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In this seminar, we will look at examples of political dissent (texts, sound, and film) ranging from the Puritan dissentress Anne Hutchinson to the Occupy movement. We will discern the reasons for the ongoing discrepancy within American society between (neo)conservative ideologies on the one hand and leftist grassroots radicalism on the other. Right from its inception in Puritan times, the political identity of the (future) United States has been characterized by a rhetoric of dissent (Bercovitch), awkwardly linked to a quasi-religious sense of providential mission. In secularized form, this rhetoric – against European monarchist authority and in favor of America’s imperial mission – was foundational to the revolutionary documents of the United States. But it has also inspired many critical voices from within American society, which continues to have one of the world’s most active countercultures: protests against the Vietnam War in the late Sixties, the Occupy movement of the 2010s, the Black Lives Matter and Idle No More movements of our own time have shaped the identities of generations of young (and some older) people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. We will ask whether these movements are truly revolutionary or ‘merely’ articulations of dissent within the constitutional intellectual framework.
Texts to be purchased:
- Reader (Stud.IP)
- Timothy D. McCarthy, The Radical Reader. A Documentary Reader of the American Radical Tradition. New Press, 2003. ISBN-10: 1565846826
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