RESISTANCE, AGENCY, AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Edited by Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, and Laura Raicovich
Boycott and divestment are essential tools for activists around the globe. Today’s organizers target museums, universities, corporations, and governments to curtail unethical sources of profit, discriminatory practices, or human rights violations. They leverage cultural production—and challenge its institutional supports—to help transform situations in the name of social justice. Assuming Boycott is the essential reader for today’s creative leaders and cultural practitioners, including original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, curators, and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism.
“The brilliant writers and debaters assembled here come at the issue from different angles, all from the central belief that art is never not political. In the end, they are less interested in arguing for or against tactics than they are in advocating an art of political thinking.” —Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic, The New York Times
“Assuming Boycott is an essential contribution to an ongoing, urgent conversation about how artists, writers, and thinkers have time and again created subtle, meaningful, powerful, and vibrant ways to engage the political sphere. This book is a valuable guide to cultural boycotts from South Africa to Palestine.” —Walid Raad, artist, professor, Cooper Union
“Without a trace of left-wing melancholy, the authors offer us an essential guide to the terrain of cultural politics today. With colleagues and comrades like these, one feels not only bolstered but downright emboldened.” —Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archeology, Princeton University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Kareem Estefan [PDF]
I. The Cultural Boycott of Apartheid South Africa
Sean Jacobs, “The Legacy of the Cultural Boycott Against South Africa”
John Peffer, “Art, Resistance, and Community in 1980s South Africa”
Hlonipha Mokoena, “Kwaito: The Revolution Was Not Televised; It Announced Itself in Song”
Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (excerpt)
II. BDS and the Cultural Boycott of Israel
Ariella Azoulay, “‘We,’ Palestinians and Jewish Israelis: The Right Not to Be a Perpetrator”
Noura Erakat, “The Case for BDS and the Path to Co-Resistance”
Eyal Weizman and Kareem Estefan, “Extending Co-Resistance” [PDF]
Nasser Abourahme, “Boycott, Decolonization, Return: BDS and the Limits of Political Solidarity”
Joshua Simon, “Neoliberal Politics, Protective Edge, and BDS”
Yazan Khalili, “The Utopian Conflict”
III. Who Speaks? Who Is Silenced?
Tania Bruguera, “The Shifting Grounds of Censorship and Freedom of Expression”
Naeem Mohaiemen, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Campaign”
Svetlana Mintcheva, “Structures of Power and the Ethical Limits of Speech”
Ann Laura Stoler, “By Colonial Design: Or, Why We Say We Don’t Know Enough”
IV. Dis/engagement From Afar
Chelsea Haines, “The Distant Image”
Mariam Ghani with Haig Aivazian, “52 Weeks, and Engaging by Disengaging”
Nathan Gray and Ahmet Öğüt, “Not Walking Away: Participation and Withdrawal in the 2014 Sydney Biennial”
Radhika Subramaniam, “Loose Connections”
INTRODUCTION: Boycotts as openings
sample chapter: “extending co-resistance”
An interview with Eyal Weizman on BDS and the meaning of co-resistance in Palestine/Israel [PDF]
