In "Against Closure," Phoebe Braithwaite argues that many artists working with the visual lexicon of protest employ a refusal of anticipated narrative closure in order to hold the political moment or conjuncture open to rupture. In three key films made during the turbulent 1980s in Britain, Looking for Langston (1989), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Handsworth Songs (1986), all of which relate to a condition of resistance and the last of which explicitly deals with a series of uprisings that took place in the ethnically mixed Handsworth district of Birmingham, England, in the 1980s, the promise of narrative closure is both proffered and refused. The expectation of violence, in the former two cases, or of resolution, in the latter, is resisted, while the films deploy differing kinds of aestheticism, montage and ‘jouissance’ in their thinking about and evocations of political resistance.
In "Rehearsing the Future: Visualizing Protest in Omar Victor Diop’s Photography," Abigail Celis examines how protest visualities play a key role in performing African photographic futures through the analysis of Liberty: Universal Chronology of Black Protest by the Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop. Liberty is composed of sixteen highly stylized photographs in which Diop stages scenes from over two centuries of struggles for racial and economic equality across different geographic territories. Each photograph is digitally composed of multiple takes, so that Diop or his female counterpart appear multiple times in a single image. At first glance, the series may appear to tell a linear, chronological narrative that renders and remembers a corrective history of Black emancipation in and beyond the African continent. However, building on Angela Naimou’s theorization of rehearsal as narrative labor and on Tina Campt’s analysis of the future anterior strategies of liberation that define Black visuality, this paper will argue that the series functions not as a history of the past but a rehearsal of a future liberation that materializes Afro-diasporic networks of protest. The series articulates a visuality of protest that serves as a performance of the future as much as a mediation of the past.
As a response to the continuous deportation of U.S. childhood arrivals to their countries of birth, Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana explores the diaspora of deported childhood arrivals through the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project. This community-participatory art project is located on the Mexican side of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border. The mural materializes the diaspora of 15 childhood arrivals who have faced deportation or remain illegalized in the U.S. The portraits that make up the mural were painted by participating storytellers. These are accompanied by quick response (QR codes) that can be scanned by visitors who can then listen to first-person digital narratives elaborated by storytellers as part of the Humanizing Deportation project.
“In Comics in Protest: Ms. Marvel and the Muslim Superheroine Patriot,” Aliyah Kahnexplores the association of Muslim superheroines in comics and visual narratives with protest, focusing on Marvel Comics’ Ms. Marvel and the Egyptian webcomic Qahera. She shows that in comics, superheroic Muslim women are typically portrayed as torn between their cultural and religious loyalties to Islam, and their allegiance to the state. This conflict inevitably occurs on the metonymic grounds of dress and costume. In the comics themselves, even the most powerful Muslim female superheroes cannot escape the specter of the hijab and its seeming incompatibility with “Western” democracy and feminism. But what then does it mean to have Muslim superheroines taken up as antigovernment protest symbols that imply a deeper nationalist, patriotic support for women citizens?