Essential and further academic readings on the intersection between arts, politics and activism! With special thanks to the MA Arts & Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London!
This list is constantly growing, and we are sure there are many things we have missed. Can you think of something you would like to add? Email [email protected] and we will add it!
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford University Press, 2002
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum Impacts, Bloomsbury, UK, 2000
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, trans. Ronald Taylor, Verso, NY, 1990
Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel, Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1998
Badiou, Alan, A Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2005
Baigell, Matthew and Julia Williams, eds. Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Originally published under the title Papers of the American Artists’s Congress, 1936
Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1995
Becker, Heather and Peter J. Schulz. Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943. Chicago: Chronicle Books, 2002
Belting, Hans et al, The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ZKM/MIT, London, 2013
Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Great Ideas, Penguin Books, London, 2008
Benjamin, Walter. The Critique of Violence, in Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926.
Bentham, Jeremy, The Panopticon Writings, Ed. Miran Bozovic, Verso, London, 1995
Berardi, Franco, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicid, Verso, 2015
Bilal, Wafaa and Lydersen, Kari, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance under the Gun, City Lights, San Francisco, 2008
Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London, 2012
Bleiker, Roland, Aesthetics and World Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009
Boyd, Andrew, ed./assembler. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolkit for Revolution. New York, OR Books, 2012
Boym, Svetlana, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea, University of Chicago Press, London, 2010
Bruckner, D.J.R., Seymour Chwast, and Steven Heller. Art Against War: 400 Years of Protest Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984
Buckley, Bernadette, ‘Forum: Art and Politics’ in Postcolonial Studies, Vol 13, No 2 June, 2010
Buhle, Paul and Nicole Schulman, eds. WOBBLIES! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. London : Verso, 2005
Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Verso, London, 2009
Crenshaw, Kimberle, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43:6. Stanford Law Review: pp. 1241–99, 1991
Cushing, Lincoln and Timothy W. Drescher. American Labor Posters. Ithaca, London: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2009.
Davis, Heather and Turpin, Etienne (Eds.) Art in the Anthropocene, Open Humanities Press, London, 2015
DeBord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, Rebel Press, London, 1992
Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 1992
Demos, TJ., The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Duke UP, London, 2013
Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. Yale University, 1996.
Downey, Anthony, Art and Politics Now, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013
Dunitz, Robin. Street Gallery: Guide to 1000 Los Angeles Murals. Los Angeles: RJD Enterprises.
Edelman, Murray, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995
Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2007
Fitzgerald, Richard. Art and Politics. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Analysis of work by 5 progressive era artists: Maurice Becker, K.R. Chamberlain, Robert Minor, John Sloan and Art Young
Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Palgrave Macmillan, NY 2010
Gail Anderson. Savage Mirror: The Art of Contemporary Caricature. New York: Watson-Guptil, 1992
Gielen, Pascal, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post Fordism, Antennae Valiz, Amsterdam, 2010
Goldstein, Robert Justin. Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France. Kent Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989
Gray, Mary Lackritz. A Guide to Chicago’s Murals. with a forward by Franz Schulze. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001
Grindon, Gavin (Ed.) Aesthetics and Radical Politics, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008
Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991.
Groys, Boris, Art Power, MIT, Cambridge Mass., 2008
Guibert, Emmanuel and Didier Lefèvre. The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders. First Second Books, 2007 http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/
Haraway, Donna, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’ in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World, Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney, eds, Basic Books, NY 2003
Heller, Steven. ed. War Heads: Cartoonists Draw the Line. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1983
Hess, Stephen and Milton Kaplan. The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975
Hogarth, Paul. The Artist as Reporter. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967
Holmes, Brian, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering, AutoNoMedia, NY, 2008
Honneth, Axel, Recognition or Disagreement: A critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality and Identity (New Directions and Critical Theory), Columbia University Press, 2016
Horn, Maurice. ed. The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons. New York/London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1980
Inkworks Collective. Visions of Peace and Justice: San Francisco Bay Area: 1974-2007. Over 30 Years Of Political Posters. Berkeley: Inkworks Press, 2007
Jackson, Shannon, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Routledge, NY, 2011
Jacobs, Karrie and Steven Heller. Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era. Layton, UT: Gibbs-Smith, nd (o.p. 1994)
Joseph, Gloria, and Lorde, Audre, ‘In Memory of Our Children’s Blood’: Sisterhood and South African Women”. Sage; Fall 1986; 3, 2; Periodicals Archive Online p.40-44, 1986
Kanngieser, Anja, Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds, Ashgate, Dorchester, 2013
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, 2nd edition revised, Macmillan, London, 1914
King, David and Cathy Porter. Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983
Kraus, Jerelle. All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page. Columbia University Press, 2009
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal, Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 2001
Latour, Bruno, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Ex. Cat. ZKM/ MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 2005
Levine, Caroline, Provoking Democracy: Why we need the Arts, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007
Lichtenfels, Peter and Rouse, John (Eds.), Performance Politics and Activism, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013
Lorde, Audre “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 53-59, 1984
Lorde, Audre, “The Uses of Anger”. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 25(1/2), pp.278–285, 1997
Lütticken, Sven, ‘Social Media: Practices of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Art’ in Afterall, Vol. 40, The University of Chicago Press, 2015
MacPhee, Josh. Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004
Marcus Bullck and Michael Jennings, Belknap Press, Cambridge Mass., 2004
Marcus, Sara, Girls to the front: the true story of the riot grrrl revolution, Harper Collins, 2010
Martin, Randy, (Ed.) Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, Routledge, 2015
Mbembé, Achille, Necropolitics, trans, Libby Meintjes, in Public Culture 15(1)
McQuiston, Liz. Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. London/New York: Phaidon Press, 1993
McQuiston, Liz. Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women’s Liberation and Beyond. London: Phaidon Press Ltd. 1997. Use of the arts in the suffrage moment
Muholi, Zanele, “Being”. Stevenson.info, Michael Stevenson, 2007
Muholi, Zanele, “Faces and Phases: Our Queer Black Aesthetics in South Africa”. Faces and Phases. Prestel: Munich, pp. 5–7, 2010
Muholi, Zanele, “South African Queer History: A Critical Reflection”. Transnational Queer Underground, 2012
Munro, Brenna, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Nayak, Suryia, “The activism of Black feminist theory in confronting violence against women: Interconnections, politics and practice” in Teaching Against Violence Reassessing the Toolbox: Teaching with Gender European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms. The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Utrecht & Central European University Press, pp. 31-60, 2013
Negri, Antonio, Murphy, Timothy S., Trilogy of Resistance, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2011
Nevins, Allan and Frank Weitenkampf. A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944
Nomusa M. Makhubu, “Violence and the cultural logics of pain: representations of sexuality in the work of Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi”. Critical Arts, 26:4, pp.504-524, 2012
Okun, Rob A., editor. The Rosenbergs: Collected Visions of Artists and Writers. New York: Universe Books, 1991
Perdue, Derek, White riot: Punk rock and the politics of race, Verso, 2011
Philippe, Robert. Political Graphics: Art as a Weapon. New York: Abbeville Press, 1980
Plato, The Republic, Oxford, 1951
Platt, Susan Noyes. Art & Politics in the 1930’s: Modernism Marxism Americanism. A History of Cultural Activism During the Depression Years. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999
Ranciére, Jacques, Aesthetics as Politics, in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity, Cambridge, 2009
Ranciére, Jacques, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Bloomsbury, London, 2010, in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity, Cambridge, 2009
Reed, T.V. The Art of Protest. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005
Resnick, Elizabeth, Chaz Maviyane-Davies, and Frank Baseman. The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Justice and the Environment, 1965-2005. Boston: Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2005
Rockill, Gabriel, Radical History and the Politics of Art, Columbia University Press, USA, 2014
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1st Edition, Vintage Books, Random House, NY, 1981
Schuhmann, Antje, “How to be political? Art activism, queer practices and temporary autonomous zones”. Agenda, 28:4, pp.94-107, 2014
Scott, Emily and Swenson, Kirsten, Swenson, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, University of California Press, California, 2015
Segal, Joes, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda, Amsterdam University Press, Netherlands, 2016
Shannon, Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Routledge, NY, 2011
Shikes, Ralph E. The Indignant Eye: The Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969
Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e), Paris, 2009
Smith, Cherry, “What is Thing Thing Called Queer?” The Material Queer. Ed. Donald Morton. Boulder, CO: WestViewPress, pp.277-285, 1996
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, London: Penguin, 2008
Steven Heller. The Art of Satire: Painters as Caricaturists and Cartoonists from Delacroix to Picasso. New York: Pratt Graphics Center and Horizon Press, 1984.
Stewart, Virginia. 45 Contemporary Mexican Artists. Stanford University Press: 1951
Steyerl, Hito, ‘Art and Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life’ in Open, NAi, SKOR, Rotterdam, 2012, No. 23
Thompson, Nato, Seeing as Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century, Melville House, NY, 2015
Thrift, Nigel and Amin, Ash, Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Duke University Press, USA, 2013
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Volume 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215, 2008
Toll, Nelly. Without Surrender: Art of the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1978.
Graphic art made in concentration camps during World War II
Tyali, Siyasanga M, “Art, media and gender based activism: A critical reflection on the University of South Africa (UNISA) colloquium on Zanele Muholi”. Agenda, 28:4, pp.145-153, 2014
Van Der Vlies, Andrew, “Art as archive: Queer activism and contemporary South African visual cultures”. Kunapipi, 34:1, pp.94-116, 2012
Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Von Beyme, Klaus, On Political Culture, Cultural Policy, Art and Politics, Springer, USA, 2014
Weibel, Peter (Ed.) Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, The MIT Press, London, 2015
Winegar, Jessica, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt, Stanford University Press, USA, 2006
Wright, Micah Ian.You Back the Attack! We’ll Bomb Who We Want! Remixed War Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003
Žižek, Slavoj, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, London, 2002
Zurier, Rebecca. Art for The MASSES: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917.Temple University Press, 1988