Protest, as an integral part of public culture since the 19th century, is today deeply engraved in the minds of young people as well as left-wing thinkers. Protests were initially composed mostly of proletarians until the 1960s, when college students from the New Left, the descendants of the French and American middle classes, became involved as protesters. Bob Dylan's lyrics document the changing culture of protest during the years of agitation, as well as the changing discourse of proletarian revolution. Geographically, liberation shifted from intervention in the public sphere to the liberation of the private individual body; at the level of knowledge and discourse, from an intellectual emphasis to a sensual redistribution; and in artistic form, from the straightforward notion of political protest to the notion of artistic selfhood and and the selfhood of life. Bob Dylan used the pop music industry, which is full of the power of cultural capital, to update the classic discourse of pop music and to give the audience an embodied way of experiencing it, injecting the global pop culture industry with the power to liberate the audience. Bob Dylan's public performances focus on the chanting of lyrics, and the verbal power of his performances is intertwined with the public protests of the 1960s in the American sense of John Searle's “words for things”. The culture of protest encompassed in Bob Dylan's art rejects notions of reversing status, eliminating hierarchy, and presupposing distance. In the performance space of his music, the hierarchical distance between singer and audience is eliminated, and community between singer and audience, and between audience and audience is no longer necessary, as his art makes room for personal experience and private life, resulting in a sense of proletarian liberty and emancipation that happens at the end of the performance.

Toward the end of her recently published Eloge de la traduction, protesting in typically rebellious mode against the inhumanity of the migrant camps in Calais, the distinguished French Hellenist, philologist, and theorist of the ‘untranslatable’, Barbara Cassin, reflects on the deeply apposite word ‘entre’ in French, split as it is between the prepositional Latin root inter-, -- thus pivotal to any thinking of difference and translation, or of any interval between two -- and as an imperative form of the verb entrer (to enter); in the context of migration and the refugee crisis, it becomes thus for her the most hospitable word on the border separating insider from outsider, while at the same time figuring translation at the heart of the deeply ambivalent nature of hospitality.

Somewhat surprisingly, readers of Tony Hillerman’s extraordinary Diné/Navajo crime novels have never paid attention to the fascinating role that translation, more often untranslatability, plays in many of them. This often comes at quite pivotal moments in the plot and is crucial to the process of interpreting and reading, both metaphorically and literally, as the two central characters and tribal policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, set out to solve the most puzzling and seemingly impenetrable of crimes, in the time-honoured mode of detection as decryption.

As well as thrilling and compelling story-telling, I see Hillerman’s novels as culturally significant in their treatment of the complex question of communicability between contemporary Native American communities (principally Diné, Hopi and Zuni), and their richly diverse language, myths, spiritual beliefs and ceremonies (notably what can or cannot be spoken about), and the non-Native world that surrounds them. The novels also dramatize the forms of protest available to these communities in the context of the longer devastating history of American colonial oppression and cultural eradication. I will focus my own reading on two such ‘scenes of translation’, from Talking God (1989) and Coyote Waits (1990), arguing that alongside translation and untranslatability, the shape-shifting figure of anamorphosis is mobilised to powerful and telling narrative effect by Hillerman.

References

Barbara Cassin, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : Dictionnaire des intraduisibles : Paris : Seuil/Le Robert, 2004. [English translation, Emily Apter et al eds, Dictionary of Untranslatables, Princeton University Press, 2014).

Barbara Cassin, Eloge de la traduction [In praise of Translation]. Paris : Fayard, 2016.

Tony HIllerman, Talking God. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.

Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.

This presentation explores Parallel Polis as a dynamic framework for protest cultures across two distinct historical and geopolitical contexts: dissident movements in 1970s Czechoslovakia and contemporary globalized art collectives such as the Propeller Group. Both cases illustrate the creation of autonomous spaces that, while deeply rooted in local histories, also engage with transnational influences. This talk examines Parallel Polis as an enduring strategy of cultural resistance and creative innovation by juxtaposing underground samizdat networks with art installations that critique power structures. This comparative analysis highlights how protest cultures adapt to shifting sociopolitical landscapes while maintaining continuity in their tactics and philosophies.

After having been involved in the Hong Kong protests of 2019, Chung Siu-hei left the city and carried on the struggle for self-determination abroad, through an online, participatory performance. "In Search of Our Common Ground" involved a physical audience in Stockholm and Zurich, as well as an online audience located in from Hong Kong. Together, they corrected and rewrote a manifesto provided by the artist, just as citizens of a democracy would amend and rewrite a law.

Concurrently, as the Hindu-nationalist parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act targeting the Muslim community (11 December 2019), the theater group Jana Natya Manch (“People’s Theater Platform”) created an inclusive, participatory performance to counter the discriminatory law. "We are the People of India" took place in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the suburbs of New Delhi and within protests against the CAA in the center of the city (as well as online, like Chung's performance, during the pandemic).

Not only did both of these performances shatter the wall that traditionally separates performers and spectators, but they also crossed the border that traditionally separates political arts from political action. These performances amounted to protests. They were devised by theater makers who were themselves—their artistic activity aside— protesters, and they turned silent spectators into vocal citizens. The script was their original creation but was based on official documents. The artists were the original leaders of the performances, but their part faded as they redistributed speech and action to participants.

Based on fieldwork with theater makers and active audiences, this comparative presentation will present analogous contributions of contemporary artists to current politics and question the formal separation between artistic and political action. It will situate these works within a geography of people’s theaters—referring to pioneering figures such as Romain Rolland, Bertolt Brecht, Utpal Dutt or Augustine Mok Chiu-yu—and speak to common debates in the humanities and the social sciences that pertain to the concept of “democracy” today. As they involve participants in the public space and address burning issues, people’s theaters lead to protest performances.