The Art of Protest

An interview with T.V. Reed, author of The Art of Protest and director of American Studies and professor of English at Washington State University. Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs, the Black Panthers without James Brown or Gil Scott Heron, or the AIDS awareness movement without the iconic aesthetics of ACT UP. In The Art of Protest Professor T.V. Reed provides a broad overview of the aesthetics of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that helped shape them. Moreover, it shows the long term importance of these movements to American culture. Throughout, Reed utilizes the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression to reveal how activism continues to remake our world.