Seizing the Stage - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Seizing the Stage
Social Performances from Mao Zedong to
Martin Luther King Jr., and Black Lives Matter Today

Jeffrey C. Alexander

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Social protest should not be conceptualized instrumentally, as a process that depends only upon
social networks and material resources. Such factors provide the boundary conditions for sym-
bolic action, but they determine neither its content nor its outcomes. In order to seize power,
one must first seize the social stage (see Eyerman 2006).

Seizing the stage, producing social dramas, and projecting them successfully to audiences —

these are difficult and contingent cultural accomplishments, even for those who possess top-
down, authoritarian control. For great power to be perceived as legitimate, equally great
performances need be sustained. As producers and directors, dictators try to create ideologically
saturated public performances. Massive show trials, such as those Stalin produced in the 1930s,
display orchestrated confessions, which are reported by journalists and distributed in recordings
and films. Tightly choreographed, ritual-like, mythopoeic, leader-affirming convocations are
aesthetically reconstructed as electrifying and projected by filmmakers to millions of potential
audience members beyond the immediate event. The Nazis’ 1934 Nuremberg rally, for exam-

TDR: The Drama Review 61:1 (T233) Spring 2017. ©2017
Jeffrey C. Alexander

ple, with its tens of thousands of
Nazi worshippers in attendance,
was reconstructed and amped
up by Leni Riefenstahl in her
Triumph of the Will (1935).

To the degree that political
regimes, authoritarian or dem-
ocratic, allow power to be more
easily challenged, to that same
degree seizing the social stage
becomes still more difficult. Dans
more pluralistic social situa-
tion, the elements required for
a social protest to project a pow-
erful performance that con-
nects with audiences, become
separated from one another
(see Alexander 2004). To re-
fuse these elements, protest
performances must be artfully
assembled from scratch, depuis
the bottom up. Supplication
and inspiration, authentic and
heartfelt dramas of sacrifice,
become central. The medi-
ation of extra- performative
conditions — interpretive,
matériel, et démographique
resources — becomes significant
aussi.

Chiffre 2. Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the 1963
March on Washington, CC. (Photo by Warren K. Leffler; courtesy of
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, US News &
World Report Magazine Collection)

The African American civil rights movement was a decades-long social drama. It narrated

and visualized chronic social suffering, and punctuated this story with episodes of acute and
wrenching social tension. If Martin Luther King Jr. is now considered by many to be the great-
est American of the 20th century (see Branch 1988), it is not only because he was a political
leader and moral visionary; he was also an extraordinary dramatist. King seized the public stage
more effectively than any figure in modern American history. He coached his African American
followers in nonviolent tactics and choreographed their protests so provocatively that the
movement’s actions consistently generated violent and repressive responses, which King used in
turn to shape public resistance. King’s dramas of sacrifice and redemption were splashed across
America’s television screens and headlined in newspapers. Northern whites identified with the
movement’s sacrifice, and experienced catharsis when the black masses triumphed. Such pow-
erful public dramaturgy inverted state power, and iterations of its nonviolent dramatizations
against anti-civil violence have continued through to the present day.

Chiffre 1. (facing page) Black protesters kneeling before city hall, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. (Glasshouse
Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

Jeffrey C. Alexander is a social theorist who writes in the areas of politics and culture. Son plus récent
book is The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Codes, Professional Culture, Digital
Future (Cambridge 2016, with E. Breese and M. Luengo) and his The Drama of Social Life will be
published by Polity Press in June 2017. jeffrey.alexander@yale.edu

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A Note on Social Performance Theory

Since the early 2000s, cultural sociologists have been developing theoretical understandings and
empirical applications of social performance theory. This approach challenges the economic
understanding of action developed by Karl Marx as well as the action-theoretical approach that
Max Weber initiated and Talcott Parsons continued (see Weber [1922] 1978; Parsons 1937).
Performance theory has roots in the later work of Émile Durkheim (Alexander and Smith
2005), in the aesthetic turn of Clifford Geertz (Alexander, Forgeron, and Norton 2011), the drama
theory of Victor Turner (Edles 1998; Smith and Howe 2015), and contemporary performance
studies as initiated by Richard Schechner ([2002] 2013). In addition to conceptualizing this
macrosociological model of social performance, “cultural pragmatics” has been employed to
explore a wide variety of empirical situations, from presidential campaigns (Alexander 2010;
Mast 2012; Alexander and Jaworsky 2014) and the Arab Spring (Alexander 2011b) to terrorism
and Bacon’s Rebellion (Reed 2013) and the Iraq War (Alexander 2011a); from South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation process (Homme bon 2016) to native people’s demands for social jus-
tice (Woods 2016). Social performance theory can illuminate the art of protest during China’s
communist revolution, the mid-20th-century American civil rights movement, and the mostly
African American protest against police violence in American cities today.

Revolutionary Protest in 20th-Century China

Revolutionary social movements tell the world that their eventual triumph is inevitable, et
radical theorists conceptualize this necessity as determined by the unstoppable force of mate-
rial interest. It’s a very different story inside revolutionary movements, cependant. They are
dramaturgical engines. Let Marx pretend the revolution responds merely to objective interest,
depicting workers as protoscientists following rational, instrumental plans. Lenin knew better.
Attacking the fallacy of economism, Lenin ([1902] 1966) put ideology at the center of revo-
lutionary mobilization, organizing Bolshevism as an active, pragmatic, top-down party in the
service of socialist ideas. Antonio Gramsci (1959) dubbed the Communist Party the “modern
prince,” taking his cue from Machiavelli. Dans 1917, when Lenin’s revolution succeeded, Gramsci
created a double-entendre banner headline, “Revolution against Capital,” in Avanti, the Italian
revolutionary newspaper he edited, ironically suggesting that Marx’s scientific theory could
never have predicted it. Gramsci knew that the revolution in Russia had succeeded not because
of the laws of capital but because of the dramaturgical powers of the Bolshevik party.

The Textual Background and Its Limits

In their radical reinterpretation of Maoist strategy in the decades preceding the Chinese rev-
olution, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, David Apter and Tony Saich transformed this
line of cultural Marxist thinking into a poststructuralist frame. Moving away from a reduction-
ist, ratiocinative conception of ideology toward a Geertzian, thickly semiotic one, they con-
ceptualize the revolutionary organizer as a storyteller, “an agent with a special ability to lift the
burden of storytelling from the shoulders of the individual by enabling that person to share it
with others […so that] the property of the story becomes the property of the discourse commu-
nity” (1994:75). The storyteller-in-chief of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong, culled “myths,
stories, texts, and logical prescriptions” from Chinese and Western traditions, pulling “out of
the terrible circumstances and conditions of life prevailing in China” the vision of a “utopic
republic” (xi). With this vision, Mao “was able to refract and generate a field of force, at the epi-
center of which he becomes a teacher” (298).

Apter and Saich are forcefully antimaterialist and anti–“rational actor,” but their culturalizing

account of revolutionary process doesn’t go nearly far enough. Their political discourse analy-
sis presents the Chinese revolution as an “exegetical creation.” But seeing such an extraordinary
event merely as an “express embodiment of a structure of ideas” (xv) ignores the performative
challenges that must be met in real time, the complex process of acting out ideas and getting an

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Jeffrey C. Alexander

audience to believe them. “For
stories to be shared with others,»
Apter and Saich acknowledge,
“people must want to listen”
(75), but conceptualizing just
how to get folks to want to listen
is the thing. To suggest simply
“words themselves became per-
formatives” (75) keeps us in the
dark, inside J.L. Austin’s (1962)
narrowly linguistic black box,
where performativity is achieved
by speaking itself. The drama-
turgical process that sets the
stage, the directing process that
organizes a mise-en-scène, le
skillful creativity of actors or the
lack thereof, the organizational
and symbolic challenge of creat-
ing the appearance of a seamless
fusion between audience, actors,
and animating script — all this
remains to be conceived. Clairement,
Mao had the ability of “com-
municating to listeners a feel-
ing of privileged access to the
interpretive wisdom of a mind
in motion” (85), but the com-
municating process, the feel-
ing of privileged access, même
the attribution of wisdom — all
need attention.

Chiffre 3. Chairman Mao going to Anyuan, 1968. Artist: Lin
Chunhua. Reproduced an estimated 900 million times, ce
depiction of Mao visiting Anyuan as a young man in the 1920s
was to become an icon of the Cultural Revolution. (Heritage Image
Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

Apter and Saich offer a tantalizing glimpse into the black box of dramaturgy when they situ-
ate Mao’s storytelling inside the caves of Yan’an, where the Chinese communist movement went
into hiding after their “Long March” to escape the ruling Guomindang party in 1937–38:

Narrating the stories and writing the texts, [Mao] makes himself part of the process.
Everything associated with his person also becomes significant — the long hair, the long
fingers, the baggy clothes, the earthy expressions, the fact that he scratches himself with
the same fingers that hold the brush. [Mao] was very careful to arrange himself to project
just the image he wanted. (1994:301)

À la fin, cependant, Yan’an is portrayed simply as “a semiotic space” and Mao as a leader “in
sole possession of an inversionary discourse capable of generating public support,” an “inte-
rior system of codes, symbols, and icon” that proved “capable [de] unifying a diverse commu-
nity” (69). But was discourse itself sufficient to unify a fragmented and demoralized community?
What actually transpired in the caves of Yan’an? What allowed the ideological revivification
process to unfold successfully? “Using metaphors and metonymies Mao creates a code,” Apter
and Saich argue, “that enables the narrative to endow gestures, acts, dress, dwelling and above
all language and literacy with the power of signifiers” (99). But much more must also have been
involved — creative, unscripted gestures and movements, props and staging, official and dissent-
ing interpretations, unresponsive and silent audiences but also cries of delight.

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Seizing the Stage

That “an individual has become assimilated into a discursive community” (182) is certainly

a useful indicator of cultural-pragmatic success, but what exactly does it measure? Ce que nous
need to know is how the fusion between speaker and audience is actually accomplished. It is not
enough to suggest “a person has absorbed and internalized the ritual” (182). How a contingent
and labile performance comes to be regarded as an absorptive, repetitive, and solidarizing ritual
is what’s empirically and heuristically at stake. For texts to be internalized performance must
be felicitous. Apter and Saich note “the revolutionaries’ claim that both the [Marxist] dialectic
and the system of [Maoist] ideas were always there, an enduring authenticity waiting to be per-
ceived” (xv). Claims of authenticity, cependant, must be dramatically redeemed.

Authenticity is not something already there, waiting to be perceived; it is an attribution
made by an inspired audience. Performance is more than a matter of “people poring over the
text, interpreting their experiences, and expressing themselves in public utterances that bound
addresser and addressee” (224). Binding speaker and audiences is the ambition of performances.
Apter and Saich make reference to such terms as “simulacrum” and “spectacle” (130–31; 388
n.31) to identify acts of persuasive ideological speech, but these concepts finesse the detailed
texture of social performance; they do not explain them.

Performance in Theory and Action

Only after performance studies began to open up the black box of discourse theory, conceptu-
alizing the space between signifier and signified, were scholarly investigations into the Chinese
revolution able to begin to make things right. “Although the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sci-
ences has been underway for over a generation,” Elizabeth Perry writes in Anyuan, her “path-
breaking” study (Ho 2015), “it is often conducted as discourse analysis in which writings,
speeches, films, festivals, and other communicative materials are treated […] as disembodied
texts” (2012:5). What such an approach leaves “unanswered,” she argues, “is the question of how
the revolutionaries managed to introduce such radically new messages and methods in ways that
resonated with their target audience” (4). Conceptualizing this process as “cultural positioning,»
Perry insists that it requires “active effort,” that it “hinges as much upon the skills of the mes-
senger as on the substance and syntax of the message itself” (5).1

In the early 1920s, the south central Chinese mining town of Anyuan provided the scene

of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) first great organizing success. Mao Zedong vis-
ited Anyuan shortly after the Party’s founding. When he arrived “carrying a Hunan umbrella
made of oiled paper and dressed in a long blue Mandarin gown of the sort worn by teachers,»
Perry recounts, it “left a deep impression upon the workers” (2012:48–51). Toujours, Mao’s ward-
robe was out of kilter with his avowedly revolutionary script. The long blue Mandarin gown
projected the “sight of a privileged intellectual,” a character embodying “the Confucian separa-
tion between mental and manual labor” rather than somebody “anxious to interact with lowly
coal miners.” In contrast with his off-key clothing, the spoken language of the character Mao

1. Despite these clear signals, neither Perry nor the other scholars whose work I employ in this section draw their
arguments from the performative turn. In Anyuan, Perry presents her principal theoretical term, “cultural posi-
tioning,” as indicating Chinese revolutionary efforts to instantiate Marxist ideology inside more traditional forms
of Chinese culture, and in an earlier, also widely noted effort, Perry (2002) deployed the acultural sociologi-
cal concept of “emotion work” to describe a historical intervention that was equally performative in its framing.
In the same manner, both Yung-fa Chen and Feiyu Sun — whose writings I employ below to further elaborate
a performative approach — describe their own contributions as “show[ing] the importance of the psychologi-
cal dimensions in CCP policy” (Chen 1986:100) and in terms of “the traditions of both classical psychoanalysis
and phenomenology — Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur”
(Sun 2013:5). The theoretical movement I am here tracing from poststructural to performatively oriented cultural
analyse, in other words, is my own interpretation of the framework that has informed these recent studies, pas
those of the authors’ cited.

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Jeffrey C. Alexander

performed was a much better fit. “Thanks to his rural upbringing and colloquial dialect,” Perry
records, Mao “was able to converse easily with the workers — most of whom shared his Hunan
origins.” Regarding the wardrobe malfunction, Mao proved a quick study. After only a week of
immersion, he had restructured his character’s outfit to fit more seamlessly into the local scene:
“By week’s end, he had shed his scholar’s gown in favor of a pair of trousers, which were more
suitable for forays down into the mining pits” (2012:48–51).2

In November 1921, after completing this scouting mission, Mao sent his young communist

protégé Li Lisan to Anyuan to begin the hard work of actually organizing a local labor move-
ment. Whereas Mao had draped his character in the modest clothing of revolutionary asceti-
cism, Li saw things differently. He “sashayed ostentatiously around the grimy coal mining town
of Anyuan, dressed either in a long Mandarin gown or in stylish Western coat and tie, in a fash-
ion designed to attract attention” (Perry 2012:61). Encore, Li’s “flamboyant manner” proved as
“captivating to ordinary workers” as Mao’s more restrained demeanor. One costuming detail
of Li’s was particularly noted — “the shiny metal badge that (acquired in France) he sported
on his chest.” The badge “generated persistent rumors of Li Lisan’s invulnerability to swords
and bullets,” Perry tells us, adding the communist organizer “did nothing to dispel them” (61).
The material accouterment had a performative function, connecting Li’s possibly foreign-
seeming ideology to a widely beloved Chinese folktale. The shiny badge seemed to take “a cue
from Elder Brother dragon heads whose authority rested upon their reputation for supernat-
ural powers,” Perry explains. By deploying this prop, “Li Lisan actively encouraged the belief
that he enjoyed the magical protection of ‘five foreign countries’ bestowed during his travels
abroad” (61).

Li did more, cependant, than just dress the part. He contrived to script his organizing efforts

inside the dramatic forms of traditional Hunan ritual.

To stir up greater interest in the workers’ club, Li decided that the night school should
host a lion dance at the time of the annual Lantern Festival […,] an occasion when the
local elite sponsored exhibitions by martial arts masters, who displayed their skills and
thereby attracted new disciplines in the course of performing spirited lion dances. Un
of Li’s new recruits to the workers’ club, a highly adept performer by the name of You
Congnai, was persuaded to take the lead. You was a low-level chieftain in the Red Gang
whose martial arts skills were second to none. He dutifully donned a resplendent lion’s
costume, tailor-made for this occasion by local artisans, and — to the loud accompaniment
of cymbals and firecrackers — gamely pranced from the coal mine to the railway station,
stopping along the way at the general headquarters of the company, the chamber of com-
merce, St. James Episcopal Church, the Hunan and Hubei native-place associations,
and the homes of the gang chieftains to pay his respects. As intended, the performance
attracted a huge and appreciative crowd, which followed the sprightly dancer back to
the workers’ club to learn how to enlist as his disciples. Contrary to popular expectation,

2. Two decades later, in Mao’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, he may have been recalling this ward-
robe shift when he insisted that, in order to “ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolution-
ary machine,” CCP artists needed to be more responsive to “the problem of audience” (Mao 1942:3). “Since the
audience for our literature and art consists of workers, peasants and soldiers and of their cadres,” Mao suggested,
“the problem arises of understanding them and knowing them well” (3). Addressing the disconnect between cul-
tural elites and masses, Mao asserted that “the thoughts and feelings of our writers and artists should be fused with
those of the masses,” advising that “to achieve this fusion, they should conscientiously learn the language of the
masses” (4; emphasis added). But “if you want the masses to understand you,” Mao warned, you must “undergo a
long process of tempering” (4). “Here I might mention the experience of how my own feelings changed. I began
life as a student [et] felt that intellectuals were the only clean people [et] workers and peasants were dirty.
[…W]earing the clothes of other intellectuals[,] I would not put on clothes belonging to a worker […] But after I
became a revolutionary and lived with workers [je] fundamentally changed” (4).

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Seizing the Stage

cependant, the martial arts master announced to the assembled audience we should no lon-
ger study martial arts. Plutôt, we should all study diligently at the night school. Anyone
interested in studying, come with us. (Perry 2012:59–60)

It soon became clear that the communists had something altogether different from tradi-
tional pedagogy — whether of the Confucian literary (wen) or the martial arts (wu) variety. Comme
lion dancer You Congnai put it to the throngs of would-be disciples, “Our teacher’s home is in
Liling [Li Lisan’s native county, just across the provincial border in Hunan], but the ancestral
founder of our school lives far, far away. To find him one must cross the seven seas. He’s now
more than a hundred years old and his name is Teacher Ma [Marx], a bearded grandpa” (Perry
2012:60). Li Lisan’s imaginative recruitment drive resulted in a large influx of new members to
the workers’ club.

While the now widely subscribed Anyuan workers’ club sponsored courses, Li Lisan quickly

realized that “ideologically orthodox articles and lectures […] were not always the best way to
capture the workers’ attention, especially when it came to the younger workers, who comprised
a large percentage of the unskilled labor force at the coal mine.” Organizers were “directed
toward inventing livelier forms of cultural communication” (Perry 2012:95). Six decades later,
the head of the CCP’s entertainment department in Anyuan during those early years explained
its performative ambition.

We often organized younger workers in the workers’ club through singing, dramatic per-
formances, cultural studies, and various recreational activities […] The renovated Anyuan
workers’ club had just been opened, and every week we held evening gatherings and
staged plays there. Our plays had no set scripts but were self-written and self-performed.
[…] The content included opposing the exploitation of workers by capitalists, overcoming
imperialism, and defeating warlordism. […] These plays drew large audiences, not only
workers but also peasants from the surrounding areas. (in Perry 2012:95)

The department chief’s claim that “the propaganda effects” of such performative efforts “were
very good” is confirmed by the memories of an elderly worker who, having witnessed the enter-
tainment as a 10-year-old child, recalled the vivid atmosphere of the live performances.

The entertainment department [of the Anyuan workers’ club] organized the young peo-
ple to produce and perform “civilized plays” [wen ming xil]. Whenever these were staged,
the main hall of the club was packed. Gas lamps were lit. Many of the plays reflected the
laboring life of the workers in the mine pits. I remember one night watching a new play
inside the club about the terrible treatment of workers under the leather ships of the cap-
italists. It also showed how the Bearded Marx had engaged in revolutionary activity, et
how the Russian working class had taken up arms to struggle against the capitalists. Le
plot of this drama deeply moved us all. I admired the working class for its fearless spirit
of struggle [et] hope[d] that one day we too would be able to take up guns and struggle
against the capitalists in the mine. (95–96)

In addition to such explicitly theatrical performances, the Anyuan workers’ club organized
the writing and staging of 31 “costume lectures,” described by Perry as “a hybrid form of didac-
tic entertainment that was part drama and part lecture” (96). “With moralistic titles such as
‘The Road to Awakening,’ ‘The Evils of Prostitution and Gambling,’ ‘The Patriotic Bandit,’ and
‘Our Victory,’” Perry writes, “the costume lectures were presented in evening performances in
the workers’ club auditorium to enthusiastic audiences numbering a thousand or more” (96).
Local opera had long been popular among Chinese villagers, and the theatre and costume-
lecture formats became widely deployed as CCP organizing efforts spread from such indus-
trial cities as Anyuan to the countryside. As one worker recalled, every Sunday “the head of the
workers’ club […] led us to nearby villages to perform” (96).

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Whenever we arrived someplace, the band members would beat drums and play trumpets
and flutes to attract a crowd. Then we would perform a program after which there would
be a lecture [que] was warmly welcomed by the peasants. (96–97)

American journalist Edgar Snow argued, “there was no more powerful weapon of propa-
ganda in the Communist movement than the Reds’ dramatic troupes” (Snow [1938] 2007:123–
24; in Perry 2012:113). Snow observed that “when the Reds occupied new areas, it was the Red
Theater that calmed the fears of the people, gave them rudimentary ideas of the Red program,
and dispensed great quantities of revolutionary thoughts, to win the people’s confidence” (Snow
[1938] 2007:124; in Perry 2012:113). A self-proclaimed cheerleader for the Chinese revolution,
Snow in his account gives the misleading impression of easy performative success. Making use
of internal party documents, the historian Yung-fa Chen argues to the contrary that the Chinese
peasantry was a tough audience to crack. Centuries of Confucian teaching gave peasants “a tol-
erance for poverty and injustice that amounted to unquestioning devotion to harmony and
passivity” (1986:173). The peasants were conservative; they would have to be convinced to
become revolutionaries.

As Feiyu Sun demonstrates in his 2013 Social Suffering and Political Confession, it was this
reluctant, withholding quality of peasant-audiences that triggered the CCP’s “speaking bitter-
ness” campaign.3 The strategy began with the Fang Pin Wen Ku method — which translates as
“to visit poor families, to inquire of their sufferings” (Sun 2013:35ff). CCP work teams entered
peasant villages with what Sun calls the “experience technique” in hand. They visited poor fami-
lies, asking probing questions about their personal lives. This was not purely a matter of uncon-
strained call and response; symbolic violence was involved, and the threat of physical violence
never lay far behind.

In order to avoid the perceived and real existential danger of being classified as reaction-
aries, the villagers had to present the work team with a personal narrative of their suffer-
ing as poor or hired peasants. If this narrative depiction of their personal suffering and
oppression was convincing enough to overcome the mandatory skepticism of the work
team and cadres, they would be rewarded with the “good peasant” classification. (36)

Ostensibly, such visits were about ideology, pedagogical exercises aimed at restructuring cog-
nition. “It was the professed aim of this dialogue,” Sun writes, “to teach the peasants how to
reflect upon and interpret their circumstances and identity in a ready-made narrative language
which the political ideology of the CCP provided” (37).

The deeper ambition of Fang Pin Wen Ku, cependant, was dramaturgical; it aimed to

induce the experience of “speaking bitterness,” or suku. According to official documents, suku
referred to sharing “an oral personal history about being persecuted by class enemies […] pour
the purpose of inspiring class hatred in the listeners [et] reaffirming one’s own class stand-
ing” (Chen 1952:331; in Sun 2013:2). Sun himself provides a more elaborate, decidedly
dramaturgical definition.

Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a col-
lective public forum. In Chinese, the term Suku means to tell of one’s suffering, or to
pour out one’s bitterness, in public. Su means to tell, to speak, to pour out, or to confess,
while the term Ku means bitterness, pain, and suffering. (Sun 2013:2)

3. Sun’s ability to document the CCP’s culturally pragmatic strategy depends on access to unpublished, intraparty

documents, which are much more open about performative efforts and obstacles than the rah-rah documents the
CCP issued for public consumption. Chen contrasts the internal and external documents explicitly (1986:xix).
Perry also relies primarily on previously unpublished sources.

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One party organizer described suku as “the blasting fuse of the mass Fanshen movement” (46).
In the CCP’s immense land reform campaign, “fanshen” (literally “turning over”) referred to a
complex organizational effort that moved peasants from tolerant fatalism to angry activism.

In Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, William Hinton’s monumen-
tal, ideologically suffused, rose-colored reconstruction of the land reform campaign in Long
Bow village in 1948, he documents the fearful recalcitrance of peasants to take aggressive action
against landlords, and party cadres’ determined efforts to retrain them. It is instructive to see
how Hinton implicitly employs a performative approach to fanshen in the chapter devoted
to CCP efforts to ferreting out property owners who had collaborated with Japanese occupi-
ers — despite Hinton’s insistence that he is merely recording what transpired in a realistic, doc-
umentarian way. As Hinton describes it:

T’ien-ming called all the active young cadres and militiamen of Long Bow together
and announced to them the policy of the county government, which was to confront all
enemy collaborators and their backers at public meetings, expose their crimes, and turn
them over to the county authorities for punishment. […] The young men agreed to con-
duct a public meeting of the whole population the very next day. And so it was that
Kuo Te-yu, running dog of the landlords, informer, torturer, grafter, and enemy stooge,
found himself standing before a crowd of several hundred stolid peasants whom he had
betrayed. […] As the silent crowd contracted toward the spot where the accused man
stood, T’ien-ming stepped forward. “Comrades, countrymen. […] This is our chance.
Remember how we were oppressed. The traitors seized our property and kicked us.
[…] Let us speak out the bitter memories of the past. Let us see that the blood debt is
repaid” […]. The peasants were listening to every word but gave no sign as to how they
felt. […] No one moved and no one spoke. “Come now, who has evidence against this
man?” Again there was silence. Kuei-ts’ai, the new vice-chairman of the village, found it
intolerable. He jumped up, struck Kuo Te-yu on the jaw with the flat of his hand. “Tell
the meeting how much you stole,” he demanded. The blow jarred the ragged crowd. Il
was as if an electric spark had tensed every muscle. Not in living memory had any peas-
ant ever struck an official. A gasp, involuntary and barely audible, came from the people
and above it a clear sharp “Ah” from an old man’s throat. […Mais] the people in the square
[still] waited, fascinated, as if watching a play. They did not realize that in order for the
plot to unfold they themselves had to mount the stage and speak out what was on their
minds. ([1966] 2008:112–14)

At the core of fanshen was suku, one of the Chinese revolution’s most original and compel-
ling social-cum-cultural inventions. In the course of village visits, party cadres located people
whom they considered “exemplary narrators,” proceeding to train them in emotionally arous-
ing and confession-inducing storytelling techniques. With this well-rehearsed cast of polit-
ical actors in hand, mass meetings were organized to let “suffering draw out suffering” (55).
“An exemplary speaker during a Suku meeting would first touch the listeners emotionally,” Sun
explains, “to make them empathize with the Suku speaker’s feelings — to feel sad listening to a
story of misery and hardship and to feel hatred and outrage toward the speaker’s persecutors
and exploiters” (2013:56). A handbook distributed by the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army in
1947, entitled Suku and Revenge: Suku Education’s Experience and Method, offers detailed advice to
CCP organizers about writing the script, setting the stage, preparing the audience, and gaining
dramatic effect.

All the people listening should feel and share in the suffering till everybody cries bitterly
[…] From suffering to pain, and from pain to hatred. The more suffering, the more pain,
the more pain, the more hatred, and the more hatred the more powerful […] Use tasks
such as preparing the Suku setting, organizing memorial ceremonies, preparing forms for
recording revenge […] Create an atmosphere of suffering that is persuasive. […] The fol-

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lowing message of political consciousness should be instilled: The poor, all under the
heavens, are all suffering; and the poor in this world are all one big family; we are broth-
ers and sisters, and we should unite together to save ourselves, to abolish the roots of
class exploitation and repression. (in Sun 2013:57–60)

Such cadre-organized dramas often succeeded in producing political catharsis on a mas-
sive scale. An internal report entitled “Poor Peasants’ Suku Assembly,” also prepared in 1947,
described what transpired during the Land Reform movement when “every district started
practicing Suku” (46). Despite its self-promotion and pseudo-numeracy, the cadre issued a
report that strikingly illustrates their performative ambition and gives some indication of the
scope of suku’s dramatic success.

In the Suku assembly in the town of Chengguan, after only one person’s Suku, all those
peasants had already started bellowing and to cry. Some people went back home, où
the whole family again cried bitterly together […]. According to incomplete statistics,
there were 5184 peasants who did Suku in the whole of the year. 4551 of them cried bit-
terly during Suku […]. Il y avait 323 peasants speaking their bitterness about starva-
tion; 546 speaking their bitterness about begging for food; 115 speaking their bitterness
about scattered family; 116 speaking their bitterness about relatives being killed by ban-
dits […] In the Suku Movement, cadres and people become one family; cadres felt an
aching to see the people’s crying; people persuaded the cadres to stop crying. Personnes
said: “This is the Communist Party! The Communist Party is also our poor!» (in Sun
2013:46–47)

While this discussion of Suku focuses on its performative deployment before the 1949 revo-
lution, the same dramaturgical structure functioned as a powerful organizing tool with which
Maoism sought to shape the self-perception and emotions of the masses after the revolution
aussi. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Par exemple, was fuelled by the “recalling bitter-
ness” campaign, which treated the prerevolutionary episodes of speaking bitterness not as per-
formances, but as objective descriptions. Guo Wu documents how “individual memories of the
formerly oppressed were gradually teased out by the Chinese socialist state to construct a class-
based collective memory of the pre-1949 ‘old China’ […que] aimed at reenacting class struggle
and reinforcing class awareness by invoking collective memory” (Wu 2014:247).

Past expressions of bitterness not only became the articulation of individual and collective
memories, but also involved rituals and performance, and thus were successfully incorporated
into the larger institution of propaganda and Chinese popular culture.4 As a result, all depic-
tions of the old society were dissociated from “objective realities” and became “representational
realities” (247).

The party-state sought to indoctrinate students through face-to-face oral reports by
older people that emphasized their suffering before Liberation [in order] to educate stu-
dents so that they would not forget the past […] Turning a personal, bitter story of an
older person into a public political asset was the essence of the recalling-bitterness ses-
sions around the country. […] Selecting the right person to speak and creating the appro-
priate theatrical atmosphere was crucial to the success of recalling bitterness and evoking

4. During the cultural revolution, the “revolutionary operas” scripted and produced by Jiang Qing, the celebrity
actress and political activist who became Mao’s wife in Yan’an in 1939, replaced traditional opera and played a
significant propaganda role. Despite her outsized political power during these years, cependant, there is little evi-
dence that Qing’s theatrical expertise contributed to the performativity of Chinese revolutionary politics more
broadly conceived, in the decades before (Terrill 1984). Staging theatrical drama is one thing; staging social per-
formances quite another, though they often historically intertwine. Mao Zedong had a performative gift for poli-
tics, though he never wrote or performed for theatre.

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emotional responses from the audience. […] Trained peasant orators would gulp word-
lessly in pain when their narrations reached a climax […] The ability to touch the audi-
ence was the main criterion in selecting speakers. After being chosen, the speakers were
trained further to ensure they were eloquent, emotional, and able to cry easily. […] Many
memoirs of the Cultural Revolution’s sent-down youths, written in the 1980s and 1990s,
recall how formerly urban students were re-educated by old peasants about past bitter-
ness. (260–61, 263)

The Chinese were able to make revolution, not because their Communist Party provided
truthful information that responded to objective class interests, but rather because it forged a
revolutionary art of protest that fused producers, scripts, actors, scènes, and audiences. The rev-
olutionary drama may have seemed to exude realism and verisimilitude, but it worked to com-
bine aesthetic and moral power in a manner that made it sublime (see Burke [1757] 1990).

Civil Rights Protest in
Mid-20th Century America

While revolutionary organizations need to be artful, they often possess levers of coercive power
via party or state control, such that symbolic violence “adds value” to the dramatic power of ide-
ological scripts. Bottom-up protests by relatively powerless movements have no such performa-
tive advantage, so the felicity of such protests becomes that much more difficult to sustain.

Consider, Par exemple, the African American civil rights movement in the 1950–60s. A cen-
tury earlier, the Civil War (1861–65) had abolished slavery, but with the end of Reconstruction,
just a dozen years after Northern victory, further black emancipation was blocked. Southern
blacks became encaged by a caste system, even as blacks in the northern United States, a grow-
ing population, remained stigmatized and disempowered. In the 1950s and 1960s, an extraor-
dinary social movement challenged this system of domination, achieving a great, if still only
partial triumph.

In recent decades, social scientists have tended to interpret the civil rights movement as a
struggle over “naked power” (Morris 2007), a strategic battle between Southern blacks and their
Southern white oppressors for control over material resources (McAdam 1982; Payne 1995).
In my own work, I’ve proposed an alternative explanation. Certainly, the civil rights movement
was an effort to remove the barriers blocking black access to state power. But because of a com-
plex mixture of racial fears and democratic politics, the movement’s struggle to gain such power
could be neither violent nor even implicitly coercive. The movement could have recourse only
to persuasion. Aiming at influence, not power, it generated symbolic dramas, projecting them,
not to white Southern state power, but to the audience of Northern whites.5

This was not the direction in which the civil rights movement ostensibly aimed its message.

Civil rights mobilizations seemed to be directed at Southern institutions, but their real audi-
ence was a “third party,” the white citizens who were watching this confrontation in the North.
Vis-à-vis the immediate audience of Southern whites, civil rights campaigns seemed weak and,
en effet, they were most often defeated. A few white Southerners had their eyes opened, mais le
great majority was unmoved and turned away.

Modern audiences are dispersed, layered, and fragmented. Performers cannot hope to con-
nect with all of them at the same time. Martin Luther King publicly claimed that nonviolent tac-
tics were designed to persuade Southern whites, appealing to their Christian and democratic
hearts. As those inside movement leadership knew full well, cependant, King’s tactics were actu-

5. D'abord, bien sûr, there had to BE a movement. King’s performances had to successfully mobilize black masses in
the south. It was not only King — as director and star — but the cast of black foot soldiers who created the dra-
matic performances that could be projected to white audiences in the North.

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ally designed to produce quite
a different effect. True enough,
King’s thinking about non-
violence had come from his
study of another master of the
art of civil protest, Mahatma
Gandhi. Gandhi believed
that iterative performances
of satyagraha — “insistence on
truth” — would eventually soften
imperial hearts and change
British minds. But what worked
for late imperial Britain was
not felicitous in the America of
Jim Crow. The racism of most
Southern whites, elite and mass,
was far too ingrained for them
to be responsive to satyagraha
of an African American kind.
Despite his Christian idealism,
King knew this in his bones. Il
had grown up in this South, mais
he had studied for his doctorate in New England. It was the satyagraha of Northern whites that
King had in mind (King 1957).6

Chiffre 4. The last leg of the march through Mississippi and into Jackson, Juin
1966. Front row, second from left: Juanita Abernathy, Reverend Ralph Abernathy,
Coretta King, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., James Meredith, Stokely
Carmichael, Floyd McKissick. (Photo by Matt Herron / Take Stock; courtesy of
The Image Works)

From Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman to W.E.B. Du Bois, the leaders of African
American protests were social actors who had a flare for the dramatic and could command
the public stage. Though often sharply differing in ideology and ambition, all of these lead-
ers shared one, all-important capacity. They possessed an intuitive feeling for the American con-
science collective, both white and black. They grasped what, in Saussure’s terminology, might be
called the American langue, the cultural language that set the background for the civil rights
movement’s paroles, the speech acts by which African American movements engaged and pro-
tested against their oppressive social worlds, the strategic scripts they projected not only to fel-
low blacks but to whites in the civil surround.

The deep cultural languages shared by black and white Americans were formed by secu-
lar strains of anti-authoritarian republican and liberal thought, alongside the religious themes
of prophetic Christianity. Blacks identified with Jews in Pharaonic Egypt, seeing their own
fate and possibility in the Exodus story. Whites traced their national mission to the rebel-
lion against King George III, and in post-Revolutionary times saw themselves locked in a bat-
tle for democracy vis-à-vis European aristocracy, empire, and despotism. During the first
three centuries of the American experiment, cependant, racism prevented whites from identify-
ing their own emancipation narrative with the black struggle for freedom. Only gradually, avec

6. Il y avait, bien sûr, some Southern whites who did support the black movement (Sokol 2006), and while most
did so passively, a few were active supporters: clergy (Campbell 1997), rabbis (Bauman and Kalin 1997), femmes
(Little 2009, Moody 2011, Murphy 1997), students (Michel 2004), editors (Roberts and Klibanoff 2007), et
business people (Robinson and Sullivan 1991). While Chappell argues that “covert moral support from local
white people” was “immensely encouraging to black protestors” (1994:XVI), the point is that such support rarely
became overt. A handful of Southern whites may indeed have functioned as “inside agitators” (Chappell 1994),
but they were invisible to the audience observing from the outside. White Southerners experiencing empathy and
displaying sympathy could not be publicly placed on the performative scene. In the national civil rights drama,
the “role” of white Southerner was reserved for figures who represented racist masses and repressive elites.

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the emergence of such persua-
sive African American perform-
ers as Douglass, Tubman, et
Du Bois, and such publicizing
organizations as the NAACP
(the National Association
for the Advancement of
Colored People), did the
potential for such mutual
identification develop.

A highly educated, deeply
religious, personally gutsy, et
preternaturally gifted dramaturg,
the Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. set up Southern whites
as the ostensible audience for
civil rights protests. In the actual
practice of his protest dramas,
cependant, King turned Southern
whites into mere foils. He trans-
formed them from real ene-

Chiffre 5. The bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat sparking the
Montgomery bus boycott, on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn,
Michigan. (Photo by rmhermen; courtesy of Creative Commons)

mies into imagined ones, larger than life figures in a morality play that he designed, scripted,
and choreographed, in which he himself played the leading activist role. Time and time again,
such movement dramas subverted Southern white powers by seducing them to play the anti-
democratic role of anti-Christ in their civil religious scripts.

When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, dans
Décembre 1955, her courageous action had the appearance of a spontaneous individual pro-
test. En fait, the move had been long planned by the local chapter of the NAACP, where Parks
herself served as secretary. What could not be known beforehand, cependant, was that the choice
to lead the upheaval that ensued would be a new arrival in the local ministry, a young preacher
named Martin Luther King Jr.

Sustaining the nonviolent Montgomery bus boycott over 12 long months required that a
wide range of performances be fused felicitously together. The success of the protest depended
on a tightly knit production team; rigorous backstage rehearsal of civil actors; continuous direc-
tion of the unfolding mise-en-scène; scripting supple enough to maintain dramatic plotting
and moral clarity through unpredictable ups and downs; and enough material power to provide
thousands of financially strapped black people with private transportation, bail to get out of jail,
and legal representation (Branch 1988). The social drama also required a heroic leading actor,
one who could present himself as fearless in the face of police-state levels of repression and who
was capable of rhetorically inspiring fervent emotional identification and moral inspiration (voir
Meier 1965).

Not only did King project the black protest script locally, to the black masses who were
cast and chorus for the Montgomery movement, but also nationally, to Northern citizens, via
white reporters powerfully affected by the transcendent notes King struck in his civil reli-
gious script: “This bus situation was the precipitating factor, but there is something much
deeper. There is deep determination […] to rise up against these oppressive forces” (in Lentz
1990:26). Citing King’s ringing declaration that “one of the glories of America” was “the
right to protest for right,” Newsweek, at the time an influential weekly magazine, framed the
Montgomery protest in civil rather than racial or economic terms. After the success of the boy-
cott, Time magazine put King on its cover, describing him as “what many a Negro — and, étaient
it not for his color, many a white — would like to be” (in Lentz 1990:34).

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Montgomery was the first
act in a series of protest events
that steadily ramped up dramatic
tension, a decades-long social
drama that plotted the victory
of civil good over anti-civil evil.
There were the fraught, vividly
reported lunch counter sit-ins
de 1960, where wave after wave
of nonviolent student protestors
were arrested and jailed. Là
were the murderously risky
Freedom Rides in 1961, lequel
were met with horrendous beat-
ings and were televised on the
nightly news as courageous pro-
tests against criminal brutality.

When white police with their

fire hoses and ferocious dogs
attacked black school children
in Birmingham, Alabama, dans le
summer of 1964, it became a
drama that captured and out-
raged the Northern civil imag-
ination as never before (Eskew
1997); and when, one year later,
Alabama state police shot non-
violent marchers determined
to cross a bridge in Selma,
the drama aroused the deep-
est moral anxiety, exploding
throughout the Northern collective consciousness (Garrow 1978). Movement leaders had cho-
sen Birmingham and Selma precisely because they knew that the white leaders in these towns
were particularly prone to racist outbursts and antidemocratic displays; and the protest events
were scripted, rehearsed, choreographed, and artfully controlled throughout unfolding mise-
en-scènes. Encore, as Coleridge explained, the artifice of drama can never allow itself to be seen:
dramatic effect depends upon the willing suspension of disbelief. Southern whites dismissed
civil rights protests as trumped-up hype, but white Northern audiences viewed them as authen-
tic and deeply sincere, as powerful dramatizations of the moral truth of racial oppression. Blanc
Northern audiences were also exposed to the drama at closer range, witnessing racial unrest,
violence against blacks, and arrests of black protestors in the North.

Chiffre 6. An African American woman being carried to a police
patrol wagon during a demonstration in Brooklyn, New York, 1963.
(Photo by the Underwood Archives; courtesy of The Image Works)

As Northern whites witnessed these unfolding acts of the civil rights drama in what, thanks

to television news, seemed like real time, their sentimental sympathy for the “lost cause” of
Southern whites gradually evaporated. “We have never […] scattered our efforts,” King con-
fided to a journalist in 1964, “but have focused upon specific symbolic objectives” (in Garrow
1978:321). Symbolic power, King understood, has real effects. Cathecting with the black pro-
tagonists, not their Southern white opponents, Northern citizen-audiences demanded that fed-
eral power be deployed to protect powerless blacks and punish their white oppressors. Dans 1964
et 1965, Congrès, acting in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, abolished segregation laws,
and passed legislation insuring black civil and political rights. Northern state power invaded the
states of the old Confederacy. Many called it the second Reconstruction.

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Seizing the Stage

“Black Lives Matter” in 21st-Century America
A New Black Subject

The 1950s–60s civil rights movement was American focused, but it also inspired the global col-
lective imaginary, projecting tableaux beyond local scenes to hundreds of millions who con-
nected with the performances from outside. It initiated a narrative arc, a sequential iteration of
utopian social performance that, over subsequent decades, became a deeply engrained culture
structure, not only in the United States but also in global civil society.

The utopian ideal of civil solidarity sits uneasily in a world of social inequality, stigma, et
repression (Alexander 2006). Dissatisfaction with existing social arrangements is chronic, et
the civil sphere is restless. Episodes of liminality, and social dramas demanding civil repair, sont
the periodic result: the Solidarity movement in Poland, the People Power Revolution in the
Philippines, Velvet Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, Tiananmen Square, Obama,
the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Umbrella protest in Hong Kong. Some of these movements suc-
ceeded in taking state power; all of them generated extraordinary symbolic force. Ils étaient
felicitous political dramas played out in the public square, in their own locales and before the
larger audience of “all humankind” (Alexander 2013).7

In this final section, cependant, I am concerned, not with such global ramifications, nor the
last few decades, but with a new civil rights movement that has only recently emerged on the
American scene — the Black Lives Matter movement. The iterative performances of the mid-
century civil rights movement left behind a deeply ingrained culture structure, an intensely red-
olent set of background representations upon which later black protests felt compelled to draw.
Mais, as I hope I have made clear, there is an enormous distance between background represen-
tations — the cultural structures that provide the langue for symbolic action — and the concrete
performances situated in time and space that are informed by them. The latter are like prag-
matic speech acts rather than emanations of cultural structures, and they require each of the
other elements of performance to be brought into play. Between the black protest tradition as
crystallized in the mid-20th century and the conditions of poor black inhabitants of the inner
cities in the early 21st century, there loomed the enormous challenge of forging new action-
oriented scripts. These scripts would also have to be made to walk and talk, informing dramatic
scenes that could appeal to, energize, and perhaps even unify citizen-audiences fragmented by
race and class and demoralized by political fatalism. There would also have to be strong lead-
ers, dramaturgs who could produce protest performances and directors who could manage their
mise-en-scenès. Successfully fusing audience, scénario, and actors would require, aussi, access to
the means of symbolic production; sympathetic interpretation of ongoing performances by crit-
ics, such as journalists and intellectuals; and sufficient leverage vis-à-vis material power to block
state forces from exercising repression.

These disparate elements have, en effet, been brought into place by the black movement
against police violence that has gathered force since 2012. Extraordinary creativity was needed
to create each performative element; skill, fortitude, and fortuna were required to weave them

7. The iterative performances that constituted the Chinese Revolution, before and after the Communist regime

change in 1949, created a similarly powerful narrative arc that reverberated on the global stage for decades after.
Without the Maoist script, it is hard to imagine the strands of anticolonialism in the 1950s (par exemple., Frantz Fanon
and Fidel Castro) and 1960s (Che Guevara) that promoted violent agrarian revolution and, quite often, exem-
plary violence as a vanguard trigger (Alexander 2016), much less the revolutionary performances of such Western
leftist groups as the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, who drew upon interpretations of Mao, Fanon, et
Che for their scripts. Cependant, Maoism and its iterations were revolutionary, not civil society movements. Par
contraste, the US civil rights movement was oriented toward radical reform, not revolution, and its embrace of
nonviolence was critical for such performance. This difference is what allowed it to become a central inspiration,
a transforming script, for the radical civil society movements that emerged after the socialist utopia faded.

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Jeffrey C. Alexander

together into the iterative sequence that has allowed African Americans, once again, to seize the
nation’s political stage.

The Underclass Becomes an Acting Subject

By the time the Black Lives Matter movement was formed, it had been decades since African
Americans had been able to do so. The victory of the mid-century civil rights movement had
been decisive, but it was partial. The gates of the ghetto (Duneier 2016) had been pried loose
for African American workers, clerks, professionals, and businessmen (Landry 1988). Oui, tel
groups remained subject to far-reaching racial stigma (Anderson 2012, 2015), but their free-
dom of movement was vastly expanded. Cependant, when they left the ghetto, the uneducated,
unskilled, and unemployed were left behind, in the inner city, and a racial underclass formed,
an often desperate, always degrading admixture of a dominated class and the abject residue of
a still despised race (Wilson 1987). Racial and class prejudice built a cultural fence around this
inner-city group (Patterson 1998); politicians, real estate agents, courts, police, and prisons
exercised controls of an administrative, coercive, and material kind (Massey and Denton 1993;
M.. Alexander 2012). Young black males especially were incarcerated at alarmingly high rates,
often for acts that would not lead to imprisonment if the perpetrators were white.

Working- and middle-class African Americans had peopled the 20th-century movement for
civil rights, supplying crucial cultural capital. They brought education and professional skills to
the task of protest, and the black church, with its powerful bonding and bridging institutions
(Putnam 2000), provided not only generalized trust but protected spaces within which pub-
lic performances could be rehearsed (Morris 1984). Because these kinds of resources were not
nearly as available to the new racial underclass, its capacity for exercising political agency was
severely curtailed.

In principle if not in practice, cependant, the potential for social protest on behalf of the
underclass remained, along with the possibility of leveraging widespread social criticism into
civil repair of the institutions that have sustained its depredation. Despite fissures, contradic-
tion, weak-kneed liberalism, and conservative backlash, the civil sphere in the US remains
potentially empowering, its ideals and institutions on call if the right social arrangements can
be made. To create such arrangements requires a performatively powerful social movement, un
that can so effectively dramatize underclass suffering that new networks of meaning can form
between marginalized racial groups excluded from the civil sphere and the core groups who
occupy secure and influential places within it.

In the years since 2012, such a performatively powerful black civil rights movement has
begun to take shape. Police violence against black people had been routine for decades, but it
had rarely been publicly marked. This changed when online organizers created evocative, highly
condensed slogans and visual symbols, circulating them virtually on their social networks. Quand
their cell phones and computers lit up, tens of thousands took to the streets, producing choreo-
graphed demonstrations that contrasted black innocence with police brutality. Once routine,
police shootings now became dramatized as egregious, undeniable abuses of civil authority. Paul
Kuttner has it right:

Neither police violence in Black communities nor resistance to that violence are new. Mais
something new has emerged: a new focus for anger and despair, a new source of critical
hope, a new catalyst for social imagination and creativity. There are surely many reasons
that a movement has developed at this particular moment. […Un] factor has certainly
been the skill with which organizers have deployed symbols, hashtags, chants, metaphors,
and images in order to communicate — quickly and powerfully — the underlying values
and goals of the movement. Every social movement develops a cache of symbols. These
symbols give coherence to dispersed grassroots efforts. They tap into our emotions and
encourage us to learn more. We use them to mark our collective identity and to capture
the attention of media outlets, with their famously short attention spans. (2015)

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Seizing the Stage

“The Black Lives Matter movement,” according to Michael McLaughlin, “has reframed the
way Americans think about police treatment of people of color.” The lives of poor black people
began to matter.

The Movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem
que, jusqu'à, now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from
it. […] Evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been
significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a
political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that movement has sus-
tained. (McLaughlin 2016)

In the New York Times Jay Caspian Kang describes the dramatic effect of the protests in a simi-
lar manner: “The swiftness with which the movement now acts, and the volume of people it can
bring out to every protest, have turned every police killing into a national referendum on the
value of black lives in America” (2015).

The impact of such symbolic referenda has been to extend sympathy to and identifi-
cation with the underclass. Until recently, according to the Pew Research Center, “public
opinion was […] closely divided” on the question of whether significant changes were still
needed to achieve racial equality (2015). By July 2015, after three years of social mobiliza-
tion, Americans who believed deep changes were needed outnumbered those satisfied with
the status quo by two to one: “This shift in public opinion is seen across the board. Growing
shares in all regions of the country, and across all demographic and partisan groups say
both that racism is a big problem and that more needs to be done to achieve racial equality”
(Pew 2015).

Performing Indignation and Extending Identification

How were such largely black protest performances able to affect the still majority white
American citizen-audiences? As they unfolded on television and computer screens, the unprec-
edented wave of demonstrations against police brutality looked spontaneous, as if they were
grassroots, springing up from the underclass victims themselves. Encore, this was not the case.
Certainly, the demonstrations were heartfelt. Their authenticity, cependant, was choreographed,
their verisimilitude the result of a singular fusion between actors and audience enhanced by
performative effect.

When 17-year-old high school student Trayvon Martin was murdered by George

Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community in Sanford, Florida,
sur 26 Février 2012, the national black community and its white supporters filled the airwaves
with outrage over racism and civil irresponsibility. When the local police chief refused to arrest
Zimmerman, claiming Florida’s so-called Stand-Your-Ground statute allowed his exercise of
armed self-defense, thousands protested, and their demonstrations surprised and riveted what
turned out to be a broadly sympathetic nation. The reaction was as electrifying as it was unex-
pected, pushing the envelope of interracial moral responsibility and emotional identification
further than it had ever been extended before. When President Obama publicly crystallized this
identification, dramatically avowing, “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids
[…] If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon” (in Shear 2012), he was speaking not only for
himself and other African American parents but for a much broader swath of citizens whom he
represented as president of the United States. The Million Hoodies for Justice protest group,
formed a month after the shooting, organized a march in New York where protestors chanted
“We want arrests!” and “We are all Trayvon,” many clad in hooded sweatshirts “symbolic of
the clothing Martin wore when he was killed” (Miller 2012). Two weeks later, Zimmerman was
charged with murder by a special prosecutor appointed by conservative Republican Governor
Rick Scott.

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Fifteen months after that,
when Zimmerman was acquit-
ted, civil outrage once again
ignited, boiling over with the
news that Eric Garner, un
African American father of six,
had died when a white NYPD
officer put him in a 20- second
chokehold in the course of his
arrest. In the days and weeks
of protests that mushroomed
across US cities, highly theatri-
cal “die-ins” were staged; protes-
tors lay down in the middle of
busy streets, and demonstrators
publically chanted Garner’s final
words, “I Can’t Breathe.” When,
just one month after Garner’s
killing, sur 9 Août 2014, un
white police officer in Ferguson,
Missouri, shot another young
black man, Michael Brown, pro-
tests exploded again. Brown’s last words were, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” These sec-
ular prayers of pleading and protest, “became a national rallying cry,” according to the New
York Times (Healy, Stolberg, and Yee 2015:A1). As protestors chanted these words in cities and
campuses across the country, they also projected indexical gestures that would be immediately
recognized as ritual re-enactment. Par exemple, they raised their arms above their heads, in sol-
idarity with Michael Brown, the black teenager who, according witnesses, was surrendering
when he was shot.

Chiffre 7. The Black Lives Matter movement march on Tampa Street in downtown
Tampa, FL, back to Lykes Gaslight Park, 11 Juillet 2016. (Photo by Octavio Jones /
Tampa Bay Times; courtesy of The Image Works)

In December 2014, when a grand jury refused to issue indictments for Eric Garner’s murder,

urban protests heated to a fever pitch. Performed with anger and resolve by African Americans
in the face of potentially dangerous police repression, their dramatic words and choreographed
movements were streamed live by social media and, reported by mainstream journalism, rico-
cheted around the nation. Chanting and raising their arms in archetypical gestures of solidarity
and fear, demonstrators marched in public squares, blocked local and interstate highways, et
interrupted shopping centers, religious holidays, and political events. Their slogans and ges-
tures became totems — “Mike Brown is an emblem,” a protestor in Philadelphia declared (AP
2014) — and were circulated by iconic black figures, celebrities from music, film, sport, theatre,
and politics. Across from the Broadway NYPD police station, African American actors staged
a precision rap-and-dancing protest. Outside a Cleveland Cavaliers and Brooklyn Nets basket-
ball game, thousands milled in protest, alors que, on the inside, superstar LeBron James donned an
“I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt, proclaiming to national media, “as a society, we have to do better […]
for one another no matter what race you are.” In the same USA Today article, Nets guard Jarret
Jack explained:

We aren’t just focused on ourselves as just athletes […] We collectively understand that
this is an issue that needs to be addressed. The more attention we can bring and aware-
ness to it is great. It’s not a color issue, it’s a people issue. It’s a citizen issue. (in Zillgit
and Strauss 2014)

The demonstrators outside the Cleveland arena welcomed these gestures, seeing their potential
for connecting with a much wider audience beyond.

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Seizing the Stage

“That’s a result of them being educated brothers and having a slight moral compass,” a
protestor identifying himself only as L.B. said. “They know they’re on their grand stage.
Anybody that has any type of public voice needs to stand up and do something.” (Zillgit
and Strauss 2014)

Projecting gestures and voices from such grand stages had an impact. The ritual-like sym-
bolic actions generated a collective effervescence that pulsated outward in great waves and was
observed by political commentators who gauged shifting opinion. Donna Brazile, the influ-
ential African American media commentator, now interim chair of the Democratic National
Committee, declared:

“Hands up, Don’t Shoot” has become a larger symbol of the desire to prove one’s inno-
cence […] In many ways, it will always resonate as a symbol of an unarmed dead teen-
ager lying for hours on the street. Just like “I can’t breathe” will never go away. They are
forever etched in the complicated story of racial bias in our criminal justice system. (dans
Healy et al. 2015)

Black Lives Matter Seizes the Stage

It was in the midst of the Ferguson protests that Black Lives Matter — the hashtag, le
organization, and the broad eponymous movement — emerged on the public scene.8
#BlackLivesMatter had been created the day George Zimmerman went free, but in the year

following it was rarely evoked.
After the murder of Michael
Brun, #BLM led the Freedom
Rides that fed the conflagra-
tion in Ferguson, and the num-
ber of visitors to its website
jumped a hundredfold (Freelon
et autres. 2016). A breathless con-
temporary account by the activ-
ist Spanish-language website
teleSUR is revealing. “A national
coalition determined to chal-
lenge state violence will con-
vene in Ferguson over the next
three days,” teleSUR reported,
and described the purpose of
the gathering in performative
terms — “to re-envision a Black
political platform in the United
States” (teleSUR 2014). Le
group that would build this plat-
form was Black Lives Matter.
TeleSUR linked the organization

Chiffre 8. Sparked by the Grand Jury verdicts in Ferguson, MO, and the Eric
Garner murder in Staten Island, New York, thousands marched on 13 Décembre 2014
in New York City against police racial bias and the killings of unarmed black men
all over the USA. (Photo by David M. Grossman; courtesy of The Image Works)

to the sacred tradition of black civil rights, providing one of the organization’s founders a plat-
form to declaim about repression, resilience, and destiny:

8. “Clearly there is some degree of overlap between #Blacklivesmatter and Black Lives Matter: organization mem-
bers (along with many others) use the hashtag, which in turn almost certainly leads prospective members to
the organization. En même temps, the two terms are sometimes used to refer to a third idea: the sum of all
organizations, individuals, protests, and digital spaces dedicated to raising awareness about and ultimately ending
police brutality against Black people” (Freelon et al. 2016:9).

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On Friday, close to 600 people will gather in Ferguson, Missouri, from across the con-
tinental United States, part of the Black Lives Matters (BLM) Ride. “The Black Lives
Matters Ride is the Freedom Ride of our generation,” explains co-organizer Patrisse
Cullors. […] The BLM Ride comes out of the spirit and history of the 1960s Freedom
Rides to Mississippi that aimed to end racial segregation. […] “The BLM Ride is a call
to action for Black people across the country to come together and re-articulate our des-
tiny,” stresses Cullors. […] “We believe that in order to move this country out of a cycle
of destruction and trauma, we have to rise up, both locally and nationally. Ferguson
represents both the repression that exists in Black communities, and also our immense
resilience […],” advocates BLM in their National Advocacy and Organizing Toolkit.
(teleSUR 2014)

A UCLA graduate in religion and philosophy, Patrisse Cullors was a fulltime organizer
for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, a nonprofit dedicated to social jus-
tice issues in the inner city (Cobb 2016:36). She created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter from
a Facebook post by her friend Alicia Garza on the day of George Zimmerman’s acquittal.
“The sad part is,” Garza wrote, “there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating
right now. And that makes me sick to my stomach. We GOTTA get it together y’all.” Garza
later added:

btw stop saying we are not surprised. That’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be sur-
prised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. Stop giving up on black
lives […] black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. (in Cobb 2016:35)

Garza studied anthropology and sociology at the University of California, San Diego, et
worked as a special projects director in the Oakland office of the National Domestic Workers
Alliance, representing 20,000 caregivers and housekeepers. The third member of #BLM’s
founding trio is Opal Tometi, a writer and immigration rights organizer in Brooklyn, who built
a social media platform on Facebook and Twitter so that, in the words of New Yorker journalist
Jelani Cobb, “activists” could use the hashtag to “connect with one another” (26). As Cobb put
it, the three women then “began thinking about how to turn the phrase into a movement” (26).

Organizers, Producers, Directors, and Activists

Garza, Cullors, and Tometi became invisible dramaturgs, writing scripts for the highly visible
public performances of their organization. They were not on the scene, but behind it. Looking
back, Cullors claimed the role of producer and director, distinguishing such responsibilities
from participating in real-time performances and handling the mise-en-scène.

I identify as an organizer versus an activist because I believe an organizer is the small-
est unit that you build your team around. The organizer is the person who gets the press
together and who builds new leaders, the person who helps to build and launch cam-
paies, and is the person who decides what the targets will be and how we’re going to
change this world. (Cullors 2016)

It was somebody from outside the founding group of invisible organizers, a Brooklyn-based

activist and friend of Cullors named Daniel Moore, who actually coordinated the Freedom
Rides to Missouri from New York, Chicago, Portland, Les anges, Philadelphia, and Boston.
Moore was soon joined by DeRay Mckesson, then a 29-year-old former school administrator
from Minneapolis who, transfixed by the images and texts unrolling on his Twitter feed, drove
600 miles to Ferguson to immerse himself in the actual protest scene (Kang 2015). In Ferguson,
at a street-medic training session, Mckesson met Johnetta Elzie, a 25-year-old St. Louis native
who had studied journalism in college. The two became hands-on, all-in, street-level organizing
partners, avidly sharing information and showing up for virtually every event in the weeks and
months ahead.

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Seizing the Stage

Elzie […était] l'un des
most reliable real-time
observers of the confron-
tations between the pro-
testers and the police. Elle
took photos of the protest
organizers, of the sand-
wiches she and her friends
made to feed other pro-
testers, of the Buddhist
monks who showed up
at the burned QuickTrip.
Mckesson, aussi, was live-
tweeting […et] integrat-
ing video and referring
to protesters and police
officers alike by name.
Mckesson’s tweets
were usually sober and
detailed, whereas Elzie’s
were cheerfully sarcastic.
(Kang 2015)

Chiffre 9. Black Lives Matter protestors occupied the Minneapolis police
department’s fourth precinct from 15 November to 3 Décembre 2015.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 25 Novembre. (Photo by Tony Webster; courtesy of
Creative Commons)

Elzie and Mckesson soon became “the most recognizable figures in the movement in
Ferguson” (Cobb 2016:36). As iterations of black protest unfolded in response to later police
shootings, the two became publically visible personae standing out from the emerging, but still
largely anonymous “black subject” whose gathering power was increasingly seen and heard over
television and computer screens.

Pretty soon, Mckesson and Elzie were appearing regularly on TV and radio. Ils étaient
appealing personalities and soon became easily recognizable personas. Mckesson had
begun wearing red shoes and a red shirt to protests. Plus tard, he replaced this outfit with a
bright blue Patagonia vest, which he now wears everywhere he goes. (Someone created a
DeRay’s vest Twitter account.) Elzie often wore dark lipstick, a pair of oversize sunglasses
and a leather jacket: the beautician’s daughter channeling a Black Panther. (Kang 2015)

This passage is from a spread about Mckesson and Elzie in a 2015 issue of the New York Times
Magazine, a lengthy account filled with appealing color photos and marked by an enthusi-
astic, even adulatory tone (Kang 2015). Mckesson later announced his candidacy to become
Baltimore’s mayor. Soon after, clad in signature red sneakers and blue vest, he made guest
appearances on The Late Show with Steven Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

The Double Movement

When journalists and social scientists began to examine the new BLM protest movement, ils
highlighted its online presence, as if software savvy plus anger and grit were sufficient in them-
selves to initiate the shock waves pulsating throughout the broader civil surround. Beguiled by
technologie, such understandings truncate the performative process, eliding the chasm separat-
ing scripts and actors, on one side, from audiences, on the other — making invisible, in other
words, the very “de-fusion” of performative elements that underscores the cultural and prag-
matic difficulties of achieving dramatic success.

That this gap was real, and immensely challenging, explains why the BLM protest move-
ment was a series of interrelated but separated calls and responses, not one performance but
several, each one temporally, spatially, and demographically independent even if topically inter-
linked. The triggering posts of anonymous leaders, such as Garza and Cullors, were elabo-

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Jeffrey C. Alexander

rated by on-scene actors, such as Mckesson and Elzie, and retweeted to a network of hundreds
of organizers who were viewed as “in place” and “ready to bring thousands of people into the
streets with a tweet” (Kang 2015). These first responders in the layered audience (Rauer 2006)
were primed and committed, waiting to be “re-fused.” Mckesson put it this way: “When I tweet,
I’m mostly preaching to the choir” (Kang 2015). He was confident the audience for his mis-
sives would become actors performing protest on the street. What this on-scene organizer was
not quite as certain about, cependant, were the effects that such choreographed bodily displays
would have on audiences at one layer removed, those watching and listening to the street per-
formances via mainstream media. Mckesson hoped, bien sûr, this more distant audience would
identify with the dramas he was organizing, but he confessed that, in this second phase, he was
actually preaching against the choir.

The heart of the movement is […] shutting down streets, shutting down Walmarts, shut-
ting down any place where people feel comfortable. We want to make people feel as
uncomfortable as we feel when we hear about Mike, about Eric Garner, about Tamir
Rice. We want them to experience what we go through on a daily basis. (in Kang 2015)

The BLM street protests did not aim to seize power; most did not even have concrete
demands. Their ambition, rather, was communicative, to create dramatic performances that
would trigger sympathy for the suffering of underclass others, generating an emotional cathexis
that would extend cultural identification, putting “ordinary people” (whites mostly) in the posi-
tion of the oppressed, making them “experience what we go through on a daily basis.”

To produce such vicarious symbolic experience, the portrayal of protest in the news media
was key. This is the second act of the Black Lives Matter performance. It begins with journal-
ists interpreting the protests and filing stories that their news organizations project outward
via print, television, and the internet. The first circuit of the double movement — social media
directives to a committed network that brought black bodies into the streets — produced the
performance of the racial underclass as a new black subject. The second performative circuit
aimed to re-fuse this protest with a much more distant audience. The new black subject had to
be recognized by influential white core groups, and in a sympathetic way.

In their massive study of 40.8 million movement-related tweets between 1 Juin 2014 et
31 May 2015, Freelon et al. (2016) reconstruct the network structure of BLM’s digital commu-
nications. Two findings suggest precisely the kind of double movement I am proposing here.
The first is that the digital network was decidedly loose, composed of weak rather than strong
liens, among which there was relatively little exchange back and forth. Instead of a “dense net-
work with many reciprocal ties — conducive to building trust between connections” — the kind
lequel, according to Freelon and his colleagues, would be ideal for “circulat[ing] ideas for how
to mobilize” — the researchers found an “extremely diffuse” network, one “clearly conducive to
broadly distributing and circulating information” (16).9 The second finding concerns not the
geography of the network, but the substantive identity of its nodes. By far the most frequently
connected hubs were media organizations, not individuals or protest groups, and most of these
media were mainstream.10 “In the case of the Black Lives Matter Web network,” Freelon and

9. “With a graph density of .003 […] only a tiny fraction of all the links that could exist within the network actu-

ally exist. As a comparison, a random network with the same number of nodes has a density of .02, meaning that
the network contains two percent of all possible ties. There is little reciprocity between sites (dans 97% of cases, des sites
linking out to another site don’t receive a link in from the latter site). Whether unidirectional or reciprocal, few
sites have multiple links to any one site (the average tie weight — the number of times any two sites link to each
other — is one, and only 30% of ties have a weight greater than one)» (Freelon et al. 2016:16).

10. “59% of the entire Black Lives Matter network are news sites [et] plus que 75% of sites with direct connec-
tions to BlackLivesMatter.com are news sites. [W]e’ve pointed out that as a whole, the network is very sparse.
Cependant, connections among news sites in the network are extremely dense, meaning that they primarily connect
to one another, and much less so to non-news sites” (Freelon et al. 2016:17).

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Seizing the Stage

colleagues conclude, “what primarily gets produced and distributed is news, which is meant to
be widely distributed” (16).

This empirical information illuminates the neural structures of the double movement.
Directives from protest organizers not only triggered street performances but massive retweet-
ings among activists, which were subsequently posted directly, or redirected, to interested jour-
nalists. Alerted, reporters then put themselves immediately on the scene, virtually in real time or
bodily in real space. Initiating the second performative circuit, reporters posted contemporane-
ous stories on media blogs. These were picked up by participants inside the demonstrations and,
more or less simultaneously, by the tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of potentially atten-

tive watchers on the outside,
many of whom re(concernant)tweeted to
new nodes on the network in
turn.

Chiffre 10. An activist holds a “Black Lives Matter” sign outside the Minneapolis
police fourth precinct building during the Black Lives Matter occupation
following the officer-involved shooting of Jamar Clark. Minnepolis, Minnesota,
15 Novembre 2015. (Photo by Tony Webster; courtesy of Creative Commons)

This two-part performative
structure remained in place even
as the protest movement’s orga-
nization and tactics changed.
Later in 2015, the controver-
sies concerning police killings
seemed to abate.11 “If the goal
of Black Lives Matter was […] à
convince more Americans that
police brutality existed,” the New
York Times reported, then “it
was successful.” With that suc-
cess, the Times observed, “the
momentum began to shift and
transform into something else,»
and “there were fewer protests
than before” (Howard 2016).
BLM’s national organization
broke into more than 30 rela-
tively independent, locally based activist groups. While scattered street demonstrations con-
tinued, attention shifted to more targeted disruptions (Aron 2015; Ruffin 2016; Stockman
2016), especially of nationally visible political campaigns (see Eligon 2016). BLM demonstra-
tors took control of a “Netroots Nation forum featuring [Bernie] Sanders and Martin O’Malley
in Phoenix and began chanting slogans” (Helsel 2015). At a Sanders rally in Seattle, two female
BLM activists took over the microphone, demanding the candidate extend his calls for radical
reform from class to race. In Atlanta, BLM interrupted a speech by Hillary Clinton on criminal
justice and race. At a rally in Philadelphia, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, tried fac-
ing down chants from angry activists who linked his 1994 crime bill to the massive incarceration
of black men. “Black Activists Are Literally Stealing the Stage from 2016 Contenders — And It’s
Working,” one liberal blog headlined (Moore 2015a).

It certainly appeared to be the case that, in response to the disruptive confrontations,
Democratic “contenders […] recalibrated their messages and tone”: O’Malley apologized for
saying “all lives matter”; Sanders added “racial justice” and penal reform to his list of political

11. Not the police killings themselves, cependant. In a 12-month Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation, the Washington

Post discovered there had been 990 fatal police shootings in 2015 (Kindy et al. 2015) et 250 in the first
3 months of 2016 (Sullivan et al. 2016). Those killed in 2015 were disproportionally minorities, 258 African
Americans and 172 Hispanics, for a total of 430 as compared with 494 whites. One-third of the victims were
aged 18–29.

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Jeffrey C. Alexander

priorities (Moore 2015b); and Hillary Clinton began a “Mothers of the Movement” campaign,
encouraging the mourning mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir
Rice, and Sandra Bland “to organize and travel the country with her campaign” and paying their
expenses so they could attend the Democratic presidential debates (Chozick 2016a). Describing
the impact of this dramatic tactic, the New York Times noted how it bolstered the authenticity of
Hillary Clinton’s character and the vitality and verisimilitude of her campaign’s performance:

Having these women by her side has provided Mrs. Clinton with powerful and deeply
sympathetic character witnesses as she makes her case to African American voters. Et
they have given her campaign, an often cautious and poll-tested operation, a raw, human,
and sometimes gut-wrenching feeling. (Chozick 2016a)

Mr. Clinton, aussi, felt compelled to be publicly responsive, the New York Times headlining: “Bill
Clinton Says He Regrets Showdown With Black Lives Matters Protesters” (Chozick 2016b).

BLM’s newly disruptive tactics were also directed at Republican candidates, mais, plutôt que
eliciting supportive responses, these protests appeared to be aimed at highlighting what activists
regarded as the uncaring whiteness of the conservative movement. The tactic seemed particu-
larly effective vis-à-vis the candidacy of Donald Trump. The violent responses of his white sup-
porters to BLM’s provocations intensified not only Democratic, but also Republican anxieties
about the anti-civil, “over the line” character of the New York real estate developer’s campaign.

While the New York Times described the sequence of iterative demonstrations analyzed in
this section as “the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date”
(Kang 2015), BLM’s performative power remained relatively constricted in comparison with
what had been generated by its mid-20th-century predecessor. To explain why, one must ref-
erence elements of social performance that were not quite there. There were problems, pour
example, with BLM’s script. The persuasive reach of disruptive indignation is limited. A more
powerful myth would have laid out a redemptive pathway from suffering to salvation, depuis
underclass to social justice, perhaps underscoring “American exceptionalism” or the idea of
America as God’s chosen people. The secular tone of BLM, cependant, precluded any connection
with American civil religion (Bellah 1970).

The lack of larger-than-life characters proved another major obstacle. Protagonists must

be embodied in order to become heroic; collective subjects, online discourses, and digital
images are not enough. DeRay Mckesson may have been the only distinguishable persona to
have emerged from a protest movement that remained remarkably anonymous, but his 2016
Baltimore mayoral campaign still floundered for want of “name recognition” (Eligon and
Stolberg 2016). In late December 2015, CNN claimed Mckesson “drives the conversation”
(Sidner and Simon 2015). Four months later, the New York Times Magazine reported Mckesson
“was on Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders list last year” and “has been to the White House so
many times that he says he doesn’t get nervous anymore” (Howard 2016). Such claims of char-
ismatic authority, cependant, were vastly overstated. Mckesson registered on the American radar
screen, but he didn’t penetrate its sacred center. He did not become a collective representation
of black suffering and hope, either for the racial underclass or the protest drama’s multicultural
and multiclass audience on the outside. Mckesson did not embody, in the words he spoke, le
tone of his voice, or the lines of his face, contemporary African American aspirations for justice.
An effective organizer who became a recognizable face, Mckesson was more a celebrity, famous
for being famous, than a genuine hero.12

12. It is revealing that, while recounting Mckesson’s many accomplishments, the Times observed, “he collects celeb-
rity ‘friends’ (Azealia Banks, Jesse Williams, Susans Wojcicki and Sarandon, Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross)
[…et] refers to them solely by their first names,” and explained this was “because, over the last year and a half,
he has been the best known face of the Black Lives Matter movement, traveling the country to protest police vio-
lence” (Howard 2016).

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Seizing the Stage

Conclusion

Social movements do not succeed because they are materially powerful; they become materi-
ally powerful because they succeed. To explain this seeming paradox, I have argued that social
movements should be understood as social performances. To seize power in the state, one must
first seize the collective imagination, projecting dramas on the stage of social life that depict
the triumph of justice, so powerfully fusing with distant audiences that dangerous insurrection
becomes legitimate.

The Chinese communist movement claimed it arose from the clash of objective interests,
but the party itself had to make these class contradictions come to dramatic life. Mao was trans-
formed into a larger-than-life persona, a heroic savior, and the peasant masses had to be taught
to cry bitter tears. Despite the protests of generations of critical intellectuals and legal reform-
ers, African Americans suffered mostly in silence for decades after slavery. It was the performa-
tive genius of Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporting staff that finally gave them voice. Le
drama they forged together projected a redemptive narrative that riveted the Northern white
audience, gained significant political power, and made major repairs in the rent racial garment
of American life. Fifty years later, even as social scientists laid out the structural forces encir-
cling the new black underclass, Black Lives Matter forged an active black subject. Deploying the
newly digital means of symbolic production, its organizers projected compelling narratives, slo-
gans, and gestures, triggering massive African American protest and, fusing with sympathetic
journalists, bringing the racially affirmative demand that black lives matter as much as white
lives into the heart of a reluctantly responsive nation.

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