It always mystifies the education-for-social-change crowd that no one is quite as excited about their pet causes as they are. “While there is no inopportune time to teach protest art, the present moment, marked by a perpetual ‘war on terror’ and the contraction of civil liberties, dramatic and growing inequality, and a remarkably narrow mainstream political spectrum, offers an especially compelling context in which to explore with students the tradition of artworks that seek to challenge injustice, promote oppositional thinking, and spark counter-hegemonic political activism,” Joseph Entin writes in the most recent issue of Radical Teacher. “That is what I set out to do in an undergraduate course called ‘Art and Protest in Twentieth-Century America,’ which I taught at Brooklyn College in 2004 and 2005.”
As you might guess by his use of a variation of the word hegemonic, Entin is not talking about Fox News and talk radio in his article in RT, which bills itself as “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Students and I examined fiction, poetry, drama, photography, and film created in association with a range of progressive subcultures and social movements, including the Greenwich Village bohemians, the 1930s Left, the Beats, Civil Rights and Black Power, Feminism, Chicano/a Rights, and ACT-UP.”
And how did the students like it? “A handful of the students elected to take the class because of the subject matter, but most, I discovered, registered because they wanted or needed a class in American literature or American Studies,” Entin writes.
Now there’s academic freedom at work for you.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
