The Aesthetics of Resistance: Using Cultural Tools as a Strategy for Change

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Race, Ethnicity, and Resistance

Abstract

Major social and political changes are often not the result of direct political confrontations but of an interaction between politics and culture. This preliminary effort to develop a theory of the aesthetics of resistance is based on re-search on Gandhi and the Indian Freedom movement, on the one hand, and the blues and the US civil rights movement, on the other.

It provides a preliminary inquiry into the aesthetics of resistance, the jiu jitsu processes of cultural and political change and involve transformation from the side, from below, and from within existing cultural configurations, with elements of surprise, drama, and even pleasure that sometimes mobilizes action and disarms opponents of the resistance. While doing something other than politics, the arts and spiritual traditions can bring about political change or loosen the soil for its cultivation.

Author

• Lester R. Kurtz, George Mason University