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Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression--storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of people's responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people's critical perspectives--gained through intimate struggle with life-altering force--to the global dialogue surrounding humanity's response to climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental catastrophe.

Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope, Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front lines of today's global emergency.

Contributors: Aaron S. Allen, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Assefa Tefera Dibaba, Rebecca Dirksen, Mary Hufford, John Holmes McDowell, Mark Pedelty, Jennifer C. Post, Chie Sakakibara, Jeff Todd Titon, Rory Turner, Lois Wilcken

The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting “performance” as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices—such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived—this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.
 

An in-depth look at how Latina/x artists transform art into activism and reclaim space in the Twin Cities

In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Lyman examines how Latina/x artists in the Twin Cities navigate and challenge the region’s deep-seated racial injustices. Using “Inter-Latina movidas”—subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space—these artists respond to systemic oppression through public performances and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the state, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Centering Latina/x women and gender nonconforming artists from Chicana/Mexicana, U.S. Central American, and Caribbean backgrounds, Place-Keepers confronts reductionist theories of Latinidad that flatten ethnic and racial identities. It demonstrates how the creative and activist practices of these cultural organizers address urgent social struggles from resisting gentrification and environmental destruction to opposing police violence. Lopez Lyman situates these efforts within the broader history of racial justice organizing in Minnesota, tracing a lineage of resistance that long precedes the 2020 Minneapolis uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

Through firsthand accounts and revealing case studies, Place-Keepers charts how these artists harness aesthetics as a tool for movement-building, strategically redistributing resources and transforming policy. Expanding the foundational concept of “movidas” in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies by highlighting maneuvers of infiltration, improvisation, individual ritual, and interdependence, Lopez Lyman establishes a crucial framework for understanding art as activism.

Today, most colonial-era modernist mass housing is seen as fundamentally broken: crumbling concrete spaces of social alienation and containment that fractured societies both then and now. In Poetics of Repair, Katarzyna Pieprzak examines how contemporary visual, literary, and performance art of the Maghreb has the potential to change the terms, histories, and imagined futures of mass housing in North Africa and France. Pieprzak dives deeply into contemporary art engagements with three mass housing sites that epitomize the French colonial geography of modernist architecture in the Maghreb. She identifies in this art what she names a transformative “poetics of repair”: a practice that conjoins, puts in relation, or simply brings closer together broken materials, separated people, and severed timelines. Reading art and its engagements with mass housing, Pieprzak argues, has the potential to unmoor established knowledge and rehearse the tensions and productive ambiguities inherent to practices of constitution and revision. She demonstrates that such a reading practice is a step toward a reparative epistemology for mass housing that turns sites of wreckage and alienation into sites of possible solidarities and new formulations of history and experience.

Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Suárez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Suárez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism’s major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Suárez shows, what’s at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

In Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charles Lim, Zai Kuning, and Kiran Kumar---who speculate about changing the world in ways that are attuned to its cultivation, repair, and rethinking in the Anthropocene. Their artistic vocabulary not only undoes Western art models and categories; it probes the unfolding future, addresses past trauma, and creates contested, vibrant, and flourishing spaces. Throughout Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam---and from Kumar’s experimental dance to Kuning’s rattan and beeswax ghost ships to Lim’s videography of Singapore from the sea---Fischer argues that these artists’ theoretical discourses should be privileged over those of the curators, historians, critics, and other gatekeepers who protect and claim art worlds for themselves.