Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements by Aziz Choudry

Author:Aziz Choudry [Choudry, Aziz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442607934
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division
Published: 2015-09-29T22:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.1: Blockade during the 16 April 2000 (A16) protests of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. (Photograph by Orin Langelle)

Music, Art, and Political Education

When formal political channels for sharing ideas, analysis, and experiences are not available, and even when they may seem to be, the arts and cultural approaches can provide powerful ways to approach political education work. Creative artists often express this directly, as when Australian singer-songwriter Shane Howard (2010, p. v) states, “Songs hold memory, document history, describe feelings, communicate ideas and are one of the most potent, portable and transmissible vehicles of thought and feeling in the human experience.” Reflecting on South African worker education during the struggle against apartheid, Vally, wa Bofelo, and Treat (2013, p. 470) concur when they write that informal education efforts included “a dizzying range of cultural and mass-media forms, including the writing and production of plays, poetry readings, songs and musical choirs, and dozens of community-based and trade union newsletters. These efforts aimed to provide everything from general literacy and technical work-related skills to running democratic and accountable union structures, organizing, political consciousness and social mobilization.” Large and small, movements and mobilizations across the world have been rich in places where politics, art, and education meet. These forms not only sustain movements but also connect across time and space with other moments, other struggles.

Like so many others, music and the arts have played a major role in my own politicization and political education. For me, Dykstra and Law’s (1994, p. 122) insights are key to thinking about movements and the creative arts in that “the full life of a social movement—poetry, music, petitions, pickets, and so forth—brings culture and politics together in an inherently educative way.” Robin Kelley (2002, p. 10) takes this even further when he writes, “In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.”

But these poetics of struggle can be so politically powerful that some artists have been banned or assassinated. Miriam Makeba’s citizenship was revoked by the apartheid South African state while overseas. Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa was arrested, banned, and exiled by the military junta in her country. Pakistani revolutionary poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib were jailed. Nigerian musician and songwriter Fela Kuti was beaten and jailed for his music’s trenchant social commentary and criticism of the military. Argentinian singer-songwriter Atahualpa Yupanqui was jailed under Juan Perón in the late 1940s and early 1950s for his Communist Party affiliation. Québécoise feminist/independence activist and singer Pauline Julien was one of many people attacked by police and jailed for several days during the 1970 October Crisis. The RCMP’s Security Service spied on Canadian singer Rita MacNeil while surveilling feminist organizations in the 1970s: “She’s the one who composes and sings women’s lib songs,” reported an RCMP memo (Hewitt & Sethna, 2012, p.

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