CliFi: A New Way to Talk about Climate Change,” The Guardian, October 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com. 10. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). 11. For works of postcolonial or decolonial ecocriticism, see Joan Martinez-­Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (London: Edward Elgar, 2002); Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmental­ ism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013); Graham Huggan and Helen Tifflin, eds., Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010); William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, eds., Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-­colonial Era

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(London: Earthscan, 2003); Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literature of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). The relation between the term decolonial and the linked term postcolonial is very complex. I use decolonial here without a technical definition but simply in the sense that, in comparison with postcolonial, it more aptly expresses an active process of transformation. On the concept, see Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary; Linda Tuhiwai-­Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (New York: Zed Books, 1999); and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 12. See T. V. Reed, “Environmental Justice Ecocriticism: A Memo-­festo” (1997), 2010, CulturalPolitics.net, http://culturalpolitics.net. 13. See Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Peña, Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics; Peña, Terror of the Machine; Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); and Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996). 14. Leslie Marmon Silko, “An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko” (1995), by Thomas Irmer and Matthias Schmidt, in Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, ed. Ellen L. Arnold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 148–­49. 15. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 14–­15. Scholars continue to debate the numbers of Natives killed by colonization, but ultimately the exact number of millions is less important than the fact of massive genocidal impact. 16. See, for example, Sarah Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). 17. “Principles of Environmental Justice,” adopted by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Washington, D.C., October 24–­27, 1991, https://www.ejnet.org. 18. Valerie L. Kuletz, Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998). 19. On the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, see the articles collected on the website of The Guardian, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.theguard ian.com/us-news/dakota-access-pipeline. 20. On the changing euphemisms, see Kuletz, Tainted Desert. 21. Winona LaDuke, “All Our Relations” (talk delivered at Washington State University, December 6, 2001).

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Notes to Chapter 8  455 22. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 523. 23. This is not a coincidence. Silko has mentioned in interviews that she read all eighteen volumes of the collected works of Freud while completing Almanac. 24. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 570. 25. On the issue of the theft of Indigenous knowledge of food, medicinal plants, and more, see, for example, two books by Vandana Shiva: Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997); and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Boston: South End Press, 1999). Calabazas embodies respect for what Almanac calls “peasant science,” or what ecojustice critic Giovanna Di Chiro calls “local” or “experiential” knowledge, in contrast to the hegemonic Western science of giant multinational pharmaceutical corporations, who are the ones harvesting everything from herbs to the very genetic material of Indigenous peoples. See Giovanna Di Chiro, “Environmental Justice from the Grassroots: Reflections on History, Gender, and Expertise,” in Faber, Struggle for Ecological Democracy, 104–­36. 26. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 258. 27. On the Silko/Marcos connection, see Deborah Horowitz, “Freud, Marx, Chiapas,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 10, no. 3 (1998): 47–­64. 28. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). 29. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 316. 30. Silko, 520. 31. Quoted in Peet and Watts, Liberation Ecologies, 1. 32. Bridget O’Meara, “The Ecological Politics of Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Wicazo Sa Review 15, no. 2 (2000): 72. 33. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 747. 34. Silko, 763. 35. In addition to the works by Adamson and O’Meara cited above, the following offer insights into Almanac as an environmental justice novel: Claudia Sadowski Smith, Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Joni Adamson, “‘¡Todos Somos Indios!’: Revolutionary Imagination, Alternative Modernity, and Transnational Organizing in the Work of Silko, Tamez, and Anzaldúa,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 1 (2012), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2mj3c2p3; Sarah Jaquette Ray, “Environmental Justice, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Local in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3z89t6hc; and Rebecca Tillett, “Sixty Million Dead Souls Howl for Justice in the Americas: Almanac

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as Political Activism and Environmental and Social Justice,” in Howling for Justice: New Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Almanac of the Dead,” ed. Rebecca Tillett (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 14–­26. 36. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. 37. For an examination of how racial stereotyping and other racial dynamics undermine the effectiveness of ecofeminism and other radical environmental efforts, see Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures. 38. For an example of this latter approach, see Giovanna Di Chiro, “Local Actions, Global Visions: Remaking Environmental Expertise,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 203–­31. 39. See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1990); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1996). 40. One rich example of this kind of analysis can be found in Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 41. A few examples of the interface of cultural studies and ecocriticism include Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka, eds., In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Luke, Ecocritique; Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991); Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1995); and Noël Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008). 42. For innovative work on multicultural understandings of environmental issues, see Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice. Peña’s groundbreaking works on Chicano/a environmentalisms include Terror of the Machine and Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics. Christina Holmes develops these cultural themes with a rich focus on gender in Ecological Borderlands. 43. The locus classicus for discussions of the capitalist “production of nature” is Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Smith and others have developed this concept in different ways. For a survey of some of this work, see Noel Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” Capital & Class 24, no. 3 (2000): 5–­36.

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Notes to Chapter 9  457 44. For contributions from queer theory, see the essays in “Queer/ Nature,” special issue, UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 6 (May 1994); Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 114–­37; Rachel Stein, ed., New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Catriona Mortimer-­Sandilands, “Queering Ecocultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 22, nos. 3–­4 (2008): 455–­76; Catriona Mortimer-­Sandilands and Bruce Erikson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Robert Azzarello, Queer Environmentality: Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012); Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); and “From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies,” special issue, UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 19 (2015).

9. PUPPETRY AGAINST PUPPET REGIMES 1. Elaine Bernard, “The Battle in Seattle: What Was That All About?,” Washington Post, December 5, 1999, quoted in Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity, 2nd ed. (Boston: South End Press, 2002), x. To my mind this book offers one of the best practical analyses of the alterglobalization movement from the perspective of the U.S. context. 2. For an argument that the current form of globalization represents a new kind of transnational “empire” different from and superseding traditional imperialism, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). My own view is that Hardt and Negri exaggerate the newness of the system, but they offer useful attempts to rethink categories. 3. The phrase “globalization from below,” along with its opposite, “globalization from above,” is credited to Richard Falk and first appeared in print in Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, eds., Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 4. One key version of this process, elaborated by Third World theorist Samir Amin, entails the notion of “delinking” from the global system and moving toward alternative nation-­based and regional economic, political, and cultural structures. There is also an environmentalist version stressing bioregions, and an anarchist one stressing self-­organization of society without government. 5. Brecher et al., Globalization from Below, 39.

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6. Quoted in Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond, eds., The Global Activist’s Manual: Local Ways to Change the World (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 1. 7. Janet Thomas, The Battle in Seattle: The Story behind and beyond the WTO Demonstrations (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2000), 77. 8. One of the most astute analyses of the strategies and tactics used in Seattle by both the protesters and the forces of putative law and order is Paul de Armond, “Black Flag over Seattle,” Albion Monitor, February 29, 2000, http://www.albionmonitor.com. 9. For an analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of the events in Seattle, see Seth Ackerman, “Prattle in Seattle,” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, January 2000, http://www.fair.org, reprinted in Globalize This! The Battle against the World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule, ed. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000). 10. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton: 2002), 5. 11. One of the key activists on behalf of traditional and Indigenous farmers, and against genetically engineered crops, is Vandana Shiva. Among her many works, see especially Biopiracy. 12. See Brecher et al., Globalization from Below, 27. 13. For a survey of these developments, see Valentine M. Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in an Era of Globalization,” in Globalization and Social Movements, ed. Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-­ Thaler, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, and Sasha Roseneil (London: Palgrave, 2001), 111–­39. 14. Kim Moody, cited in Brecher et al., Globalization from Below, 129. 15. Brecher et al., 56, 141. 16. K. Ruby, “History of Radical Puppetry,” accessed June 21, 2018, http://www.rogueruby.com/radpup.html. See also David Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” in Disobedient Objects, ed. Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 68–­77; Kerry Mogg, “A Short History of Radical Puppetry,” September 11, 2006, http:// libcom.org; and Morgan F. P. Andrews, “When Magic Confronts Authority: The Rise of Protest Puppetry in North America,” in Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority, ed. Josh McPhee and Erik Reuland (Chico, Calif.: AK Press, 2007), 180–­209. 17. On the Women’s Pentagon Action, see Reed, Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers, 120–­41. 18. Alli Chagi-­Starr, “Behind the Scenes in Seattle,” interview, Yes!, December 2, 2009, http://www.yesmagazine.org. Subversive dance is a form I

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Notes to Chapter 9  459 have had to neglect in this book, but its usefulness in demonstrations should not be underestimated. As Chagi-­Starr explains: “When I started getting involved in more street activism, I found protests to be not very compelling. I was committed to finding a way, using the arts, to create more interesting events that would draw people in. As a dancer, it was pretty organic for me to get people in the streets to do gestures. We would add everyone’s individual gestures together, making what I ended up calling a dance of accumulation, or a democracy dance, in which everyone becomes a choreographer, everyone has a piece in the dance. Within 10 minutes, we would have choreographed a dance that we could then take into the middle of streets. When police officers would say, ‘You’re supposed to be behind the chain link fence with the other protesters,’ we could respond, ‘We’re a theater company, and we’ll be finished with our performance soon, officer.’ And they would say, ‘OK, hurry up then.’ By then, we were on Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 11, and we’d done something that was a little more interesting than shaking our fists or trying to hoist our signs higher. It was a way for participants and passersby to be more engaged.” See also Susan Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (October 2003): 395–­412. 19. David Solnit, quoted in Andrew Boyd, “Irony, Meme Warfare, and the Extreme Costume Ball,” in Shepard and Hayduk, From ACT UP to the WTO, 247. 20. David Solnit, “David Solnit and the Arts of Change,” interview by Jen Angel, November 2008, online only, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, http:// www.joaap.org/webonly/solnit_angel.htm. 21. Boyd, “Irony, Meme Warfare,” 247. 22. Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets.” 23. Boyd, “Irony, Meme Warfare,” 248. 24. A “global” phenomenon, Klein’s No Logo has been translated into sixteen languages. 25. Quoted in Boyd, “Irony, Meme Warfare,” 248. 26. An account of the turtle action can be found in Thomas, Battle in Seattle, 16–­28. 27. “Shutdown the WTO,” DAN Handbook, accessed March 15, 2005, http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist. 28. Paul Hawken, “N30: Skeleton Woman in Seattle,” January 6, 2000, http://www.mapcruzin.com/globalwatch/paul_hawken.htm, reprinted in Danaher and Burbach, Globalize This! 29. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2000), 15–­16. 30. Cockburn and St. Clair, 23.

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31. Alexander Cockburn, “Seattle Diary,” accessed March 15, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/seattlediary.html. A slightly rewritten version appears in Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World, 24–­25. 32. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World, 25. 33. Staude’s story is told in Thomas, Battle in Seattle, 84–­88. 34. Hawken, “N30: Skeleton Woman.” 35. The local Seattle press carried stories about anthrax and other “terrorist threats” in the weeks preceding the protests, inducing paranoia in both the police and some protesters. See Thomas, Battle in Seattle, 129–­30. 36. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World, 27–­28. 37. Hawken, “N30: Skeleton Woman.” 38. Hawken. 39. Hawken. 40. Tico Almeida, interview, WTO History Project, accessed June 21, 2018, http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/TicoAlmeida.htm. 41. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World, 47. 42. Bob Young and Jim Brunner, “City to Pay Protesters $250,000 to Settle Suit,” Seattle Times, January 17, 2004, http://community.seattletimes.nw source.com. 43. Peter Costantini, “The Tear Gas Ministerial,” accessed June 21, 2018, http://users.speakeasy.net/~peterc/wto/wtoint.htm. 44. Almeida, interview. 45. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World, 113. 46. For an excellent discussion of the mainstream media’s treatment of the events in Seattle and the small amount of violence of a few protesters, see Rebecca Solnit, “The Myth of Seattle Violence: My Battle with the New York Times,” in The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, ed. Rebecca Solnit and David Solnit (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2009), 57–­72. 47. David Solnit, “The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle,” in Solnit and Solnit, Battle of the Story, 26. 48. Solnit, 27. 49. Hawken, “N30: Skeleton Woman.” 50. Naomi Klein, “The Vision Thing,” The Nation, July 10, 2000, https://www.thenation.com/article/vision-thing. 51. Klein. 52. See Castells, The Information Age. 53. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 171. 54. “Let Our Resistance Be as Transnational as Capital! November 30th, 1999: A Global Day of Action, Resistance, and Carnival against the Global

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Notes to Chapter 9  461 Capitalist System,” Peoples’ Global Action, accessed June 21, 2018, https:// www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/seattle/n30/n30callen.htm. 55. Various perspectives on the developing use of the Internet in transnational grassroots organizing can be found in the following: G. Lins Ribiero, “Cybercultural Politics: Political Activism in a Transnational World,” in Culture of Politics, Politics of Culture: Re-­visioning Latin American Social Movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 325–­52; Harry M. Cleaver Jr., “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of Alternative Political Fabric,” Journal of International Affairs 51, no. 2 (1998): 621–­40; and “Social Justice Movements and the Internet,” special issue, Peace Review 13, no. 3 (September 2001). See also chapter 10 for more on the development of social media–­based activism. 56. See Paul de Armond, “Netwar in the Emerald City: WTO Protest Strategy and Tactics,” in Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2001). 57. Linda Setchell, “Democratizing Media,” in Prokosch and Raymond, Global Activist’s Manual, 187–­88. 58. Jeff Perlstein, interview by Miguel Bocanegra, WTO History Project, October 15, 2000, http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Perl stein.pdf. 59. Ana Nogueira, “The Birth and Promise of the Indymedia Revolution,” in Shepard and Hayduk, From ACT UP to the WTO, 296. 60. Iain A. Boal, “Glossary,” in The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization, ed. Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton Rose (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001), 379–­80. 61. See Martin Khor, “Seattle Debacle: Revolt of the Developing Nations,” in Danaher and Burbach, Globalize This!, 48–­52. 62. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 9. 63. Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez’s article “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” has been reprinted in several collections, including Danaher and Burbach, Globalize This! It is also available at Colorlines, accessed June 21, 2018, https:// www.colorlines.com. 64. Chris Dixon, “Finding Hope after Seattle: Rethinking Radical Activism and Building a Movement,” Onward, Spring 2001, also available at the Anarchist Library, accessed June 21, 2018, http://theanarchistlibrary.org. 65. For a list of such protests and an argument for their greater importance, see Anup Shah, “Public Protests around the World,” Global Issues, page last updated November 7, 2011, http://www.globalissues.org.

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66. Yutaka Dirks, “Doing Things Differently This Time: Kananaskis G8 Meeting and Movement Building,” Colours of Resistance Archive, accessed June 21, 2018, http://www.coloursofresistance.org. 67. Porto Alegre was chosen initially in large part because of its progressive government. The city is part of a growing political movement in Brazil that is systematically delegating power back down to people at the municipal level rather than hoarding it at the national and international levels. Brazil’s Workers’ Party has been the prime architect of this decentralization process. 68. World Social Forum Charter of Principles, April 9, 2001, https:// fsm2016.org/en/sinformer/a-propos-du-forum-social-mondial. 69. For an analysis of this period, see Lesley J. Wood, Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For discussion of a variety of approaches to the movement, see Donatella della Porta, ed., The Global Justice Movement: Cross-­National and Transnational Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2007). 70. For an account of the attack by police on puppets, see Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” including the comments section. On new modes of suppressing protest, see Greg Elmer and Andy Opel’s documentary short Preempting Dissent (Infoscape 2014 Productions, 2014), based on their book Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2008). 71. L. A. Kauffman, “All Has Changed,” Free Radical, September 17, 2001, available at People’s Geography Project, http://www.peoplesgeography project.org/changed.html. 72. One useful resource for tracking the always-­contested sizes of protests and other crowds is the Crowd Counting Consortium, accessed July 28, 2018, https://sites.google.com/view/crowdcountingconsortium. 73. Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, article in La Jornada, March 25, 2002, translated as “How Barcelona Defeated Violence,” available at Znet, https://zcomm .org/znetarticle/how-barcelona-defeated-violence-by-jes-s-ram-rez-cuevas. 74. Liza Featherstone, “The New Student Movement,” in Yuen et al., Battle of Seattle, 329, 331. 75. Likewise, as I argue in chapter 10 of this book, mocking and making fun of the new wave of white supremacists and other “alt-­right” activists emboldened by Donald Trump is more likely to be effective than the actions of putatively left “anti-­fa” forces who are seduced into becoming a mirror image of violent right-­wing protesters. 76. Quoted in Solnit, “Battle of the Story,” 54. For a different kind of visual intervention regarding Seattle, see noted photographer Alan Sekula’s

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Notes to Chapter 10  463 “antiphotojournalistic” slide-­show installation Waiting for Tear Gas, selected photos from which are available for viewing at various gallery websites, including the Tate, accessed July 7, 2018, https://www.tate.org.uk, and Camera Austria, accessed July 7, 2018, http://camera-austria.at.

10. #OCCUPY ALL THE ARTS 1. Throughout this chapter, I use Occupy Wall Street (or OWS) in reference to this movement’s activities centered in New York City, and Occupy or the Occupy movement to signify the larger set of occupations that occurred in many cities around the United States and across the globe. Some prefer the use of a hashtag in front of any of these designations, but for the most part I have chosen to eschew that so as not to overemphasize the important but often exaggerated digital components of the protests. Among the most useful of the vast number of works available on OWS, see especially these primary source collections: Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen, et al., eds., Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso, 2011); Amy Schrager Lang and Daniel Lang/Levitsky, eds., Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2012); Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). Of particular importance, given the focus of this chapter, is Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-­Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2016). In addition, see these interpretive histories: David Graeber, The Democracy Project (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013); Michael Gould-­Wartofsky, The Occupiers: The Making of the 99% Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Sarah van Gelder and the staff of Yes! Magazine, eds., This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-­Koehler, 2011); Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone, eds., Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Noam Chomsky, Occupy (London: Penguin Press, 2012). See also the documentary film by OWS participant-­observer Marisa Holmes, All Day, All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story (2016), and another documentary, the collectively authored 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (2013). See also Nicholas Mirzoeff’s Occupy blog/diary, accessed June 21, 2018, http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012.

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2. For a general overview of this remarkable year in protest, see Paul Mason, It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012). For a rich study of the theatrical dimensions of the Tahrir Square events, see Jeffrey Alexander, Performative Revolution in Egypt (London: Blooms­bury Academic, 2011). 3. I first encountered the name “movement of the squares” in Paolo Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4. See Joanna Walters, “Occupy America: Protests against Wall Street and Inequality Hit 70 Cities,” The Guardian, October 8, 2011; Karla Adam, “Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global,” Washington Post, October 15, 2011; Derek Thompson, “Occupy the World: The 99% Movement Goes Global,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2011; and Esther Addley, “Occupy Movement: From Local Action to Global Howl of Protest,” The Guardian, October 17, 2011. 5. One important early organizer, for example, Marisa Holmes, was a young filmmaker who had spent the summer of 2011 interviewing participants in the Tahrir Square revolt. Holmes and numerous other OWS participants from the worldwide revolt of 2011 are mentioned in Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, 4. 6. The deregulation of markets that began in earnest in the 1980s not only helped to create this vast wealth gap but also led to the degradation of working conditions, extensive damage to the environment, and a decline in health care and a host of other social services. Much of the terrorism and chaos around the world can be traced in large part to these polices and the “austerity measures” imposed on the rest of the world by the major capitalist economies and global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For additional statistics on income inequality in the United States and globally, see the Inequality.org website, https://inequality.org. 7. Rebecca Solnit, “Foreword: Miracle and Obstacles,” in Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, xii. 8. On the direct links between OWS and the Sanders campaign, see Becky Bond and Zack Exley, Rules for Revolutionaries (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2016), esp. 90–­94. 9. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 2. See also Christian Fuchs, Occupy Media! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (London: Zero Books, 2014). Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport take up related issues in Digitally Enabled Social Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 10. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, a mass of information is available about U.S. government spying on citizens. For one useful entry

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Notes to Chapter 10  465 point into this body of work, see “FAQ: What You Need to Know about the NSA’s Surveillance Programs,” ProPublica, August 5, 2013, https://www.pro publica.org. 11. For an exploration of the complex, contradictory play between corporate-­controlled and movement-­based digital media, see Fuchs, Occupy Media! 12. Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets, 156–­57. 13. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14. Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder, “Occupying Wall Street: Places and Spaces of Political Action,” Places Journal (September 2012), https:// placesjournal.org. This article, written by two architects sympathetic to OWS, offers details of the physical layout of the camp as well as intriguing observations on the relation between private and public city places and on online hyperspaces as sites of democratic enactment. 15. “We Are the 99 Percent,” Tumblr, accessed June 21, 2018, http:// wearethe99percent.tumblr.com. Not surprisingly, conservatives replied with a site called “We Are the 53 Percent,” a figure they claimed represented hardworking, taxpaying Americans as opposed to what they assumed were the tax-­ slacker hippies represented by Occupy Wall Street (note that the demographic statistics of OWS refute this claim). 16. For details on the various activists and sectarians meeting under the rubric NYC General Assembly in the weeks before the launch of Occupy, see Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, 3–­23. 17. The kind of large-­scale reforms necessary to establish such an economy are presented in Gar Alperovitz, America beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Democracy Collaborative Press, 2011); and Robert Pollin, Greening the Global Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). 18. For an excellent discussion of movements as sites of education, see Aziz Choudry, Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). For a detailed political science examination of the “demands” issue, see Susan Kang, “Demands Belong to the 99%? The Conflict over Demands, Issues, and Goals in OWS,” in Welty et al., Occupying Political Science, 59–­88. 19. Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, 59–­60. 20. Those more than five thousand volumes were thrown away by police during the illegal raid that ended the New York occupation, a move that says a good deal about the NYPD’s respect for education. The successful lawsuit filed by the protesters against the police included a settlement of $50,000

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for destruction of the library. See Michael Kelley, “NYPD to Pay More Than $360,000 for Its Destructive Raid on Occupy,” Business Insider, April 10, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.in/NYPD-To-Pay-More-Than-360000-For -Its-Destructive-Raid-On-Occupy/articleshow/21187245.cms. A complete cat­ a­log of the books that made up the People’s Library is available at Library Thing, http://www.librarything.com/catalog/OWSLibrary. The library also continues to have an online presence at the People’s Library, https://peopleslibrary .wordpress.com. 21. For a unique reading of how a movement’s structure can embody (democratic) theory, see Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements.” 22. McKee, Strike Art, 94. 23. Marina Sitrin, “The Chills of Popular Power: The First Month of Occupy Wall Street,” in van Gelder and Yes! Magazine staff, This Changes Everything, 30. 24. The main demographic outlines of OWS participation are pretty consistent across several surveys, though interpretations of the data are quite varied, as might be expected. While certainly not a representative sample of the entire U.S. population, especially in party identification, OWS was not as monolithic as critics suggested. The basic statistics are as follows: roughly 60 percent male; 80 percent white; 25 percent under age twenty-­five, 32 percent over forty-­five, and 42 percent twenty-­five to forty-­four; 60 percent college educated; 25 percent Democrats, 72 percent independents, and 3 percent Republicans; 45 percent with annual income less than $25,000, 30 percent over $50,000, and 25 percent $25,000–­$50,000; 45 percent employed full-­time, 20 percent part-­time, and 12 percent unemployed. A large proportion of those who reported being employed said that they viewed their employment as precarious. Compare these polls and articles: Occupy Theory staff, “Demographics of Occupy Wall Street Movement,” OccupyTheory.org, December 12, 2013, https://occupytheory.org; “The Demographics of Occupy Wall Street: By the Numbers,” The Week, October 20, 2011, http://theweek.com; “Occupy Wall Street Statistics and Demographics,” Statistic Brain Research Institute, March 1, 2017, http://www.statisticbrain.com; Jillian Berman, “Occupy Wall Street Actually Not at All Representative of the 99 Percent, Report Finds,” Huffington Post, January 29, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/ 29/occupy-wall-street-report_n_2574788.html. 25. Both alternative and mainstream media noted the labor union involvement. See, for example, Andy Kroll, “Occupy Wall Street, Powered by Big Labor,” Mother Jones, October 5, 2011, http://www.motherjones.com/ politics/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-labor-unions; and Steven Greenhouse and

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Notes to Chapter 10  467 Cara Buckley, “Seeking Energy, Unions Join Protest against Wall Street,” New York Times, October 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com. 26. Stuart Leonard, “Taking Brooklyn Bridge,” in “OWS Poetry Anthology,” Atuuschaaw blog, November 19, 2011, http://atuuschaaw.blogspot.com/ 2011/11/ows-poetry-anthology.html. 27. Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, 6. 28. McKee, Strike Art, 23. 29. See Michele Elam, “How Art Propels Occupy Wall Street,” CNN, November 4, 2011, http://www.cnn.com. 30. Quoted in Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street, 145. 31. The term horizontalism is a translation of horizontalidad, a concept developed by contemporary Argentinian activists building on the long tradition of antihierarchical modes of organizing. On this important precursor movement to OWS, see Marina A. Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (London: Zed Books, 2012). 32. See McKee, Strike Art, esp. chap. 1. 33. See “Ratio between CEOs and Average Workers in World in 2014, by Country,” Statista, 2018, https://www.statista.com/statistics/424159. 34. “About,” Arts & Labor, accessed July 9, 2018, http://artsandlabor .org. 35. See, for example, the website of Occupy Design UK, http://occupy design.org.uk. Something of the variety of Occupy arts can be seen on the Web Urbanist website; for example, see S. A. Rogers, “Occupy the Art World: 21 OWS-­Inspired Designs and Graphics,” Web Urbanist, accessed June 22, 2018, https://weburbanist.com. See also Eugene Wolters, “Two Years Later—­the Best of Occupy Art,” Critical-­Theory blog, September 17, 2013, http://www.criti cal-theory.com. 36. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Doubleday, 1972). 37. Noah Fischer, “Occupy Museums Manifesto,” October 20, 2011, http://www.noahfischer.org/view/manifesto/38396. 38. “Occupy Museums!,” Occupy Museums, October 19, 2011, http:// www.occupymuseums.org/index.php/about. 39. For coverage of the Sotheby’s protest, see Liza Eliano, “Reporting from the Front Lines at Wednesday’s Sotheby’s Protest,” Hyperallergic, November 10, 2011, https://hyperallergic.com/40156. 40. Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, “#Occupy Art,” Art Monthly, no. 359 (September 2012), https://www.artmonthly.co.uk. 41. In a similar move, MoMA, never to be outdone in co-­optation, added ManifestAR’s augmented-­reality occupation of MoMA to its permanent collection.

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42. For thoughtful discussion of a museum exhibition designed to raise questions about how protest art should be represented in museum contexts, see Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, eds., Disobedient Objects (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). 43. For detailed coverage of an Occupy Museums action carried out at MoMA, see Whitney Kimball, “Professors, Artists, Workers, and Activists Rally inside MoMA,” Art F City, January 16, 2012, http://artfcity.com/2012/01/16. 44. See the Occupy Museums website, http://occupymuseums.org. 45. For ManifestAR’s Occupy work, see “AR Occupy Wall Street,” accessed June 22, 2018, https://aroccupywallstreet.wordpress.com. For additional examples, see https://manifestarblog.wordpress.com. 46. Quoted in Paul Mason, “Does Occupy Signal the Death of Contemporary Art?,” BBC News, April 30, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/maga zine-17872666. 47. The Illuminator continues to do its enlightening work. In 2017, it projected support for the Women’s March and attacked Donald Trump’s call for a border wall. See the collective’s website, http://theilluminator.org. 48. Elam, “How Art Propels Occupy Wall Street.” 49. Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american -bubble-machine-20100405. 50. For examples of Crabapple’s work addressing the revolts of 2011, see “The Shell Game,” accessed June 22, 2018, http://mollycrabapple.com/the -shell-game. For her ongoing work since Occupy, see her website in general, http://mollycrabapple.com. 51. Quoted in Esther Zuckerman, “Molly Crabapple on ‘Shell Game,’ Her Surreal Take on the Financial Crisis,” Village Voice, March 11, 2012, https:// www.villagevoice.com. 52. On Occupy’s impact on the art world, see, for example, Maud Newton, “How Occupy Changed Contemporary Art,” New Republic, April 12, 2013, https://newrepublic.com. 53. Quoted in Newton. 54. For a discussion of the original incident and a sampling of the pepper-­spray memes, see “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop,” Know Your Meme, last updated November 18, 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com. 55. Quoted in Gazelle Emami, “Occupy Broadway: Protesters, Performers Creatively Resist at Times Square,” Huffington Post, December 31, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/03/occupy-broadway_n_1127017 .html.

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Notes to Chapter 10  469 56. Information about Beloff’s production can be found at “The Day of the Commune,” accessed July 2, 2018, http://daysofthecommune.com. Clips are also available on Vimeo, accessed July 2, 2018, https://vimeo.com/39765 763. 57. For a video about the Puppet Guild created as part of an appeal for financial support, see Alma Sheppard-­Matsuo, “Occupy Wall Street Puppet Guild: The People’s Puppets,” IndieGoGo, accessed June 22, 2018, https:// www.indiegogo.com. 58. Robert Hass, “Poet-­Bashing Police: At Occupy Berkeley, Beat Poets Has New Meaning,” New York Times, November 19, 2011, http://www.ny times.com. 59. The Nation, quoted in Stephen Boyer, “The OWS Poetry Anthology Story,” in The Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, comp. Stephen Boyer et al. (November 2011), 23–­24, https://peopleslibrary.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/ ows-poetry-anthology5.pdf. 60. For some inside dope on the drum circle debate, see “Monday Night Urgent OWS Message,” N+1, October 24, 2011, https://nplusonemag.com. For an example of mass-­media coverage of the controversy, see Mark Memmott, “Occupy Wall Street Drummers Generate Loud Debate,” NPR, October 25, 2011, http://www.npr.org. 61. See Quinn Norton, “Beyond ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: The Music of Occupy Wall Street,” Wired, December 30, 2011, https://www.wired.com/ 2011/12/occupy-wall-street-music. For additional details, see the Music for Occupy website, http://musicforoccupy.org. 62. As political journalist Harry Enten has pointed out, the Tea Party and the right in general have a much more homogeneous group of constituents than does the left, which has to negotiate a broad range of cultural differences among its diverse voter base. Harry Enten, comments made on “Politics Podcast: The Health of the GOP’s Health Care Bill,” FiveThirtyEight, March 13, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-the-health-of-the -gops-health-care-bill. 63. For a good sample of Occupy posters and prints from across the United States and around the world, see Occuprint, accessed July 10, 2018, http://occuprint.org. 64. See, for example, Andrew Boyd, ed., Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution (New York: OR Books, 2012); and Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-­imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007). For these books’ related websites, see http://beautifultrouble.org and https://artisticactivism.org. Also check out various other radical art sites linked

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to “Social Movements and Culture: Art Activism,” CulturalPolitics.net, http:// culturalpolitics.net. 65. Matt Taibbi, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests,” Rolling Stone, November 11, 2011, reprinted at Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org. 66. Mason, “Does Occupy Signal the Death of Contemporary Art?” 67. In Strike Art, McKee takes up the question of Occupy as art from a number of insightful perspectives. Elsewhere, I have discussed the value and limits of thinking about movements themselves as art forms; see T. V. Reed, “Protest as Artistic Expression,” in Fahlenbrach et al., Protest Cultures, 77–­93. 68. For a diverse sampling of work being done by Occupy participants in subsequent years, see Accra Shepp, “Occupy Wall Street: Where Are They Now?,” New York Times, September 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com. A number of similar follow-­up investigative articles years after OWS have found the same pattern of Occupy participants’ continuing work in a wide range of local, national, and transnational actions around the globe. 69. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Image, Space, Revolution,” in Mitchell et al., Occupy, 111. 70. On the women’s peace camp, see Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins, eds., Greenham Common: Women at the Wire (London: Women’s Press, 1984); and Jean Stead, “The Greenham Common Peace Camp and Its Legacy,” The Guardian, September 5, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/uk. On the antinuclear occupations, see L. A. Kauffman, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017); and Noël Sturgeon, “Direct Theory and Political Action: The U.S. Nonviolent Direct Action Movement” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991). 71. Figures cited in Kauffman, Direct Action, 171. For details on the destruction of the sites, see Gould-­Wartofsky, The Occupiers, esp. 136–­37, 216–­18. For a vivid firsthand account of the attack on the UC Berkeley encampment, see Hass, “Poet-­Bashing Police.” 72. Kelley, “NYPD to Pay More Than $360,000.” 73. Longtime activist Angela Davis noted both the genocidal origins of the notion of occupation and its current reference to the occupied territories of Israel/Palestine, while acknowledging the attempt of OWS to recoup and redefine occupation in positive terms. See her short piece “(Un)Occupy,” in Taylor et al., Occupy!, 132–­33. 74. Razzle, quoted in Writers for the 99%, “POCcupy—­People of Color Occupy Wall Street Too!,” in Occupying Wall Street, 115. 75. Solnit,“Foreword,” xi.

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Notes to Chapter 10  471 76. See Manissa McCleave Maharawal, “Reflections from the People of Color Caucus of Occupy Wall Street,” in We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, ed. Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2012), 177–­83. McKee discusses the complex relation of Occupy to Black Lives Matter in Strike Art, esp. 181–­88, 216–­18, 222–­28. In Direct Action, L. A. Kauffman also addresses these questions in examining race relations generally within the progressive left. 77. Max Ehrenfreund, “A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows,” Washington Post, April 26, 2016, https://www.washington post.com. 78. Joreen (Jo Freeman), “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” 1971, http://www.jofreeman.com. 79. For a brilliant exploration of the positive functioning of these egalitarian structures, see Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Chris Dixon offers an equally important take on current versions of these structures in Another Politics: Talking across Today’s Transformative Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); see also Chris Dixon, “Building ‘Another Politics’: The Contemporary Anti-­authoritarian Current in the US and Canada,” Anarchist Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 32–­60. 80. See Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets, esp. 134–­57. 81. Key aspects of these process issues are discussed in Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, esp. 61–­63. 82. For more on the origins of horizontalism, see Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions. 83. The term first occurred in the work of C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London: Clarendon Press, 1962). The concept has been developed usefully in a U.S. context by George Lipsitz in his deeply relevant book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). Those who blame progressive “identity politics” for the rise of Donald Trump need to understand that “whiteness” too is an identity and that much recent political history needs to be understood as a racist white identity politics fostered by folks with a vested interest in keeping the current economic inequalities intact. 84. In addition to Gerbaudo’s concerns cited above, see the rich analysis of the virtues and limits of radical egalitarianism in Dixon, Another Politics; and L. A. Kauffman, “The Theology of Consensus,” in Taylor et al., Occupy!, 46–­50.

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85. Daniel Kreiss and Zeynep Tufekci, “Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics,” Cultural Studies–­Critical Methodologies 13, no. 3 (2013), 163–­64. 86. Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements.” 87. Slavoj Žižek, “Don’t Fall in Love with Yourselves,” in Taylor et al., Occupy!, 66–­68. 88. Kauffman, Direct Action, 171. 89. Part of that will include finding a more effective, accessible rhetoric to describe the ways a cleaner, more just economy will be beneficial to ordinary folks. The ideas are not hard to find; see works like Alperovitz, America beyond Capitalism; and Pollin, Greening the Global Economy. But the language used to convey those ideas is trickier, though the writings of George Lakoff are one good place to start. Lakoff’s relevant books include Don’t Think about an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2014); The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic (New York: Free Press, 2012) (coauthored with Elisabeth Wehling); The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-­Century American Politics with an 18th-­Century Brain (New York: Viking Press, 2006); and Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). 90. Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag, esp. “Conclusion.” Nonviolence will be essential to success. Violence from the left plays into the hands of the right. Until progressives succeed in making a widely popular argument about the many forms of structural violence, and thereby delegitimate the government’s monopoly on the use of force, nonviolence will always be the more effective tool. Regardless of their ideological kinship, groups on the left advocating street fighting (Black Bloc, Antifa, and others) allow the right to set up a false equivalency between hate groups and those advocating greater social justice. For decades, law enforcement agencies have planted advocates of violence within progressive groups. Is there any more eloquent testimony that the powers that be see violence as far easier to contain than the power of nonviolence? The far greater success rate for nonviolent struggle over many decades has been documented convincingly by scholars and activists alike. For a critique of the Black Bloc’s impact on Occupy, see Chris Hedges, “The Cancer in Occupy,” Truthdig, February 6, 2012, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the -cancer-in-occupy. For careful empirical research on the relative power of nonviolence, see Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). For a brief TED lecture summarizing this work, see “The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder,”

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Notes to Conclusion  473 YouTube, November 4, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue =8&v=YJSehRlU34w. 91. The hastily organized 2017 Women’s March drew more than five million participants around the United States and elsewhere and led to hundreds of new organizations created to carry on a progressive agenda. Since that time, resistance to the alt-­right and Trumpism has reached an unprecedented scale. A possibly formidable dual strategy can be seen in the rise of organizations like Indivisible and Swing Left on the electoral side along with the renewed energy behind thousands of grassroots progressive community groups. But that strategy will succeed only if movement activists respect electoral work and vice versa (I know, many folks do both), and if liberals and progressives realize that they need each other to fend off an incredibly dangerous resurgence of racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and policies.

CONCLUSION 1. For more on the various schools of social movement theorizing mentioned here, see the collection of classic essays edited by Steven M. Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke Jr., Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1997). Editors Donatella della Porta and Mario Diana add more recent perspectives to the traditional analyses in their anthology The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Steven Buechler provides a good secondary summary of approaches in Understanding Social Movements: Theories from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2016). 2. For works introducing these interdisciplinary fields, as well as poststructuralist and neo-­Marxist cultural theory, see the section on interdisciplinary cultural theory on my website, CulturalPolitics.net, http://culturalpolitics.net. 3. The classic description of frame analysis is found in Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes.” Updated perspectives on this approach appear in David A. Snow, “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2004), 380–­412. A particularly grounded introduction to collective identity theory is provided by Verta Taylor and Nancy E. Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities,” in Frontiers of Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 104–­29. Alberto Melucci’s “The Process of Collective Identity,” in that same volume, offers another useful perspective, one Melucci expands upon in his

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book Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On narrative analysis, see J. E. Davis, ed., Stories of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On affective approaches, see Jeff Godwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); James M. Jasper and Lynn Owens, “Social Movements and Emotions,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, vol. 2, ed. Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (New York: Springer, 2014): 529–­48; and Deborah Gould, “Emotion,” in Fahlenbrach et al., Protest Cultures, 160–­65. On traditional performance analysis, see Robert D. Benford and Scott A. Hunt, “Dramaturgy and Social Movements: The Social Construction and Communication of Power,” Sociological Inquiry 62, no. 1 (1992): 36–­55. For a more recent theorizing of performativity in cultural politics, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). On discourse analysis that combines sociological approaches with methods drawn from the work of poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault, see Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller, “Comparing Discourses between Cultures: A Discursive Approach to Movement Knowledge,” in Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research, ed. Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ullrich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 113–­39. Fahlenbrach et al.’s anthology Protest Cultures examines a variety of additional cultural elements of and approaches to social movements. 4. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 5. See Amy Swidler, “Cultural Power and Social Movements,” in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 25–­40. 6. Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture: The Culture of the Women’s Movement,” in Johnston and Klandermans, Social Movements and Culture, 163–­64. 7. A good place to enter the rich theoretical and methodological universe of Pierre Bourdieu is his essay collection The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 8. Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164–­65. 9. To my mind, one of the better attempts to introduce the players and stakes in this set of theoretical issues remains Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1991). A more advanced

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Notes to Conclusion  475 key text in these debates is Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001). 10. The literature by and about Foucault is vast. One relevant place to start is with Ullrich and Keller’s essay “Comparing Discourses between Cultures.” 11. Brecher et al., Globalization from Below, xii. 12. I take the term material-­discursive from feminist cultural theorist Donna Haraway, who uses it throughout her crucially important body of work. Often mischaracterized as concerned only with “discourse,” Haraway has always been a materialist as well, one who argues brilliantly against the politically disastrous effects of these and related dichotomies. Two good places to enter Haraway’s intellectual universe are her essay collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and The Donna Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003). 13. In addition to the works cited in note 1 above, the following offer useful discussion of collective identity in movement terms: Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities,” in Buechler and Cylke, Social Movements; Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes”; Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam, “Collective Identity and Activism,” in Morris and Mueller, Frontiers of Social Movement Theory; Aldon D. Morris, “Political Consciousness and Collective Action,” in Morris and Mueller, Frontiers of Social Movement Theory; Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and Melucci, Challenging Codes. 14. For more of my take on the social construction of identities through new social media, see T. V. Reed, Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2019). 15. See Sidney Tarrow, “A Movement Society?,” in Buechler and Cylke, Social Movements. 16. A good, comprehensive introduction to many of the key texts in the history of subcultural studies is provided in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, eds., The Subcultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997). The classic cultural studies text analyzing the disruptive semiotic potential of subcultures is Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). In later work Hebdige moved closer to the position I articulate here in arguing that subversive qualities of subcultures become significant challenges to the dominant culture primarily when they are connected to those politicized subcultures

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I call movement cultures. See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (New York: Routledge, 1988). 17. Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 761–­75. 18. Raymond Williams develops the notion of “formations” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); and The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1981). Denning makes brilliant use of the concept in The Cultural Front. 19. See Denning, The Cultural Front, xix–­xx. 20. Transcend is no doubt a controversial term in this context. I do not mean it in a metaphysical sense. I mean something closer to the negative dialectics of art claimed by Theodor Adorno. 21. Naomi Klein discusses both the power and the limits of culture jamming as a social change strategy in No Logo, esp. 279–­309. 22. On this anecdote, see Klein, 302. 23. See Williams, Marxism and Literature; and Williams, Sociology of Culture. 24. A number of important scholarly works have addressed these questions. One good place to start is the classic early study by Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching. The following articles can give a general sense of the literature: William A. Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld, “Movements and Media as Interacting Systems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528 (1993): 114–­25; John D. McCarthy, Clark McPhail, and Jackie Smith, “Images of Protest: Dimensions of Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Washington Demonstrations, 1982 and 1991,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 3 (1996): 478–­99; Douglas M. McLeod, “News Coverage and Social Protest: How the Media’s Protest Paradigm Exacerbates Social Conflict,” Journal of Dispute Resolution 2007, no. 1, art. 12 (2007), https://scholarship.law .missouri.edu/jdr/vol2007/iss1/12; and R. Wouters, “From the Streets to the Screen: Characteristics of Protest Events as Determinants of Television News Coverage,” Mobilization 18, no. 1 (2013): 83–­105. 25. Buechler develops his notion of “movement community” most fully in Women’s Movements in the United States. 26. Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity. Fantasia defines the concept of “cultures of solidarity” as an emergent structure less elaborated than a subculture but more than random in its resistance to dominant cultural values. 27. John Lofland, “Charting Degrees of Movement Culture: Tasks of the Cultural Cartographer,” in Johnston and Klandermans, Social Movements and Culture, 188–­216. 28. On affect theory, see the works cited in note 3 of the Conclusion.

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Notes to Conclusion  477 29. The books of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio probably offer the most readable entry point into this body of literature for nonscientists. See, for example, Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon, 2018). 30. See Williams, Sociology of Culture. 31. For a variety of perspectives on the role of protest humor drawn from a wide swath of history and a range of cultures, see Marjolein ’t Hart and Dennis Bos, eds., Humour and Social Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 32. Roy’s important work, and other efforts on this terrain, including my own, could be strengthened through an examination of the vast body of literary and culture studies work in reception theory and reader-­response criticism. Over the course of decades, these methodologies have devoted much nuanced analysis to precisely how social relations shape the consumption/interpretation of sociocultural texts and how aesthetic form shapes audience reception. A good place to start investigating these fields is Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-­Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-­structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), followed by Andrew Bennett, Readers and Reading (New York: Routledge, 1995). Molly Abel Travis offers a useful, socially grounded approach in Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). 33. Robert Ferrell, Pete Simi, and Simon Gottschalk, “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene,” Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006): 275–­304. 34. The WUNC concept is elaborated in Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 35. There is a large body of work, primarily by anthropologists and sociologists, on cultural diffusion processes. And some movement theorists have analyzed things like the diffusion of movement tactics and symbols between and among movements. See, for example, Dieter Rucht, “The Diffusion of Movement Symbols,” in Fahlenbrach et al., Protest Cultures, 528–­38. But there seems to me much more work to be done on the diffusion of movement ideas, styles, and values into the wider society. 36. Marco Giugni, “Political, Biographical, and Cultural Consequences of Social Movements,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 5 (2008): 1591. See also, for example, Jennifer Earl, “The Cultural Consequences of Social Movements,” in Snow et al., Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 508–­30. 37. Doug McAdam, “Culture in Social Movements,” in Buechler and Cylke, Social Movements, 481.

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38. I am using the term defusion as a neologism and play on words. It should not be confused with the psychological concept of the same name. 39. Swidler, “Cultural Power and Social Movements,” 33. 40. Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left. 41. Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting. 42. Sturgeon, “Theorizing Movements.” 43. Alberto Melucci’s ideas can be found in compact form in “The Symbolic Challenge in Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52 (1985): 781–­816, and in more elaborated form in his book Challenging Codes. 44. Reed, Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers. 45. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 46. Raymond Williams elaborates the term structures of feeling in Marxism and Literature. He uses it to name something different from, but related to, worldview or ideology and argues that these structures need to be examined in relation to institutions, cultural formations, and other forces that serve to organize subjectivity. 47. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 182.

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INDEX

Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 430n29 academic studies: American, 374, 420, 421; American Indian, 150; black, 45; Chicano/a/x, 121, 124, 141; cultural, xvi, 18, 267, 374, 382, 391, 446n4, 456n41, 475n16; environmental, 240; ethnic, 240, 374, 395; gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender, 206, 226; women’s, 112, 240, 324, 374, 395, 411 ACT NOW (AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize and Win), 225 “actorvists,” 151, 159 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), xxiii, 197–238, 282, 320–21, 342, 383–85, 407, 449n1, 450n17, 450n25, 450n28, 451n32, 459n19, 461n59; art world and, 210–18; baseball games and, 221–22; Catholic Church as target of, 201, 208; health education and, 211; medical research and, 199, 211–16;

mobilization of emotions and, 208; pink triangle of, 209, 235; spin-off groups, 205, 213, 230– 32; women’s committee, 219, 221 Acuña, Rodolfo, 126, 442n9 Adamson, Joni, 452n8, 445n35 Adbusters, 293, 327, 333, 335, 340, 398 advertising industry, 235 affinity groups, 407, 413; in ACT UP, 204, 207; in Direct Action Network, 295–97, 305 AFL-CIO, 284, 293, 318 Africa, xxiv, 10, 56, 621, 126; and AIDS epidemic, 196, 219, 237, 282, 451n32; and famine relief projects, 175–82 African Americans, 8–10, 42, 78; and AIDS epidemic, 207–8; and Black Lives Matter, 78–81; and murals, 123; and Occupy, 360–61. See also black power movement; civil rights movement 479

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480 

Index

“Afro” hairstyle, 46, 73, 83, 349 agents provocateurs, 69, 363 “agit-pop,” 173–74, 194 agribusiness, 280 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 198 AIDS chic, 234–35 AIDS epidemic, 198–204, 216, 224. See also ACT UP AIDS Quilt, 225, 450n17 AIDS “victims,” 217–18 Alaniz-Healy, Wayne, 127 Alarcón, Norma, 134 Albany, Georgia, 17, 23–24, 35 Albright, Madeleine, 298 Alexie, Sherman, 143, 443n3 Alicia, Juana: Las Lechugueras mural, 135 Allen, Pam, 100, 436n19 Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, 293 Almeida, Tico, 300, 303, 460n40, 460n44 alternative media. See independent media ambiguity, strategic, 127, 209 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 304 American Indian Movement (AIM), xxii, 62, 143–71; action in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, 148; archaeological desecration, 165; film portrayals of, 141; malecenteredness, 162–67; occupation of BIA office, 148 Amin, Samir, 457n4 Amnesty International, 282, 304, 448n27 anarchists: and ACT UP, 202, 228; in Battle of Seattle, 271, 286,

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301–2, 320, 365; and Occupy, 366; as subculture, 391, 457n4 anger, mobilizing, 39, 76–78, 155, 165, 200, 217, 223–25, 405 anti-apartheid movement, xxii, xxiii, 173–96, 392, 411, 446n3, 446n21 anticolonial struggles, xxiv, 10, 66, 126, 436n18 anticorporate globalization movement, 269–324; internal tensions in, 315–18; issue areas, 279–84. See also Battle of Seattle antinuclear movement, 174, 245, 271, 374, 413, 470n70 antislavery movement, xv, 2, 244 antisweatshop movement, 276, 284 antiwar protests, 323–24; and Chicano movement, 131–32 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 104–6, 134 appropriation. See cultural appropriation appropriation art, 210, 351 Apted, Michael, 145, 157 Aquash, Annie Mae, 170, 445n16 Arab Spring. See Movement of the Squares Arendt, Hannah, 167, 359–60, 397 Art and Revolution, 286–88, 293 Artists United against Apartheid, 173–83 Asian Americans, 40, 62, 92, 105, 138, 144, 243, 255, 265, 271, 357, 427n53 Asian Sisters, 93 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, 240 Audubon Society, 244–45

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Index  481 autoethnography, 105 AZT (anti-AIDS drug), 213–14 Aztec culture, 119, 122, 130, 386 Aztlán, 123–29, 136 Baca, Judith Francisca, 134, 136–41, 139 (fig.) Bad Heart Bull, Wesley, 165 Baker, Arthur, 186 Baker, Ella, v, vii, xxi, 3, 4, 14, 22–23, 195, 365, 426nn14–15; Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, 82 Baldwin, James, 10 “Ballad of Emmett Till” (Dylan), 2 “Ballad of the Sit-Ins” (Carawan), 17, 23, 405 Bambara, Toni Cade. See Cade (Bambara), Toni Band Aid, 175, 176–77, 447n5 Banks, Dennis, 145, 167 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 48–49, 50–55, 56 Bari, Judi, 283 barrios, 76, 101, 116–19, 125–29, 257 Bass, Ellen, 109 Battle of Seattle, 269–325; antiWTO banners in, 281; assessments of, 303–5; cell phones and, 272, 308–10; education and, 278–84 Baudrillard, Jean, 448n32 Beal, Frances M., 93 “beautification” projects, 137 Bedard, Irene, 163–69, 443n3 Belafonte, Harry, 38, 177 Bellecourt, Clyde, 145 Bello, Walden, 278 Beloff, Zoe, 353–54

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benefit rock, 173–74. See also Live Aid; Sun City (Artists United against Apartheid) Benetton advertisement, 221 Benford, Robert, 434n2 Benjamin, Medea, 278 Benjamin, Walter, 397 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 72 Bevel, James, 21 Beyoncé, 83–84, 114, 433n57 Bible: as source of liberation stories, 12 biocentrism, 248–49 biopiracy, 280–81 Birmingham school, 446n4 birth control pill, 96 black aesthetic movement, 46–52, 56 black artists: and Live Aid, 176; in Sun City project, 184 Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), 50–52 Black Bloc, 292, 298, 301–2, 319, 472n90 black church, 5, 11–13, 15, 20, 119. See also civil rights movement black colleges, 13, 330 black history, 20, 36, 41, 55, 83 Black House, 53 Black Lives Matter, xxii, 19, 70, 74–84, 351, 364–65; civil rights and Black Power and, 82–83; claims about violence in, 81–82; leadership in, 81–82; music in, 83–84; popularity of, 81 Black Mountain poets, 108 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, xxii, 43–84; decline of, 64–70; “Executive Mandate #1,” 44; formation of, 55–56; ideology of, 61–63; internationalism of, 53,

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482 

Index

56, 71; mural of, 122–23; organization of, 61–62; repression of, 63–68; survival programs, 57, 63, 66, 71–72; Ten-Point Program, 55–56, 57, 63, 73, 429n16; use of drama, 53–55, 59; use of rhetoric, 59–61; and violence, 59–60, 63–68; and weapon use, 57–58 black power movement, 47–48. See also Baraka, Amiri blacks. See African Americans Blake, William, 244, 355 “blaxploitation” films, 73, 233 Block, Sam, 30 blood symbolism, 214–15 blowouts in Chicano movement, 121, 125 blue jeans, 398 Boal, Iain A., 313 Bono, 196 Botello, David Rivas, 127 Bourdieu, Pierre, xix, 379, 396 Bové, José, 278, 280 Boyd, Andrew, 292 “bra burners” myth, 87 Brando, Marlon, 145–46 Bread and Puppet Theater, 285–86, 287 (fig.), 288 Bread and Roses, 99 Breines, Wini, 359, 413 Brown, Elaine, 38, 68–70 Brown, James, 46 Brown, Michael, 78 Brown Berets, 62, 125, 146 Buechler, Steven, 92, 382, 401 Buell, Lawrence, 251 Bullins, Ed, 52–53 Burns, Stewart, 423n4 Burroughs Wellcome, 213–14, 223–24

Reed.indd 482

bus boycott (Montgomery, Alabama), 17–21 Bush, George W., 237, 323 Butler, Octavia, 250 Cade (Bambara), Toni, 45, 98, 103, 113, 250 California Save the Redwoods League, 244 “call and response”: in black church, 42; in black theater, 51 camp humor: ACT UP and, 206–8; Battle of Seattle, 320 “cannery women” strikers, 116 Carawan, Guy, 20, 23, 35 Carmichael, Stokely, 41–45, 47–48 carnalismo: in Chicano movement, 127 Carson, Rachel, 245, 247 Castells, Manuel, 306, 450n22 Castillo, Ana, 250, 259 Catholic faith: Chicanos and, 122, 128 Center for Campus Organizing, 284, 293 Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, 129 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 103 chain stores: as focus of sit-ins, 21 Charles, Ray, 22, 24, 38 Chávez, César, 117, 120, 121–23 CHER (Commie Homos Engaged in Revolution), 207–8 Chiapas, Mexico, 251, 253, 262–64, 266, 275 Chicago Eight, 64–65 ChicanismA, 133–36 Chicanismo, 123, 133 Chicano aesthetic, 118–19

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Index  483 Chicano/a/x, xxvi, 115–42; movement, 386, 393, 407 Chicano/a/x murals: Bernal mural, 119–24; Black and White Moratorium Mural (Herrón and Gronk), 131–33, 132 (fig.); Che Guevara image, 125–27; in Chicano Park, San Diego, 128–33; crucified farmworker mural (Montoya and Rebel Chicano Art Front), 129– 30; history portrayed in, 118– 23; Homeboy (Cruz), 130–31; Homenaje a Frida Kahlo (Ríos), 136; La Familia (East Los Streetscapers), 127–28; La Ofrenda (Cervantes), 134–35, 134 (fig.); Las Lechugueras (Alicia), 135; Latinoamérica (Mujeres Muralistas), 135; The Wall That Cracked Open (Herrón), 131 Chicano moratorium, 131–33 Chicano movement/movimiento, 115–42, 146, 393; evolution of, 131; and male-centeredness, 133– 36; portrayal of history, 119–23 Chicano Park, San Diego, 128–33 Chomsky, Noam, 278 Chow, Rey, 106, 278 Christianity, 11. See also black church church music, 13–15, 119. See also freedom songs CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), 276 Citizens Clearinghouse for Toxic Waste, 243 Citizenship Schools, 41 Citywide Murals project (Los Angeles), 137–40

Reed.indd 483

civil disobedience, xxi, 168, 408; ACT UP and, 207–25; Battle for Seattle and, 288–320; and black power movement, 57; Bové and, 280; in civil rights movement, 6–37; electronic, 309; Gandhi and, 10; Occupy and, 338–362; Thoreau and, 11, 244; in women’s movement, 87 civil rights movement: xv, xxii, xxiv, 1–42, 360, 371–418; ACT UP and, 200, 230; AIM and, 146; Black Lives Matter and, 82; black power and, 44, 50, 57, 82; Chicano/a/x movement and, 117, 119, 122, 136; environmental justice and, 243; gay liberation and, 425n5; Jubilee and, 279; Occupy and, 330; preconditions for, 7–10; roots of, 11–13; women in, 96–98 class: and environmental issues, 224, 246, 250; women’s movement and, 96 Cleaver, Eldridge, 53, 69 Clinton, Bill, 237 Cockburn, Alexander, 296–97 Cody, “Iron Eyes,” 148 cognitive praxis, 90, 240–41 COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), 65–66, 73, 430n26, 430n29; Church Commission and, 430n29 Cold War, 7, 9 collective identity formation, 387–89 colonialism, 126, 154, 254–61; internal, 126 Combahee River Collective, 93–95, 99 commodification, 194, 259–60 communism, 208; collapse of, 273

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484 

Index

community mural movement, 115–41 consciousness-raising (CR), xxii, 87–90, 98–101, 436n19, 437n24; in Chicana murals, 136; and #MeToo, 114; and Nelson Mandela concert, 191; and poetry, 103–14; and popular music, 114; and spoken word, 114 conservationism, 243 consumer: advocacy, 275, 282, 398; and anticorporate globalization movement, 271, 321; nonconsumerist, 374; and Occupy, 333, 357, 361, 367 contraceptives, 96 “copyleft,” 313 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), 11, 27 Corona, Bert, 116–17 corporate scandals, 321 corridos (Mexican political ballads), 120–21 Cosmopolitan magazine, 219–20 “cowboys and Indians” formula, 150–51, 156, 160–63 Crabapple, Molly, 349–52; “Our Lady of Liberty Park,” 352 (fig.) criminalizing vs. medicalizing approach to drugs, 80 criminal justice system, 80–81, 138, 147 criminal trials: of AIM members, 162; in Battle of Seattle, 302; of Black Panther Party members, 64–69 Crimp, Douglas, 198, 203, 208 cross-dressing, 207 Crow Dog, Leonard, 166 Crow Dog, Mary, 160–69

Reed.indd 484

Crusade for Justice, 124 Cullors, Patrisse, 77 cultural appropriation, 397–98, 410–12 cultural elements, 51; dimensions and qualities, 401; residual, emergent, and dominant, 398–99 cultural fields (Bourdieu), xix, 379, 396 cultural formations, 394–410, 487n46; AIM and, 170; in black power movement, 45–46, 389; in feminist poetry movement, 106–11 cultural front formation, 395 cultural imperialism, 174, 270, 321, 446n4 cultural politics, 89–90, 396–97; ACT UP and, 197, 234, 382–85; Battle of Seattle and, 412; mural movement and, 118 cultural studies, xvi, xviii, 267, 374, 377, 382, 391, 446n4, 456n41, 475n16 culture in movements, xvi, 376–97 culture jamming, 327, 398, 476n21 cultures of solidarity, 401, 476n26 cycles of protest, 233, 398, 450n25 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, 171 dance, in protests, 458n18 Davis, Angela, 45, 54–55, 70, 73, 74 (fig.), 77, 79–80, 337, 470n73 debt elimination, 279–84 Deep Dish TV, 310 deep ecology movement, 248 defusion of movement culture, 234– 36 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 146

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Index  485 democracy: economic vs. political, 274 Democratic national convention (Chicago, 1968), 64 Denning, Michael, xix, 395–96 desegregation, 8–9, 21 destruction of property: as non­ violence issue, 301, 304, 319, 321, 348 Di Chiro, Giovanna, 455n25 DiFranco, Ani, 114 Direct Action Network (DAN), 277, 293–95, 301, 322; DAN Handbook, 295 direct action tradition, xxi–xxii direct theory, 413 Dixon, Chris, 316, 471n79 Doctors without Borders, 282 “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” 175–78 “double jeopardy,” 93, 100 dramatic action, xiv, xxi; AIM and, 148; black power movement and, 49, 73; civil rights movement and, 17, 20, 23. See also feminist poetry dramaturgical and performativity analyses, 376 drug approval process, 213–14 Dylan, Bob, vii, 26, 357, 399 Earth Day (1970), 247 Earth First!, 245–46, 281, 293, 296 Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), 275 ecocriticism, xxiii, 239–68; critique of, 242; definition of, 240; schools of, 246–49 ecofeminism, 106, 243; as ecocriticism, 248–49, 260 ecological ecocriticism, 247–48

Reed.indd 485

ecology, 247 economic violence, 133, 255, 289 El Congreso de Pueblo de Habla Español, 116 Electronic Disturbance Theater, 309 Electronic Hippies Collective, 308–9 el movimiento. See Chicano/a/x movement El Salvador, 135, 174, 276 El Teatro Campesino, 119–20, 124 encampment: antinuclear, 470n70; Greenham Common, 362; Occupy, 326–29, 334, 337–38, 344–45, 351–57, 362–69, 465n14; Wounded Knee, 162–64, 167–68 Environmental Defense Fund, 245 environmental issues: xxiii, 239–68; and anticorporate globalization movement, 281 environmental justice ecocriticism, xxiii, 239–68; and history of environmentalism, 243–46; trends in, 249–50 environmental justice movement, 242–43 Erdoes, Richard, 160–62 essentialism: AIM and, 160, 170; in black power movement, 75; in Chicano movement, 127; cultural, 380; in feminism, 101, 106, 437n24, 438n25 ethnicity: in ACT UP, 229; in feminism, xxii, 104–5; in Occupy, 328, 363; and social movements, 386, 390, 403; in Sun City, 186 Eyerman, Ron, 90 Eyre, Chris, 443n3

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486 

Index

Facebook, 77, 314, 330–31, 391 Fairey, Shepard, 348–49 famine, images of, 180–81 famine relief projects, 174–83 Fanon, Frantz, 50, 66, 74 Fantasia, Rick, 401, 476n26 Farmer, James, 11, 27, 33 farm workers, Chicano, 135 farm workers movement, 120–22, 246 fear as tool of oppression, 25–29 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): and AIM, 143, 148–71; and Battle of Seattle, 299– 300; and Black Lives Matter, 432n47; and Black Panthers, 64–67, 430n29 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 11 “feminine mystique,” 95 feminism, 85, 90–98, 100–106, 113, 195, 211, 395, 410. See also ChicanismA; feminist poetry; women’s movement feminist bookstores, 108, 111 feminist music, 114 feminist periodicals, 112 feminist poetry, 85–114; as consciousness-raising, 88–90; as cultural formation, 106–13; in #MeToo, 114 feminist presses, 111–12 feminist theory, 93, 104 feminization: of labor force, 283; of poverty, 100, 283 Fifty Years Is Enough, 275, 277, 293 films, xxii; Dances with Wolves, 151, 160; Incident at Oglala, 144, 157; Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, 160–70, 160 (fig.);

Reed.indd 486

Mississippi Burning, 160; Powwow Highway, 153–57, 153 (fig.), 159, 170; Smoke Signals, 443n3; Spirit of Crazy Horse, 144; Thunderheart, 157–60, 158 (fig.) First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (1991), 242, 255 folk song revival, 25, 399 Fonda, Jane, 145, 160 Foucault, Michel, 202–3, 383, 473n3 frame analysis, 377, 434n2 Frankfurt school, 446n4 freedom: meanings of, xv, 16, 36–38 freedom rides, 6, 23, 27–28, 33 Freedom Schools, 41 Freedom Singers, 24–25 freedom song movement, 1–42 freedom songs, xxii, 2; and collective identity, 34–36; and empowerment, 25–32; and ideology, 39–40; and jail context, 37; and outside audience, 32–34; strategic role of music, 14–15 Freedom Summer (1964), 25, 160, 398 “free logging” agreement, 281 Free Radio Berkeley, 310 Free Southern Theater, 50 Free Speech TV, 310 free trade, 274–76, 289, 318–22; Native, 264 Freire, Paulo, 426n15 Friedan, Betty, 93 Friedman, Thomas, 278 Friends of the Earth, 245 Friends of the Earth International, 277

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Index  487 functions of culture in movements, 404–5 Furies, 99 Gage, Patrick, 224 Galería de La Raza, San Francisco, 136 Gamson, Joshua, 204 Gamson, William, 222, 236 Gandhi, Mahatma, xxiv, 10 gangsterism of Black Panther Party, 68–70 gang violence: and Chicano movement, 130–31 Garner, Eric, 78 Garrison, Ednie, 90 Garza, Alicia, 77, 84 gay and lesbian liberation movement, 40, 200, 204, 221 gay and lesbian rights movement, 205, 225–26 gay bookstores, 206 gay community: and AIDS, xxiii, 198–201, 204; as subculture, 206. See also ACT UP gay/lesbian activism: in the civil rights movement, 4; in the women’s movement, 83–84, 205–6. See also ACT UP gay liberation movement, 62, 70, 394 gay/straight dichotomy, 204 Geldof, Bob, 176–84, 196 Genet, Jean, 62, 73, 74 (fig.) Genoa, Italy, 312 Gerbaudo, Paolo, 329–30, 365–66, 370 gestures: in Battle of Seattle, 375, 408, 458n18; of black power movement, 46, 56 Gibbs, Lois, 243

Reed.indd 487

GI Forum, 116 Ginsberg, Allen, 108 Giovanni, Nikki, 103 Global Exchange, 278–79, 293 globalization, xxiii, 194, 252, 264; anticorporate, 269–324 globalization from below, 71, 238, 264; alter-, xxiv, 265, 269, 326, 329, 364, 392 global justice movement, 252, 264, 269–324, 384 GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), 199–200, 230 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 124 gospel songs, 15–16, 22, 30, 36, 51 Grahn, Judy, 103 Gramsci, Antonio, xxvi, 75, 202 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 76 Gran Fury collective, 209–10, 218, 220–21, 235 Grant, Madison, 244 Great Wall of Los Angeles, 137–40, 139 (fig.) Greene, Graham, 157 Greenpeace, 246, 281 Greensboro, North Carolina, 21 Greenwood, Mississippi, 25, 399 GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), 198 Griffin, Susan, 103, 106 Guevara, Che, 125–26 hacktivists, 265; and Battle of Seattle, 308–10, 313 Hall, Stuart, 181–82 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 4, 39 Hampton, Fred, 66, 71, 430n29 Haraway, Donna, 385, 475n12 Harjo, Joy, 103, 250

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488 

Index

Hass, Robert, 355 Hayden, Casey, 97 hegemony, 45, 112, 182 heterosexism, 93, 197–238, 242 hidden transcripts, 414–16 high culture: xxii, 344, 378; and diffusion, 411 Highlander Folk School, 1, 8, 17, 20, 23, 35, 392 Hilliard, David, 59–60, 63 hip-hop culture, 74–84, 114, 194, 286, 292, 296, 356–57, 392, 400, 431n43 hippie subculture, 165, 349, 392; “neohippies,” 292 Hispano land grant movement, 122–23 Hoffman, Abbie, 64, 347 Hoffman, Julius, 65 Hollywood, 299; and AIM, xxii– xxiii, 143–73, 443n3; in Almanac, 257; and Battle of Seattle, 322–23 homophobia, xxiii, 4, 70, 77, 73, 198, 203–28 Hoover, J. Edgar, 64 Horton, Zilphia, 35 housewives: in postwar America, 94–95 Howe, Florence, 109–10 Huerta, Dolores, 120, 122, 134–35, 134 (fig.) Hughes, Langston, xv, 423n3 human rights issues: xxiii, 321, 399; and anticorporate globalization movement, 271–73, 281–82, 304; and Occupy, 344; and Sun City, 185; and women’s groups, 283; and World Social Forum, 317

Reed.indd 488

identity formation, 204–5, 387–89, 437n24 identity politics, 71, 104, 204, 305, 387–89, 471n83 Idle No More protests, 171 Illuminator, The, 347–48, 354 imprisonment: of AIM members, 147, 162–63; of Black Panther Party members, 63–67, 430n29; of civil rights workers, 31, 33, 37–38; of Native Americans, 147 Incident at Oglala, 144, 157 independent media, 310–14, 312 (fig.) indigenismo, 120, 126, 130 Indigenous Environmental Network, 278 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 446n2 Indymedia collective, 310–14 infiltration: of law enforcement, 432n47; of radical groups, 69, 304 institutions, parallel, 111 instrumentalism, 406 intercommunalism, 71 Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment (ISLE), 241 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 272–327 International Women’s Conference, Beijing, 275, 283 Iraq War, xiv, xxv, 323 I Wor Keun (Red Guard), 62 Jackson, Michael, 177, 193 Jameson, Fredric, 194, 262, 446n4 Jamison, Andrew, 90 ji Jaga, Geronimo (Elmer Pratt), 430n29

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Index  489 Johnson, Lyndon, 75, 132 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jordan, June, 103, 107, 425n5 Kahlo, Frida, 136 Karenga, Ron, 45, 48, 68 Kauffman, L. A., 318–19, 369, 471n76 Kennedy, Florynce, 97 Kennedy, John F., 10, 95 King, Katie, 91, 100, 104, 434n1, 436n19 King, Martin Luther, Jr., xxv, 2–3, 11, 18, 20, 23, 41, 49, 81, 123, 177, 230, 354 King, Mary, 97 Kingsolver, Barbara, 250 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 395 kiss-ins, 220–21, 232 Klein, Naomi, 275, 278, 292, 306– 7, 476n21 La Adelita, 120–21, 133–35 labor movement, xv, 2, 8, 92, 117– 18, 250, 283–84, 293, 401; and popular front, 116, 118, 120, 425n8 labor songs, 24, 356 LaDuke, Winona, 250, 257 Lafayette, Bernard, 21 Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, 144, 160–71, 161 (fig.), 445n18 Lamar, Kendrick, 77, 83 La Raza Unida Party, 124 Last Poets, 46 Latino/a/x, 40, 76, 92, 114, 125, 141, 144, 186, 220, 227, 243, 246, 255 “lavender menace,” 93

Reed.indd 489

legislation, federal: civil rights acts (1964, 1965), 41, 373; Equal Pay Act (1963), 95; Patriot Act, 319, 430n29; Termination Act (1953), 147 Le Guin, Ursula, 250 Lesbian Avengers, 205, 232–33 lesbian liberation movement, 40 lesbians, 93, 105, 113, 141, 200, 204, 219–26, 227, 232–33, 387, 425n5; as lesbian-feminist, 205; as subculture, 206. See also gay and lesbian liberation movement; gay/lesbian activism Let the Record Show exhibition, 209–10 Lewis, John, 38 Lewis and Clark College, 297 liberation musicology, 13–15 liberation theology, 12–15 Little Rock, Arkansas, 20 Live Aid, 174–83, 185, 190, 193, 196 López, Alma, 141 Lorde, Audre, 85, 88, 103, 104, 112, 250, 425n5; Audre Lorde Project, 364 Lowe, Lisa, 252, 307 Lubiano, Wahneema, 75 LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), 116 Lumpens, The, 46 lynching, 9, 25–26, 427n27 MacKinnon, Catherine, 436n19 Malcolm X, 45, 48, 49–50, 54–56, 66–67, 123, 230 Mandela, Nelson, 175, 188, 193; concert, 190–92 Mani, Lata, 106

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490 

Index

ManifestAR, 346–47 Marley, Bob, 393 Martin, Trayvon, 78 Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita,” 117, 315 material-discursive processes, 385– 418, 475n12 Mauss, Marcel, 377 MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization), 124 McAdam, Doug, 409, 475n13 McKee, Yates, 340–42, 470n67 Means, Russell, 150, 166–67 MEChA (El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), 125 media, 362, 380–83, 388–89, 391– 401, 408, 416; and ACT UP, 197–234; and agit-pop, 174–76, 183, 189–96; and AIM, 143–71; and Battle of Seattle, 272–321; and Black Lives Matter, 81; and black power movement, 42, 55, 61, 71; and civil rights movement, 4–5, 14, 23, 26; and Chicano/a/x movement, 125; corporate, 272– 329, 380; and environmental movement, 245; as mass media, 400; in Occupy, 329–62, 412; and social construction of identities, 475n14. See also films; independent media medical research, 199, 211–16 Melucci, Alberto, 394, 413, 473n3 MeToo movement, 113–14, 370 minority, use of term, 62, 125–26 Mississippi Burning, 160 mobilizing vs. organizing, xxi Moore, Amzie, 34 Moraga, Cherríe, 103, 104–5, 134 Morgan, Robin, 103

Reed.indd 490

Morris, Aldon, 426n13 Morrison, Toni, xix, 62, 112, 395–96 Moses, Bob, 34 movement culture, xvi–xviii, xxi, 39–40, 86–87, 136, 168, 194–95, 356, 380, 384–414, 475n16; diffusion into mainstream culture, 75, 112, 233, 234–36, 241, 288, 402–14 Movement for Black Lives, 78 Movement of the Squares, 326–28 MTV network, 178, 184, 187, 189 Muir, John, 243–44 multiculturalism, 41, 137–40 murals. See Chicano/a/x murals muralthon (1977–78), 129 Murieta, Joaquín, 120 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 210, 344–46, 467n41 music: and agit-pop/benefit rock, 173–96; in Battle of Seattle, 186, 356–57; as captivity narrative, 36–38; and civil rights movement, 1–42; and collective identity, 34–36; as communication, 32–34; corridos, 120–21; against fear, 25–29; feminist, 114; as/against ideology, 39–40; and movement culture, 13–15; as movement “history,” 15–21; punk, 114, 186, 391; rap, 75, 76–77, 114, 395; rave, 296; rhythm and blues, 21–23; rock, 114, 173–97, 391, 392, 411; soul, 2, 22, 38, 46, 83; as source of pleasure, 38–39; spirituals, xxii, 15–16, 24, 36, 51, 397; as strategy and tactic, 29–32. See also freedom songs musical apartheid, 186

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Index  491 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 3, 9, 13–14, 17, 116, 205, 392 Nader, Ralph, 278, 398 Naess, Arne, 248 naming: and ACT UP, 207–8, 217, 222; and AIM, 145–46; and Black Lives Matter, 77; and the power of, 416; self-, xxvi, 50, 317, 388; as symbolic naming, 56 Nashville Quartet, 21–23, 24 National Black Feminist Organization, 93 National Council of American Indians (NCAI), 146 National Domestic Workers Alliance, 77 National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), 146 National Institutes of Health, 236; and Office of AIDS Research, 232 National Organization for Women (NOW), 92, 93 National Welfare Rights Organization, 92 Nation of Islam, 49, 77 Native Americans: alcoholism and, 165; city/reservation split among, 147; filmmaking and, 143–72, 443n3; fishing rights and, 146– 47; relocation of, 147; takeover of Alcatraz Island, 147 Natural Resources Defense Council, 245 Neely, Barbara, 250 neoliberalism, 272–74 neopunk, 357 New Left, 40–41, 64, 96, 111, 412, 413, 435n15, 436n18

Reed.indd 491

Newton, Huey, 44–113; rally for, 72 (fig.) New York Crimes, 216–18 New York Radical Women, 99 Nike Corporation, 301, 309, 398 Nixon, E. D., 17 Nixon, Richard, 59, 150, 245 Nkrumah, Kwame, 56 nonviolence, 5, 31–32, 204, 224, 299, 301, 319, 426n12; strategic effect of, 304, 472n90 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 264, 275 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), xx, xxiv, 325–70, 388, 390, 392, 393, 395, 407, 412, 463n1; Arts and Culture Working Group and Guilds and, 341–46; art world and, 340– 60, 399; consensus process in, 366–67, digital organizing and, 329–32; leadership in, 365–67; the 99% slogan, 328; “occupation” concept and, 363; Occupy Broadway, 353; Occupy Design, 343–44; Occupy Museums, 344– 46; Occupy Poetry, 354–56; Occupy Puppetry, 354; Occupy This Album, 357; People of Color Working Group, 363; “Pepper Spray Seurat,” 352–53; puppets in, 341–54, 363; racism and, 365–67; sexism and, 363; slogans and, 358 O’Connor, Cardinal James, 223 organizing, xiv, xxi, xxiii; vs. mobilizing, 14 organizing tradition, 7, 14, 61, 136 Orozco, José Clemente, 118 Ortiz, Simon, 250

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492 

Index

Paper Tiger Television, 310 paradox of diffusion and defusion, 411 paranoia: Black Panther Party and, 69; digital surveillance and, 331; direct action and, 305; terrorist threats and, 460n35 Paris (rapper), 78 Parker, Pat, 103 Parks, Rosa, 17, 19, 21 parody, 28, 125–26, 264, 398 Paterson Pageant (Madison Square Garden, 1913), 446n2 Patton, Cindy, 202, 203, 228–29 Payne, Charles, 1, 25–26, 28, 29, 34, 36, 136 Peace and Freedom Party, 62 Peltier, Leonard, 143, 157, 162 Peña, Devon, 252, 267 Peoples’ Global Action (PGA), 277, 293, 308 performativity: analyses, 376, 473n3; in black community, 56 pharmaceutical corporations: ACT UP and, 211–14, 221, 383; theft of indigenous knowledge, 455n25 Piercy, Marge, 103 Pinchot, Gifford, 244 pink triangle: as ACT UP symbol, 209, 235 poets: beat, 108; and Occupy, 339, 343, 354–55; romantic, 243, 247; slam, 114; women’s movement and feminist, 85–114 police brutality: and AIM, 147; and Battle in Seattle, 299, 302–4, 311, 353; and Black Lives Matter, 80, 416; and Black Panthers, 49, 57, 60, 66, 70; and Chicano/a/x

Reed.indd 492

movement, 125, 132; and racial profiling, 78–80 political process model, 373, 425n10 Porto Alegre, Brazil, 317–18, 319, 462n67 postcolonial theory, 106; and environmental issues, 267 Powwow Highway (1989), 144, 151–57, 153 (fig.), 159, 170 preservationism, 243–44, 247 prisoner rights movement, 70; as anti-incarceration, 78–80, 345 prison–industrial complex, 70, 79–80, 282 public happiness, 168, 359 Pulido, Laura, 252, 267 punk subculture, 412 puppets in protests, 285–90, 341, 354, 363, 458n16 puritanism of the left, 187 push-pull strategy, 230 Quakers, 11 Queen Latifah, 77, 114 queer culture, 205–6 Queer Nation, 205, 207, 232–33, 320 queer women of color, 78 Quintana, Alvina, 134 race, 389–90, 402, 403; and ACT UP, 206, 225–28, 229; and agitprop/anti-apartheid movement, 177–78, 186; and anticorporate globalization movement, 305; Black Panthers and, 57, 63; and Chicano murals, 138; in civil rights movement, 5–6; and ecofeminism, 248–49; and environmental justice, 240–44, 250, 253,

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Index  493 267; and Occupy, 328, 349, 363– 64, 471n76; and women’s movement, xxii, 91–97, 103–4, 437n24 “racial uplift” ideology, 19 Radicalesbians, 99 Rainforest Action Network, 281, 293 Randolph, A. Philip, 8 Rastafarians, 176, 292, 393 rational actor model, 387 Reagan, Ronald, 43, 55, 75, 181, 199, 223–24, 286 Reaganism, 113, 181 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, v, 14, 24–37, 279, 424n1 Reagon, Cordell, 24, 27, 37 Rebel Chicano Art Front, 129–30 Reclaim the Streets (RTS), 291–92 recruitment into social movements, 13, 31, 125, 213, 330, 390–92, 402, 408 Redford, Robert, 145, 151, 157, 170 redomestication of American women, 94–95, 138 red power movement. See American Indian Movement red ribbons: as symbol of “AIDS chic,” 234–35 Redstockings, 99 religious right: and AIDS epidemic, 199, 218 repression: of AIM, 170; of antiglobalization movement, 304, 320; of Black Panther Party, 63–70, 430n29; of Latino/a/x movement, 133, 135; post– September 11, 318–19 reproductive rights, 95, 100, 231, 283, 417

Reed.indd 493

“Republican drag,” 207 resocialization, 90 resource mobilization theory, 13, 372–73 Ricks, Willie, 42 right to vote, 6, 90 Riot Grrrl, 114, 195, 356 Rivera, Diego, 118, 136 Robinson, Jo Ann, 18 Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith, 97 rock-and-roll activism, 173–96 Rosie the Riveter, 94, 138 Rubin, Jerry, 64 Rukeyser, Muriel, 107–10 Rustin, Bayard, 4, 11 Salazar, Rubén, 132–33 Sanchez, Sonia, 103 Sandoval, Chela, xv, 92, 134, 267 Sanger, Kerran, 31 Schulman, Sarah, 235 SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), 3–4, 20, 21–23, 390 Scott, James C., 415 Scott, Joan, 437n24 Scott-Heron, Gil, 45, 46, 310 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), 98, 117; Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP), 96 Seale, Bobby, 44, 48, 53–58, 61, 64–65, 68, 73 Seale, Malik Nkrumah Stagolee, 56 Seals, David, 152, 156–57, 170 sea turtle brigade, 292, 294 (fig.) Seeger, Pete, 35 segregation, in civil rights song lyrics, 22, 25, 26, 29 segregation, de facto, 57

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494 

Index

segregation system: in American South, 5–6, 9–21, 37, 41–42 self-hatred, internalized: among blacks, 49, 50–51 Sessions, George, 248 sexism, xxiii, 75, 76–77, 83–84, 85–114, 203, 226, 228, 239, 241, 261, 363, 431n33, 445n16 sexual harassment, 86, 100, 361, 363 Shakur, Afeni, 76 Shakur, Tupac, 76 shantytown demonstrations, 190 Shiva, Vandana, 278 Sierra Club, 244, 245 Silence = Death Project, 200, 208–9, 210, 223, 235 Silko, Leslie Marmon, xxiii, 154; and Almanac of the Dead, 239–68 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 60, 67 Siquieros, David Alfaro, 118 sit-in movement, 10–11, 13, 17, 21–23, 27, 333; as a tactic, xxi, 2, 5–6, 87, 190, 211, 220, 376, 408; “virtual” sit-ins, 308–9 slavery, 2, 7, 16, 36, 279, 347, 415; and the black church, 11–12 slogans, xix, 59, 198, 206, 222–23, 301, 330, 386, 407; “Black is beautiful,” 46, 56; “the personal is political,” 87; “Silence = Death,” 209; “We Are Not a Minority,” 125–26; “We Are the 99%,” 348; “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” 207 Smith, Andrea “Andy,” 152 Smith, Paul Chaat, 145–46, 149 Smoke Signals, 443n3 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 3–4, 23–27, 34–38, 40–42, 50, 81, 97–99,

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117, 279, 365, 390, 398, 399, 433n53 Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), 441n6 social cultural studies, 382 social movement industries (SMIs), 307 social movement organizations (SMOs), 91, 307 social movements: defining and recognizing, xi–xiv; as messages, codes, and direct theory, 307–8 social movement sectors (SMSs), 307 social movement theory, 89, 240, 371–418 social texts, movements as, 229, 413–14 sociology, 111, 373, 377, 391 Sofia, Zoë, 180 soldaderas, 120 Solnit, David, 286, 289, 304, 322 Solnit, Rebecca, 329, 364 soul food, 46, 53 South Africa: and anti-apartheid projects, 183–96 Speak Truth to Power Tour, 77 Spirit of Crazy Horse, The, 144, 165 Steinem, Gloria, 384 Stiglitz, Joseph, 315 Stonewall Bar, Greenwich Village, 394 Stop the Violence movement, 77 street style, black, 56 Stripes, James, 150 structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 273–74, 279 structures of feeling, 90, 403, 415, 478n46 Sturgeon, Noël, 368, 413, 438n32, 450n22, 456n37

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Index  495 subcultures, xvii–xix, 105, 186, 194– 95, 206, 292, 379, 390–400, 475n16 Sun City (Artists United against Apartheid), 173, 183–96, 448n31 Sun City (video), 175, 182–90, 185 (fig.) survival strategies: of Black Panther Party, 57, 63, 71–72; in Chicano movement, 127 sustainable development, 250, 252 Sweet Honey in the Rock, 279. See also Reagon, Bernice Johnson Swidler, Amy, 377 symbolic challenge of social movements, 391–92 TAG (Treatment Action Group), 213, 231 Tarrow, Sidney, 389, 450n25 Taylor, Verta, 378, 392, 473n3, 473n13 teach-ins, 278–79, 292, 303 terrorist attacks: of the Ku Klux Klan, 13; of September 11, 318– 19, 320, 321, 430n29 textual analysis, 175 Thatcherism, 181 theatrum mundi, 428n3 Thin Elk, Ted, 159 Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 243–44, 247 Thunderheart (film), 144, 157–60, 158 (fig.) Tijerina, Reies López, 122–24 Till, Emmett, 25–27 Tilly, Charles, xiii, 408, 477n34 Time’s Up movement, 113–14, 370 Title IX (1972), 95 Tometi, Opal, 77

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trafficking: of drugs, 259; of women, 283 “Trail of Broken Treaties” car caravan, 148 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 115 Treichler, Paula, 202–3 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 106 Troll, Ray, 349–50; “Octopi Wall Street,” 350 (fig.) Trudell, John, 150–51, 159 Trump, Donald, xxii, 70, 82, 237, 314, 329, 331, 370, 462n75 Turner, Nat, 12 Turner, Ted, 151, 160, 170 Twitter, 77, 114, 314, 330–31, 391 UFW (United Farm Workers), 119, 122, 124, 391 un-American activities, 208 “Uncle Tom,” 33, 49 underground railroad, 12 United Slaves, 68 United Students against Sweatshops (USAS), 284 U.S. Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 9–10, 26, 200, 373; Roe v. Wade (1973), 95 Vaid, Urvashi, 233 Valdez, Luis, 120, 124 Van Deburg, William, 46, 61, 72 “vanishing Indian” myth, 169 Van Zandt, “Little Steven,” 183–88 Villa, Pancho, 120 Virgen de Guadalupe, 122 Visual AIDS, 235 Vizenor, Gerald, 250 Walker, Alice, 103, 112, 250 Ware, Cellestine, 99

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496 

Index

Warhol, Andy, 150 Warrior, Clyde, 146 Warrior, Robert, 145–46, 149, 171 “warriors”: AIM as, 143, 148–50, 159, 163–69, 171; “street” and “code” warriors in Battle of Seattle, 303, 313 Watney, Simon, 203 wave metaphor: for women’s movement, 90–91, 113 WEAL (Women’s Equity Action League), 92 weapons: bodies as, 30; corporations and, 80, 289; FBI and, 167; nuclear, 276, 321; police in Battle of Seattle, 289 “We Are the World,” 175–84, 189, 193, 448n31 Weber, Max, 377 welfare rights, 100 WHAM (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization), 231 White Citizens’ Council, 6, 26–28 “whiteface,” 51 white flight, 95, 139, 246 Whitehead, Kim, 107 white privilege, 315 Whittier, Nancy, 378, 436n21, 475n13 Williams, Raymond, 107, 376, 381, 396, 398–99, 403, 476n18, 478n46 Wilson, Richard “Dickie,” 149, 166 WITCH, 99 Wolfe, Tom, 64, 429n25 womanist, xxii, 74, 83, 114, 271 Women of All Red Nations (WARN), 93, 163

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women of color: and Black Lives Matter, 78–80; as feminisms, 100, 395, 434n4; and the prison– industrial complex, 282; and the women’s movement, 85–114, 437n24 women’s health movement, 200, 211 women’s liberation, 25, 62, 90–111 Women’s March (2017), 113–14, 370 women’s movement, xxii, 40, 85–114, 282, 381, 392, 410–11, 433n1, 435n15, 436n21, 437n24 Women’s Political Council, 18 women’s rights, 282–83, 321 Wonder, Stevie, 177 World Social Forum (WSF), 264, 317–19 World Trade Organization (WTO), xxiii, 266, 269–324. See also anticorporate globalization movement; Battle of Seattle Wounded Knee, South Dakota: AIM standoff at, 148–51; 1890 slaughter of Indians at, 149; filmic references to, 151–69 WPAC (Women’s Political Action Caucus), 92 Yamashita, Karen, 250, 260 Young, Stacey, 105, 433n1 Young Lords (Puerto Rican), 62 Youth International Party (Yippies), 64–65, 347 “zap actions,” 87, 211, 222 Zapata, Emiliano, 120–21, 122, 135 Zapatistas, 253 Zellner, Bob, 37–38

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T. V. Reed is Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Washington State University. He is the author of Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era; Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left: A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction; and Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements. He edits the web matrix culturalpolitics.net.

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