In The Wounding and Healing of Desire, Wendy Farley (2005) asserts that, âAll of us exist and flourish only in utter and complete interdependence on othersâ (p. xv). Protest is messy. Itâs messy because as Farley suggests, humans exist and flourish only in interdependence, and that interdependence often generates conflictâand protest is born of conflict. This book is also messy, not just because it focuses on protest, but because it is a product of what Eve Sedgwick (2003) has deemed the âfilthy workshopâ of John L. Austin âs Speech Act Theory (SAT) (p. 17). 1 From its debut in 1955, Austinâs theory of performative speech acts, articulated in How We Do Things with Words (1994), has developed as a benevolent philosophical and linguistic Dr. Frankenstein, spawning progeny far and wide. His concept of the performative utterance âthe idea that when particular people utter particular words in particular ways, at particular times, in particular places, they are doing certain types of work, like promising, daring, or marryingâhas been explored in a wide range of fields from philosophy, to theater studies, anthropology, and natural science.
This expansion of the performative for protest, like the story of Dr. Frankenstein, is one about the wounding and healing of desire amidst the mess. Protest is rooted in a sort of irredentism, a desire to reclaim not always an entire lost homeland, but instead to restore a lost sense of the whole to oneâs community. A desire to animate new ideas for the common good. A desire to straighten up the mess in oneâs neighborhood.
The metaphor of a neighborhood frames the following exploration of the performance of protest because protest is about the life of a community; because, even in a time of instant globalized communication, Tip OâNeillâs dictum remains true: all politics are local. Decisions that are made by those in power play out in particular locations, impacting particular people, in particular ways. The language of protest always begins particularly, locally, even though now in the era of Facebook , Twitter , and Youtube , it can go global in the click of a shutter, a touch of a keypad. The following broad comparative study investigates the performance of protest, through a targeted Austinian lens, across different genres, geographies, and languages to understand more fully how the human desire to speak out, from particular locales in the world, against that which wounds the world, is accomplished. This targeted Austinian lens is a renovation of the criteria, or felicity conditions , necessary for a successful performance of a speech act as articulated in SAT, by an integration of questions of power and position generated by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) into those conditions. Whereas SAT prompts recognition of the doing in the saying, CDA posits questions as to who benefits from the doing in the saying, and who does not, and who gets to do the saying in any given context . The main benefit of this integrated approach, developed in Chapter 2, is the breadth of opportunity the renovation facilitates for comparing speech acts across genres (chants, songs, poems, prose), languages, and places, that do the same work, protest; correspondingly, the main detriment is the loss of a depth of context that a telescoped case study of one genre produces.
A Defining of Protest
To embark on this comparative study, an examination of the accepted definition of the word protest, as found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is presented. The denotations of the definition, as well as several connotations, are considered to provide a richer understanding of this word in relationship with concepts, such as political efficacy , the Cooperative Principle , and social capital . The use of an English word to serve as a cornerstone for a study that is crosslinguistic and cross-cultural is problematic at best. The irony , of using the OED, the bulwark of a colonial lingua franca to launch an exploration of protest, is also evident. Nevertheless, because of the realities of English as a lingua franca of todayâs global media, it provides an initial grounding point for a study of a phenomenon that often occurs simultaneously in multiple languages. Chants, songs, poems, or prose are often produced in a local language of the protest group and English, or a combination of the two, to reach the broadest possible audience. For example, consider Saudi Arabian activist comedian, Hisham Fageeh âs remake of Bob Marleyâs âNo Woman, No Cry.â Fageeh transformed the Marley classic into âNo Woman, No Driveâ to protest the Saudi ban on female drivers throughout the kingdom. In his parody, he not only mimics Marleyâs Jamaican English reggae style, but also provides subtitles in both Arabic and Jamaican English (Van Tets 2013). With such instances, Homi Bhabha âs postcolonial ideas of a Third Space and of hybridity are animated, pushing a recognition of the interstices, the spaces in between, of nationalities, ethnicities, and identities , and of the possibilities a Third Space offers to the study of language change and development (Guerin et al. 2011, p. 364). This Third Space is a productive one that blurs traditional cultural assumptions and boundaries, engendering new possibilities (Bhabha 1994) such as a Jamaican English-Arabic commentary on a Saudi cultural practice. Certainly, social media and the rapidity of globalized communication enhances this Third Space by facilitating linguistic innovation and its sharing. Thus, with this benefit and limitation noted, of using a single word from a single language as a cornerstone for a crosslinguistic study, the denotative (i.e., the social, political and cultural dimensions of dissent) and connotative (i.e., power, risk, and commitment) aspects of protest, are explored in the remainder of this chapter, which concludes with an overview of the remainder of the book.
An Expression of Social, Political, or Cultural Dissent
The Oxford English Dictionary (2014) offers a range of definitions of protest in the form of a noun and a verb. This dual categorization is appropriate for a phenomenon that is both a doing, a verb-in-action, while simultaneously a naming of that doing, a noun-in-being. In its noun form, protest is âthe expression of social, political, or cultural dissent from a policy or a course of action, typically by means of a public demonstration; (also) an instance of this, a protest march, a public demonstrationâ (definition 4c). As an intransitive verb, protest is â[o]f a (large) number of people: to express collective disapproval or dissent publicly, typically by means of an organized demonstration; to engage in a mass protest, usually against a government policy or legal decisionâ (definition 6c); whereas as a transitive verb, protest is â[c]hiefly, U.S. to object to (an action or event); to challenge or contest; (also) to make the subject of a public protest or demonstrationâ (definition 6d).
Historically, the word has had a rich and varied history as both noun and verb in English, from when it first surfaces in 1429, to the present. However, this study is rooted in the definitions, noun and verb, that highlight protest as that which expresses dissentâsocial, political, or culturalâthat is shared in a public manner. These two syllables have journeyed to English from the Latin prĆtestÄrÄ«, through the French protester. This seems fitting as the French storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, the refusal of the apocryphal invitation to âjust eat cakeâ, remains a touchstone for many contemporary protests. Such moments of challenge to the status quo ground the noun-verb as a herald of change and disruption, an enactment of social, political, or cultural dissent.
A protest is the expression of different types of dissent. Although the thinking of private individuals permeates public protests, a protest is not an inchoate or even a well-considered thought, but something concrete, manifested and communicated by a shared word or action. It is the carrying of a placard that reflects thinking about alternatives to war, âWhat if they gave a war, and nobody came?â or the chanting of a rhyme that reflects thinking about the value of higher education, âNo ifs, no buts, no education cuts!â Although the physical actions of marching and carrying reinforce these examples, the analyses in this text focus on the verbal action of dissent, how words are used to perform acts of protest, as opposed to other aspects of the linguistic landscape, causes, or effects of protest actions.
As a verbal act of dissent, protest is an expression, not a feeling, although oppositional feelings of anger or disillusionment ground expressions of protest. It is the crying out of âWe are the 99%â as part of the Occupy Movement , âIrhal!â (âLeaveâ) as a chant of the Arab Spring , or the singing of âSmert tyurme, svobodu protestâ/âDeath To Prison, Freedo...