Protest Lit 101

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Inevitably when I teach a course dealing with American protest literature—literature that self-consciously aspires to change the world—a student will pipe up at some point and raise some variant of the impertinent question: well, did it? It is tempting at these moments to turn to reliable trump cards like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“It helped spark the Civil War, you know”), The Jungle (“USDA inspections, anyone?”), or Waiting for Lefty (“Strike!”), but the truth is that such shorthand is often more trouble than it is worth. It plays into my students’ expectation that, especially in the case of the art of protest, the work’s “success” is best measured instrumentally, in terms of its impact on traditional political terrain; and by obliging their preference for cut-and-dry answers over imaginative speculation, it threatens to make much of our classroom discussion, revolving as it does around narrative strategies and specific turns-of-phrase, seem beside the point. Taken to an extreme, this impulse to show how protest literature matters in the world can lead to a narrowly empiricist cul-de-sac, where the best admissible evidence follows the formula, “X read Y, then was inspired to do Z.”

So it is nice to see that, among scholars who focus on the conjunction of US literature and social movements, there is often a healthy worry about the dangers of oversimplifying that nexus. In a recent essay on protest art, Paul Lauter poses a series of theoretical questions—what is the relationship between individual creativity and social action? How do we distinguish between works directly involved in social conflict and those that, retrospectively, shape our memory of that conflict? What is the relationship between specific genres and social protest?—then ends with a plug for nuance and irresolution: “The question of protest literature is imbedded in the ambiguity of both of those terms. ‘Protest’ is not, after all, a conventional literary term like ‘iambic pentameter,’ ‘sonnet,’ or ‘fiction.’ It is a social dynamic, and the relationship of art—largely produced by individuals—to such movements is always, at best, ambiguous and conflicted” (Lauter 12). The funky phrase here is “at best,” which I assume is no glitch but a willful provocation. If ambiguity and conflict represent the best case scenario for protest literature, then we should be wary of any artist who claims to speak, unambiguously and with an easy conscience, as the voice of a movement; and we should welcome rather than shy away from the complicated questions of intention and reception that arise, say, when an artist aims for some sort of bull’s-eye and discovers that he has been shooting buckshot, which scatters.

Similarly, in his comparative study of social movement cultures, T. V. Reed takes issue with the currency of the term “cultural politics,” which, he argues, has often been improperly deployed in a way that subsumes the political into the cultural: when cultural resistance is found everywhere, it threatens to be nowhere, too (Reed 289). All artworks may have political facets, Reed suggests, but few artworks will have political resonance if they lack an audience—most often molded by subcultures and social movements—ready to understand them in that manner. Yet, as Reed argues against the grain, these audiences do not simply turn to protest art as a radical-messaging system for their movement; art does not just inspire, exhort, instruct, dramatize movement goals, or tell the history of the movement—as important as those functions are. In addition, a key role of art for a social movement is to “critique and transcend ideology” (303). Art suggests the limits of the movement, admitting pleasures that might be considered guilty and pulling against the drift into dogmatism (299–300): “[A]esthetic texts are always both ideological and in excess of ideology, and their role in and around movements can be to remind activists, who often are tempted by the pressures of political struggle into ideologically reductive positions, that the full lived complexity of cultural life cannot be reduced to any ideological system” (303). Reed, tipping his hat to Walter Benjamin (“The ideological tendency of...