The Revolution Will Be Improvised

The Revolution Will Be Improvised The Intimacy of Cultural Activism

Hardback (20 Nov 2024)

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Publisher's Synopsis

The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism. In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craftmaking. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People's Corporation.

Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation's roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore further the improvised, often ephemeral, works of art activism.

Book information

ISBN: 9780472077045
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Imprint: The University of Michigan Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 303.484
DEWEY edition: 23/eng/20240628
Language: English
Number of pages: 228
Weight: 454g
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine width: 25mm