As we prepare this collection for publication, thousands of students, parents, family members, and teachers in cities and towns across the US are marching against gun violence. One month has passed since the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which claimed 17 lives. Fading flowers, stuffed teddies, and condolence letters remain on the grass outside the school and affixed to fences as symbolic reminders both of the tragedy itself and of the studentsâ sustained resolve to instigate radical changes in gun control legislation. The studentsâ social media shrewdness has allowed them to take control of the narrative, organize effectively en masse in a short amount of time, and keep the topic of gun control in the headlines for weeks, defying the typically fickle attention span of the news cycle. The March for Our Lives rallies by students not yet old enough to vote and not yet old enough to be dissuaded by cynicism have raised the prospect of a new, politically engaged generation of activists with a slate of creative tactics at the ready. These include the familiar repertoires that use their own bodies as the medium for marches and die-ins, but they also extend into the domain of networked media to circulate stories, jokes, memes, and video clips that leave NRA (National Rifle Association) spokespersons scrambling for rejoinders and members of Congress, clinging to their Second Amendment rights and their millions in NRA campaign contributions, stumped. But in the wake of President Donald Trumpâs flaccid response to gun control proposals and the non-response of the Republican-controlled houses of Congress, the question remains as to whether students will manage to sustain the efforts of their movement and, if so, how?
Following the wave of people-powered millennial movements such as March for Our Lives, this volume responds to an emergent concern among the progressive Left: How to sustain and keep alive activist interventions in unsustainable and precarious times? How to create direct actions that effectively support the ongoing labor of political and social movements? How to create art and performance within the changing frontiers of activism that make effective use of their âremains,â to invoke Rebecca Schneider, as a vehicle for personal and collective endurance?1
The episodic rise and fall (and determined continuance) of global movements have led organizers on the ground to raise questions as to whether political change can be accomplished through street protests, temporary occupation of sites, and online petitions alone. These direct actions have a crucial function, but they are necessarily limited to the time and space of protest, or to maintaining the momentum of burgeoning movements. Moreover, these same actions often suffer from having been rehearsed in the public realm one too many times. In the words of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, âToo often lately, the Left has been unsuccessful because it has allowed itself to be constrained by a politics that is grounded in habitual ways of thinking and actingâto the advantage of conservative forces.â2 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams concur: protest, in their minds, is often too predictable, habitual, and fleeting; moreover, they contest, it has become âincreasingly repetitive ,â even feeding anti-progressive sentiments when its âmessages are mangled by an unsympathetic media smitten by images of property destruction.â3 This commitment to habit has contributed, these scholars argue, to the Leftâs marked inability to protect citizensâ core public and private institutions. For decades, governments and corporations have undermined constitutional laws and regulations with the primary aim to âelevateâ and serve the âfinancial sector relative to the real sector.â4
Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times responds to these concerns by investigating work in the Americas that meets the shifting demands of activism through the creation of art activist tools, sustainable spaces, and adaptable tactics that exceed the space-time of the action itself. These pages are both an archive and a how-to-manual documenting ways of keeping effective interventionist strategies in circulation. These efforts can be grounded, as the title of this collection suggests, in shared, interrelated conceptsânamely, tools and tactics, rights and their violations, sustainability and precarity. With a specific focus on the geopolitics of the Americas, we join current efforts in performance studies scholarship to engage a more inclusive hemispheric optic that takes account of the ways in which transnational migrations, economic systems, and cultural practices imbricate seemingly discrete nation-states. Operating within the macro-structures of various trade deals such as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and ALADI (AsociaciĂłn Latinoamericana de IntegraciĂłn, or the Latin American Integration Association), as well as state initiatives such as Canadaâs Americas Strategy that have formalized cross-border agreements in the name of economic security and opportunity, the performance actions documented in this volume map the micro-movements of artists, activists, and art activists who use the tools of their disciplines to build cross-continental alliances for the precarious conditions these very agreements have, in many cases, produced. Our contributors examine how artists and activists have responded to the interrelated forces of economic restructuring, globalization, and neocolonialism across the continents, North and South. Most importantly, the hemispheric focus of this volume marks our effort to redress how national borders, as colonial constructs, have often stood as necessary and ânaturalâ delimitations of scholarly inquiry foreclosing Pan-American and Indigenous methodologies, paradigms, and practices. This volumeâs geopolitical vantage point unveils how activist and art activist tactics have beenâand can beâput to work in the shared struggles of precarity that transcend borders.
Over the past 40 years, social movements in the Americas have modeled different methods of sustained action against the combined forces of neoliberalismâs market-liberal policies of privatization and deregulation, authoritarian regimes, and forms of neocolonialism advanced by extractive industries. Boliviaâs Cochabamba Water War series of protests in 1999 and 2000 in response to the privatization of water; the ongoing efforts since 1994 of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, to secure Mayan sovereignty over resources and land; the Indigenous movements in Ecuador, which organized under the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador in 1986 to effect broad social reform agendas; the mothers of Soacha, BogotĂĄ, whose continued performance actions with director Patrizia Ariza, interviewed in this collection, have brought international attention to the falso positivos murdered by Colombiaâs military forces, a plot uncovered in 2008; the Idle No More movement in 2012, which involved the occupation of public spaces to demand Indigenous sovereignty in response to failed treaty agreements in Canadaâthese are just a few of the many protest movements that demonstrate how a well-organized, structured, and choreographed public theatre can be put to work to effect widespread political change. Progenitors of the sustained power of protest can be found in the persistent, decades-long actions of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who, since 1977, have demanded accountability and justice for the disappeared during Argentinaâs military dictatorship (1976â1983) and in the US civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, which managed to dismantle public segregation policies and reduce employment discrimination through long-form, collective, and piecemeal planning over time.
But a genealogy of sustained social action and mobilization reaches back further still to the centuries-long resistance and survivance of First Peoples.5 Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson traces this history in her various writings about Indigenous struggle : âWe have been resisting colonial imposition for four centuries. I think our communities know...
