PERFORMING THE COMMON: Political Imagination of Protest in Place1

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Abstract

This chapter examines the interrelationship between protest action and place through a discussion of the Black Lives Matter protests at the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 2020. Drawing upon the political theory of Hannah Arendt, the essay argues that protest action performatively enacts and discloses not only actors’ unique identities but also new realities and potentialities of the common within discrete places. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the common world is shown to encompass an implicit, original place-structure which protest-actors rearticulate and disclose anew within the places of protest events. The striking transformation of the Lee monument and the place where it stood through the action of protesters is understood to embody and express this rearticulation of the common as a setting fit for action and appearance, and for protest as a mode of political imagination in place.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Theatres of Architectural Imagination

First Page

71

Last Page

81

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