Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada offers two separate but interconnected strategies for reading alternative culture in Canada from the 1940s through to the present: first, a history of radical artistic practice in Canada and, second, a collection of eleven essays that focus on a range of institutions, artists, events, and actions. The history of radical practice is spread through the book in a series of short interventions, ranging from the Refus global to anarchist-inspired art, and from Aboriginal curatorial interventions to culture jamming. In each, the historical record is mined to rewrite and reverse Canadian art history—reworked here to illuminate the series of oppositional artistic endeavours that are often mentioned in discussions of Canadian art but rarely acknowledged as having an alternative history of their own. ?p Alongside, authors consider case studies as diverse as the anti-war work done by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal and Toronto, recent exhibitions of activist art in Canadian institutions, radical films, performance art, protests against the Olympics, interventions into anti-immigrant sentiment in Montreal, and work by Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas. Taken together, the writings in Imagining Resistance touch on the local, the global, the national, and post-national to imagine a very different landscape of cultural practice in Canada.

It examines political economy of neoliberalism and curates contemporary case studies of resistance and alternative organizing in India.

The concept of animal resistance is now reaching a wide audience across the social media landscape. Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era offers an overview of how animals resist human orderings in the context of capitalism, domestication, and colonization. Exploring this understudied phenomenon, this book is attentive to both the standpoints of animal resisters and the ways they are represented in human society. Together, these lenses provide insight into how animals’ resistance disrupts the dominant paradigm of human exceptionalism and the distancing strategies of enterprises that exploit animals for profit. Animals have been relegated to the margins by human spatial and ideological orderings, but they are also the subjects of their own struggle, located at the center of their liberation movement. Well-researched and accessible, with over fifty images that aid in understanding both the experiences of and responses to animals who resist, Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era is an important contribution to scholarship on animals and society. The text will appeal to a broad audience interested in the relationships between humans and the other animals with whom we share this planet.

A collection of the words of women spaning some 26 centuries from every corner of the earth and from many cultures.

Winner, 2021 Ray and Pat Browne Edited Collection Award, given by the Popular Culture Association How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Gautam Chakravarty explores representations of the event which has become known in the British imagination as the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers, Chakravarty shows how narratives of the rebellion were inflected by the concerns of colonial policy and by the demands of imperial self-image. He goes on to discuss the wider context of British involvement in India from 1765 to the 1940s, and engages with constitutional debates, administrative measures, and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian novel. Chakravarty approaches the mutiny from the perspectives of postcolonial theory as well as from historical and literary perspectives to show the extent to which the insurrection took hold of the popular imagination in both Britain and India. The book has a broad interdisciplinary appeal and will be of interest to scholars of English literature, British imperial history, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (which asks for a “poetics”), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the contributions here is their focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual arts, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues including the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; the body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; and the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader with a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the body–image relationship, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.