By analyzing the cases present in this volume, the editors develop important steps towards a theory of social change that can adequately address the complex realities and intersectionality of identity (race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality) within and among these new movements.

How does one achieve a sense of freedom and meaning in a confusing, over-bureaucratized, and unequal world? Scott McNall offers the compelling case that we do so by taking a stand to protect our identities and values, and by taking further steps to create a sense of community with like-minded people. Modern social movements have sprung up on the right and left, to provide this sense of community, to seek explanations for why things are the way they are, and to discover what might be done in response. At this critical juncture in American society when divisions over race, class, gender, and government influence persist, movements allow their members to feel they are not trapped by their conditions. Cultures of Defiance and Resistance is an eye-opening account of the 'Antis' - those who stand in opposition to received wisdom and power, who resist the science of climate change, who reject vaccinations, who want to ban GMOs, and those who have resisted what they see as political or cultural oppression, such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party. McNall masterfully explores the goals, narratives, and rhetoric used by groups on the left, right, and center to understand and cope with 21st century America in a time of mass discord, uncertainty, and hostility. In doing so, he reframes social movements for a new era in one of the first cross-comparative books reflecting the entire political spectrum.

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From the Diggers seizing St. George Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon. This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With concise, illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, and includes a number of new activist authors published here for the first time. Cultural Resistance Reader is both an invaluable scholarly resource and a tool for political activists. But most importantly it will inspire everyday readers to resist.

Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship. The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.

Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured--until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.