Activism & Protesting

An authoritative, richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art. Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms. Spanning continents and centuries, "Protest!" presents a major new chronological look at protest graphics. Beginning in the Reformation, when printed visual matter was first produced in multiples, Liz McQuiston follows the iconic images that have accompanied movements and events around the world. She examines fine art and propaganda, including William Hogarth's Gin Lane, Thomas Nast's political caricatures, French and British comics, postcards from the women's suffrage movement, clothing of the 1960s counterculture, the anti-apartheid illustrated book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, the "Silence=Death" emblem from the AIDS crisis, murals created during the Arab Spring, electronic graphics from Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, and the front cover of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Providing a visual exploration both joyful and brutal, McQuiston discusses how graphics have been used to protest wars, call for the end to racial discrimination, demand freedom from tyranny, and satirize authority figures and regimes. From the French, Mexican, and Sandinista revolutions to the American civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and the Women's March of 2017, "Protest!" documents the integral role of the visual arts in passionate efforts for change.

"I like a little rebellion now and then," so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements; political, social, and cultural from the Revolution, to abolition, to gay rights, and to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genres, pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, posters, and a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.

Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Among such creator is Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), which has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Meanwhile, critics were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their status as "lesser lights" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates that their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.

The use of print to challenge prevailing ideas and conventions has a long history in American public life. As dissenters in America sought social change, they used print to document, articulate, and disseminate their ideas to others. Protest always begins on the margins, but print is the medium that allows it to reach a larger audience. In" Protest on the Page", scholars in multiple disciplines offer ten original essays that examine protest print culture in America since 1865. They explore the surprising range of dissidents who enlisted print in their causes--from vegetarians and anarchists at the advent of the twentieth century, to midcentury evangelicals and tween comic book readers, to GIs and feminists in the 1970s-80s. Together they demonstrate that print has never been a neutral medium, but rather has been instrumental in shaping the substance of protest and its audiences.