The political aesthetics of global protest: The Arab Spring and beyond edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots (original) (raw)

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Global Protest : Visual Culture and Communication

The Aesthetics of Global Protest, 2019

Protest movements are struggles to be seen and to be heard. In the last 60 years protest movements around the world have mobilized against injustices and inequalities to bring about substantial sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic changes. Whilst familiar repertoires of action persist, such as strikes, demonstrations, and occupations of public space, the landscape is very different from 60 years ago when the so-called 'new social movements' emerged. We need to take stock of the terrain of protest movements, including dramatic developments in digital technologies and communication, the use of visual culture by protestors, and the expression of democracy. This chapter introduces the volume and explains how aesthetics of protest are performative and communicative, constituting a movement through the performance of politics.

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

2019

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

The Aesthetics of Creative Activism: Introduction

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2023

In this introduction to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue on the aesthetics of creative activism, we canvas influential scholarship of political aesthetics to sculpt a broad typology of six interconnected mechanisms by which art might intervene in the world. We label these: Documentation, Disruption, Recognition, Participation, Imagination, and Beauty. Each has a compelling tradition of theory and application, augmented, extended, and sometimes challenged by the thirteen fresh and provocative contributions in the special issue. Yet, we ask, if both politically minded artists and culturally minded activists are convinced of the power of art to provoke social change, and if we live a world that by almost all measures is now saturated with politically inclined, aesthetically informed practices, interfaces, objects, and texts, why does art not seem to be making a difference? Clearly, we need to think harder about the relationships between art and action, a task the articles assembled here call upon us to take seriously.

Unfolding the Political: Voices of aesthetics and emotions - introduction

Political Perspectives

Roland Bleiker identifies two shifts in the production of knowledge about world politics. In the first of these shifts the so-called "postmodern" scholars began to challenge positivist foundations of knowledge (Bleiker, 2001: 510). They raised questions about how the "parameters" of knowledge made it difficult, if not impossible, to locate and explore a wide range of other insights into world politics (see for instance .

Aesthetics and Transcendence in the Arab Uprisings

Politics is regarded as a science for it tells us what to do, when it deals with measurable concepts. But politics is also an art—a form of practice, telling us how and when to do things. Lest we forget, the arts of persuasion and inspiration are part of politics. And, every art also produces an aesthetic. By aesthetics I mean, the ways by which we think about art: recall, art is what we do and how we do things. Those things and acts that become visible when we do and produce certain actions—jubilation, conversations, speeches, greetings, protests, banners, deaths, wounds and other expressions—all constitute the means by which thought becomes visible, effective, and sensible. Th ese forms and visible expressions of the sensible constitute the aesthetics of politics. Only the patient will know where the momentum for change in the Arab world is heading. But, if the outcome of the Arab uprisings is unclear, then there is one certainty: the people have changed the order of the sensible. Thanks to peaceful protests in the face of regime brutality, tens of millions of people have performed change in myriads of expressions: aesthetics. Their feelings have cumulatively changed, and how people feel about governance is ultimately what politics is all about.

Art and the Re-Invention of Protest

The involvement of artists in social movements that can be witnessed today is just one aspect of the interconnection of arts and political activism. This paper traces the inspiration social movements have gained from artist practices. In western post-war societies the trends developed in the realm of arts have deeply influenced the repertoire of action, social movements have adopted. In a broader sense it was the altered kind of expression visible in new forms of staging, performance art and alike that inspired protesters to develop forms of action they considered to be more effective and appropriate to a modified understanding of politics. In the western world, happenings, street theatre, fakes and other disruptive forms of action have been incorporated in the repertoire of protest by anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s. Today, these modes of contention are deployed by any social movement actor ranging from faith communities to right-wing organizations. The bearing central to this enhancement of protest is a quasi-artistic relation to social reality. The cultural stock of shared symbols and meanings is regarded as material, disposable to re-invent common interpretations of reality. The global justice movements challenging neo-liberal hegemony have been enforced by many artists. By the means of arts they have illustrated the movements' framing of reality and made their contribution to colourful and diverse protest events. But neither has the connection between artists and movements reached a new quality -as suggested by some observers -nor did artists enrich the action repertoire of global justice activism contributing new forms of contention.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART

THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART GREGORY SHOLETTE, 2022

* This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries, UK, 2022) * Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to it. Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist), in order to propose that the narrowing gap separating forms of activist art from an aesthetics of protest is part of a broader paradigm shift constituted by the multiplying crises within contemporary capitalism and democratic governance across the globe.