Performing on the streets: Infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan (original) (raw)
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Street Arts of Resistance in Tahrir and Gezi
Middle Eastern Studies
With the tremendous visibility of popular mobilization in the last decade, scholars have increasingly directed their attention to the streets to examine the dynamics of power and resistance. Among emerging venues of politics, this study examines street art and graffiti as a performance of resistance in the 2011 Tahrir Revolution and 2013 Gezi Protests in Egypt and Turkey, respectively. As re-appropriation of the urban landscape and modes of self-expression, street art and graffiti lie at the intersection of politics, space, and identity. Inspired by James C. Scott's concept of ‘arts of resistance’, this study takes up these ‘street arts of resistance’ as revealing the hidden transcript, namely, the self-disclosure of subordinates under the politics of disguise. While unpacking that subversive power, this study rests on its claim that street art and graffiti not only seek to represent, but also to perform and interject. Thereafter, it examines how these modes of visual culture interrupt time, space, and the self, along with their respective effects.
There is currently much talk about the centrality of 'the public' in the processes of democracy. Habermas refers positively to the ways in which newspapers, magazines, radio and television create a dispersed ‘public body’ capable of articulating public opinion (1974), however there is also a deep sense of ambivalence about the gathering of actual public bodies in city spaces This sense of distrust is rooted in the perceived unreasonableness of the mass and the belief that the politically productive enthusiasm of the crowd can easily metamorphose into the physically destructive hysteria of the mob (Calhoun: 1992, Mouffe: 2005). The way in which public space are perceived to be structured by complex and oscillating us/them distinctions that both construct and challenge the democratic project are particularly pertinent and timely in these turbulent times. This chapter contribution will examine the way in which protesters perform their antagonisms through the physical occupation city spaces. It will begin by focusing on the way in which distinctions between those who are included and excluded from the processes of democracy have been enacted by protester’s formation of picket lines during trade disputes, permanent picket lines during the anti-apartheid campaign and temporary occupations of public spaces during more recent protests against the unfolding process of neo liberalism. In doing so it will examine multiple sites of antagonism and reflect upon the ways in which they are both geographically particular and symbolically unified responses to the growing sense of global crisis that have characterised the start of the twenty first century. This chapter will then go on to compare and contrast protester’s response to neo liberal economic policies more specifically. Summit spaces, such as those called into being by the WTO and the IMF in the late 1990s, occupied a place beyond the criticism and control of the world’s citizenry. Encircled by a protective wall of concrete blocks and chain-link faces these barriers made the 'usually invisible wall of exclusion starkly visible' (Klein, Guardian, 23rd March 2001) and in doing so actualised the boundaries between the included and the excluded. Consequently, anti-globalisation demonstrations focused on breaching the barricades, which literally and metaphorically excluded 'the public' from the decision-making process. In contrast, Occupy Wall Street’s simultaneous occupation of multiple city space brought the marginalised majority into the global mainstream and made them visible. In this way protesters positioned the previously excluded 99% within the social spaces in which power is decided (Castells, 2007). Thus, Occupy protesters moved beyond demanding the right to access democracy in particular places and began a debate about the processes of democracy in a newly globalised world (Chomsky, 2012). In this contribution I will argue that both these movements, like those that have gone before them, have used occupation (differently) to temporarily unfix the meanings usually ascribed to people and places. I will suggest that these radical spaces challenge the us/them boundaries that commonly frame the political and enable protesters to find both common ground between activists and to gain purchase within the wider population. Thus I will suggest that activists’ ability to perform their political antagonisms creates a politically productive oscillation of spatalities and scales that both unsettles the exclusionary dynamics of capitalism and offers utopic alternatives.
Antipode to Terror: Spaces of Performative Politics
Antipode, 2014
Focusing on Pakistan we address the human geography of politics and violence to argue that organized political violence is not only about death and destruction but also, more importantly, about the control of the public sphere, and vitally, the reorganization of space. To make this argument we also extend Arendt’s thesis on totalitarianism and the human condition. Our argument is grounded in a review of the activities of Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan’s (TTP) during their brief control of the Swat valley in Pakistan. We argue that TTP’s spectacular violence eliminates “worldliness”, plurality and life, so that spontaneous action is denied and the public sphere is destroyed through the universalization of terror. The practical implication of our argument is that, in significant contrast to state and military actions to date, productive measures to resist violence should protect the performance of politics in an extended public sphere
Resistance and Street Theatre: Democratizing the Space and Spatializing the Democracy
2015
The present paper explores how the practice of street theatre by staging resistance not only exercises the right to resist but strengthens the democratic values and institutions. India’s independence and the acceptance of democracy were the result of simultaneous resistances against colonial power and the undemocratic, hierarchical, caste-class-ridden social structure. However it didn’t end the phase of resistances. Values, such as resistance to injustice, anarchy, dominance and assertion of newly gained rights make democracy meaningful. Over the years the natures, aims, means, and modes of such values also change. Occasionally, it appears that the resistance has become unethical, technical, and ritualistic. Such developments however undermine the genuine and concerned articulations of resistance. The need is to strengthen the ethical, pragmatic, and representative deliverability of resistance. Thirst (2005), a street play by Telugu playwright Vinodini, stresses how the street thea...
“We Are Farkhunda”: Geographies of Violence, Protest, and Performance
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2019
H er hair matted with blood, arms reaching up, eyes beseeching someone outside the frame, the young woman pleads as several men close in, attacking her with punches, kicks, stones, and large sticks. This iconic image of Farkhunda went viral in March 2015, emblematic of the unfathomable attack and brutal murder of a young woman, a religious student, in broad daylight, in the center of Kabul, Afghanistan. Drawing on feminist political geography and analysis of gendered violence in Afghanistan, we examine the social and political geographies of violence, protest, and performance. The first section of this essay provides a description of Farkhunda's death and its immediate aftermath, followed by an analysis of the geographies of gendered violence. The second section examines Farkhunda's funeral and street protests by civil society organizations (CSOs). Analyses of these public events elucidate the gendered geographies of embodied and performative expressions of anger, sorrow, and empathy for Farkhunda. The third section examines the theatrical reenactment of Farkhunda's murder on the fortieth day of mourning. 1 We conclude with analyses of gendered violence in contemporary Afghanistan. The descriptions and analyses in this article are contextualized through a triangulation of research methods. Drawing on Gillian Rose (2016), we conducted a content analysis of the publicly posted videos of Farkhunda's murder, her funeral, pro-Farkhunda and justice-seeking protests, and the theatrical reenactment of her death. Based on prior research, we situate these acts within Afghan sociocultural contexts (Kandiyoti 2007a, 2007b). In the summer of 2015, three months after Farkhunda's murder, we interviewed male and female civil society leaders and activists, those involved with organizing and orchestrating Farkhunda's funeral and the demonstrations that followed, We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the insightful and helpful comments. Special thanks to Miranda Outman for her exceptional and detailed edits and suggestions. This article would not have been possible without the assistance of our field research associates and participants, all of whom provided exceptional care and attention to assist us and shared their time and thoughts with us. This research was funded by the United States Institute of Peace and the University of Colorado Boulder. 1 Forty days is the customary period of mourning for Muslims.
This chapter focuses on the interrelation between resistance, novelty and social change. We will consider resistance as both a social and individual phenomenon , as a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and as an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities. In this account, resistance is thus a creative act having its own dynamic and, most of all, aesthetic dimension. In fact, it is one such visibly artistic form of resistance that will be considered here, the case of street art as a tool of social protest and revolution in Egypt. Street art is commonly defined in sharp contrast with high or fine art because of its collective nature, anonymity, its different kind of aesthetics and most of all its disruptive, " antisocial " outcomes. With the use of illustrations, we will argue here that street art is prototypical of a creative form of resistance, situated between revolutionary " artists " and their audiences, which includes both authorities and society at large. Furthermore, strategies of resistance will be shown to develop through time, as opposing social actors respond to one another's tactics. This tension between actors is generative of new actions and strategies of resistance.
Master Thesis - Masquerade beyond Boundaries: The Art of Protesters and Outsiders
2017
My Master thesis titled “Masquerade beyond Boundaries: The Art of Protesters and Outsiders” is a comparative study of the relationship between Outsider Art and Protest Art. In my thesis, I argue that Protest Art, as displayed in the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park Protests, and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, should be considered as a form of Outsider Art. Like Outsider Art, protest and occupy movements create a distinct carnivalesque moment, where amateur and self-taught artists can become unconventional creators. In addition, I showed that the intellectual origins of Art Brut are very much associated with anti-establishment ideas about creative autonomy that also signifies Protest Art. My thesis has also a design output. As a case study, I approached the role of masks and masquerade in Protest Art and Outsider Art and created three masks as artefacts in the shared style of Outsider Art and Protest Art.
Spaces of performative politics and terror in Pakistan
Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2010
Two UK-based specialists on terrorism in Pakistan use empirical evidence to document and analyze the Pakistani Taliban's (Tehrik-e-Taliban) practice of targeting spaces of public interaction for terrorism intended to suppress expressions of public unity and restrict venues for open discussion. In tracing the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan, the authors review the country's history of state and civil society formation, its relations with Afghanistan, and U.S. and Western policy in the region. The authors present timely information and insights that enhance understanding of the recent surge in terrorist attacks on civilians in Pakistan and its ties to the eastward spread of conflict from neighboring Afghanistan.