SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Rather than considering protest art as singularly revolutionary, disruptive,or unsettling to established power structures per se, this article and the contributions in the special issue explore the complex relation between cultural politics, aesthetics, affect, and resistance. Many of the articles contextualize the ambivalent and nuanced relationship between works of art, culture, and resistance within wider, constantly shifting, multiple, hegemonic discourses, and power structures. These contributions cast a skeptical eye on the notion of resistance. They complicate our understanding of how political and economic contingencies,colonialism, neoliberal market-driven policies, and global and local discourses can work to normalize, appropriate, co-opt, and commodify protest art and resistance. Moreover, they shed light on the transformative potential of art that focuses on the ordinary, or activates affective ties by disrupting hegemonic imaginaries and sensibilities.