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ISBN: PB: 9780226042749

ISBN: HB: 9780226042602

University of Chicago Press

May 2013

152 pp.

21.6x14 cm

29 halftones

PB:
£11,50
QTY:
HB:
£42,00
QTY:

Occupy

Three Inquiries in Disobedience

"Mic check! Mic check!" Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy", W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide".You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland", Taussig writes in the opening essay, "and now you can't leave or do without it". Following Taussig's artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter – by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics – Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument".Occupy" stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011's revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment – an occupation itself.

About the Author

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of "Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present", published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also co-editor of the journal "Critical Inquiry".

Reviews

"If you, like I, have been moved, inspired, consternated, and frustrated by the new political disobedience, then read this trio of provocative, thoughtful, and troubling inquiries. With originality and insight, they illuminate both the underlying meaning and consequences of demonstrations ranging from Tahrir Square in Cairo to occupations in Zuccotti Park and everywhere else" – Victor S. Navasky, author of "The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power"