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4 books match the query 'Social movements in literature'

cover of Imagining Health: Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American Literature

Imagining Health

Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American Literature

Ira Halpern

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

A surprising look at how American writers envision a more equitable healthcare system

In the United States, a deep suspicion of professional medical expertise is becoming increasingly prominent. Meanwhile, many arguments for health justice take a highly critical view of medical authority, even rejecting it entirely. In the early to mid-twentieth century, alternatively, as medicine rapidly professionalized, Americans came to hold the medical establishment in a particularly high regard, while many saw how it could play a crucial role in progressive politics. In this period, technologies developed, specializations grew, and medical education became standardized. With this process came inequities, as marginalized populations struggled to access the highest levels of care. Literary writers confronting social ills through their work included critiques of this new system in their writing, Ira Halpern argues.  Without abandoning professional medicine, they called for alternative systems of care that could better serve diverse populations.

Halpern examines the work of several writers—including Robert Herrick, Wallace Thurman, Frank Slaughter, Charles Chesnutt, Walter White, Ralph Ellison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton—to demonstrate how American writing from this period embedded a critical look at healthcare within other elements of progressive politics, from racial protest and women’s rights to disability justice and counter-capitalist viewpoints. Placing this writing into historical context, in terms of medical and scientific developments as well as traditions of social protest, Halpern reveals the efforts of these writers to envision better alternative trajectories for a quickly evolving medical establishment that left too many Americans without reliable care.
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cover of Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala: The Insurgent Poetics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala

The Insurgent Poetics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature

Hannah Burdette

University of Arizona Press, 2019

From the rise of the Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia and the Idle No More movement in Canada, the turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a notable surge in Indigenous political action as well as an outpouring of texts produced by Native authors and poets. Throughout the Americas—Abiayala, or the “Land of Plenitude and Maturity” in the Guna language of Panama—Indigenous people are raising their voices and reclaiming the right to represent themselves in politics as well as in creative writing.

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala explores the intersections between Indigenous literature and social movements over the past thirty years through the lens of insurgent poetics. Author Hannah Burdette is interested in how Indigenous literature and social movements are intertwined and why these phenomena arise almost simultaneously in disparate contexts across the Americas.

Literature constitutes a key weapon in political struggles as it provides a means to render subjugated knowledge visible and to envision alternatives to modernity and coloniality. The surge in Indigenous literature and social movements is arguably one of the most significant occurrences of the twenty-first century, and yet it remains understudied. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala bridges that gap by using the concept of Abiayala as a powerful starting point for rethinking inter-American studies through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty.
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cover of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present

The Art of Protest

Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present

T.V. Reed

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance


The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. 

Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. 

Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

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cover of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

The Art of Protest

Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

T.V. Reed

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs and the politics of women's movements without poetry. Or, more difficult yet, imagine an America unaffected by the cultural expressions and forms of the twentieth-century social movements that have shaped our nation. The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that express and helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture. In comparative accounts of movements beginning with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and running through the Internet-driven movement for global justice ("Will the revolution be cybercast?") of the twenty-first century, T. V. Reed enriches our understanding of protest and its cultural expression. Reed explores the street drama of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement's use of film and video, rock music and the struggles against famine and apartheid, ACT UP's use of visual art in the campaign against AIDS, and the literature of environmental justice. Throughout, Reed employs the concept of culture in three interrelated ways: by examining social movements as sub- or countercultures; by looking at poetry, painting, music, murals, film, and fiction in and around social movements; and by considering the ways in which the cultural texts generated by resistance movements have reshaped the contours of the wider American culture. The United States is a nation that began with a protest. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression, Reed reveals how activism continues to remake our world.
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