Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas

This collection promises to be a cornerstone in the field of performance studies and human rights activism. By mixing scholarly chapters with artists’ manifestos or “interruptions” it promotes the idea of the collective work between academia and social movements. Not only is it very timely, theoretically savvy, and well written, it also brings together scholars, activists, artists, and artivists in a very fluid, collective approach, something many of us strive to do.”

―           Paola S. Hernández, University of Wisconsin, USA

This book charts the changing frontiers of activism in the Americas. Travelling Canada, the US, the US-Mexico border, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Indigenous territories on Turtle Island, it invites readers to identify networks, clusters, and continuities of art-activist tactics designed to exceed the event horizon of the performance protest. Essays feature Indigenous artists engaging in land-based activism and decolonial cyberactivism, grass-roots movements imagining possible futures through cross-sector alliance building, art-activists forwarding tactics of reinvention, and student groups in the throes of theatrical assembly. Artist pages, interspersed throughout the collection, serve as animated, first-person perspectives of those working on the front lines of interventionist art. Taken together, the contributions offer a vibrant picture of emergent tactics and strategies over the past decade that allow art-activists to sustain the energy and press of political resistance in the face of a whole host of rights emergencies across the Americas.

Winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and recipient of an Honourable Mention for the Patrick O'Neill Prize administered by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. 

Project Artists:

- The Great Collective Cough-In – L.M. Bogad

- Le Temps d’une Soupe – ATSA

- For Freedoms – Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman

- Down with Self-Management! Re-Booting Ourselves as Feminist Servers – subRosa

- Journey for Activism and Sustainability Escola de Ativismo

- Unstoppable – micha cárdenas, Patrisse Cullors, Chris Head and Edxie Betts

- Listen to Black Women – Syrus Marcus Ware

- Notes on Sustainable Tools – Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, with Suné Woods

- The Mirror Shield Project – Cannupa Hanska Luger

- The Human Billboard Project – Leah Decter, with Stop Violence Against Aboriginal Women Action Group