Introduction: Repertoires of Engagement in Motion

Abstract

Perspectives on artistic engagement in political protest have undergone a profound renewal. Yet debate on the links between art and politics is certainly nothing new. From engaged art to 'art for art's sake' at the other end of the spectrum, the engaged artist has represented an archetypal figure since the end of the nineteenth century. But in studies on political protest, artistic intervention has long been treated as something marginal. In such works, art essentially manifests itself in its contributions to shaping and disseminating the cause, and in the figure of engaged artists and their ties to partisan apparatuses. The social and political sciences have, however, recently seen a re-evaluation of the challenges of situating the place of art within politics, which has essentially followed two lines of reflection.First, political aesthetics scholars have argued that "not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic" (Sartwell, 2010: 1). Protesting about the political order thus involves producing protest aesthetics that challenge dominant ideologies and representations, environments and media, and a dominant aesthetic in which the power of regimes is incarnated (Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots, 2014) (in a manner not dissimilar to Stuart Hall's [1982] analyses of hegemonies). This situates us within what some have called an 'aesthetic turn' in political science. It highlights the political contribution of artistic expression, not as engaged art, which Roland Bleiker argues is just another means of delivering a political message, but where artists "challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent the political [… which has] the potential to engender reflection that could open up to political and ethical insights" (Bleiker, 2009: 8). This brings us back to Jacques Rancière, who argued that the aesthetic becomes political when it calls into question the common norms of discourse and of thought (Rancière, 2000).The second current of analysis emerged from the sociology of social movements. Without necessarily making the aforementioned epistemological role the heart of artistic political intervention, a whole field of research has developed over the past twenty years concerning the place of art, and music in particular, in protest (Eyerman and Jamison, 1998;Danaher, 2010;Gromis and Roy, 2013). As Balasinski and Mathieu observed in 2006, how these links interweave within social movements has remained under-researched, and they open up new lines of research in their book Art et contestation (Art and Protest) (2006). Since then, various studies on artistic activism, particularly