How to Do Politics with Art
A major issue in the relation of art to the rest of society is the question of how art penetrates politics. From the perspective of most art scholars, this is a question of aestheticswhether politics necessarily pollutes and debases the quality of the arts. From the perspective of social science, it has been primarily a question of meaninghow political messages are conveyed through artistic media.
Recent work has begun to broaden the study of the arts and politics beyond semiosis and content focus. Several strands of scholarship are converging around the general issue of the social relationships within which art takes political form, that is, how art and artists do politics. This perspective of doing moves analysis beyond addressing the meaning of culture, to focus on the ways that art is embedded inand intervenes insocial relationships, activities, and institutions.
This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from France and the United States to investigate these directions and themes by exploring the question of how to do politics with art from a comparative standpoint, putting sociological approaches in conversation with other disciplinary prisms. It will be of interest to scholars of social movements and politicization, the sociology of art, art history, and aesthetics.
Violaine Roussel is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris 8, France, and Affiliated Faculty at the University of Southern California, USA.
Anurima Banerji is Assistant Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Routledge Advances in Sociology
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/SE0511
1 Algorithmic Cultures
Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies
Edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge
2 Becoming Anorexic
A Sociological Study
Muriel Darmon
3 European Social Integration and the Roma
Questioning Neoliberal Governmentality
Cerasela Voiculescu
4 How To Do Politics With Art
Edited by Violaine Roussel and Anurima Banerji
5 Urban Music and Entrepreneurship
Beats, Rhymes and Young Peoples Enterprise
Joy White
6 Multigenerational Family Living
Evidence and Policy Implications from Australia
Edited by Edgar Liu and Hazel Easthope
7 Sociology of Crisis
Myrto Tsilimpounidi
8 Praxeological Political Analysis
Edited by Michael Jonas and Beate Littig
9 Austere Histories in European Societies
Social Exclusion and the Contest of Colonial Memories
Edited by Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willn
10 Habermas and Social Research
Between Theory and Method
Edited by Mark Murphy
How to Do Politics with Art
Edited by Violaine Roussel and Anurima
Banerji
First published 2017
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2017 Violaine Roussel and Anurima Banerji
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roussel, Violaine, editor. | Banerji, Anurima, editor.
Title: How to do politics with art / edited by Violaine Roussel and Anurima Banerji.
Description: New York : Routledge, [2017] | Series: Routledge advances in sociology ; 192 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022080| ISBN 9781472473455 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315587127 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: ArtsPolitical aspects. | Arts and society.
Classification: LCC NX650.P6 H69 2017 | DDC 701/.03dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022080
ISBN: 978-1-4724-7343-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-58712-7 (ebk)
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Contents
VIOLAINE ROUSSEL AND ANURIMA BANERJI
WILLIAM G. ROY
LILIAN MATHIEU
BLEUWENN LECHAUX
ANURIMA BANERJI
AUDREY MARIETTE
STEVEN J. ROSS
VIOLAINE ROUSSEL
APARNA SHARMA
Anurima Banerji is Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where she teaches dance and performance studies. Her articles and reviews have been published in the journals About Performance, Economic and Political Weekly, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Women and Performance, and the collection Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, edited by Andr Lepecki and Jenn Joy (2009). She is author of the monograph Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State, forthcoming from Seagull Books.
Bleuwenn Lechaux is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Rennes II and Research Fellow at Arnes-CNRS in France. Her main research areas focus on activism, art practices, professionals careers, as well as comparisons between France and the United States. With Violaine Roussel, she has co-written a book on the involvement of American artists against the war on Iraq (Routledge, 2010). She has also published various articles on the intersections between art and politics through public performances in Paris and New York (as in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2010, and Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2011), as well as on comparative research (Terrains & Travaux, 2012), and a book chapter, De quoi nous parle un terrain qui parle bien, on social sciences methodology applied to the theatre world (in Exploiter les difficults mthodologiques, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). Since 2013, she has conducted research on the effects on individual trajectories of activism in French 1968s radical Left organizations, unions, and feminist collectives.
Audrey Mariette is Associate Professor at the University of Paris VIII and member of the CRESPPA-CNRS (Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris/Center for Sociological and Political Research of Paris). Her PhD thesis, Social cinema and the boundaries of commitment: The sociology of a label between art and politics (2008), deals with the social cinema label as it has been defined in France since the mid-1990s. Her study takes into consideration the trajectory of the labelled films, from their production to their reception. Mariette has published several articles from this work, including in the
