even revolutionary vision in response to a broken political system, a pressing issue, a dire condition, or an impending crisis. Recent anthologies such as The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond and The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication 11 have focused on vernacular creativities—both visual and performative—that energize protests or visual representation through lens-based image-making that circulates through digital means fromone locale to another, into a global cacophony of resistance and future-making. What marks the past ten years—from the Arab Spring to Covid-19—are the spatial and temporal intersections and oscillations between the corporeal mass protests of many and the diffusion of tactics through social media. Both of the above are now common to the contemporary protest. The list of causes seems endless—from resistance to state repression, outrage at economic inequities, and demands for anti-racist and anti- colonialist policies; to calls for police reform, gun control, and the end of mass incarceration; to holding power accountable for upholding the rights of women, the TSLGBTQ+ identified, and immigrants; and to voices exposing the existential threat of climate change—and the work ahead is daunting.
11. PninaWerbner, MartinWebb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, eds., The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Umut Korkut et al., eds., The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam: AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2020).
26 The Lure of Protest
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