Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest

Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. RICHARD FOX and ORIN STARN. eds. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997; 279 pp. This volume offers a wide range of case studies and theoretical discussions of the politics of betweenness - the and political space between violent revolution and everyday resistance. With the decline of revolutionary movements and the travails of post-revolutionary societies such as Cuba and Ethiopia, members of marginalized groups have engaged in yet do not seek the total overthrow of the social order (p. 3). Under the auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation, the volume editors, Richard Fox and Orin Starn, brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines to foster dialogue about the midways of mobilization among diverse movements - from environmental movements in India to indigenous media in Australia and peasant in Peru. Among the themes that the volume explores are the politics of (re)membering past social protest, the engagement of movements with new technologies such as video production and biotechnical-based conservation, and the articulations of the local and the global. The concepts that provide a theoretical umbrella for the volume, betweenness and cultural politics, are offered not to generate static models of but rather as points of departure for understanding how cultural representations play a pivotal role in the formation and maintenance of social protest (p. 6). Under this umbrella fit a variety of approaches and emphases that do not necessarily adhere to more traditional notions of social movements based on protests and demand-making. For example, Yoshinobu Ota, in his contribution Appropriating Media, Resisting Power: Representations of Hybrid Identities in Okinawan Popular Culture, focuses on how island activists through theater and television integrate elements of U.S., Japanese, and Okinawan cultures to articulate a new sense of identity. The ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson, in her contribution Abbey Lincoln's Straight Ahead: Jazz in the Era of the Civil Rights Movement, shows how AfricanAmerican Jazz musicians challenged racism through their music and struggles for control over clubs and record companies. In both cases struggles over identity and culture influence and are conditioned by wider struggles (such as the civil rights movement in the case discussed by Monson). These cases highlight the complex interaction between social and the production of alternative versions of identity and history. As Fox and Starn note in their introduction to the volume, these interactions must be understood in terms of specific historical and intersections - neither popular culture nor music are necessarily implicated in social protest. The editors view culture as a creative process that gets made into (usually temporary and short-lived) structure as people become conscious and learn to cope with historical events (p. 8). The contributions to the volume that focus on how activists have (re)interpreted the histories of in their countries are especially relevant for this project. In articles on Peru, Korea, and Brazil contributors show how the meanings associated with revolution and in the 1980s are a major element of how members of activist groups have (re)imagined social in the 1990s. Orin Stam, in his article Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in Peru's Andes, describes how members of peasant groups organized against the Shining Path. While the Peruvian army supported these groups, Starn convincingly argues that Andean peasants did not act as military pawns but rather had their own agenda in rejecting the Shining Path's violence and attempts to limit participation in regional markets. Starn emphasizes that the reasons that peasants engaged in counter-revolution are complex and varied as are their hopes for a better future. …