Abstract
In this chapter, we seek to explore tactics that are currently being envisioned by the pluralistic voices of the Left in the era of an authoritarian, nativist, de-regulated vision of the US nation-state. Our case studies include collectively authored texts such as A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda by Indivisible and Debt Resistors Operations Manual by Strike Debt. We also take stock of the client-based tools generated by Safety Pin Box, an enterprise by Black liberationists Marissa Johnson and Leslie Mac. Together, these movements and enterprises signal a proliferation of ‘how to’ manuals encouraging the People to push back against the distribution of inequality that defines the present. These nuts-and-bolt texts mark a return to the genre of the advice manual, now adapted to user-driven platforms such as Google docs, YouTube, blogs, wikis and photo-sharing sites. These advocacy tactics are visible, real-time acts that, through public assembly and performative conduct, become an instrument for Leftist resistance.
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Notes
- 1.
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 72.
- 2.
See also our interview with White in this volume, ‘The Protest Repertoires of Left Activism after Occupy.’
- 3.
We refer, here, to what Zephyr Teachout calls ‘the newly political,’ or people who were drawn to politics for the first time.
- 4.
Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013).
- 5.
Angela McRobbie, ‘Feminism, the Family and the New “Mediated” Maternalism,’ New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 80, no. 8 (2013): 133.
- 6.
Indivisible, A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, updated March 9, 2017 (2016): 6. https://www.indivisible.org/guide/.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Indivisible, ‘Chapter Four: Local Advocacy Tactics That Work,’ 2016. https://www.indivisible.org/guide/advocacy-tactics/.
- 9.
Butler, 67.
- 10.
That figure is according to the findings by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, released June 26, 2017. As of the writing of this chapter (April 2018), the Affordable Care Act remains to be fully repealed. The Kaiser Health News includes a timeline that tracks how the legislation has been altered at state and federal levels since Donald Trump took office. See Julie Rovner, ‘Timeline: Despite GOP’s Failure to Repeal Obamacare, The ACA Has Changed,’ April 5, 2018. https://khn.org/news/timeline-roadblocks-to-affordable-care-act-enrollment/.
- 11.
Indivisible, 18.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
A full recording of the town hall can be accessed on the YouTube channel, Live Satellite News. The constituent from the Better Medicare Alliance Group can be heard at the 20-minute mark of the video. See ‘Arkansas Tom Cotton Hostile Town Hall (PT1),’ YouTube video, 56:19, posted by Live Satellite News, February 22, 2017. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lwuE_yD3Rg8./.
- 14.
Dylan Robinson, ‘Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to Anger, Being Idle No More,’ in Performance Studies in Canada, ed. Marlis Schweitzer and Laura Levin (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 217.
- 15.
Ibid., 217.
- 16.
See Indivisible’s Facebook recording of this exchange, ‘Woman Asks Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) “What Insurance Do You Have?”’ Facebook, posted by Indivisible, February 22, 2017, online video. All quotes from the constituent that follow in this chapter can be accessed on this video or through the full town hall recording on YouTube, cited in the note 14.
- 17.
Indivisible, 18.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
To see the collective imperative for resistance, scroll to the bottom of the homepage for Indivisible Front Range Resistance under the section ‘Taking Action.’
- 20.
See the Sample Call Dialogue on the Indivisible resource page, ‘Hold your Senators Accountable for their TrumpCare Votes,’ https://www.indivisible.org/resource/hold-senators-accountable-trumpcare-vote/.
- 21.
Visit the website, Cory Gardner: Absentee Senator for Colorado, http://gardnertownhall.com/.
- 22.
See Dan Njegomir’s, ‘Coming to Your Town Soon: The Cardboard Cory Gardner!’ Colorado Politics, July 27, 2017. https://coloradopolitics.com/coming-town-soon-cardboard-cory-gardner/.
- 23.
See ‘An Interview with Cardboard Cory,’ Indivisible (IndivisiBlog), October 17, 2017. https://indivisible.org/blog/interview-cardboard-cory/.
- 24.
Cardboard Cory, Twitter post, July 27, 2017, 3:30 p.m. https://twitter.com/CardboardCoryCO/status/890700949815263232.
- 25.
We allude here to J.L. Austin’s formulation of the performative speech act whose felicity is contingent upon a number of conventions and conditions, most notably, its proper authorization; that is, the individual issuing the performative must be appropriate for the invocation and authorized to make it. See J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, Second Edition), 34–35.
- 26.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
- 27.
See Cardboard Cory’s Facebook page, accessed February 22, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/CardboardCoryCo/.
- 28.
See ‘An Interview with Cardboard Cory.’
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2016), 19.
- 31.
Members of the Strike Debt assembly, Occupy Wall Street, Common Notions, and Antumbra Design, 2012. The Debt Resistors’ Operation Manual (2012): v. http://strikedebt.org/The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manual.pdf.
- 32.
Ibid., vi.
- 33.
Members of the Strike Debt assembly et al., x.
- 34.
See Jennifer Spiegel’s sharp analysis of the Quebec student protests in this volume, ‘Beyond the Strike: Creative Legacies of the 2012 Quebec Student Protests.’
- 35.
Members of the Strike Debt assembly et al., vi.
- 36.
Yates, 161–162. Strike Debt’s rolling jubilee events would become pivotal sites for debtor assembly. Launched in the form of a retro ‘telethon’ variety show in November 2012 titled ‘The People’s Bailout’ at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the rolling jubilee became an ingenious and enduring strategy of debt resistance and a tactical response to the federal bailout of the Wall Street. The rolling jubilee events raise funds that are used to purchase defaulted debts from collectors on the secondary debt market at discounted prices, which would then never be collected, effectively erasing debt.
- 37.
Ibid., 84.
- 38.
Ibid., 87.
- 39.
Ibid., 10.
- 40.
Ibid., emphasis in the original, 80.
- 41.
Ibid., 35.
- 42.
See Laura Grattan, ‘Popular Resonances in the 21st Century: The Tea Party and Occupy,’ in Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America, especially her razor sharp critique of whiteness and occupy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 202–212.
- 43.
The August 2014 Ferguson Riots in Ferguson, Missouri, were precipitated by the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager shot six times by police. Months later, in November 2014, the grand jury decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s murder sparked further riots in Missouri and across the United States. The Ferguson Riots were a tipping point for a community that faced daily harassment by police including disproportionate traffic stops, physical searches, ID checks, arrests, and lethal force. Ferguson proved to be a formative moment for the Black Lives Matter movement, a coalition of rights activists and Black liberationists demanding an end to the systemic police violence, mass incarceration, and murder of Black people.
- 44.
Safety Pin Box, ‘What is Safety Pin Box?’ (2016). https://www.safetypinbox.com/home/.
- 45.
See Southern Law Poverty Centre’s post-2016 election hate watch page, ‘SPLC Hatewatch,’ December 16, 2016. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/12/16/update-1094-bias-related-incidents-month-following-election.
- 46.
See Safety Pin Box, Frequently Asked Questions. https://www.safetypinbox.com/faq/.
- 47.
Safety Pin Box, Frequently Asked Questions, ‘Why Is It Called Safety Pin?’ and the comparative chart that follows, ‘Wearing a Safety Pin’ versus ‘Safety Pin Subscription.’
- 48.
Tuck and Yang argue that the act of critically engaging in decolonization should not ‘attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity,’ an argument that also applies to the anti-oppression work of Safety Pin Box. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 21.
- 49.
Ibid., 21.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
These statements can be found on the ‘Subscribe’ page of the site, https://www.safetypinbox.com/subscribe/.
- 52.
See Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza’s article, ‘A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza,’ October 17, 2014. https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.
- 53.
The quotes in this paragraph are from the Safety Pin Box page, ‘Black Women Being.’ https://www.safetypinbox.com/black-women-being/.
- 54.
David Garneau, ‘Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing,’ in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 23.
- 55.
Melissa Gregg, ‘The Limits of Self Help Productivity Lit,’ The Atlantic, April 22, 2016.
- 56.
These statements can be found on the ‘Subscribe’ page of the site, https://www.safetypinbox.com/subscribe/.
- 57.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11.
- 58.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, [1952] 2008), 92.
- 59.
In this way, the Ally Backpack directly cites Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.’ In this foundational piece, McIntosh notes how she has ‘come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.’ See Peggy McIntosh, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,’ Peace and Freedom Magazine (July/August 1989): 10–12.
- 60.
Johnson and Mac, The Ultimate White Ally Glossary.
- 61.
Ahmed, 217.
- 62.
Ibid., 65.
- 63.
Ibid., 66.
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Fanon, Frantz. [1952.] Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2008.
Garneau, David. ‘Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.’ In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 21–41.Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.
Grattan, Laura. Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Gregg, Melissa. ‘The Limits of Self Help Productivity Lit.’ The Atlantic, April 22, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-limits-of-self-help-productivity-lit/479382/.
Indivisible. A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda. Updated March 9, 2017. https://www.indivisible.org/guide/.
———. ‘Chapter Four: Local Advocacy Tactics That Work.’ 2016. https://www.indivisible.org/guide/advocacy-tactics/.
———. ‘How to Plan a Die-In’ From, ‘Save the ACA: Die-in Planning Guide.’ 2017. https://www.indivisible.org/resource/die-in-planning-guide/.
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Alvarez, N., Zaiontz, K. (2019). Performative Conduct for Precarious Times. In: Alvarez, N., Lauzon, C., Zaiontz, K. (eds) Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11557-9_3
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