Teaching the experimental arts of American protest.

While there is no inopportune time to teach protest art, the present moment, marked by a perpetual "war on terror" and the contraction of civil liberties, dramatic and growing economic inequality, and a remarkably narrow mainstream political spectrum, offers an especially compelling context

in which to explore with students the tradition of artworks that seek to challenge injustice, promote oppositional thinking, and spark counter-hegemonic political activism. That is what I set out to do in an undergraduate course called "Art and Protest in Twentieth-Century America," which I taught at Brooklyn College in 2004 and 2005. As the syllabus on page 7 indicates, students and I examined fiction, poetry, drama, photography, and film created in association with a range of progressive subcultures and social movements, including the Greenwich Village bohemians, the 1930s Left, the Beats, Civil Rights and Black Power, Feminism, Chicano/a Rights, and ACTUP. I am especially interested in art's capacity to challenge and even change our habits of perception, and I designed the course to feature protest art that is aesthetically experimental. While I did assign some art that falls within a recognizably realist tradition, most of the works we analyzed tend to combine subversive ideas--such as the power of collective action, the pervasiveness of racial and gender oppression, the centrality of the working class to American culture--with avant-garde formal devices, such as defamiliarization, montage, and unorthodox narration.

If this course had a working hypothesis that I wanted to explore with students, it was this: experimental protest art uses formal techniques of fragmentation, interruption, and open-endedness not only to insist that readers and viewers take an active role in constructing the meaning of these works, but also to suggest that the culture we inhabit is a product of struggle and open to democratic transformation. In other words, the emphasis on dialogue, contradiction, and lack of closure in these works asks us to see the world itself as dynamic, fluid, and in need of radical change. While modernist aesthetic strategies are not by nature politically progressive, they always call attention to the audiences' role as active participants in the production of meaning. When used by artists whose aim is to protest injustice they can be powerful tools for dismantling and challenging official ideologies.

Before turning to some of the art and our class discussions, let me say a bit more about the institutional context in which the course was taught. Brooklyn College is one of the campuses of the City University of New York, a large and pitifully under-funded public university; the college enrolls about 10,000 undergraduates, all of whom commute, mostly from various parts of Brooklyn, a borough of two-and-a-half million people. Half of the college's students work more than twenty hours per week to support themselves and one quarter of the students (whose median age is twenty-six) have at least one dependent. The majority of students are non-white and roughly twenty percent are foreign-born, hailing from the former Russian republics, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and a host of other places. My "Art and Protest" course was an upper-level class that attracted English and American Studies majors. A handful of the students elect ed to take the class because of the subject matter, but most, I discovered, registered because they wanted or needed a class in American literature or American Studies. A few had very finely tuned political stances, but others did not. The students were aware that they live hard-pressed lives, and tended to be quite savvy about race, gender, and economic inequality, but the classes were by no means full of student radicals. What distinguished these students--and what distinguishes most Brooklyn College students--is a willingness to engage earnestly with the material, to take what is placed before them and respond openly, honestly, and with insight. I designed the course to prioritize student voices, and each week we spent the first half-hour of our class sessions in small student-led discussion groups. I would often provide a brief mini-lecture situating a given work historically and politically, doing my best to give students a "people's-history" kind of feel for a particular period, but the bulk of the class consisted of group discussion.

One of my primary aims was to encourage students to think through the relationship between content and form, politics and aesthetics. More specifically, I wanted students to consider how the avant-garde dismantling of conventional aesthetic forms, and the opening up of the process through which textual meaning is produced, can reinforce a political effort to undermine conventional ideologies and remake the shape and meaning of the world through dialogue, collaboration, and struggle. As we began the semester, I posed some general questions for students to contemplate: Why does an artist choose a particular medium, genre, and style? In what ways--and why--does a given work of art depart from standard artistic styles and expectations? How do the particular aesthetic decisions an artist makes relate to the political "message" he or she wants to convey? My hope was that these questions would help students focus on the ways in which an oppositional artist's formal choices reinforce (and occasionally contradict) his or her politics.

One of the works that generated lively discussion in class, and most clearly demonstrates the linking of experimental aesthetics and radical content, is Muriel Rukeyser's twenty-part poetic sequence "The Book of the Dead." Published in 1938 as part of her book U.S. 1, "The Book of the Dead" is based on Rukeyser's investigation, performed with her friend the photographer Nancy Naumberg, of the notorious 1930s Hawk's Nest disaster, which was for many years the largest industrial "accident" in US history, in which upwards of 2,000 workers contracted silicosis, a fatal lung disease, while digging a water diversion tunnel. (1) Rukeyser's poem is what might be called a form of documentary modernism--an "experimental fusion of poetry and non-literary languages" drawn from journalistic accounts, transcripts of Congressional hearings and interviews, excerpts of letters, even stock market accounts. (2) In its disjointed, episodic form and its themes of death and rebirth, "The Book of the Dead" re-writes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but the fragments shored together here are not the voices of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, but of Merle Blankenship, George Robinson, and Juanita Tinsley, a literal "committee" of local people, black and white, victimized by corporate malfeasance.

Rukeyser opens the text with a metaphor of mapping, and the poem takes the reader on a journey to the town of Gauley Bridge and the surrounding hills and eventually down into the tunnel itself. She casts the site of the massive disaster, which she describes as "the fatal brilliant plain" (1052) on the hillside above the mineshaft, as the "nation's scene and halfway house" (1049), that is, as a place that condenses the country's history which, the poem ultimately suggests, is marked by violence and exploitation yet also by resilience and democratic potential. Near the end of the poem, after she has surveyed the landscape, the injured bodies, the corporate justifications, the governmental response, and the community voices that emerged in the wake of the tragedy, the poet asks herself and her readers, "What three things can never be done?" (1050). Her answer: we can never "Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone" (1050). Memory, speech, and collectivity, in other words, are the three things this poem promotes in the face of tragedy and oppression, and things that it tries to embody. It does so by stitching together an array of sources and points of view, taking documentary film, especially cinematic montage, as a model for juxtaposing the voices of the powerful and the powerless in an effort to brush history against the grain. (3) Statements by ill and dying laborers, by sympathetic social workers, and by miners' wives and mothers are set in dialogue with the Congressional testimony of a doctor who defends the corporation, a stock market ticker showing the company's rising profits, and a resolution passed by a Congressional subcommittee, which results in a blocked bill.

The diversity of sources and stories contained in the poem made it come alive in the classroom, as individual students were invariably drawn to different sections or elements. In class, I asked students to select the lines they found most powerful, and to write briefly about them (an exercise I also performed). We then took turns reading the lines out loud and explaining our choices. The results were fascinating; some students gravitated to the snippets of testimony and individual narratives, while others took to more traditionally "poetic" sections, filled with rich imagery and symbolic resonance. As we read, it became clear that this poem is a deeply dialogic text, one that not only includes a range of (at times conflicting) voices and poetic registers, but also invites readers to identify and engage with it in heterogeneous ways. The poem certainly has a point of view, marked by sympathy for the workers, anger at the company and political elites, and a sense that collective working-class action is the best remedy for corporate malfeasance. But, as our classroom discussion indicated, readers are asked to do more than passively consume this poem; rather, we are required to actively sort and interpret it, to stake out our own positions regarding the history being described. In encouraging, even demanding, our involvement, the poem itself thus categorizes the participatory democracy that it proposes for the actual world. The form of the poem thus acquires an epistemological dimension, delivering a sense of the world as dynamic and embattled, open to and in need of collective transformation. (4)

As a work that brings together an array of voices and materials, the poem is what Rukeyser refers to as an "alloy," a "deliberate combine [that] adds new qualities, / sum of new uses" (1149-1151). It is an unorthodox amalgamation of elements that allows us to "widen the lens and see / standing over the land myths of identity, / new signals, processes" (1146-8). Here, Ruskeyser imagines that new technologies--"new signals and processes," associated throughout much of the poem with industrial corporations and the violence they inflict--can in fact be used as a form of counter-power and critique, as a way to "widen the lens" and direct attention to what has been previously obscured by the "myths of identity," buried and suppressed by hegemonic historical narratives in which, as the poet asserts, "The facts of war [are] forced into actual grace" (1053).

As the poem moves toward the final stanzas, the narrator addresses her readers directly:

   You standing over gorges,
    surveyors and planners
   you workers and hope of
    countries, first among powers
   you who give peace and bodily
    repose....
   and you young, you who are
    finishing the poem
   wish new perfection and begin
    to make;
   you men of fact, measure our
    times again. (1119-1121;
    1125-1127)

Here, in this notion of measuring, speech and action, aesthetics and politics, converge. To "measure again" is to review, to re-consider, in this case from a hitherto neglected perspective, that of injured and exploited working people. The term "measure" has a scientific ring to it, and echoes Rukeyser's adoption of cartography and the X-ray as crucial metaphors for her investigation of the disaster. But "measure" is also poetic measure--rhyme and meter. As a speech act, Rukeyser's documentary poetry itself provides a new "measure," a new poetic form, based on the techniques of avant-garde montage, that is also a model for ethical seeing and, by implication, for a kind of inclusive, multi-pronged action through which a community of aggrieved people, and those sympathetic to their plight, might join together to challenge dominant institutions and arrangements of power. The poem itself, in its very form, is thus a model of revisionist history (one that includes previously slighted or occluded voices) and of collective action, in which the coming together of isolated and disempowered voices can transform "our times." In the words of Adrienne Rich, activist poetry of the kind Rukeyser is writing is "a ligatory art" which "defies the space that separates," bringing together narratives and voices that hegemonic discourses would keep separate and suppress. It creates what Octavio Paz calls "another kind of space," which challenges the dominant social and verbal order, hinting at another way of organizing society and history that is based on dialogue rather than dominance. (5)

Like "The Book of the Dead," 12 Million Black Voices, the 1941 documentary book by Richard Wright, with assistance from lay-out artist Edwin Rosskam, is structured by a logic of montage, in this case the interweaving of written text and visual images in a virtually cinematic suturing. (6) Wright and Rosskam's book uses Marxism's rhetorical force and documentary photography's "truth effects" to make visible African American labor, suffering, and dignity, even as its occasionally surrealistic tone and structure challenge the reliability of normative historical, visual, and sociological narratives. Teaching 12 Million Black Voices proved to be challenging. On the first day of discussion, my normally loquacious students seemed hesitant, reserved. After class, a student approached me, and explained that for her, Wright's book, which deals so forthrightly and directly with racial oppression, is not easy to talk about, especially in a racially heterogeneous class. In the following session, I began by acknowledging this difficulty, and noted that the very fact that the text is hard to talk about testifies to the persistence of racial division and injustice. In examining the book, I tried to encourage students to see not only the stridency of Wright's tone (evident in the frank discussion of slavery, sharecropping, and lynching) and the genuine anger in the text, but also its experimental qualities, the way in which the book's vigorous anti-colonial critique is expressed in a remarkable range of verbal registers, including allegory, sermon, statistics, folk tales, and poetic lyricism. Wright aims to unsettle conventional white (and to an extent black middle-class) perspectives in order to have his readers grasp the fact that the history and experiences of the black working class are, as he puts it in the book's opening sentence, "far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem" (10). Like many other works of experimental protest art, Wright's book fuses modernism and radicalism, blending text and image, folk idiom and sociological realism, in an effort to challenge traditional habits of perception. In particular, while Wright's text aims to make us grapple with some of the hard realities that American culture tends to overlook or suppress--racism, discrimination, exploitation, "hardened into a daily ritual, backed by rope and fagot" (48)--it also aims to have readers un-learn some things they would have taken for granted in 1941, and may still assume today, such as the certainty and stability of racial identity, ideas that have served to justify violence against blacks for hundreds of years.

To help students see Wright's challenge to conventional notions of race, I pointed to the book's opening two photographs. The first, by Dorothea Lange, depicts a sharecropper's well tanned and weather worn hands holding a hoe. On close inspection it becomes evident that the farmer is white, but because the print is cropped just below the man's head, effectively decapitating him, and because his hands are darkened by sun and grime, he could appear at first glance to be black. The next picture, on the reverse page, presents the head of an elderly black man with a white beard and hair, as if it might be the head of the headless figure from the previous page. Together, these two images--the headless white, but dark body and the bodiless black, white-haired head--form a bizarre, biracial Frankenstein. Why, I asked, would Wright and Rosskam open this book about the history of African Americans with these two pictures? My hunch that these images, when seen together, unsettle the very racial binaries that seem to organize the text, was picked up by several students, one of whom pointed the class to a passage from the book's final pages: "The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us.... Look at us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives!" (146, original emphasis). In underscoring the contingency and intersectionality of black and white identities, this passage helps us grasp the "strangeness" of the opening pair of images, and helps us to see the book's layered protest, which critiques both the racial terror on which American modernity has been built, and the theories of racial essentialism that have served to naturalize and legitimate that terror in the first place.

If Rukeyser and Wright and Rosskam use forms of apposition to structure their revisionist histories, Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, in his 1968 drama Zoot Suit, uses Brechtian techniques of interruption, as well as anti-realist staging and dream sequences, to reconstruct two major events that occurred in Los Angeles in 1942 and 1943: the Sleepy Lagoon Trial, in which seventeen young Mexican-Americans were falsely convicted of murder (the ruling was eventually overturned), and the Zoot Suit Riots, in which off-duty military service men attacked hundreds of young men, predominately blacks and Latinos, for the ostensibly un-patriotic practice of wearing oversized zoot suits during a period of war-induced fabric rationing and conformity. The play is presided over by the ghostly presence of El Pachuco, a mythical Mayan/Aztec figure who is the alter ego of the play's protagonist, Henry Reyna, who is unjustly charged and jailed for murder. Valdez, who got his start writing plays for United Farm Worker rallies, is clear that protest art demands innovative aesthetic forms. "The nature of Chicanismo," he stated, "calls for a revolutionary turn in the arts as well as in society. Chicano theater must be revolutionary in technique as well as content." (7))

In Zoot Suit, which tells the story of Henry's struggle for justice and his internal dialogue with El Pachuco, Valdez mixes not only Spanish and English dialogue, but also agit-prop and expressionist styles, weaving together the political and the mythic and insisting on the socially constructed nature of everyday reality. At certain key points in the action, for instance, H Pachuco freezes the action by snapping his fingers, offering commentary or asking Henry to reconsider a decision. In doing so, he points to neglected possibilities, options for action that were not taken, but might have produced alternative outcomes. The ending of the play, which offers several possible--and conflicting--stories about Henry's future, is resolutely open-ended, refusing a cathartic "all's well that ends well" kind of closure. In the final lines, characters wonder: Is Henry a "born leader," a "street corner warrior," or a "social victim"? (8) One character speculates that he will end up going back to prison for robbery; another imagines that he will fight in the Korean war, dying overseas; another proposes that he will marry and live quietly, one day sending his children to the University of California.

About certain things, such as ethnic prejudice and police brutality, the play is quite dear. But the question of what is to be done and how the future will unfold is left to the audience. Some students embraced this invitation, and were eager to debate various possibilities, while others found the play's lack of finality frustrating. Confronting this frustration is one of the challenges of experimental protest art--an art about process, about the urgency of striving for change rather than about its definitive attainment. Because such art so often refuses to provide neat, easily consumable messages in familiar forms, it asks its audience to assert themselves, something that frequently cuts against our accustomed habits of reading or viewing. Yet this is precisely the point, and the reason why I find working with and teaching experimental progressive art so satisfying: in asking us to participate in the construction of its meanings, this art implies that we can participate in reconstructing the world around us, too. It is this link between unorthodox artistic forms that require our input, on the one hand, and oppositional politics that promote democratic participation and collaboration, on the other, that I wanted students to understand and experience.

In his book From Art to Politics, Murray Edelman contends that "works of art enhance, destroy, or transform common assumptions, perceptions and categories, yielding new perspectives and changed insights, although they can reinforce conventional assumptions as well." (9) While Edelman is making a claim about art in general, his comments are especially relevant to experimental protest art. At its most ambitious, such art aspires to transform not only common assumptions and categories, but also to transfigure our very ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. Such art not only gives voice to previously slighted or overlooked perspectives, but also tries to unsettle customary patterns of perception, and to make us partners in the act of producing an artwork's meaning. Such art aims to unsettle and rework conventional aesthetic forms and expectations and, in so doing, allegorize the process of ideological and political dismantling that is required for radical social transformation.

Yet, as Edelman's comment also suggests, no matter how innovative or subversive the form or ideological resonance of a given work may be, art invariably reproduces aspects of the dominant ideological climate, even as it seeks to contest hegemonic thinking. There is no work of pure or absolute protest; all protest art is partial in some ways. This is an especially important point to underscore when teaching, I think. Rukeyser's poem, for instance, is premised on a romantic idea of "the people" that was characteristic of Depression-era culture and could, as the historian Warren Susman has argued, have conservative as well as progressive implications. Wright and Rosskam's book, like much of Wright's fiction, tends to give short shrift to African American women, and their role in black history and activism. Valdez's play posits, in the figure of H Pachuco, what some critics consider nostalgia for an essentialized Chicano identity, an impulse that bespeaks the nationalist moment of the 1960s when the play was conceived. All protest art is limited in the depth and range of the protest it offers; all artists, even the boldest and most visionary, work within certain imaginary limits set by the ideological context in which they live and which they can never wholly leave behind. Attending to the limitations of protest art is vital to teaching about it because it helps to break down reductive binaries of resistance and dominance, categories that are, of course, deeply intertwined. Recognizing the complexities and contradictions of protest art should not diminish our sense of its power; rather, such complexities testify to the difficulty of sailing against prevailing ideological winds, and to the need for careful and rigorous critique, something that teaching about protest art demands and deserves.

My aim for the course was to have students grasp and feel authorized to take up the participatory demands that experimental protest art makes on us. To conclude, let me mention one way that I tried to underscore the contemporary relevance and urgency of such art. In the closing weeks of the semester, I asked students to bring in examples of oppositional art that are significant to their own lives. As one might expect, the range of works they presented was striking, and included anti-war posters, photographs of murals and graffiti, clips from documentary films, graphic art by the Guerrilla Girls, poems, and music by Bruce Springsteen, Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and various hip hop artists. Students spoke and wrote eloquently about the art they shared. One student, discussing the Jay-Z song "Where I'm From," about the Marcy Houses public housing complex in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, argued that "the song is about the desperate LACK of a solution [to the dire economic and social conditions being described], and that is where the heart of the protest lies." A few others spoke from a more immediately visceral perspective, explaining that the art they brought gives them hope that the frustrations they feel are shared by others and that change might be brought about. When I teach the course again, I will consider compiling a class "portfolio" of contemporary protest art, selected by students and containing short critical and personal writings explaining their choices. Such a collective project would, I think, be a fitting capstone for such a course, which focuses on art that asks us to see ourselves as members of larger communities in which we might not only imagine, but actively collaborate in the construction of a better world.

NOTES

(1) The catastrophe occurred in the early 1930s, when workers discovered large deposits of silica, an element used for processing steel, while digging a tunnel for a Union Carbide subsidiary designed to divert water for a hydroelectric plant outside Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. The company knowingly neglected to take appropriate measures to protect the silica miners and many of them, as Time magazine put it, "died like ants in a flour bin" of silicosis. The version of the poem to which I refer can be found in Cary Nelson, ed., Anthology of Modern American Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 2000). My citations will be parenthetical by line number.

(2) Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 162.

(3) In taking still and moving cameras as inspiration, Rukeyser's poetry compares in interesting ways with the 1930s novels of John Dos Passos, whose experimental writing was also modeled in part on avant-garde cinema. For more on Dos Passos and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, see Carol Shloss, In Visible Light (Oxford UP, 1987), Chapter 4.

(4) I am grateful to Linda Dittmar for helping me conceptualize and articulate this point.

(5) Adrienne Rich, "Credo of a Passionate Skeptic," Los Angeles Times (Sunday March 11, 2001). The article can be found on the "Modern American Poetry" web site, maintained by Cary Nelson: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps /index.htm.

(6) Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1988). Citations to the text will appear parenthetically by page number.

(7) Luis Valdez, Actos (San Juan Bautista, California, 1971), 2. H Teatro Campesino, an offshoot of Mexican avant-garde, Mexican/Chicano popular traditions, and the San Francisco Mime Troop, was active in the 1960s and 1970s.

(8) Lius Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992), 94.

(9) Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52.