Creative Activism: Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts - Paperback

by Rachel Lee Rubin (Editor)

This collection brings together interviews with a compelling range of musicians, artists, and activists from around the globe. What does it mean for an artist to be "political"? Moving away from a narrow idea about politics that is organized around elections, advocacy groups, or concrete manifestos, the subjects of Creative Activism do their work through song, poetry, painting, and other arts. The interviews take us from Oakland to London to Johannesburg and from the Occupy movement to the coal mines of Appalachia to the fantasy worlds created by some of our most fascinating writers of spectacular fiction. Listening to the important "cultural workers" of our time challenges any idea that some other time was the golden age of political art: Creative Activism gives us a front-row seat to the thrilling artistic activism of our own moment.

Author Biography

Rachel Lee Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, where she directs the Center for the Study of Humanities, Culture, and Society. She has authored and edited numerous books on American popular culture including Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, American Identities: An Introductory Textbook, American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, and an upcoming title for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series, Okie from Muskogee. She is a regular commentator on public radio and frequently quoted as a popular culture expert in the mainstream media.