Abriendo Brecha III: Activist Scholarship on Crisis, Politics, and Performance
February 16-18, 2006
Crisis, Politics, and Performance reflects immediate and long-term trends in current activism. We understand activist scholarship to be research and creative intellectual work in alignment with communities, organizations, movements or networks working for social justice.
Crisis : a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent- has been rhetorically useful for the separation of politics from democratic debate. For example, policies of neglect, indifference, and hostility structured the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and across the Gulf South; the language of "crisis" shifted attention away from the structural causes behind this suffering. The ongoing performance of "crisis" in the political realms that shaped Katrina and other disasters calls for an activist analysis of "crisis" and "politics." We call for a discussion of performances that strengthen, disrupt, maintain, challenge, or transform the depoliticized "crisis as usual" facing the Americas.
Politics: Politics is often reduced to "crisis management"-removing a disaster from the practice of politics, reducing deaths and violence to a random outcome of nature, the free play of market forces, or an unpredicted act of terror. In "border emergencies" in Arizona and New Mexico, "Drug Wars" in Mexico and Colombia, and "natural disasters" like AIDS across the Greater Caribbean, policy makers select aspects of the emergency facing communities on the margin. These "crises" maintain the policies that foster the state of emergency. This definition of politics is deeply hostile to the practice of democracy. In response, many in these crises have begun the process of defining and demanding the basic conditions of life.
Performance: Whose bodies count in a crisis? Performances-whether spontaneous, repeated, deeply scripted, or disruptive-have been key to reinvigorating the cultural dimensions of struggle over resources in our societies. Performance can also refer to the ways communities and individuals can outstrip the "crisis management" capacity of state and private authorities to appropriate these demands. Performance asks us to think through whose bodies count, whose memories resonate, and whose desires carry through into the public realm. How can activist performance intervene in the politics of crisis? This question returns us to long-term trends in current activism. There are activists across different communities pushing to build situations that do not fall under nationally restrictive crises. There must be more developments that can be discussed across labor rights, queer organizing, sustainability, educational struggles, anti-police brutality movements, etc.
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