Creativity and resistance in a hostile world

Sarita Malik, Churnjeet Mahn, Michael Pierse, Ben Rogaly

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526152831
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope.Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.

1
Radical openness in a hostile world

Churnjeet Mahn, Sarita Malik, Michael Pierse and Ben Rogaly

How can we maintain hope for a more equal world? In this chapter we outline the theory and practice that undergirded our solidarity in the project. The chapter contains some of the readings, the references, the routes, that we all brought to the project to understand how creative forms of resistance have responded to hostile environments, and why. We begin by revisiting bell hooks’ work on ‘radical openness’, not to be confused with the United Nations’ adoption of radical openness as a template for transparent working and resilience. Indeed, one of the elements that our work is attuned to is moments of institutionalisation or co-option which empty the practice of creative resistance – of meaning or purpose beyond the aesthetic. We then move to a discussion of the art of resistance along different kinds of borders and walls, before considering how we use an ‘interruption’ to dominant discourses as a form of resistance.

Revisiting ‘radical openness’ in a hostile world

hooks’ ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’ (1989) is now over thirty years old, but its formulations and imperatives have been activated by a new generation of academics, activists and community groups for whom hooks articulates a politics of hope. One of the defining arguments in hooks’ work is the space for desire, transgression, play and joy at the margins:

I located my answer concretely in the realm of oppositional political struggle. Such diverse pleasures can be experienced, enjoyed even, because one transgresses, moves ‘out of one's place.’ For many of us, that movement requires pushing against oppressive boundaries set by race, sex and class domination. Initially, then, it is a defiant political gesture. Moving, we confront the realities of choice and location. Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, towards that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing? (hooks 1989, 20)

This formulation acts as an imperative to connect our theory to practice. But, more than this, it underlines the importance of rhetorical investigations of marginalisation and oppression for the everyday resistance of people who suffer from the structural inequalities produced by the intersection of race, sex, class and colonisation. ‘Moving’ worlds for hooks involved moving words: from changing her language and accent (losing her ‘thick Southern speech’), to bringing emotions to the heart of political language: to feel and articulate suffering as the starting point to a political praxis. Most importantly, hooks’ writing is proleptic: it agitates for a world that does not yet exist, its revolution is an effort that demands the creation of new space. A similar impulse exists in Marianne Hirsch's writing on contemporary political art that asks us to fight for a world that we cannot fully imagine but whose conditions we can make possible through resistance to state violence:

The encounter with these images and words enjoins us to hear the devastating stories they tell and the inspiring moments they come back to reclaim […] This invitation, to praise, is an invitation to do what we have learned and what we teach, and what sustains us as scholars, teachers, and human beings – to read, to look, and to listen openly and vulnerably. And in thus inviting us to consider what might have been, these words also propel us to imagine and to fight for what might yet be. (Hirsch 2016, 93)

‘Radical hope’ for the future is a phrase that has been used variously to describe active resistance and survival. Jonathan Lear uses Radical Hope (2006) as the title of his study of the last Chief of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups, to try to understand how a community faced by the increasing impossibility of maintaining their land and culture find different forms of resistance through seeking compromised ways to continue their existence. Radical hope, then, is the imperative to move towards a deferred promise of a different world – it is not the utopia of the future, but the impelling power behind everyday forms of resistance against the oppressive forces of state racism, or neoliberal capitalism. But this hope is not blind, or the promise of happiness. Queer and feminist theorists such as Muñoz (2009), Berlant (2011) and Ahmed (2010) have critiqued the idea of happiness through its connection to capitalist forms of aspiration such as the desire for the ‘good life’. Instead, the promise of a better future lies in making the present more bearable:

We need to think more about the relationship between the queer struggle for a bearable life and aspirational hopes for a good life. Maybe the point is that it is hard to struggle without aspirations, and aspirations are hard to have without giving them some form. We could remember that the Latin root of the word aspiration means ‘to breathe.’ I think the struggle for a bearable life is the struggle for queers to have spaces to breathe … with breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility. If queer politics is about freedom, it might simply mean the freedom to breathe. (Ahmed 2010, 120)

Hope as activism and as sustenance has been a driver for the project, but the language we use to describe that hope has had to change. From talking to our collaborators, to talking to our funders as a project, or writing about our ‘impact’ for the university, we were always aware of our role in the academy and how it sometimes sat in tension with our lives as activists or our own personal experiences of marginalisation. hooks’ work is especially helpful here because she insists on recognising the location from which any author speaks. Her own history of coming into academia from ‘that space in the margins, that lived-in segregated world of my past and present’ was remembered as being influenced by ‘those who name themselves radical, critical thinkers’ (hooks 189, 22). We are cognisant of the location from which we are working and its inherent contradictions. It is important to acknowledge that the global North academy itself, and its research endeavours, contain deep structural inequalities within them along axes of race, class and gender. Furthermore, academics often express themselves through language and practices that perpetuate positions of cultural privilege in relation to much of the rest of society – privilege which is experienced particularly by those academics who have long-term or permanent contracts.

hooks holds out an alternative to the practices of erasure that can structure academic research and writing. She offers ‘an intervention’ that completely turns around the relations of dominance that standard academic practice often entails,

[a] message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonised/coloniser. Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators. (hooks 1989, 23)

These words, these feelings, these imperatives, have been at the centre of our work, something we elaborate on further in the next chapter on lived theory. In our diverse settings, we have interrogated what conditions need to change in order to make a space for a form of knowledge or expression that has been silenced or siloed. In some settings this has meant connecting people across real, geographical borders: enabling people at the margins of their own distinct context, and of different nations, to connect. In some settings it has meant drawing on archives that were thought to have been destroyed. Geographically and culturally, we have asked what might connect people who have felt oppression, and how those connections might echo or amplify resistance. Becoming self-reflective and self-critical – our methodological approach to self-reflexivity – is to make oneself vulnerable to the suffering of others while feeling one's own vulnerability. The chapters in the book touch on these issues in the everyday practice of our work. In the next section we move on to a discussion of a type of creative resistance that connected our work: fighting against exclusionary borders.

Art on the borders

Since April 2018 Palestinian youth taking part in the Great March of Return have danced Dabke (a traditional Palestinian dance), played football, shared traditional stories and food and even organised weddings on the Gaza border, employing culture as a powerful expression of resistance, resilience and hope to protest the siege of Gaza and demand their right as refugees to return home, a right enshrined under international law. Despite the bullets fired by Israeli snipers and the tear gas thrown at protestors by the Israeli army, the peaceful marches continue every Friday (at the time of writing this chapter). The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 254 Palestinians were killed and 23,603 injured by Israeli occupation forces in the besieged Gaza Strip between 30 March 2018, when the Great Return March started, and 31 December the same year (Middle East Monitor 2019). The creative acts enacted by the people of Gaza on the border represent the ultimate embodied forms of cultural resistance that cry out to the world for human recognition. As Fadi Abu Shammalah, the executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centers in Gaza, asserts, ‘The singing, the dancing, the storytelling, the flags, the kites and the food are more than symbols of cultural heritage. They demonstrate – clearly, loudly, vibrantly and peacefully – that we exist, we will remain, we are humans deserving of dignity, and we have the right to return to our homes’ (Shammalah 2018). Social media profiled these acts of resistance, with videos of young men and women dancing Dabke on the border going viral in July 2018. Palestinian media and alternative news sites such as Ruptly, BuzzFeed and Group194 dubbed the act as ‘The Great Dance of Return’ (Palestine Chronicle 2018).

In the same year that the Great March of Return began in Gaza, ‘Postcards from Home’ offered a chance for forty-seven Indian and Pakistani artists (1947 being the year of Partition) to combine text and image to create discrete objects that sutured fragile, nostalgic and partial memories (of grandparents’ homes, of places played in as children) with images that pinned these memories to real spaces and moments. The exhibition of this work was shown in Pakistan, and an Indian exhibition was finally agreed. Creating the artistic objects and bringing the artists together (virtually) may have been one thing, but the politics of collections of art, especially those that critique borders, is another. The Wagah-Atari border (on the Indian side, especially) offers a full family day out with the opportunity to buy souvenirs and engage in play of hyper-nationalism, cheering for the Indian soldiers to kick their legs higher than their Pakistani counterparts during a staged performance for visitors. Here the politics of borders, along one of the tensest national lines in the world, is commercialised for tourism and national consumption. But the pomp, the camp, the ceremony, hide older stories of memorialisation at the border. Flowers and gifts left for people lost. Homes and everything those homes held lost, beyond the border. One of the largest movements of refugees in the twentieth century is not commemorated at this border by a statue or a museum. But is there something that can connect those older moments of visceral memorialisation among people whose loss was felt so keenly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• A history of struggle for now
• On radical transformation
• Introduction: Creativity and resistance in a hostile world
• 1 Radical openness in a hostile world
• 2 ‘Lived theory’: the complexities of ‘radical openness’ in collaborative research
• 3 Creative anti-racisms: screen and digital labour as resistance
• 4 Workers: creative resistance to racial capitalism within and beyond the workplace
• 5 Creatively connecting civil rights: co-creation, theatre and collaboration for social transformation in Belfast
• 6 Re-curating a literary utopia: creative resistance in Preet Nagar
• Conclusion
• Index