Commentary in The Drama Review (TDR): “Art in and for a Democracy”
Dudley Cocke
It’s commonplace today to hear that democracy’s future is at risk. And as social media feeds us our daily diet of rancorous extremism, there is a growing recognition that culture is a central battleground for democracy’s survival. What is missing, and what we need, is a cultural strategy to fight back.
The authoritarian Right has long understood that culture is upstream from politics. In his bid for the presidential nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, Pat Buchanan put it this way:
My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in the country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. (Buchanan 1992)
Buchanan’s declaration of the culture war was a direct challenge to the victories of the civil rights movement and all the other social justice movements that had sprung from it. There, too, culture played a central role. Beginning in the 1960s, artists across the US realized their communities shared the common plight of being exploited for profit by a relative few in powerful positions. They also recognized that prominent in the exploiter’s playbook was the plan to replace a community’s deep, distinctive histories and traditions with shallow, generic stereotypes. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o described this tactic as “the cultural bomb,” intended “to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves” (1986:28). Once communities stopped believing in themselves, they could easily be played off against one another in the time-tested winning strategy of divide and conquer.
Seeing what was happening, many artists in these communities set about creating plays that investigated and celebrated their local history and cultural heritage. Their public performances engendered a new sense of personal and community pride. In the central Appalachian coalfields where I have lived most of my life, this realization and move toward reclamation brought a group of community-trained storytellers and musicians together in 1975 to form Roadside Theater—and two years later brought Roadside together with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Free Southern Theater, doing the same work in their home towns in the Black Belt South. This initial union between Roadside and the Free Southern Theater (which in 1980 became Junebug Productions) eventually grew into the American Festival Project, a national alliance with like-minded African American, Latino, Jewish, Asian, Appalachian, and Native American artists and ensembles. Footnote1 Over the next 25 years, the American Festival Project produced 21 multiyear multicultural festivals that demonstrated how people across race, class, religion, and rural-urban lines learn to turn away from fear and isolation, tell their own stories, and listen to the stories of their neighbors, both next door and far away.
This is an excerpt from Dudley Cocke’s comment in Theater Drama Review (TDR), Volume 68 , Issue 1: Still Exhausted: Labor, Digital Technologies, and the Performing Arts
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