Occupations: A Repertoire of Experimental Political and Artistic Practices

Taking up the multivalence of "occupation" — it can refer to a hobby, a profession, an act of residence, a colonization of space, or a resistance to that colonization — I use this term to sketch a practice-oriented understanding of individual and small-scale experiments in resistance and alternative life in the post-WWII period. These experiments sought unorthodox, radically democratic, and participatory modes of life. My argument uses four "illegitimate" political acts — hunger strike, self-immolation, sabotage, and squatting — to rethink utopian and resistant possibilities of postwar experimental art, particularly in postcolonial contexts. The archive, or repertoire, of this dissertation is thus wide-ranging. Its artistic objects include Moroccan poets, authors in American and French avant-garde groups — from more classical figures like Bernadette Mayer and Jacques Roubaud to under-explored authors like Norman H. Pritchard and Danielle Collobert — a film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, visual and performance art from the Fluxus and Situationist groups, and the American "maintenance" artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Artists in this period often sought to eschew the stagnancy of the artistic object, of artistic creation, of representation, for practices and acts that would spur change. The language used to talk about such experiments, however, is still overly concerned with objects and aesthetic meanings. In response, my work explores "practice" to emphasize not only the processual or bodily changes that such arts and political acts demand, but also the democratizing, nonhierarchical possibilities latent in performing them. Next to these artistic objects, I read historical and political events such as the MK's sabotage acts in 1960s South Africa, the practice of sumūd in Palestine, and the disparate, wide spread of hunger strikes and self-immolations in the last half century. Multilingual (across English, French, and Arabic) and transnational, my argument is an attempt to locate the forms of resistance, reparation, and survival that can be replicated, learned, and taught, both in the physical world and its cultural counterpart. This means looking for hidden, missed, and failed alternatives to the unjust and totalizing forces that entrenched their power in the 1960s-1980s (neoliberalism, First World dominance, continual forms of imperialism and colonialism). In other words, I argue that formal interpretations of political, material acts of resistance expand how experimental aesthetics can represent, navigate, and even take part in decolonization.