
Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán
Edward J. McCaughan
McCaughan argues that the social power of activist artists emanates from their ability to provoke people to see, think, and act in innovative ways. Artists, he claims, help to create visual languages and spaces through which activists can imagine and perform new collective identities and forms of meaningful citizenship. The artists' work that he discusses remains vital today—in movements demanding fuller democratic rights and social justice for working people, women, ethnic communities, immigrants, and sexual minorities throughout Mexico and the United States. Integrating insights from scholarship on the cultural politics of representation with structural analyses of specific historical contexts, McCaughan expands our understanding of social movements.
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About Edward J. McCaughan
Reviews for Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán
Elaine Carey
Hispanic American Historical Review
“. . . [A] broad and politically sensitive addition to the English-language literature on three contemporaneous social movements whose demands and achievements continue to reverberate in the contemporary art worlds of Mexico City, Oaxaca, and California.”
Christopher Michael Fraga
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
“Overall, McCaughan’s book is an excellent resource for scholars interested in the cultural dynamics of social movements or who have an interest in the Chicano movements of the late 1960s. As text, the book would be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses addressing art and social movements.”
Katherine Everhart
Mobilization
“Based on extensive research and informed by the perspective of a witness to and participant in the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, Art and Social Movements carefully attends to the cultural and artistic dimensions of recent social movement history and experience.”
Bruce Campbell
Journal of Latin American Studies
This book offers a detailed and fascinating exploration of the work of a generation of Mexican artists during the decades that followed the 1968 student revolution. . . . The real strength of the book is that the author, as a sociologist, is always keen to place art and artistic practice in a wider context.”
Annette Jorgensen
Visual Studies
“Masterful. . . . The value of a transdisciplinary lens surfaces in the diverse bodies of knowl¬edge activist artists draw on ‘to produce a deeper knowledge of the social world’ they inhabit (165). Clear in McCaughan’s analysis is the ability of art¬ists to draw from the works of philosophers, writers, and historians to further promote movement efforts.”
Daniel Sarabia
Social Forces