Exactly the Right Place: Antistate Genres and Political Mobilization

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 10. Culture and Politics

Abstract

Songs, posters, poems, and murals pepper accounts of resistance under repressive regimes, but rarely have scholars undertaken to explain the ubiquitous presence of cultural objects in the different stages of contention. Using case studies of poetry in El Salvador and Nicaragua during civil conflicts in the 1960s-1990s, this paper develops a typology of antistate genres, whose purpose is to undermine a regime and offer alternative visions of governance. I identify four anti-state genres: politically integrated, potentially political, cultural politicians, and cultural resistance. I hypothesize genre trajectories, which, for audience members of antistate genres, follow a trajectory of political mobilization into an anti-state cultural network. This proposed model of micro-mobilization shows how cultural objects can be agents of politicization under severe repression, when political assembly and speech cannot occur in public.

Author

• Sarah M. Neitz, University of Notre Dame