The arts, culture and protest

Much scholarship on the arts and its use in protest has been situated in social movement studies. In his interesting analysis of protest as artistic expression, Reed (2016: 77) observes that ‘[t] o engage in protest is to offer public witness’. That the act of protesting is not only about positioning oneself against something or someone, but – ‘as the prefix “pro” suggests’ – it is also about ‘be[ing] presentational, putting forth a positive alternative or creative vision’ (Reed, 2016: 77). There are various forms of protest which position themselves against particular issues and/ or individuals or which present specific visions driven by different aspirations, commitments, motivations and objectives. Protests also draw on a range of instruments, materials, practices and media – including those typically associated with the arts and cultural spheres. Numerous social movements, both in the past and present, have used the arts and culture to express and to achieve their goals. However, while there exist rich academic analyses of both macro and meso levels of protest, not much focus has been placed on the use of the arts and culture – and associated organisational structures and production contexts – at micro levels (Jasper, 1997; Johnston, 2009; Reed, 2016).

James Jasper (1997: 5) noted that because scholars have generally preferred ‘to examine fully fledged, coordinated movements’, their work ‘renders invisible’ those other actors, groups and organisations engaging in protest in local or community contexts. Similarly, and more recently, Reed (2016: 84) has observed that ‘[f] or the most part, the role of art [and culture] as protest has been subsumed under [a] more general concern to define and analyse movement cultures’. To Hillman (2018: 57), this ‘point[s] to a broader issue, which [has contributed to] the scarcity of detailed analyses of art [and culture] in the service of political activism’ at micro levels outside of social movements and mainstream culture. This chapter acknowledges that protest can and does happen ‘even when it is not part of an organised movement’ (Jasper, 1997: 5).

The chapter discusses and analyses the significance of the forms of arts and culture that Hillman alludes to. Conceptualising them as arts and cultural work as protest, it considers how such work embodies the ‘public witness’, oppositional and ‘presentational’ functions that Reed (2016: 77) identified.