I research and write about culture and activism, specifically the role of art and performance in social movements. My book The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism (University of Michigan Press, 2024) analyzes the visual, literary, and performance art created by young activists of color working in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)’s network and the local people they served in the U.S. South and California. This book places cultural production at the center of contemporary engagement with civil-rights-era memory and works to theorize social movements from the art-objects created within them. For performance and other kinds of art emerging within the framework of cultural activism, the object functions less as representative of the social movement, and more of a provocative framework for meaning-making to happen in the community. The archive of cultural activism analyzed in the book provides a glimpse into how local people reacted to civil rights activism and how their participation changed what activists did and how they used their resources. Over the arc of the book, I show how activists transformed their platform of integration and civil rights in response to the local people’s demands for labor reform and economic self-determination.
You can read more about the context for my book in Routledge Companion to the Literature of the U.S. South. Eds. Katherine Burnett and Monica Miller (see “Activism”) and The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, edited by Harialos Stecopoulos (see “Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement”)
Other Scholarly Writings:
“Toni Cade Bambara’s Literary Activism in Atlanta” (2022) forthcoming in a special issue on Atlanta in Studies in the Literary Imagination eds. Matthew Dischinger and Gina Caison.
“Stowaway Stories and Mythological Realism in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.” (2021) in Crossings: The Journal of Migration and Culture. Volume 12.1, April 2021, pp. 331-346(16).
“Designing Latinidad: Circum-Gulf South Migration and Contemporary Gentrification in Ybor City” The Global South , Vol. 12, No. 1, Caribbean Transmigration in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Reimaginings and Globalizing Conditions (Spring 2018), pp. 89- 111.
“The Activist Turn in American Studies: A Pragmatic Response from the South.” (2016) PMLA 131.1, 170-81.
“On Strike and On Stage: Migration, Mobilization, and the Cultural Work of El Teatro Campesino.” American Studies in Scandinavia 46.1, 103-121.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder 