Dissenting Images: Engaging the Pedagogy of Protest

On January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of a new president, over 5 million people gathered in cities across the globe for the Women's March on Washington. Although the march was originally conceived of by white women and was given the name "Million Women March," its leadership soon shifted to have women of color in the majority, with Tamika D. Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland as national co-chairs. It was, according to some sources, the largest protest in the history of the planet. Images of sister marches held everywhere from New York City to Sydney, Australia, flooded digital media. Do-it-yourself (DIY) signs hastily constructed with Sharpies, glitter, and cardboard exhorted viewers to "Free Melania" and "Keep Your Politics off My Pussy." Marchers wore jeans, parkas, and elaborate costumes, and groups conducted tightly choreographed collaborative performances.

The march arrived in the wake of many other uprisings, each with its own sights, sounds, and histories, from the crumpled body in the street, military tanks, and "Hands up, don't shoot!" visuals of Ferguson, Missouri, to the stream of videos and audios of police killing black people—Michael Brown, Lacquan MacDonald, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner. These live images were reworked in real time by artists and activists, including Shirin Barghi's painful, powerful # LastWords series, which presents the last words of black people killed by police: "I don't have a gun. Stop shooting" were eighteen-year-old Michael Brown's. The pedagogy of protest—emblazoned across protest signs, television screens, and Twitter—is not new. Under pressure and through collaboration, social movements have always created new language—interruptions—and analytical tools to support shifts in power or to enable openings for the consolidation of old forms of power.

In the spirit of learning from this mobilization and the political moments that wrapped around and infused this women's march and particularly from the pedagogical power of its rich visuality, we invited a range of people we admire, from a breadth of geographical contexts, to select any image from the day and offer a comment. Here are their engagements.

Future Histories?

Sampada Aranke, San Francisco, California

Two days after the election, my students asked me to take time at the beginning of class to help them make sense of it all. Our conversation was both comforting and sobering; for forty-eight hours, my students—many of whom had voted for the first time in this election—walked around like hollow shells, overcome by the shock of recognizing that this nation had fully realized its white supremacist, heteropatriarchial ideal. I, too, was stunned. Even though I have never had any real faith in electoral politics, let alone the structures this process enables, I too was slack-jawed at the November 2016 results. I spent the first twenty minutes of my "Art since 1945" survey course doing a historical read of electoral politics, analyzing the structures of power that keep such processes in place, and contextualizing data released after the results were called. One graphic was particularly telling: the Washington Post had released exit polls that reflected that black women overwhelmingly (92% to 95%) had voted against Trump. I ended our conversation amplifying, "Black women tried to save us."

Figure 1.

Photo credit: Rachel Schreiber.

These data and their implications, to me, are what anticipate this photograph from the Women's March in DC. Two little girls—one white, one black—stand in the middle of a crowd of bodies that surround them. One smiles for the camera; one avoids eye contact. One proudly presents her sign; the other holds hers close to her body. They stand together but signal such a historical difference. This image, for me, embodies the knowledge felt from the painful reality of that cold exit poll data. It reminds us to ask What pasts live between these two girls? What future histories does this photograph anticipate?

Witches for Black Lives

Tara Betts, Chicago, Illinois

a cluster of unseen facesheads tipped, pointed beaksof witches...