Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice.

9781439916988

Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice

Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz

Temple University Press

2019

271 pages

$32.95

Insubordinate Spaces

HM654

The authors contend that new practices, politics, and polities are emerging inside what they call "insubordinate spaces," as people enact new identities, identifications, affiliations, and alliances as forms of resistance, using insubordination, improvisation, and accompaniment as tools within concrete spaces and places, due to the subordination of democratic opportunities and aspirations in major social institutions through the privatization of public resources, the militarization of international relations, the commodification of all aspects of human interaction, and the mass criminalization and incarceration of specific populations. They consider the challenges facing people involved in social justice in an era when social institutions have been reconfigured to conform to a market society and explore projects responding to crises in the areas of education, the arts, and activism. They discuss the concepts of accompaniment, konesans, and balans that fueled Jean-Bertrand Aristide's lavalas movement in Haiti, as well as Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the middle run; the projects and insubordinate practices of the Idle No More movement by indigenous people in Canada; acts of convening outside commercial culture instigated by son jarocho music performance and Fandango celebrations in Mexico and the American Southwest, the performance art of Chingo Bling, and the installation art of Ramiro Gomez; the mass protests in Ferguson, Missouri, responding to police killings of black youths; the challenges posed by hegemonic knowledge projects; developing cultures of accompaniment for insubordinate spaces within the subordinating institutions of college and university research and teaching; and how activists, artists, and academics have learned to use improvisation and accompaniment to conduct the struggle and improve social relations, practices, and institutions. (Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)