ABSTRACT

This book analyses dissent and its manifestations in movements of social and political transformation across communities and cultures. It shows how these movements create ruptures in the structures of power, and social hierarchy; expressed through songs, slogans, poetry and performances. The chapters in the book explore these sites of transgression and the imprint they leave on culture, politics, beliefs and the collective society – via music and poetry as in the Bhakti movement or through feministic theories born in post-World War Europe. It also explores how these dynamic movements generate alternate spaces within which the self, identity and collective purpose take new forms and find new meanings as they travel.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities, literature, history, sociology, politics and culture studies.

chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction

The dynamics of dissent: theorizing movements for inclusive futures

chapter 2|14 pages

Conversations across abstractions

A silent movement by the poet-wayfarers 1

chapter 3|17 pages

“What knowledge is this that an old woman understands better than a learned man?” 1

Hacking special knowledge in late medieval Europe, a provocation

chapter 5|13 pages

Kabir Suman

The child and father of movements

chapter 6|22 pages

Lotus and labrys

The role and legacy of a Buddhist young women’s movement and the young lesbian feminist movement in Wellington, New Zealand at the end of the millennium

chapter 7|17 pages

Perspectives on Japan’s anti-nuclear movements

The effectiveness of social movements?

chapter 8|20 pages

Ressentiment as false transcendence

How transformative dissenting political and social movements can create inclusivity

chapter 9|12 pages

Song of the sawngs

Transformation of a cultural protest and the role of nationalist politics

chapter 10|17 pages

‘We shall rise’

Intimate theory and embodied dissent

chapter 11|15 pages

Women in Black

A women’s peace movement

chapter 12|3 pages

Afterword

Inclusive futures and dissenting visions