Cultural activism as resource: Pedagogies of resistance and solidarity

Abstract

This article engages with the notion that literature and other forms of cultural production are themselves resources. This idea becomes especially suggestive in relation to the cultural activism of international solidarity movements, which deploy artistic works as sources of information and inspiration for “distant issue” activism. Focusing on documentary films and novels circulated among anti-apartheid and Palestine solidarity activists in the long 1970s, the article explores the ways in which such works provide theorizations of the resource-value of cultural activism, particularly in its aesthetics of resistance and emphasis on the documentary real. These works advocate a comprehensive understanding of the political calculations and commitments of domestic activists, and seek to preserve and sustain their ideas for transnational resistance movements to mobilize in response to intensifying resource-based crisis, including the struggles over distribution, access and control that are yet to come.

Keywords:

• Palestine
• South Africa
• resistance
• solidarity
• cultural activism
• documentary realism

Notes

1. My thanks to Faten Hussein for this observation and for identifying the poem by Rashid Hussein.