A Terrible American Beauty is Born: The Poetics of US Protest From the Wizard of Oz to the Women’s Marches

• In Event: Climates of Dissent: Media Ecologies as Oppositional Pedagogy

Abstract

William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem “1916” of seeing ordinary women and men of Dublin transfigured as subjects of revolt during the Easter Rising, using his refrain “a terrible beauty is born” to signal how such transformational powers emerged out of the everyday. The mediated eco-system of U.S. protest, dissent, and resistance has pivoted on flashpoints of a specifically “American” mythos and affect in generating such terrible beauties among participants and prophetic voices alike. This paper traces the baked-in aesthetics of U.S. political protest, an aesthetic of wonderment and transformation turned upside down that originates in the “operational aesthetic” of P.T. Barnum, the literary sleight of hand of Frederick Douglass’s narrative, the Ghost Dance movements, to an iconic iteration in Frank L. Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” of 1900. With a focus on the twentieth century and our immediate and urgent 21st, the paper argues that US protest and dissent configures as a mediated constellation, reliant on image, narrative, and performance across aesthetic, cultural, gendered and political boundaries, the weaponizing of fantasy and fiction rather than their repudiation, predicated on marginal identities, especially of women and people of color, and imbued with a revelatory sense of space that insists on what William Faulkner called the endpoint of protest: “to change the earth.”

Author

• Jennifer A Wicke