Inspired by Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975), this seminar explores the connection between arts (literature, film, performance, and visual culture) and political activism across centuries marked by uprisings and mass movements against colonialism, imperialism, autocracy, occupation, religious fundamentalism, and fascism. The seminar aims to understand how revolutionary desires and feelings, images, and stories are translated; how they make resistance visible; cross borders; and operate as cultural weapons against domination, repression, and control. Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible” provides our starting point; protest functions by reconfiguring “what is seen and to be recognized.” Benjamin’s insistence that “artworks should be represented from the standpoint of their struggle for existence” and Jameson’s claim “cultural revolution coexists with various modes of production, and their contradictions move to the very center of political, social, and historical life” extend this framework. Fanon’s “On National Culture” and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” go further, framing revolutionary aesthetics as a means of giving voice to those excluded from dominant orders of representation. 

Recent youth- and Gen Z–led movements in Sri Lanka (2022); Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement (2022); Bangladesh (2024); Nepal (2025); Madagascar and Morocco (2025); the very recent India’s Cockroach Party protest in 2026; and other movements across the world, along with longstanding struggles like the anti-apartheid movement, Fourth-wave feminism, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, did not just use art; they were partly built through it. In Dhaka, walls became canvases for graffiti, murals, cartoons, and poetic verse; across Asia, protesters waved the One-Piece pirate flag and shared memes as a shared language of dissent; in Iran, murals and protest chants became inseparable from the movement’s identity. Such approaches justify what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look” and what Azoulay names “civil imagination,” examining the arts, visual culture, and political realities asserted against the state’s monopoly. The poems, films, songs, and counter-archives created from these movements are not just reactions to politics but spaces where political memory is preserved and shared across borders and generations.

We welcome and encourage submissions from scholars at all career stages on underrepresented areas, languages, cultures, and Indigenous traditions. Subjects are not limited to the following:

• Street art, photography, graffiti, murals, and public space
• Memes, digital platforms, and networked protest aesthetics
• Counter-archives, testimony, and memoirs
• Translation, circulation, and the style of global movement and protest
• Poetry, song, drama, and performance
• Resistance: Indigenous and subaltern perspectives
• Gender, the body, feminist and queer revolutionary imaginaries
• The afterlives of revolution: defeat, trauma, mourning, and healing