scholarly journals Class struggle and the spatial politics of violence: The picket line in 1970s Britain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diarmaid Kelliher
Keyword(s):  
Class Struggle ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Picket Line

Curb Cuts: Crip Displacements and El Edificio de Enfrente

Somatechnics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-215
Author(s):  
Robert McRuer
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Good Will ◽  
British Embassy ◽  
The Uk

Theorists of neoliberalism have placed dispossession and displacement at the centre of their analyses of the workings of contemporary global capitalism. Disability, however, has not figured centrally into these analyses. This essay attends to what might be comprehended as the crip echoes generated by dispossession, displacement, and a global austerity politics. Centring on British-Mexican relations during a moment of austerity in the UK and gentrification in Mexico City, the essay identifies both the voices of disability that are recognized by and made useful for neoliberalism as well as those shut down or displaced by this dominant economic and cultural system. The spatial politics of austerity in the UK have generated a range of punishing, anti-disabled policies such as the so-called ‘Bedroom Tax.’ The essay critiques such policies (and spatial politics) by particularly focusing on two events from 2013: a British embassy good will event exporting British access to Mexico City and an installation of photographs by Livia Radwanski. Radwanski's photos of the redevelopment of a Mexico City neighbourhood (and the displacement of poor people living in the neighbourhood) are examined in order to attend to the ways in which disability might productively haunt an age of austerity, dispossession, and displacement.

On Strike and On Stage: Migration, Mobilization, and the Cultural Work of El Teatro Campesino

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Integrated Analysis ◽  
Stage Migration ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Picket Line ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Teatro Campesino

This essay looks at the role of labor activism through the cultural work of El Teatro Campesino, the theater company that emerged from the farmworkers’ strike led by Cesear Chavez in Delano, California, during the mid-1960s. Through makeshift performances along the picket line, the farmworkers and their creative visionary, Luis Valdez, innovated Chicano/a performance and created an activist aesthetic that has continued to influence Chicano/a performance and art. Their productions, which started as small improvisational actos, drew from a wealth of transnational influences as well as from a larger proletariat and activist theater tradition. However, El Teatro Campesino adapted these techniques to their local resources. The result created a unique forum that enabled promotional education about unions and workers’ rights to exist side-by-side with themes of self-reflection and criticism concerning the risks of identity politics. The essay explores the methods by which El Teatro Campesino questioned and critiqued ethnic identity and argues for a more complex approach to their earlier picket-line entertainment. It proceeds to consider the importance of cultural production for labor mobilization, and argues for a more integrated analysis of the relationship between activism and art.

Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Common Lands ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Urban liberties—the privileges and responsibilities linked to citizenship—were understood spatially. This chapter argues that urban politics were spatial politics. Space was not only the terrain upon which wider political battles were fought, but the object of contestation in its own right. The chapter identifies an idea of public space, in which ordinary citizens were anxious about and sensitive to its proper use. Spatial politics in towns were specifically about boundaries. Townspeople conceived a connection between three seemingly separate practices: encroachment upon streets and lanes; the segregation of religious houses within ecclesiastical closes; and the enclosure of common lands. In the course of their disputes, townspeople learned to become citizens.

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