Joy Amidst the Ruins: Gabriel Levine's Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings

I write from Canada. As Levine, similarly situated, observes, these are lands marked by "the dispossessions of colonial modernity" (18) and "the hurt of history" (5), including often-occluded legacies of slavery on Canadian soil and associated contemporary racisms. Although our relationships in Canada, like other settler-colonial states, are marked by "white supremacy, genocide and lived oppression" (7), Levine follows anti-racist and Indigenous scholars in arguing that the present, like the past, is not exhausted by these dynamics. Instead, diverse Indigenous and racialized peoples challenge these relationships of domination, as they "retell stories, learn languages, and reclaim everyday life practices, in the service of creative flourishing in the present" (18).

Levine acknowledges persistent racist, colonial injustices and continuing uprisings against them such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and the Standing Rock protests. Yet his focus is neither on structural inequities nor the more spectacular, mediatized challenges to them. Instead, Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings explores everyday, often under-the-radar vernacular expressions of renewed artistic traditions, emphasizing how these playful reinventions of the past may presage emancipatory futures.

Levine is specifically concerned with the re-imagining of Jewish, Indigenous and settler traditions, each featured in a substantive chapter, prefaced by an introduction and conclusion. The introduction presents a challenge to static, frozen understandings of tradition, and instead explores traditions as inevitably fluid, an act of "translation" from the past into the present. Levine is explicitly concerned with reinvented traditional practices that "expand sociality" (8) beyond the bounds of the colonial and capitalist horizon. Accordingly, the second chapter centers on "a tricked-up and queered out" (76) carnivalesque play on the Jewish Purim festival, while the third chapter critically engages the "sonic mash-up" (169) of the NDN musical group A Tribe Called Red, as well as the creations of a range of Indigenous digital artists. The fourth chapter is focused on the "political" (255) but also literal ferments of "sourdough starters and kombucha mothers" (259); for Levine the "quiet bubbling" (261) of organic substances—home practices retrieved from traditions made nearly obsolete in a world of commodified, sterile food production—is politically suggestive, a reminder of the slow, often invisible work of organizing for progressive social change (262). Together, as the final chapter concludes, these diverse experiments in reinvented tradition are understood as exemplars of a countercultural politics of the everyday—they are hopeful in their promise for "new collective projects" despite and beyond the world devastation "of our collective making" (282).

Theoretically, the inspiration is diverse. The chapter on the Purim festival draws both on Walter Benjamin's conceptualization of happiness as "the pursuit of transience in a damaged world" (90) and Sara Ahmed's understanding of queer pleasures as the opening up of "a shared world of profane happiness" (122) to explore "collective practices of shared play, mourning and pleasure" (135). Next, the music of A Tribe Called Red is described as a Freudian psychoanalytic "working through" of colonial trauma (184–5), but also—more than that—a remixing of tradition that recalls Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Simpson's insistence on the powerful remaking of forcibly suppressed knowledges and cultural practices in service of the well-being of Indigenous peoples in the present (192–3). The chapter on do-it-yourself fermentation engages with Marxist critiques of the political limits of such local "petit-bourgeois" (211) experiments, before turning to the Foucauldian explorations of àskesis, "a mode of self constitution as an ethical subject through daily embodied exercises" (214). In home fermentation, this self constitution extends to "multispecies entanglement" (214) that Levine suggests are, limitations notwithstanding, a potential antidote to individualistic, anti-ecological self fashioning that prevails under capitalist relationships.

Across the book, illustrated with more than twenty color plates of various artistic works, there are descriptions of dancing, meal sharing, beer drinking, singing and a bonfire, this last configured with characteristic romantic élan as a moment when the "leftover...