Resisting Green Crimes of the Powerful Through Music

• In Event: Theoretical Analyses of Green/Environmental Crimes

Abstract

We present a framework that positions music as a significant and vitalizing resource for resisting state and state-corporate crimes. First, as a resource for resistance, we argue music's characteristics as discourse possesses potential for transformational power-knowledge relations, embedding within discourses alternative regimes of truth that create opportunities for infrapolitics and counter-hegemonic subjectivity. Second, understanding music as constructing, constituting, and reinforcing a series of social practices and relationships, we argue music as a social practice becomes a significant modality of sociality through which everyday resistances may and do take on a collective effervesce significant to creating, maintaining, and reinforcing music’s discursive realities and use in cultural resistance. In turn, we employ this framework in an analysis and exploration of environmental activism and environmental justice movements targeting state and state-corporate environmental actions and policies, emphasizing the privatization and preservation of natural resources, the degradation and destruction of environmental conditions, and environmental security, demonstrating the discursive and social-practice functions and effects music has within resistances to green crimes of the powerful.

Authors

• Clay Michael Awsumb, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

• David Kauzlarich, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville