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The revolution will be improvised: the intimacy of cultural activism
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The revolution will be improvised: the intimacy of cultural activism

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
University of Michigan Press
2024
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.12849979
Appears in  Recent Books by UI Authors
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https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12849979View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism. In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craftmaking. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People's Corporation. Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation's roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore further the improvised, often. ephemeral, works of art activism. Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-203) and index.
 Civil rights Political aspects Social aspects

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