Choreographies of protest

Theatre Journal

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 395-412

  Foster, Susan Leigh ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646681740     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2003.0111     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Bayard Rustin, Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 42.
2. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher, 1973), 371.
3. See, for example, George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Survey of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964);
4. Georges Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964);
5. and Aristide R. Zolberg, "Moments of Madness," Politics and Society 2 (1972): 183-207.
6. For an excellent overview of these theories of protest, see James M. Jasper, The. Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1-100.
7. See also Belinda Robnett, "African American. Women in. the Civil Rights Movement: Spontaneity and Emotion in. Social Movement Theory," in. No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest, ed. Kathleen M. Blee (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 65-95.
8. Jasper, The. Art of Moral Protest, 237.
9. Many of the ACT UP protestors were choreographers, dancers, directors, and actors, and this undoubtedly contributed to the kinds of events they staged. For further insight into the relations between artists and activists, see David A. Schlossman, Actors and Activists: Polities, Performance, and Exchange among Social Worlds (New York & London: Routledge, 2002).
10. For a fuller account of the first day, see the interview with Franklin McCain in My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, ed. Howell Raines (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977), 77-78.
11. But William Chafe argues for a more historicizing approach, which would show that the students were influenced profoundly by many years of prior civil rights initiatives of which they were well aware. See William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Chafe also provides an excellent history of the city of Greensboro and a larger context within which the sit-ins took place.
12. Diane Nash, quoted in. Hampton, Voices of Freedom., 57-58.
13. Lewis, quoted, in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 100.
14. Proudfoot, Diary, xxiii.
15. See also Ty Geltmaker, "The Queer Nation Acts Up: Health Care, Politics, and Sexual Diversity in the County of Los Angeles," Society and Space 10.6 (1992): 609-50.
16. Such protests, highly effective on the congested streets of New York, were replicated in other cities; yet protestors often found that they needed other types of actions in order to communicate their message, especially in sprawling urban centers such as Los Angeles. For further discussions of the interplay between site and protest, see Kenney, Mapping Gay LA.
17. The die-ins functioned at the most fundamental physical level to instantiate what activist Aldyn McKean identified as ACT Up's most basic strategy: "Make it more costly for those in power to resist than to give in" (L. A. Kauffman, "A Short History of Radical Renewal," in From Act-Up to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald. Hayduck [London: Verso Books, 2002], 35-41, 38).
18. Rustin, Strategies for Freedom, 44-45.
19. Larry Kramer, quoted in Alisa Solomon, "AIDS Crusaders ACT UP a Storm," American Theatre, October 1989, 40.
20. Solomon, "AIDS Crusaders ACT UP a Storm/' 39.
21. For an excellent overview of the anti-nuclear demonstrations, see Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
22. "Direct Action Packet" circulated by the Direct Action Network Against Corporate Globalization, 1999.
23. This Is What Democracy Looks Like, an Independent Media Center/Big Noise film production, 1999.