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“If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be In Your Revolution.”This quote attributed to Emma Goldman, circulates as “buttons, posters, banners, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and in books and articles”1 in the sphere of cultural commodities , quite similar to the circulation of the popular cultural icons. According to Alix Kates Shulman, the famous quote is indeed a result of the conversion of Goldman’s philosophy into a T-shirt design, for which Shulman herself was partly responsible. Asked by an activist for a photo image of Goldman along with her phrase or slogan to print T-shirts for a fundraiser at the celebration marking the end of the Vietnam War, Shulman offered him a passage from Goldman’s biography, Living My Life. The passage Shulman chose deals with Goldman’s introspective thoughts at the dances—today’s equivalent of raves, concerts, or park jams— where she was “one of the most untiring and gayest.”2 On one evening, Goldman ’s dance was interrupted by her comrade, Alexander Berkman, who criticized her behavior as “undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement” and that her “frivolity would only hurt the Cause.”3 In response, Goldman refutes Berkman, which inspired the genesis of the slogan: I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, 1 INTRODUCTION On Popular Cultural Revolution the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything.4 If one can say, in a somewhat stereotypical way, that the stoicism of Berkman represents the traditional left’s approach to revolution, Goldman’s insistence on the totality of revolution finds her coconspirator in an emerging subjectivity of the global popular movement, which David Solnit calls, a “new radicalism .”5 Surfaced on the radar of the international public and media at the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, which shut down the proceedings of the World Trade Organization, the “new radicalism” is partly the deterriotorialization of the Zapatista’s struggle to transcend globalization or neoliberalism: the planetary recolonization by transnational capital and radical undermining of national sovereignty by supranational multilateral polity. Solnit gives a poetic definition to the “new radicalism” that suits the paradigm it represents: The new radicalism is a movement of movements, a network of networks , not merely intent on changing the world, but—as the Zapatistas describe—making a new one in which many worlds will fit. It is a patchwork quilt of hope sewn together with countless hands, actions, songs, e-mails, and dreams into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its pieces.6 I am quite certain that the new radicalism would be a great dance partner for Goldman in the groove of revolution. The undercurrent of subjectivity that runs from Goldman to the global popular movement is a new paradigm where revolution pivots not so much on taking the power of the dominant institution as on reconstruction of society based on radical affirmation of desire and life force both on collective and individual levels. This eros or passion of revolution , as it were, is what became condensed in the form of a T-shirt design. And the Goldman T-shirt itself corresponds to the structural position that the popular cultural revolution, the central theme of this book, occupies in the totality of revolution. The circulation of the popular cultural revolution, such as the kung fu films and hip hop culture discussed here, takes place primarily in the global cultural commodity market as a deviant by-product of the mass consumer culture . The popular cultural revolution arises from the historical context in which the commodity culture constitutes the infrastructure of communication among the masses, as C. L. R. James in his American Civilization observed of the culture of the Fordist mode of production in early 1950: From Kung Fu to Hip...

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