Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

U A G E
L A N G
TH E
O T E S T
O F PR
M A N CE,
P E R FOR ACY
OF IM
ACTS AND LEGIT
N T I T Y,
IDE
The Language of Protest
 Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

The Language
of Protest
Acts of Performance, Identity,
and Legitimacy
Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill
Department of English and
Communication Studies
St. Mary’s University, Texas
San Antonio, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-77418-3 ISBN 978-3-319-77419-0  (eBook)

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 For the three Andrews Hill, whose answer is never,
“No,” but instead always, “How?”
and for Thomas J. Hoffman, whose incisiveness and probity
were a gift to all who
had the privilege of knowing him.
 Preface

We live in an era of bombast that makes us suspicious of words. That

this is the “WORST/BEST EVER fill-in-the-blank.” An era in which
bumper stickers reflect a crass individualism of “It’s all about me” or a
disdainfulness of “You’ve mistaken me for someone who cares.” Of talk
shows across the political spectrum in which the average anchor shouts
at the opposition instead of engaging in a thoughtful discussion of the
issues. Of government officials who repeatedly animate Lord Acton’s
warning that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nevertheless, despite
this trend, we also live in an era with voices that counter the corrup-
tion, disdain or crass individualism with “Fusion>Fission,” that “I don’t
have to agree with you to like and respect you,” or “Coexist” because in
the quiet moments of our day, we know that “in the end, love wins.”
These bumper stickers, positive and negative, reflect a belief, perhaps
not articulated or even privately acknowledged, that in having our say,
our words create and shape the world in which we live.
This is a book about particular groupings of words, the words of
protest that have stirred imaginations, urging people to call for change
and others to respond to that call. It is a book that hopes to encourage

vii
viii    
Preface

intentionality of speaking, of doing what our grandmothers used to tell

us to do: to think before we speak. Because what we say matters.
Twenty years ago, on a New Orleans spring day, Dr. Geoffrey
Harpham paused unexpectedly while speaking to his graduate class at
Tulane University to utter words that have mattered tremendously
to me. After staring out the window for several seconds, he faced his
expectant class, declaring, “It is a rarefied and privileged thing we do at
this moment. To have the time and the security to be here together, dis-
cussing the great ideas of humanity.” Indeed it was.
Since that day, during my years on the other side of the desk at St.
Mary’s University, this rarefied privilege has continued to shape my
life in a myriad of ways, particularly through opportunities to engage
in intergenerational exchanges with previous mentors and students, on
the ideas, events, and people who shape our contemporary moment. In
my Tulane experience, Judith M. Maxwell, as my doctoral advisor, gra-
ciously nurtured with patience and good humor, my interest in how we
use puffs of air, scratches on a surface, or pixels on a screen to create
and shape our world. Neither she, nor Tulane, shied away from shep-
herding my cross-disciplinary explorations, of the relationship between
language and power, despite the ever-increasing pressures of speciali-
zation within academia. For this openness on their parts, I have been
most grateful and have been delighted with the assistance and support
Dr. Maxwell has provided me in the development of Chapter 5 regard-
ing the Condemnations of the Totonicapán Massacre. In my St. Mary’s
experience, I am most grateful for the generous assistance, particularly
in the research and writing of the analysis of “Sí Se Puede” in Chapter 2,
of two former students, Genesis Calderon, a doctoral student in
Linguistics at Tulane, and Valerie Saenz, a teacher in the San Antonio
Independent School District, whose passion for a better world reassures
even the most jaded cynics.
This passion for a better world is the taproot of the Language of
Protest. I wished to understand more fully the creativity of the human
voice when it risks responding to forces of power in pursuit of the
Common Good. To compare various genres of creativity—chants,
songs, poems, and prose—in which words perform protest, I have con-
structed a proscenium arch, built from the ideas of John L. Austin’s
 Preface    
ix

How To Do Things With Words, under which to analyze four linguis-

tic genres of protest. These analyses encourage a richer understanding
of this global phenomenon, especially in our era of burgeoning social
media.
Intended as an act of hospitality, in the spirit of Parker Palmer’s idea
of integrative education, the book transgresses disciplinary borders in
pursuit of an authentic conversation that can inform the ethical and
moral civic actions that shape our communities. I hope that it serves
as an invitation: to discourse analysts to consider dimensions of power
and the Common Good in their excavations of language use; to politi-
cal scientists to consider questions of language and genre in their explo-
rations of power; to practitioners of philosophy, literary, and cultural
studies to consider linguistic power and practice as a driving force in the
human narrative; and to protesters to consider their civic participation
in relation to the “traveling concept of the performative” and the Social
Contract. I hope that it encourages understandings of how we do things
with words to promote the democracy to come.

San Antonio, USA Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

 Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to the many individuals who have con-

tributed to this project. The graciousness of Judith Maxwell, Genesis
Calderon, and Valerie Saenz to assist me in the thinking and writing
about how we use words to induce positive change is deeply appreciated.
I am grateful to Judith for her gracious contribution to the identifica-
tion, translation, and analysis of Guatemalan documents in Chapter 5.
I am grateful to Genesis and Valerie for their rich contribution to the
research and writing of the “Sí se puede” analysis in Chapter 2. The
tenacity and curiosity of Genesis as my research assistant throughout
much of this process has been inspiring, while Valerie’s enthusiasm and
willingness to contribute to the project’s completion have been a tre-
mendous act of generosity.
The patience and insights of Charles Cotrell, as we sorted presupposi-
tions and aspirations in relation to the Social Contract, proved founda-
tional to the analytical frame underlying this project. The librarians and
staff of the Blume Academic Library at St. Mary’s University, particu-
larly Caroline Byrd, Diane Duesterhoeft, and Nettie Lucio, once again
graciously provided unflagging support from start to finish. The sup-
port of my colleagues in the St. Mary’s University community, especially

xi
xii    
Acknowledgements

Alice H. Kersnowski and Kathleen Maloney, has been invaluable. This

project has been richly informed by the keen eyes and intellects of the
following researchers and readers who have generously contributed their
time and insights: Andrew J. Hill, Cyra Dumitru, Alex Eakins, Marie
Feldmeier, Hannah Garcia, Luis Hernandez, Lindsey Johnson, Frank
Kersnowski, Carol McDavid, Jennifer Nunez, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Sarah
Justus, Connie Lanaghan, Matthew Mangum, Daniel Rigney, Daniela
Sorea, Dominique Vargas, Michele T. Weber, and Kurt Weber. Working
with the primary materials in the Wilfred Owen collection at the Harry
Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin was a much-appre-
ciated shot of encouragement at the right time.
I am especially grateful to The Edward and Linda Speed Peace and
Justice Fellowship, the St. Mary’s University Faculty Development
Grant program, the St. Mary’s University School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, under the auspices of Janet Dizinno, and the United
States Institute of Public Education Peacebuilding grant program, for
providing the funding necessary to support the research and writing of
this text.
It has been delightful to work with Cathy Scott, Commissioning
Editor, Language and Linguistics, and Beth Farrow, Editorial Assistant,
Sociology/Language and Linguistics, as they have encouraged and
guided this project into reality. The author and publisher are grateful
to Ana Blandiana, Daniela Sorea, the Bobby Sands Trust, John Stuart
“Brick” Clark, Sony/EMI Music for permission to use their respective
materials. We are also grateful to the Highlander Research and
Education Center, the caretakers for We Shall Overcome.
In our time-honored tradition, I extend an apology to anyone whose
contribution I have failed to include here, and I accept full responsibil-
ity for all errors within the text.
Finally, I live in gratitude to my family, especially Andrew and A.J.,
who are the Great Joy of my life.

Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood

of Protest 35

3 Exploring the Protest Language of Chants “Everyday

I’m çapulling” and “Sí se puede” 79

4 Exploring the Protest Language of Songs:

We Shall Overcome and 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons 121

5 Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry:

“Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade”
and “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is Sweet and Good” 171

6 Exploring the Protest Language of Prose:

Condemnations of the Totonicapán Massacre
and The Diary of Bobby Sands 219

xiii
xiv    
Contents

7 Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood

of Protest 265

Appendix A 297

Appendix B 299

Index 303
 About the Author

Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill, Ph.D. is a professor of English and

Communication Studies at St. Mary’s University of San Antonio,
Texas. After having cross-trained by taking advanced degrees in Political
Science, English Literature and Language, Anthropology, and Linguistics,
Gasaway Hill embarked on her teaching career at St. Mary’s. She pur-
sues innovative pedagogies that build on established strategies, such as
that highlighted in her work with “Digital Diagramming,” in which she
teaches sentence diagramming using current technologies. The inaugu-
ral Edward & Linda Speed Peace and Justice Fellow, Gasaway Hill is a
scholar and poet interested in the nexus of language, power, and change.

xv
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Lyrics and translation for 99 Luftaballons/99 Red Balloons 144

Fig. 4.2 Phew, that was close by Brick 149

xvii
 1
Introduction

In The Wounding and Healing of Desire, Wendy Farley (2005) asserts that,
“All of us exist and flourish only in utter and complete interdependence
on others” (p. xv). Protest is messy. It’s messy because as Farley suggests,
humans exist and flourish only in interdependence, and that interdepend-
ence often generates conflict—and protest is born of conflict. This book
is also messy, not just because it focuses on protest, but because it is a
product of what Eve Sedgwick (2003) has deemed the “filthy workshop”
of John L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory (SAT) (p. 17).1 From its debut in
1955, Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, articulated in How We
Do Things with Words (1994), has developed as a benevolent philosophical
and linguistic Dr. Frankenstein, spawning progeny far and wide. His con-
cept of the performative utterance—the idea that when particular people
utter particular words in particular ways, at particular times, in particular
places, they are doing certain types of work, like promising, daring, or
marrying—has been explored in a wide range of fields from philosophy,
to theater studies, anthropology, and natural science.
This expansion of the performative for protest, like the story of
Dr. Frankenstein, is one about the wounding and healing of desire amidst
the mess. Protest is rooted in a sort of irredentism, a desire to reclaim not
always an entire lost homeland, but instead to restore a lost sense of the
© The Author(s) 2018 1
M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_1
2    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

whole to one’s community. A desire to animate new ideas for the

­common good. A desire to straighten up the mess in one’s neighborhood.
The metaphor of a neighborhood frames the following ­exploration
of the performance of protest because protest is about the life of a
­community; because, even in a time of instant globalized communica-
tion, Tip O’Neill’s dictum remains true: all politics are local. Decisions
that are made by those in power play out in particular locations,
impacting particular people, in particular ways. The language of pro-
test always begins particularly, locally, even though now in the era of
Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, it can go global in the click of a shut-
ter, a touch of a keypad. The following broad comparative study inves-
tigates the performance of protest, through a targeted Austinian lens,
across different genres, geographies, and languages to understand more
fully how the human desire to speak out, from particular locales in the
world, against that which wounds the world, is accomplished. This tar-
geted Austinian lens is a renovation of the criteria, or felicity conditions,
necessary for a successful performance of a speech act as articulated in
SAT, by an integration of questions of power and position generated by
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) into those conditions. Whereas SAT
prompts recognition of the doing in the saying, CDA posits questions
as to who benefits from the doing in the saying, and who does not, and
who gets to do the saying in any given context. The main benefit of this
integrated approach, developed in Chapter 2, is the breadth of oppor-
tunity the renovation facilitates for comparing speech acts across genres
(chants, songs, poems, prose), languages, and places, that do the same
work, protest; correspondingly, the main detriment is the loss of a depth
of context that a telescoped case study of one genre produces.

A Defining of Protest
To embark on this comparative study, an examination of the accepted
definition of the word protest, as found in the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), is presented. The denotations of the definition, as well as
 1 Introduction    
3

several connotations, are considered to provide a richer understanding

of this word in relationship with concepts, such as political efficacy, the
Cooperative Principle, and social capital. The use of an English word
to serve as a cornerstone for a study that is crosslinguistic and cross-
cultural is problematic at best. The irony, of using the OED, the bul-
wark of a colonial lingua franca to launch an exploration of protest, is
also evident. Nevertheless, because of the realities of English as a lin-
gua franca of today’s global media, it provides an initial grounding point
for a study of a phenomenon that often occurs simultaneously in mul-
tiple languages. Chants, songs, poems, or prose are often produced in
a local language of the protest group and English, or a combination
of the two, to reach the broadest possible audience. For example, con-
sider Saudi Arabian activist comedian, Hisham Fageeh’s remake of Bob
Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” Fageeh transformed the Marley classic
into “No Woman, No Drive” to protest the Saudi ban on female drivers
­throughout the kingdom. In his parody, he not only mimics Marley’s
Jamaican English reggae style, but also provides subtitles in both Arabic
and Jamaican English (Van Tets 2013). With such instances, Homi
Bhabha’s postcolonial ideas of a Third Space and of hybridity are ani-
mated, pushing a recognition of the interstices, the spaces in between,
of nationalities, ethnicities, and identities, and of the possibilities a
Third Space offers to the study of language change and development
(Guerin et al. 2011, p. 364). This Third Space is a productive one that
blurs traditional cultural assumptions and boundaries, engendering
new possibilities (Bhabha 1994) such as a Jamaican English-Arabic
commentary on a Saudi cultural practice. Certainly, social media and
the rapidity of globalized communication enhances this Third Space
by facilitating linguistic innovation and its sharing. Thus, with this
benefit and limitation noted, of using a single word from a single lan-
guage as a cornerstone for a crosslinguistic study, the denotative (i.e.,
the social, political and cultural dimensions of dissent) and connotative
(i.e., power, risk, and commitment) aspects of protest, are explored in
the remainder of this chapter, which concludes with an overview of the
remainder of the book.
4    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

An Expression of Social, Political, or Cultural Dissent

The Oxford English Dictionary (2014) offers a range of definitions of

protest in the form of a noun and a verb. This dual categorization is
appropriate for a phenomenon that is both a doing, a verb-in-action,
while simultaneously a naming of that doing, a noun-in-being. In its
noun form, protest is “the expression of social, political, or cultural dis-
sent from a policy or a course of action, typically by means of a pub-
lic demonstration; (also) an instance of this, a protest march, a public
demonstration” (definition 4c). As an intransitive verb, protest is “[o]f
a (large) number of people: to express collective disapproval or dissent
publicly, typically by means of an organized demonstration; to engage
in a mass protest, usually against a government policy or legal decision”
(definition 6c); whereas as a transitive verb, protest is “[c]hiefly, U.S. to
object to (an action or event); to challenge or contest; (also) to make the
subject of a public protest or demonstration” (definition 6d).
Historically, the word has had a rich and varied history as both noun
and verb in English, from when it first surfaces in 1429, to the pres-
ent. However, this study is rooted in the definitions, noun and verb,
that highlight protest as that which expresses dissent—social, political,
or cultural—that is shared in a public manner. These two syllables have
journeyed to English from the Latin prōtestārī, through the French pro-
tester. This seems fitting as the French storming of the Bastille prison in
1789, the refusal of the apocryphal invitation to “just eat cake”, remains
a touchstone for many contemporary protests. Such moments of chal-
lenge to the status quo ground the noun-verb as a herald of change and
disruption, an enactment of social, political, or cultural dissent.
A protest is the expression of different types of dissent. Although
the thinking of private individuals permeates public protests, a protest
is not an inchoate or even a well-considered thought, but something
concrete, manifested and communicated by a shared word or action.
It is the carrying of a placard that reflects thinking about alternatives
to war, “What if they gave a war, and nobody came?” or the chanting
of a rhyme that reflects thinking about the value of higher education,
“No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!” Although the physical actions of
marching and carrying reinforce these examples, the analyses in this text
 1 Introduction    
5

focus on the verbal action of dissent, how words are used to perform
acts of protest, as opposed to other aspects of the linguistic landscape,
causes, or effects of protest actions.
As a verbal act of dissent, protest is an expression, not a feeling,
although oppositional feelings of anger or disillusionment ground expres-
sions of protest. It is the crying out of “We are the 99%” as part of the
Occupy Movement, “Irhal! ” (“Leave”) as a chant of the Arab Spring, or
the singing of “Smert tyurme, svobodu protest ”/“Death To Prison, Freedom
To Protests”, by Pussy Riot outside of Moscow Detention Center No. 1
prison (Know Your Meme 2014). As Michael Kronenwetter (1996) states
in his book on protest for young readers, “Protest can spring from dif-
ferent emotions. A sense of personal injury. Outrage at injustice. Anger.
Even fear” (p. 13). It also often develops as a rational response to an
oppressive dynamic in one’s community. Tarrow’s (2011) political pro-
cess model of social movements, which assumes a rational individual-
ism, reminds one that oppression and dissent have always been part of
civic life, but at certain moments, grievances are mobilized into social
action. For a mobilization to be successful, people generally believe for
some reason, possibly because of an expansion of political access or divi-
sion within the traditional ruling class, that a new opportunity is avail-
able, which can be capitalized on by formal and informal community
networks. Tarrow also notes that successful social movements are able to
identify their issues and offer solutions within frames that culturally reso-
nate, by drawing from a community’s reservoir of collective action.2
These four components—opportunities, relationships, frames, and
shared ideas of action—in conjunction with emotion, provide a basis
for political efficacy: the “feeling that political and social change is pos-
sible and that the individual citizen can play a part in bringing about
this change” (Campbell 1954, p. 187). Protesters take action because
they think and feel that they can affect change in their world. Protest is,
therefore, an act of imagination, a re-visioning of a community’s possi-
bilities and potential. Such imaginative thinking and feeling, in turn, is
rooted in hope, which Marguerite Duras describes as a type of illness,
“We were sick with hope, those of us from ’68,” when remembering
the buoyant possibilities of her participation in the May ’68 protests in
France (Chew-Bose 2012).
6    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Duras’ metaphor of hope as a malady, however, also generates the

image of hope associated with protest born of desperation. This is the
type of self-sacrifical hope evident in dire acts such as self-immolation
as lived by Jan Paluch in Prague challenging Czechoslovkian com-
munism (1968), Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon bringing to light the
persecution of Buddhists by Ngô Đình Diệm’s South Vietnamese gov-
ernment (1963), or Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid,
Tunisia, sparking the Arab Spring (2011). Although deeply, desperately
emotional events, Martin Monestier suggests that “such protests can be
perceived as rational and logical, since their objective is to instigate a
wave of public outrage, to turn the public against the person’s adver-
sary, and to force the latter to adopt the required measures” (Blažek
et al. 2007). Their logic resides in a pathos of an ironic despair of a
hope delayed, a hope for others to benefit from their sacrifice, hope
in the impulse of Derrida’s la démocratie à venir, the “democracy to
come” (2004).
Along with articulating a logic of pathos, Monestier’s statement
assumes an audience of viewers, readers, and listeners of these pro-
tests. In doing so, he taps into the idea that as a performance of hope,
whether that of ultimate self-sacrifice or the tangential affirmation of
resending a Tweet, protest is a response to a call from social, political,
or cultural powers. For example, consider Japan’s decision to restart its
nuclear power plants in June of 2012. Reflections of Japanese demon-
strators against this action highlight the relationship between hope and
political efficacy in relation to the dyad of rights in and responsibility
for one’s community:

• Sixty-year-old male: “Raising our voices is a major right of the peo-

ple. We have to keep speaking out otherwise we don’t know what will
happen. I want everyone to speak out.”
• Fifty-nine-year-old female: “The reason we are in this situation is
because people did not take politics seriously, we just thought about
ourselves. But we also have a responsibility. If things are to get better,
everyone has to do their part.”
• Twenty-year-old student: “Nothing will come of thinking alone. It is
important to try and get your message across” (Williamson 2012).
 1 Introduction    
7

These reflections assume the presence and hope of cooperation from

a listener/reader/viewer that resonate with H. P. Grice’s Cooperative
Principle regarding conversation. Grice (1975) asserts that participants
in a conversation expect that each will make a “conversational contribu-
tion such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange” (pp. 45–46, 49–50).
While this is the pattern for daily conversation, in the protest
exchange, the required contribution is generally not the expected one.
To continue with the Japanese example, the government did not par-
ticularly expect such a strong reaction of dissent as a response to their
call to reopen the nuclear power plants. This is a consistent discourse
pattern in protest: an authority issues a call to the people and the people
counter the call by responding in an unexpected way, altering the pat-
tern of the civic talk exchange. This often leads to conflict in the public
arena, the site of the talk exchange for insurrectionary speech, which as
Butler (1997) notes, “becomes the necessary response to injurious lan-
guage, a risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in lan-
guage that forces change” (p. 163). Regardless of where one enters the
dance of call and response, the dance is fluid, and ultimately assumes a
degree of cooperation on this civic level, just as it is expected on Grice’s
private level. Ideally, this cooperation is also rooted in authentic listen-
ing, but with a corresponding commitment to social improvement, as
well as successful communication. Such cooperation wants to assume
that participants possess a level of political efficacy that informs civic
communicative competence that, in turn, facilitates positive public
change.
Protest assumes an inherent dialogicality, a two-way interaction
between the individual and the social, even in the inner speech that
foreshadows outer speech. The idea that “every utterance is in relation
to some other utterance” suggests that “the personal individual voice is
also communal and social—that is, to speak is always to speak through,
with, and in relation to the voices of others” (Wetherell 2001, p. 12).
The performance of protest speech blatantly manifests this discursive
pattern of call and response in the service of the communal. Through
this social exchange, meanings are created, co-constructed in the give
and take of the community conversation (Jenkins 1996, p. 4–5).
8    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Concerning Identity and Legitimacy

In such discursive productions of meaning, identity, which is irreduci-

bly about meaning, is nourished and challenged. Like meaning, iden-
tity also has discursive roots. It is a social and relational dynamic that
“emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction rather
than … a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche
or in fixed social categories” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, pp. 585–586;
Hymes 1975; Mannheim and Tedlock 1995). This does not suggest that
the individual psyche or fixed social categories are irrelevant. It simply
suggests that they are partial for a given community of practice, or group
which engages in a process of collective learning around a shared con-
cern: a team of tutors at the local library, a band of new recruits try-
ing to survive boot camp, or an alliance of protesters agitating for their
cause (Wenger 2002, p. 7). Communities of practice shape the identi-
ties of individuals, even as individuals, in turn, shape the identities of
their communities of practice.
Identity as an emergent phenomenon, produced in interactive dis-
course within particular contexts, does not favor particular instances
over larger social structures, but it does posit that these structures are
composed of, and reinforced by, habitual micro- and macrolinguis-
tic activities, each time speakers/writers choose from available voices
and texts in each interaction (Bakhtin 1981; Bucholtz and Hall 2005,
p. 587).3 For example, in 2014, dozens of men in Nairobi surrounded,
beat, and stripped a woman in an act of “slut shaming” for wearing a
miniskirt. In response, the Kilimani Mums, a Facebook group that is a
virtual community of practice, protested by coming together physically
to march and chant “My Dress, My Choice” through central Nairobi.
On a microlevel, their use of the first person singular possessive pronoun
(my) to modify two nouns (dress, choice) presupposes self-possession,
autonomy, a sense of individual identity expressed by connecting cloth-
ing choice with individual freedom. The repetition of the parallel phrase
structure of pronoun plus noun reinforces this connection as it opposes
the macrolevel culturally conservative discourse, which names mini-
skirt wearers not as autonomous citizens, but as sluts who provoke men
by their attire and who need to be taught modesty (Cummings 2014).
 1 Introduction    
9

Such interchanges between micro- and macro-discourse create, reinforce,

and challenge each other, serving as an often porous hermeneutic circle
in which identity emerges through habits enacted in the daily work of
words (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, p. 597; Bourdieu 1991). The Kenyan
women’s repeated collective use of the first person singular possessive
pronoun, as a community of practice, reinforces an emerging identity
of woman as autonomous citizen capable of making basic choices in her
life, even as it challenges patriarchal norms of Kenyan society.4
Like identity, legitimacy also develops in and through the give and
take of micro- and macrolinguistic activities at play within particu-
lar contexts. Protesters strive for legitimization, “the process by which
speakers accredit or license a type of social behavior” (Reyes 2011,
p. 782), for themselves and their causes. For protesters, legitimization
depends upon a multileveled cooperation. It not only involves processes
by which protesters accredit their behavior but also that of the response
of listeners and witnesses. For legitimization to be real in the sense of
being effective or persuasive, speakers, listeners, and onlookers need to
recognize, even if grudgingly, the reasonableness and the appropriate-
ness5 of protester behaviors and identity, developed in and through such
behaviors, and usually represented and mediated through video, audio,
or print media. The use of language is one such behavior that must sat-
isfy the demands of the Cooperative Principle at the communal level,
while satisfying the linguistic and discourse demands at the text level, to
attain distinct but interrelated types of legitimacy. The framework based
on Austin’s SAT, which is developed in Chapter 2, provides the criteria
for a proposed pragmatic legitimacy, or how a speaker or hearer accredits
a speech act, for the speech act of protest.
In times of protest, the concerns of political legitimacy are at play
for the state as much as they are for protesters against the state.6 Sayer
(1994) suggests a tacit complicity in the legitimacy relations between
state and citizen in that, as long as average citizens can manage daily
life in a reasonable way, they maintain an operable belief in the politi-
cal legitimacy of the state (pp. 367–378). However, if daily life becomes
compromised, then the legitimacy of the state wanes, and the potential
for dissent waxes.7 Thus, protest, in terms of legitimacy and identity, is
a cooperative expression of a particular type: a teleology that publicly
10    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

performs thoughts and feelings that desire a change in the status quo. In
other words, an expression of dissent.

Concerning Dissent

Like protest, dissent is also a noun-verb, a thing/being as well as a

doing.8 The dimensions of the noun-verb dissent that ground the fol-
lowing exploration of protest speech acts are “the difference of opinion
or sentiment; disagreement” (OED noun definition 1) and “to think
differently, disagree, differ from, in (an opinion), from, with a person”
(OED verb definition 2a). Thinking differently, oft the roots of disa-
greement, is critical for protest as it is a primal source for imagination,
the spring of alternatives to the status quo. In other words, this is the
beginning of the utopian enterprise, a reimagining of a community’s
possibilities, ranging from a political reimagining of civic life beyond
the Berlin Wall in a divided Germany, to a cultural reimagining of
women driving in Saudi Arabia.
Such possibilities resonate with Benedict Anderson’s concept of the
imagined community. Anderson (1991) contends that a national com-
munity is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear
of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”
(p. 6). This idea of nation-as-mental-construct, present in the minds
and memories of nationalized subjects, can be manipulated by hegem-
onic powers to reinforce the status quo; however, it can also be high-
jacked by protesters to challenge the status quo: to call for a reimagining
of the imagined community, i.e., a reunited Germany, female drivers in
Saudi Arabia.
Such reimaginings, rooted in thinking differently, pry open relation-
ships of power and domination within social, political, and cultural life,
potentially unleashing the unstable and often dangerous binary of “Us
versus Them.” Once opposing sides emerge in tandem with each other,
risk grows palpable and quite real, testing the intensity of a protester’s
commitment. This risk runs the gamut from the personal emotional dis-
tress of self-alienation in relation to one’s family or village, such as the
silent protests in Katra Village, Uttar Pradesh against the honor killings
 1 Introduction    
11

of two Indian girls (2014),9 to physical violence such as the Egyptian

security forces’ beating of an unknown “woman in the blue bra” in
Tahrir Square (2011), or ultimately to death such as that of Nedā Āghā-
Soltān, 26, shot in the heart, most likely by a Basij militia member, dur-
ing the Iranian Green Revolution/Persian Awakening (2009).
Intense experiences like these prove fertile ground for the objectifica-
tion of the Other, as the beginning of viewing someone, some people, as
so Other that they are no longer quite human: no longer the subject or
actor of a sentence, but instead the direct object or receiver of the verb’s
action. At this moment of the binary establishment of Us versus Them,
the social grammaticalization of transitivity, or the conflation of oppos-
ing people with opposing ideas and realities, is activated. Protest, at its
core, is a transitive verb; transitive verbs involve two entities, a subject
and a direct object; the underlying structure of the transitivity of protest
is: I/We protest X, with I/We acting as the human speaker and X holding
the place of the direct object, an inanimate recipient of the action of
protest such as war in “We protest the war!” Through acts of protest,
this relationship becomes one of civic transitivity, as individuals, groups,
and the state wrestle with the issues of the day. This idea of transitivity,
at play on linguistic as well as social levels, underpins the concept of
convocativity, or the configurative effect of splintering protesters into Us
or Them, which is introduced in the next chapter.
Risk-danger proliferates in these transitive moments, when the sub-
ject conflates those associated-with-the-object, with the object, itself.
Ironically, when the inanimate object is animated in this peculiar way,
through this conflation of the human with the nonhuman—of all
American officials with prolonging the Vietnam War in the 1960s, of
all Occupy protesters with looting in 2011, or of all Soweto students
with violence in the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a strange spiral occurs,
with the inanimate (violence) becoming animate (students) and the
once animate (students) becoming an inanimate object (violence). This
conflation resonates with Hodge and Kress’ (1996) observation about
meaning generated in the transactional moment, when the actor trans-
forms the affected, in an ontological sense, from person into object,
from protesters into looters, students into wielders of violence, or gov-
ernment employees into warmongers (p. 8). No longer are they human,
12    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

like you and me, but instead, only conduits for antisocial behavior.
Objectification and reification are at play with the potential of demoni-
zation. Violence becomes an option for both sides. They are just Them,
not Us. Thinking differently takes on sinister tones.
It is at this moment of heightened risk in protest that we can
expand the linguistic concept of the Cooperative Principle, from the
person-to-person level, to intersect with that of the political concept
of the Social Contract. Contract thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau, contend that a state’s first and foremost duty is the safety and
security of its citizens, and that, in turn, its citizens have the obligation
to consent to and comply with state authority. This cooperative hon-
oring of civic responsibilities is the foundation of the Social Contract.
However, this requirement of security is often tinged with a tragic irony
in terms of protest, either because protests are in reaction to a lack of
state protection of the people, like the Thai police’s use of tear gas and
bulldozers in the anti-Yingluck protests in Bangkok in 2014, or the
reverse, because of protesters’ use of violence against the state, like when
a Thai police officer was killed by demonstrators during that same pro-
test action (Human Rights Watch 2014). Oddly enough, the words
risk, danger, or commitment, do not actually appear in the OEDs defi-
nition of protest nor does class, whether of the economic or caste type.
Nevertheless, class disparities, asymmetrical relationships and structures
rooted in economic and/or communal inequalities, permeate the social,
political, and cultural dimensions of protest and dissent.10 Although
these words are absent from the definition, they are certainly part of the
connotations associated with protest.
While the OED definition leaves out these various aspects, it does
denote that protest is an expression of different types of dissent: social,
political, or cultural. However, even a cursory glance at a social issue
like contraception quickly reveals that protest generally isn’t contained
neatly in one of these three categories, but instead freely migrates over,
under, and across borders. Contraception can be deeply related to prac-
tices and beliefs of a particular cultural viewpoint, such as its moral
acceptability in the United States, Sweden, or South Africa, but its
moral unacceptability in Ghana, Nigeria, or Pakistan, while laws are
passed or rejected within a particular political system, such as China’s
 1 Introduction    
13

former one child only law or Romania’s former coerced pregnancy/mul-

tiple child law. Because most of the issues which people protest possess
social, political, and cultural dimensions, these aspects are considered in
relation to dissent below.

Social Dimensions of Dissent

As an expression of a voice-to-be-heard, protest is a social reality. Not

just me, but you and me, together. There is a connection to fellow-
ship, partnering, solidarity, and the common good. It is often a call for
attention to a shared challenge or a declared opposition to social reali-
ties that oppress different constituencies: poor working conditions, such
as those against which the United Farm Workers have fought, a lack of
political freedoms, such as those for which demonstrators marched in
Tiananmen Square, equal rights such as those promoted by the Human
Rights Campaign, or the basic safety of children, such as those advo-
cated by the Bring Back Our Girls movement.
This social dimension extends the recognition of the rhetorical rela-
tionship, between the Cooperative Principle and the Social Contract,
to the witness-spectator of the performance of protest: the annual Red
Hand Day commemorations, in which activists paint their hands red
to challenge the use of child soldiers across the world11; the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) parade
of silent protest in New York in 1917 to protest lynching and violence
against African Americans; or the wearing of white scarves and the car-
rying of pictures of their “disappeared” children of the Madres de Plaza
de Mayo in Buenos Aires, from 1977 to 2006. These protests observed
by thousands honor the Social Contract of the state, through their non-
violent tactics of images, words, or silence, even while they challenge
certain aspects of the state. This has been the case in Hungary sur-
rounding a new World War II memorial. In Budapest, in 2014, the
Hungarian government erected a monument, the “Memorial to the
victims of the German invasion,” featuring Hungary as the Archangel
Gabriel with a Nazi eagle sweeping down over him. However, many
Hungarians, particularly in the Jewish community, have protested this
14    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

representation of the Hungarian state and citizenry as innocent victims

of the Nazis when, in fact, Hungary had been a German ally prior to its
occupation by the Nazis. Protesters have hung banners in front of the
memorial with statements such as “Forgery of history,” and established
an impromptu counter-memorial, of pictures and artifacts of loved ones
lost during the Hungarian Holocaust, in front of the statues. Police
have been present at the site but have generally not interfered with the
grassroots’ response. They, like the pro-memorial and anti-memorial
protesters, are bearing witness to the past and the present intermingling
in daily Hungarian life (Dolan 2014). It has been a reasonably peaceful
manifestation of the Social Contract and the Cooperative Principle at
work together.
This interactive observing of the Other in Budapest highlights at least
two other dimensions of the social in terms of protest: that of social cap-
ital and that of social or collective memory. Putnam (2000) distinguishes
social capital from the objects associated with physical capital and the
properties of individuals associated with human capital,12 as networks
of reciprocity and trust at work in human interactions. Within these
networks, civic virtue develops in relation to the depth and intensity
of the social relationships at play. Asserting that a “society of many
virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capi-
tal” (Putnam 2000, p. 19), he contends that it is only when individu-
als join together, develop a sense of belonging, grow commitments to
each other and the community, that the social fabric is woven in ways
that benefit the community and its individual citizens (Smith 2012).
Tarrow’s (2011) analysis of the importance of formal and informal net-
works for the rise of social movements reinforces the importance of this
relational dynamic for civic change to be possible.
Rich deposits of social capital prove fertile ground for positive and
productive protest because it requires the work not of virtuous, iso-
lated individuals, but of engaged, inter-connected individuals, who
strive to improve life in their communities for themselves and each
other. Through this shared work, a sense of belonging develops in tan-
dem with a shared or collective memory in which societies and cul-
tures shape and reinforce practices of remembrance (Rossington 2007,
p. 134). While protests happen in a particular moment, synchronically,
 1 Introduction    
15

social networks are developed over time, diachronically, and in the pro-
cess draw on and generate collective memory, when “[t]he individual
calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social mem-
ory” (Halbwachs 1992, p. 182).
Collective memory allows for protests to be interpreted synchron-
ically and diachronically. A diachronic interpretation draws upon the
notion of the intertextuality of protests. The text of a protest may be
interpreted in relation to other protests in webs of meaning that can
link protests ideologically, within the collective memories of the social
networks of many generations, across cultures. The signs in Florida in
2012 of “I am Trayvon Martin” are links to the T-shirts proclaiming “I
am Mohamed Bouazizi” in Tunisia in 2011, which are links to the fem-
inist anthem “I am Woman” by Australian Helen Reddy in 1972, which
is a link to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers strike cry of “I am a
Man,” which is a link to the British abolitionist question of “Am I not
a man and a brother?” and so forth, until we reach a slave uprising in
ancient Rome via Hollywood in 1960 with the cry of “I am Spartacus,”
which in turn was a tweet that went viral in 2010, when Paul Chambers
was accused of threatening to blow up an English airport, that in turn
was reconfigured after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris into “Je
suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) in 2015. The intertextual use of this basic
predicate nominative structure of equality of, “I am _____”, relies on
an intertextual reading of interconnected frameworks of social memory
and history to resonate with activists today, as it has in the past. Such a
pattern animates the ideological as “ways in which language carries for-
ward echoes of the past and can instantiate current powerful orthodox-
ies” in a particular moment or over time (Wetherell 2001, p. 12).13
For protest, the connections of social memory, transmitted from
generation to generation within a dense social network, influences lev-
els of political efficacy and commitment, while shaping how a group
may cope with risk. In the American South, Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., drew upon the collective memory of the endurance of African
Americans under white Southern oppression when he marched, was
arrested, and wrote the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (2005). In the
letter, he powerfully connects touchstones within the collective mem-
ory, not just of African Americans by citing instances of surviving
16    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

discrimination, but also of the white Christian and Jewish communi-

ties by citing various historical figures and the bible. Dr. King combines
such citation strategies with that of the risk-acceptance strategy of the
four steps of nonviolent resistance—collection of facts, negotiation,
self-purification, and direct action—to engage in nonviolent protests.
These strategies, in turn, are those which reveal the protesters’ desire to
honor the Cooperative Principle and the Social Contract, even though
the state had consistently violated both, by meeting nonviolent direct
action with the violence of fire hoses and police dogs.

Political Dimensions of Dissent

This series of civil rights protests, which led to the passage of the US
Civil Rights Act of 1964, connects the notion of the social, of you and
me together in protest, with that of the political, of how we might
arrange ourselves in terms of policies, services, and resources, within the
public affairs of the community. Activists for civil rights were indeed
able to contribute to changes of American federal policies, rearranging
the public affairs of the community through their protests. This success-
ful instance also highlights another aspect of protest that, like risk, is
implied via dissent in the OED definition, that of power, and the rela-
tionship between types of power and political dissent. Acknowledging
that power is a multifaceted reality, this text employs an understand-
ing of power as relational, reflecting the dynamic of the Cooperative
Principle and the Social Contract at work in expressions of social, polit-
ical, or cultural dissent. In this sense, power is not a thing possessed, but
instead a relationship in process. For protest, the circulation of power
relates protesters, such as members of the African National Congress, to
the agents of the social, political, and cultural hegemonies at play, such
as members of the South African apartheid government.
Whereas many traditional ideas of power view it primarily as the pos-
session of the capacity to dominate or control someone or something else,
and is thus generally within the provenance of the state, Foucault (1977,
1980) contends that power permeates the entire social body. This is the
case because, along with repressive power, either through mechanisms of
physical (e.g., a Machiavellian approach), ideological (e.g., Althusserian
 1 Introduction    
17

approach), or economic (e.g., Marxist approach) control associated

with the state, there is also creative or productive power. It is this crea-
tive type of power that births protests and the reimaginings of civic rela-
tionships. Also, considering power in terms of hegemony, or the processes
by which a dominant group maintains its position vis-à-vis the domi-
nated, allows for the possibility of power as resistive and malleable, ena-
bling it to meet the needs of the community (Childers and Hentzi 1995,
p. 239; Said 1983).
This resistive notion prompts a consideration of Gramsci’s idea of
hegemony (1971) as that created by the power of the state through
coercion and consent (Buttigieg 1995, p. 7).14 While the coercive power
of the state tends to be on view in obvious ways, for example through
a police or military presence in daily life, the state’s manufacturing of
consent tends to be much more subtly accomplished and most deci-
sively through linguistic means. Resistance then requires not just resist-
ing the coercive power of the state, but also the manufactured consent
to the state, by challenging its use of language. Fox (2014) reveals this
Gramscian connection between hegemonic power and daily language
through a look at a single word, welfare. In the spirit of Gramsci, she
demonstrates that words used day-to-day are carriers of the dominant
ideology of a socio-cultural historical moment, conditioning one to
think in particular ways. She points out the predominance of negative
connotations that the word welfare carries in contemporary American
society. “Someone who is poor … Passive. Irresponsible. Overloaded
with children … Maybe out to cheat the system. A drain on the tax-
payers … We have no word to describe this system of government pay-
ments that carries a positive connotation. No word that evokes images
of dignity and family pride.”
Fox’s observation reveals that the use of a single word can activate a
dominant ideological myth, serving as a shibboleth of it, to account for
what Malinowski (1948) terms the “sociological strain” produced by
extraordinary privileges or duties, great social inequalities, and severe
burdens of rank, whether high or low (pp. 64, 103). Edelman (1967)
points out that these myths are often employed to reign in potential
resentments resulting from these asymmetries. He reflects that without
these myths, “the inequalities in wealth, in income, and in influence
18    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

over governmental allocations of resources can be expected to bring res-

tiveness; with them, potential rebellion is displaced by ‘constitutional’
criticism or approval” (p. 18). Such mythic conditioning allows lan-
guage to be deftly used in the manufacture of consent. This example
of welfare-as-affront to the American myth of rugged individualism
demonstrates how language serves as one of the hegemonic practical
strategies “by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from
those it subjugates” (Eagleton 1994, p. 115). Sometimes, however, the
people do get restive, question the backstory, refuse their consent, and
start to reimagine their communities.
Gandhi operationalizes this type of resistive power in his 241-mile
march to the sea for salt in 1930. In marching, from Sabarmati to the
coastal town of Dandi to collect salt from the sea, he defied the British
Salt Acts, which prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, to
challenge the British salt monopoly. Similar acts of civil disobedience,
involving thousands of people, broke out throughout India. In response
to this, the government exercised its coercive power, arresting and
imprisoning Gandhi and others for their acts of civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience, or the refusal to comply publicly with a law as
an act of nonviolent protest, underscores that the freedom to ­protest
is governed by the state and in that sense even protest is a sort of
­manufactured consent. The level of risk in acting on this manufactured
consent is generally dependent upon the tolerance of the state for such
actions, often linked to the view of whether politics is seen primarily
as “a struggle for power between those who seek to assert it and those
who seek to resist it” or as “cooperation, as the practices and institutions
that a society has for resolving clashes of interest over money, influence,
liberty and the like” (Chilton 2004, p. 3).15 When the former attitude
predominates and protest is highly restricted, risk is higher than when
it is viewed as just another acceptable tool in the political repertoire,
with even public officials occasionally participating and at risk of arrest
(Meyer 2006, p. 1). However, as Henry David Thoreau (1987) points
out in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” agents of the state gener-
ally promote politics as usual. Thoreau argues that would-be protesters
choose not to act until the majority has been persuaded, as they fear
that the remedy will be worse than the evil. He then asserts that, if that
 1 Introduction    
19

is true, then it is the government’s fault. “It makes it worse….Why does

it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults,
and do better…? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommuni-
cate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin
rebels?” (pp. 228–229). As indicated by Thoreau’s choice of examples,
serious risk—of crucifixion, excommunication, or treason—can be at
play in the performance of speech acts of protest and civil disobedience.
The presence of these levels of risk often reveal cultural determinations
as to which human beings are deigned worthy of respect by virtue of
their humanity—with voices worthy of a Social Contract that reflects
that reality—or not worthy of such respect.

Cultural Dimensions of Dissent

Whether individuals are considered to be worthy is a question wrought

within a cultural experience of the world. Who and what is worthy of
respect, of power, or of a voice is shaped by cultural beliefs, understand-
ings, and practices, particularly those associated with race, class, and gen-
der. Geertz’s (1973) definition of culture resonates with such concerns
when he writes, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal sus-
pended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be
those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental sci-
ence in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (p. 5).
Geertz strives to interpret meaning within what Williams (1976) calls “a
particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” (p. 90).
Cultural dissent erupts when the meanings within these webs are
questioned or torn in some way. Culture is not rigid or stagnant but is,
instead, continually being formed, re-formed, reinforced, or contested
by its members. In this dynamic ebb and flow, when something in an
individual’s Lebenswelt, or lived experience of the world, no longer holds
together within these webs, a difference of thinking unfolds, as it does
with political and social dissent. It does so with all of the same atten-
dant risks.
Due to this association of risk with the potential abuse of power,
Fiske’s (1996) reminder that culture, and by implication cultural
20    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

dissent, is neither necessarily “aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but

political,” is important to remember (p. 115). He contends that, “[c]
ulture is not conceived of as the aesthetic ideals of form and beauty
found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of the
‘human spirit’ that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak
to a hypothetical universal” (ibid.) person, but is instead political.
Protest language, which works to produce change in the public arena,
includes aesthetic and humanistic concerns along with its political ones.
Dissent over language rights in Tibet and Guatemala bring these
concerns into focus. In October 2010, Tibetan students took to the
streets in a nonviolent protest against proposed policy changes, by the
Chinese government, to elevate Mandarin to the language of instruc-
tion in Amdo (Wangdu 2011). According to Students for a Free Tibet,
this policy ignited a solidarity movement of resistance to China’s
marginalization of the Tibetan language, encouraging supporters
to wear traditional clothing, eat traditional food, and to speak and
write Tibetan, even on Facebook, each Wednesday (2014). Although
clearly language rights are a cultural concern, governmental policies
of ­repression or support shape the future of a language and those who
speak it. The risks involved with protesting for Tibetan language and
cultural rights has a violent history of repression, which is indicated
even on the setup of the group’s webpage which uses a secure https pro-
tocol, instead of the usual http, to encrypt transmissions to and from
the group’s website.
Or, consider the example of the Chuj-Spanish dictionary, Diccionario
del Idioma Chuj, in Guatemala. This dictionary, based on compila-
tions gathered between 1973 and 1976 of the Mayan language Chuj,
had to be kept hidden from the Guatelmalan government during the
decades-long civil war, until the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996.
Political realities dictated when it had finally become safe enough for
the dictionary’s compilers to make it public. Within this climate, the
compilation of the dictionary, itself, is an act, not only of cultural dis-
sent, but also of political dissent, on the personal level of the linguists,
until it could be safely published. Ironically, at that safe point of peace
in 1996, the dictionary becomes a retroactive instance of public protest
language.
 1 Introduction    
21

These two examples of language repression are in direct opposition to

Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (2015)
that calls for freedom of expression and opinion: “Everyone has the
right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom
to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Nevertheless, not all cultures have an active practice of the freedom of
speech, whether that is speech in an indigenous language or a coloniz-
ing language. Ideally, as US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
(1949), states in Terminello v. Chicago (1949), free speech “invite[s] dis-
pute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condi-
tion of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even
stirs people to anger.” Douglas’ position resonates soundly with those of
Thoreau, the Chuj researchers, the Tibetan students, and all those who
choose language as a tool to challenge consent or coercion.
The Tibetan and Chuj examples also reveal concerns of representa-
tion of a culture—not political representation, but semiotic and seman-
tic representation—of how a group is portrayed through image and
language. Frow and Morris (1996) indicate the importance of these
types of representation in their approach to culture as “a network of rep-
resentations—texts, images, talk, codes of behavior, and the narrative
structures organizing these—which shapes every aspect of social life”
(p. 345). This also includes how the Cooperative Principle is shaped by
and within a particular culture, which influences what is considered to
be an appropriate contribution, by whom, and at what point in a talk
exchange. Through culturally shaped patterns of linguistic cooperation,
meaning emerges as a joint production, whether in or through conver-
sation or writing, in a movement toward a shared sense of social inter-
action. These social events make shared sense when they activate the
cultural rules and standards of common narratives, and for what makes
a good story, what makes a good speech act, in the community of prac-
tice (Rudrum 2008). The meaning, legitimacy, and identity of a pro-
test cause and its group are negotiated within such particular cultural
narratives.
Within all such human narratives, language can be exploited to
destroy and oppress; however, it can also be used to create and liberate
22    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

as shown in the chants, songs, poems, and prose analyzed in this study.
To set the stage for the analysis of these instances of creation and libera-
tion, Chapter 2, “Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of
Protest,” reviews Austin’s original SAT and the impact of its concept of
the performative. Next, due to the exploration of multiple genres for this
study, Sedgwick’s concept of the periperformative is presented in relation
to the metaphor of surface and deep syntactic structures as borrowed
from Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar (1957). Finally, the practice
of CDA is introduced with its questions of how power functions discur-
sively to set the stage for the renovation of a foundational part of SAT,
the felicity conditions, or linguistic norms, for a speech act. This reno-
vation, in turn, acts as the analytical frame or proscenium arch through
which comparisons, of different genres of texts performing the same
linguistic work of protest, can be made. Two concepts are introduced as
part of the renovation, that of convocativity and pragmatic legitimacy.
Chapter 3, “Exploring the Protest Language of Chants,” the first of the
analysis chapters using the renovated felicity conditions, focuses on the
performance of two protest chants, “Everyday I’m Çapulling!” (Sheets
2013) from the çapullers of Istanbul’s Taksim Square and “Sí Se Puede”
from the United Farm Workers in the Southwestern United States. The
Farm Workers chant is examined because of its longevity and flexibil-
ity. Not only has it been and continues to be a positive marker of iden-
tity and legitimacy for its originating organization and related Latinx,
Chicana/o organizations for the past 50 years, but it also has proven flex-
ible in its English adaptation of “Yes, we can” in the presidential cam-
paigns of US President Barak Obama. The Turkish example is explored
because of how it reflects the speed with which social media can trans-
form a prime minister’s insult, of a group of environmentalists in
Istanbul, into a legitimate hybrid multilingual cry for democratic rights
across the globe.
In Chapter 4, “Exploring the Protest Language of Songs,” the second of
the analysis chapters, the American civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome
and the West German bilingual antinuke smash hit 99 Luftballons/99 Red
Balloons (Karges 1983; McAlea 1984) are examined. We Shall Overcome is
so well known globally as a protest song that it often marks a gathering as a
protest, serving as a legitimizing marker for such acts of civic engagement.
 1 Introduction    
23

This holds regardless of the issue(s) under dispute. 99 Luftballons/99 Red

Balloons, on the other hand, focuses on the specific issue of nuclear war.
Making its claim to legitimacy by the telling of an Everyman’s story, com-
bined with a very danceable techno beat, the song proves it possible that
pop music can make a political statement and be a global hit. However,
whereas We Shall Overcome remains associated primarily with protest and
civic action, 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons appears in a wide variety of
media and events outside of the realm of protest.
In Chapter 5, “Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry,” two
poems, “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” from Romanian poet
Ana Blandiana and “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is Sweet and Good” from
British poet Wilfred Owen (1984), are analyzed, whereas in Chapter 6,
“Exploring the Protest Language of Prose,” several pieces of prose,
Guatemalan condemnations in English, Spanish, and K’iche’ of the
Totonicapán massacre (Comunidades 2012; Government of Totonicapán
2012; Guatemala Human Rights Commission 2011), and the Irish Diary
of Bobby Sands (2013) are examined. The two poems highlight the anni-
hilation of identity in coerced birth and death scenarios, prompting ques-
tions of the legitimate relationship between citizen and state, whereas
the pieces of prose emphasize how choices of language and style can act
as rhetorical indicators of identity and legitimacy. The range of these
texts was chosen for analysis to challenge the plasticity of the adapted
Austinian framework, so as to compare and contrast disparate texts that
still manage to perform the same recognizable type of linguistic work.
As prologue to the analyses, the chants, poems, songs, and prose are
contextualized in a targeted deep story of the performance of the par-
ticular act of protest. The challenges associated with identifying contex-
tual relevance and significance are considerable. As this study is a broad
comparative overview, as opposed to a targeted case study, the deficien-
cies of context cut sharp with much left on the editing room floor. To
ease this loss, endnotes along with suggested readings are provided. The
four analysis chapters are divided using simple titles and subtitles to
allow for easy reader comparison of the different aspects of the reno-
vated felicity conditions between analyses.
The Language of Protest closes with Chapter 7, “Considerations and
Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest” that highlights insights
24    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

gained from the use of an adapted Austinian framework for compara-

tive analysis, and posits several questions, particularly regarding the
impact of the quicksilver magic of technology on the performance of
protest: What does Marshal McLuhan’s (1964) dictum, “The medium is
the message” mean for the performance of protest today? What are the
emerging relationships between physical public space, such as Zuccotti
Park the home base of Occupy Wall Street, and virtual public space,
such as openDemocracy.net, a digital commons supporting progressive
dialogue? What are the dangers of the burgeoning use of social media in
an era of increased state surveillance of those same media? These ques-
tions, because they involve interdependence, are messy. They are messy
because the content of screens, podcasts, radios, and newspapers inces-
santly challenge one to confront the civic wounds that many so des-
perately wish to heal: The refugee crisis of Syria; the Central American
refugee children turned away at the US border; the 65 wars and 658
militant groups currently active in the world16; the Doomsday Clock
currently set at 2 ½ minutes to midnight. Along with being messy, these
questions are difficult. They are difficult because they force the recog-
nition of W.H. Auden’s (2015) acknowledgment of interdependency in
his protest poem, “September 1, 1939”, written upon the outbreak of
World War II: We must love one another or die.

Notes
1. Sedgwick states, “Clearly for Austin, taxonomic work with particu-
lar sentences is not a rigid, Searlean reification of performativity, but
rather the filthy workshop of its creation, criss-crossed with skid marks,
full of dichotomies that are ‘in need, like so many dichotomies, of
­elimination’” (17).
2. If interested in learning more about political dimensions of con-
tentious politics and social movements, see: S. Tarrow’s Power in
Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Revised and
updated. third edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011;
S. Tarrow’s Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious
Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; C. Tilly’s Social
 1 Introduction    
25

Movements 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004; and

C. Tilly’s Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
3. If interested in exploring the development of the concept of identity
across academic disciplines, see J. E. Joseph’s Language and Identity:
National, Ethnic, Religious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. For
a broad theoretical overview of identity, see H. Grad and M. Rojo’s
“Identities in Discourse: An Integrative View” in Analyzing Identities in
Discourse, edited by R. Dolon and J. Todoli’s. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
2008, pp. 3–30.
4. For a view of this issue as a distraction from Kenya’s larger prob-
lems, see Joyce Nyairo’s “Beyond My Dress My Choice campaign lie
vital issues that should concern us all” in the Daily News. Monday,
November 24, 2014. http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-
/440808/2533576/-/4av7kfz/-/index.html.
5. Note that reasonableness and appropriateness are culturally determined
criteria.
6. For more in-depth analysis of legitimacy, particularly in relation to the
state and organizations, see Max Weber’s Political Writings, third edi-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; J. Steffek’s “The
Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach”
European Journal of International Relations, vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp.
249–276; and M. Zelditch, Jr.’s “Theories of Legitimacy,” in The
Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice,
and Intergroup Relations, edited by J. Jost and B. Major. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
7. In The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s
Romania, Kligman argues that complicity is the comrade of duplicity in
the totalitarian state. See footnote on Sayer, p. 261.
8. Both protest and dissent are what Austin calls explicit performative
verbs. See How to Do Things with Words (161).
9. For a discussion on the relationship between shame, identity, and per-
formativity, see Chapter 1 in Eve K. Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity. London: Duke University Press, 2003.
10. The expectation of economic class permeating protest is rooted in

Marxist theory. For an in-depth essay of Marx’s theory of class in rela-
tion to crisis, see Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver’s “Marx’s Theory of
Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle” The Commoner, Autumn 2002,
26    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

pp. 1–61. This article was originally published in Research in Political

Economy, vol. 5, 1982.
11. On Red Hand Day, February 12, activists paint their hands red to
imprint their hands on notes to the United Nations, to encourage
nations to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of
the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.
12. For a consideration of how metaphors such as “human capital” or
“human resources” pave the way for objectification of others, see
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, second edition, 1983.
13. For an introduction to ideas of dialogicality, see Janet Maybin’s

“Language, Struggle and Voice: The Bakhtin/Volosinov Writings”
in Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates (eds.)
Discourse Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2001. For an in-depth
look at the original sources, see Mikhail Bakhtin’s works: The Dialogic
Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by
C. Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984; and
Speech Genres and other Late Essays. Edited by C. Emerson and
M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. See also
V.N. Volosinov’s works: Freudianism: A Marxist Critique. New York:
Academic Press, 1976 and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1986.
14. To learn more about Antonio Gramsci’s approach to power, particu-
larly in terms of manufactured consent and coercion, see The Prison
Notebooks and Selections form the Political Writings. Edited by Q. Hoare.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978/1921–1926.
15. Chilton succinctly articulates two schools of thought regarding what
makes up politics. The first is rooted in Aristotle’s approach of articu-
lating the ideal political arrangement that is best for all who can real-
ize the ideal. See Aristotle’s The Politics and the Constitution of Athens.
Translated by S. Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999. The second is rooted in the work of Michel Foucault (Discipline
and Punish. New York: Random House, 1979); Antonio Gramsci
(Selections from the Political Writings. Edited by Q. Hoare. London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1978 [1921–1926]); and Niccoló Machiavelli
(The Prince. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004 [1532]).
 1 Introduction    
27

16. For a current list of conflicts, see Wars in the World at: http://www.
warsintheworld.com and to learn more about the Doomsday Clock,
visit the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at: http://thebulletin.org.

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 2
Mapping Theory and Method in the
Neighborhood of Protest

A Cloud of Witness
They cried out,
     “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!”
I am
     Here
     Queer
     Woman
     Spartacus
     Trayvon Martin
     Mohamed Bouazizi
     A Man
To throw the tax collectors out of the Temple
To spend the night in jail
To march to the sea for salt
To inhale the silence con las Madres
To strike the match in
     Selma
     Prague

© The Author(s) 2018 35

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_2
36    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

     Paris
     Johannesburg
To bring back our girls
To stand with him in Tiananmen
To counter, “Whatever you say, say nothing”
     With “Sí, se puede.”
Because Jesus was an undocumented child refugee
Because, We Shall Overcome
Because it is
     Ansin tchífidh muid éirí na gealaí
Because it is
     Then we shall see the rising of the moon.

This brief litany of protest speaks to the ubiquity of this particular

human experience. It spans the world, sweeping across generations,
with echoes of it lilting in collective memories across cultures. This
impulse to speak out, to generate awareness, to stand up through and
by words-as-actions is a tentacle of the human experience, tethering
the individual to the common good in imaginative and often desper-
ate ways. This study explores these words-as-actions through a targeted
Austinian lens across genres, geographies, and languages to promote a
richer understanding of how this linguistic impulse successfully con-
nects the individual and the community.

Speech Act Theory

Austin (1994) crafts his Speech Act Theory (SAT) through a series of
eight lectures that introduces the performative utterance as its central
concept. With the performative, he undermines a commonly held tenet
regarding language: that to say something is “always and simply to state
something” (p. 12). Instead, Austin calls attention to the fact that often
times, “to say something is to do something; or in which by saying some-
thing,” like the bride and groom declaring I do, “we are doing some-
thing” (ibid.). Austin’s work and that of others (e.g., Searle 1975, 1995;
Searle and Vanderveken 1985), clarifies that language is used not only to
state propositions but also to perform a variety of acts, to do particular
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
37

types of work—like pardoning or warning—with words. As an object

of study, these acts fall under the linguistic subfield of pragmatics, the
study of ways in which meaning is produced by language-in-use in par-
ticular contexts.
Initially, for Austin, these acts share the semantic and syntactic traits
of an appropriate first person singular subject, combined with a per-
formative verb in present tense, indicative mood, in active voice. These
verbs, also, can be modified by an adverb, such as ‘hereby’ in English,
that does not alter the form or meaning of the verb, but instead func-
tions more like a marker of the performative verb, in a recognizable dis-
course routine like

• Sentencing: “I, hereby, sentence you …” spoken by a judge;

• Apologizing: “I, hereby, apologize …” spoken by an offender;
• Christening: “I, hereby, christen thee the USS Ticonderoga …”
­spoken by the ship’s sponsor.1

With a successful performative utterance, the saying of the words, there-

fore, makes it so. These utterances reveal language as constitutive, pro-
ducing the social reality that it references. In Austinian performativity,
language does not just describe or report reality, as it does in constative
utterances, but it also constructs or affects it (Sedgwick 2003, p. 5). As
Wetherell (2001a) suggests, when people speak to and with each other,
“a formulation of the world comes into being” due to language’s pro-
ductive capacity in tandem with its descriptive capacity (p. 16). Protest
language takes advantage of both the descriptive and generative dimen-
sions of language, articulating a particular descriptive view of reality
while using language to create an alternative. Over the last five decades,
many linguists and discourse analysts, including practitioners of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA), have adopted this understanding of lan-
guage in their work (e.g., Bednarek and Caple 2014; McConnell-Ginet
2005; Hodge and Kress 1996), recognizing it as a primary tool for the
social construction of reality (e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966).2
Along with supporting this productive capacity of the performa-
tive, Sedgwick challenges the binary, of the anti-essentialist position
(e.g., Butler 1997; Derrida 1988; Foucault 1975), that all language is
38    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

performative and productive versus the positivistic position (e.g., Searle

1975; Benveniste 1974) that some language is performative and some
constative or descriptive, to instead map the neighborhood of the
explicit performative to discover what it is doing, what else might be on
the margins, and what its value might be for those involved. Because the
language used to perform protest often does so through word play (e.g.,
irony, metaphor), this study respects Silverstein’s (1995) observation
that “to different degrees, any linguistic form, a pragmatic realization of
structure in use, has multiple indexical values for its users, whether or
not these are explicitly recognized in conscious awareness” (p. 548).

Performatives: A Traveling Concept

Such plasticity and productivity of language undergirds how this say-

ing-as-doing idea of the performative/performativity has become a
“traveling concept,” leading to a trans- and interdisciplinary “perform-
ative turn” in a variety of fields, which have nuanced this concept for
their own purposes (Berns 2009, p. 94). However, it is rather curious
that the performative should be so well-traveled, as between lectures one
and eight on his theory, Austin (1994), himself, offers it, discusses it,
and then nearly disowns it completely, as he thrashes out examples of
ordinary, daily language use that challenge his ideas. Ultimately, he con-
cludes that the performative impulse is at play in “every genuine speech
act” (p. 147), not just in the special sub-group of performatives as, “[a]
ll constatives … are a little bit performative, and all performatives are
a little bit constative” (Miller 2007, p. 228). Instead of a binary, it’s a
continuum of related overlapping speech acts, with the more purely
performative moving in one direction and the more purely constative
moving in the opposite direction (Austin 1994, p. 150). This con­
tinuum of grammatical impulse has given birth to a wide range of
thinking in the philosophy of language through the work of Derrida
(1988), Searle (1975) and Benveniste (1974), while being appropriated
into gender and political theory by Butler (1997), literary and cultural
studies by Pratt (1977), Miller (2007), Felman (1983; 2003 ), Rudrum
(2008), the socio-narratological by Herman (1999), ethnographic and
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
39

anthropological work by Singer (1959) and Turner (1982), theater

and performance studies including drama, dance, and ritual by
Auslander (2003), Fischer-Lichte (2004), even into the sciences with
Law and Singleton’s (2000) study of technology or the workshops on
“Performativity and Scientific Practice” sponsored by the German
Hanse-Wissen Schaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Study (Diebner
2012), among many others.3
This list reveals how the performative and its offspring continue to
connect with something dynamic that sparks thinking and writing
across a wide range of fields. Through these disciplinary travels, the
path of the performative speech act, such as a bet, and the path of the
performance, such as a play, have intermingled to the point of bewil-
derment. Miller (2007) sets out to distinguish the performative speech
act from the dramatic or musical performance, by delineating Austin’s
performative in relation to those of Lyotard (1984). However, just as
Austin’s analysis circles him back home to accept that the pulse of the
performative is active in all utterances to a varying degree, so too does
Miller’s analysis lead him to recognize the shared dimensions of per-
formativity in various fields. In an almost audible sigh for the reader,
Miller concedes, “And yet … And yet … And yet—after all my efforts
of disambiguation, I must nevertheless assert that these various forms
of performativity, different as they are from one another, have a family
resemblance, in the Wittgensteinian sense of that phrase” (p. 233). He
admits that Butler’s performativity of gender is a bit like falling in love
by saying “I love you”, which are both a bit like being changed by play-
ing Mozart, even as Mozart’s music is changed in the playing, because
“all of these examples show the power of words or other signs to do
something, to act” (ibid.).
The following exploration of the power of words to act as protest
returns the performative to its Austinian home base as a speech act,
accompanied by power and position concerns of CDA. This home base
is grounded in a system of acts and conditions that Austin suggests for
a performative utterance to be successfully or felicitously enacted. In the
remainder of this chapter, this original system is first reviewed before
its renovation, to facilitate comparisons of how texts of different genres
accomplish the same work of protest, is presented.
40    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Austin’s Speech Act

Austin (1994) posits a triptych for speech acts: a locutionary act, an

illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act. The locutionary act is the
basic utterance, itself, with its particular sense and reference that is gen-
erally understood as its meaning, i.e., its propositional content. The
illocutionary act is the interactional function and intention of the work
done by the utterance, and occurs at the moment when the saying is
the doing, like a request, demand, or invitation. For Austin, “the perfor-
mance of an ‘illocutionary’ act, [is] i.e., performance of an act in saying
something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something”
(pp. 99–100). Generally, the performance of a locutionary act, accord-
ing to Austin, is also the performance of an illocutionary act as informa-
tion is provided, questions are asked, warnings are issued, or invitations
are extended (ibid., pp. 98–99). Finally, the perlocutionary act is that
of the effect of the illocutionary act via the locutionary act. It is the
actual persuading, surprising or convincing of the audience (Hill 2002,
p. 541). It is the change brought about by the speech act, such as the
enacting of a judge’s sentence, the heeding of a warning, or the expres-
sion of sympathy.4
Within the midst of these acts lies the performative verb. Austin clas-
sifies different performative verbs according to the type of work that
they do. For example, commissives, which “commit the speaker to a cer-
tain course of action,” include promise, undertake, contract, give my word,
covenant, whereas verdictives, which “consist of the delivering of a find-
ing” in the judicial sense, include acquit, convict, sentence, rule. Protest
for Austin belongs to the class of behabitives, which “include the notion
of reaction to other people’s behavior and fortunes and of attitudes and
expressions of attitudes to someone else’s past conduct or imminent
conduct” (pp. 153–160).5
This action-reaction dynamic in Austin’s behabitive resonates with
the give and take of the Cooperative Principle, with protesters react-
ing to past or imminent conduct of a social, political, or cultural
power, to generate a reaction from them, while attracting others to the
protest cause. The locutionary act of the protest utterance is driven by
the illocutionary intention of the protester, to counter the conduct of
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
41

power, by generating a perlocutionary effect in others to engage the

issue.
In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Butler (1997) acti-
vates the illocutionary and perlocutionary with a concentration on the
temporal dimensions of these acts. She points out that Austin distin-
guishes illocutionary acts from perlocutionary acts as that which are
simultaneous versus that which are delayed. In the performance of an
illocutionary act, the saying and doing are simultaneous, with the act,
itself, being the deed. In the performance of the perlocutionary act,
however, the act produces a particular effect, as the act and the effect
are not the same thing (Butler, p. 3). Austin argues for care as the dis-
tinction between the illocutionary and perlocutionary can become quite
blurry, stating that the illocutionary is “conventional, in the sense that at
least it can be made explicit by a performative formula” such as “I pro-
test X,” but that the perlocutionary act and effect cannot be. “Thus we
can say ‘I argue that’ or ‘I warn you that’ but we cannot say ‘I convince
you that’ or ‘I alarm you that’” (pp. 103–104, 110). While Austin has a
focus on form and effect, Butler has one on timing.
For Butler’s (1997) illocutionary utterance, speech equals con-
duct, while in the perlocutionary utterance, speech generates conduct
(p. 112). Protest as performative contains both of these dimensions.
When anti-war protesters chant, “Don’t Attack Iraq!” or “Not in My
Name,” it is not in the conventional Austinian form of “I protest the
war,” but the utterances are nevertheless an illocutionary act perform-
ing protest: the chanting equals the protest. Along with this equating
of saying and doing, however, the chanters’ goal is delayed, as it is to
produce certain effects, including the more immediate ones, of build-
ing solidarity among the protesters or publicizing the protest, and/or of
longer range goals such as not sending troops into another country.

Austin’s Felicity Conditions

Regardless of whether the saying-doing is characterized as simultaneous or

staggered, the performative utterance must be judged, not as true or false
like its constative brethren, but as successful or felicitous. Austin (1994)
42    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

asserts that when we employ performative utterances, we are not merely

saying something that can be judged true or false such as the constative
utterance, “The water is deep,” but actually performing an act, such as
a dare, that may be judged as successful or not: “I dare you to dive in.”
He clarifies this, asserting that, “If you hurl a tomato at a political meet-
ing (or bawl ‘I protest’ when someone else does…) the consequence will
probably be to make others aware that you object, and to make them
think that you hold certain political beliefs”; however, it does not make
the throw or the shout true or false (p. 111). In the same vein, he points
out that the production of any number of perlocutionary effects cannot
prevent a constative utterance from being true or false (Austin’s emphasis).
Austin names the four social conventions that govern successful per-
formative utterances felicity conditions because when they are satisfied,
the speech act is felicitously or happily performed (see below and/or
Appendix A). Although Searle (1976) further formalizes Austin’s con-
ditions to account for speech acts in general, this study moves in the
opposite direction, telescoping Austin’s conditions to focus on the par-
ticular performative of protest. In doing so, the felicity conditions take
on a life as a proscenium arch that is movable to compare one protest
genre6 with another, from chants in Gezi Park, to songs at the Berlin
Wall, from poems at the Somme, to condemnations on Cuatro Caminos.
Political theorist and activist Charles Cotrell suggests that Austin’s
first two conditions are more accurately presuppositions while the last
two are aspirations. The upholding or satisfaction of these presuppo-
sitional and aspirational conditions is required for a successful perfor-
mance of an appointment, a sentencing, a marriage, or a protest. The
violation of conditions one and/or two results in a misfire of the speech
act. When this happens, the work being attempted by the utterance
simply doesn’t occur. If the justice of the peace declares, “I might now
pronounce you husband and wife,” then the marriage is not just off to
a shaky start, but to no start at all! With violations of conditions three
and four, there is not a misfire, but instead an abuse of linguistic con-
vention. If a speaker has sworn to uphold the law, then she or he must
indeed uphold the law, or the sworn oath is abused. Butler’s focus on
the temporal delay of the perlocutionary act becomes apparent in these
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
43

moments of abuse, as the effects can occur only after the performance of
the speech act.
Austin’s Felicity Conditions

Felicity Condition #1: It must be a commonly accepted conven-

tion that the uttering of particular words by particular people in
particular circumstances will produce a particular effect.
Felicity Condition #2: All participants in this conventional proce-
dure must carry out the procedure correctly and completely.
Felicity Condition #3: If the condition is that the participants in
the procedure must have certain thoughts, feelings, and intentions,
then the participants must in fact have those thoughts, feelings
and intentions.
Felicity Condition #4: If the convention is that any participant in
the procedure binds her/himself to behave subsequently in a cer-
tain way, then s/he must in fact behave subsequently in that way
(Austin 14–15).

The fulfillment of each of these conditions leads to a felicitous perfor-

mance of an utterance’s stated work of declaring, threatening, annul-
ling, etc. The satisfaction of these conditions resonates with certain
aspects of Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical sociology, which along with
Chomsky’s (1957) approach to syntax, was a dynamic strand of thought
in the intellectual milieu of the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on the
metaphor of drama, Goffman posited seven elements of the presenta-
tion of self through performance of daily life.7 Three of these, Belief,
Idealization, and Maintenance resonate with Austin’s felicity conditions
in particular. Belief in playing one’s part and the belief of the audience
in that playing is important for a successful performance for Goffman,
just as it is for Austin’s ‘particular person.’8 Idealization, or the idealized
version of a given performance, gets at expectations and understand-
ings present in the coordinated effort of Austin’s (1994) conditions: it is
expected that the judge sentences the criminal, according to procedure,
44    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

with the intention of enacting justice, and that the state carries out the
sentencing as designated. Maintenance refers to the need for consistency
of character in the performance to avoid audience confusion or miscues.
For Austin, the violation of either of his first two conditions results in a
misfire, so that the work of the words simply doesn’t occur. The criminal
is not judged or sentenced. The violation of either of the last two condi-
tions doesn’t prevent the work from being done, but it does result in an
abuse of the linguistic convention. If the criminal promises the judge to
make amends, then she or he must indeed make amends, or the prom-
ise is an abuse. Consistency of maintenance is generally necessary for
felicitous speech acts.
Sedgwick (2003) calls performatives that satisfy these conditions
“explicit performative utterances” (p. 4). However, she also demonstrates
how even some of these apparently explicit performatives can be prob-
lematic. Take for instance “the meeting is adjourned.” This is certainly
a performative speech act, but it violates the requirements of first per-
son singular subject as well as active voice. For acts of protest, violations
of performative conventions can also occur in a variety of ways. For
example, just pausing with Austin’s (1994) first person singular subject
exposes contradictions: “We all deserve the freedom to marry!” from the
2014 Human Rights Campaign; “You’re doing it wrong!” from the 2009
G20 protests; or “Love is a Human Right” from the 2012 World Pride
gatherings. These are perfectly acceptable instances of language perform-
ing protest with no “I” involved, or even the presence of a performative
verb. The appropriated “Careful Now” from the British sitcom, Fr. Ted
(1995), used in the 2013 Belfast flag protests, simply eliminates the sub-
ject “you understood”, and the verb “be”, which Austin doesn’t consider
to be a performative verb. This study refines Austin’s conditions to focus
solely on the performance of protest to account for how such slogans
may function as speech acts of protest despite their flaunting or abuse of
the established conditions of a performative utterance.

Periperformatives in Residence

When each felicity condition is fulfilled, the speech act exemplifies

Sedgwick’s explicit performative utterance. Sedgwick (2003) suggests,
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
45

that along with explicit performatives, there are other utterances that
resemble these, but don’t quite fit in. She calls this group periperforma-
tives in that they share the space of the performative, assume it and
depend on it, but are different from it. Although they are not per-
formatives themselves, “they are about performatives and … they cluster
around performatives” (p. 68). This parallels Austin’s (1994) observation
that the distinction between constative and performative utterances
needs to be adjusted in “favour of more general families of related and
overlapping speech-acts,” like a family of protest (emphasis in the origi-
nal, p. 150).
Whereas Butler (1997) raises the possibilities of protest or insurrec-
tionary speech in terms of time, Sedgwick (2003) considers speech acts
in terms of space, proposing that some utterances reside in the neigh-
borhood of the explicit performative, even though they, themselves,
are not performative. It is clear they are not, because they state they are
not, either through negation or because they refer to or allude to an
actual explicit performative. Sedgwick demonstrates this by offering the
famous line from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we can-

not hallow this ground

as a periperformative (2016). Like with the negation of the verbs, if

someone utters, “he suggests that we dedicate this ground,” it does not
dedicate the ground, but it does reference the possibility of dedicating
the ground. Sedgwick posits that the explicit performative, grounded
in verbs such as dedicate, consecrate, or hallow, occupies the prestige
center in the performative neighborhood, while the periperformatives
occupy a range of positions, from at or near the center to the outskirts
(pp. 68–75). From this spatializing pulse, Sedgwick proposes a mapping
of this neighborhood, by moving out from the prestige center to the
“multitude of other utterances scattered or clustered near or far, depend-
ing on the various ways they might resemble or differ from those exam-
ples” (p. 5).
Another famous example of a periperformative is Hannah Arendt’s
famous non-affirmation of her self-identity, “I have never denied being
46    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

a woman or a Jew (1998). This non-denial non-affirmation assumes,

and is indeed dependent on, her physical reality of being a woman and
a Jew. As an utterance of denial, it is radically different from performing
an affirmation of “I am a woman and a Jew” (Zerilli 1995, p. 189) and
a long way from the 1970s anthem of “I am woman hear me roar.” The
protest instances analyzed for this study appear to be such periperforma-
tives, sharing the space of protest but not actually occupying it. They are
scattered around, in an ebb and flow, with words being sung or chanted,
read or recited, in a wide variety of forms, even though they all seem to
be doing the same type of work, that of protest. They sound like songs
or chants; they read like poems or condemnations. Their surface forms
are indeed those things. However, their functions reveal them as speech
acts of protest. Despite their variety of form, they have functioned polit-
ically, sociologically, and emotionally as protest speech acts: chanters
challenge their government and endure water cannons in Turkey, even
as agricultural powers classify them as “types of loads” in the American
Southwest; singers share visions of nuclear winter in Berlin even as they
are beaten, arrested, and jailed in the United States; poets expose the
cost of war in Britain, even as they are banned and isolated in Romania;
and writers interrogate corporations and governments after the killing
of activists in Guatemala, even as they starve themselves to death in
Northern Ireland. In conjunction with the similarity of their functions,
the diversity of their forms testifies to the power of ordinary language
as being more complex, heterogeneous, reflective, mobile, powerful,
and eloquent, than may appear at first glance (Sedgwick 2003, p. 75).
This accomplishment, of these diverse seemingly periperformative forms
functioning to enact the same work, induces a linguistic fracking in the
protest neighborhood.

Fracking Surface Structures

As Austin articulates his constitutive approach to language in the 1950s,

Chomsky (1957) introduces his theory of the internalized rules of
Transformational Generative Grammar, of surface structures and deep
structures, to account for linguistic competence and diversity. Both
Austin (1994) and Chomsky consider potentially universal patterns in
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
47

language. Whereas in Syntactic Structures, Chomsky (1957) focuses on

internalized grammatical utterances, outside of context, to reveal formal
and substantive universals as the basis for a generative grammar, Austin
focuses on externalized utterances in context, to develop a set of social
conventions governing speech acts in How to Do Things with Words.
While Chomsky strives to attain descriptive adequacy to account for the
variety of languages and explanatory adequacy to identify the internal-
ized grammatical rules through which humans endlessly and creatively
employ these languages, Austin strives to attain descriptive adequacy of
various classes of speech acts and explanatory adequacy to identify the
social conventions at play in the performances of speech acts. Inspired
by Hodge and Kress’ borrowing of the word deep from Chomsky who
had, in turn, borrowed it from Whorf (1956), the base metaphor of
Transformational Grammar’s deep and surface structures is borrowed,
for this study, to adapt Austin’s social conventions to allow for analysis
of multiple genres—chants, songs, poems, and prose—that all do the
work of protest (Hodge and Kress 1996, p. 10).
While Hodge and Kress scrutinize the relationship between sentence
level transformations and ideological positionings, this study adapts it
to longer, more complex structures. For them, transformations consist
of an assortment of operations practiced on basic forms through actions
such as deleting, substituting, combining, or re-ordering the syntactic
relations within a syntagm or on the syntagm itself. Thus, The govern-
ment cut the health care budget is transformed into The health care budget
was cut, with a named actor (the government) being deleted as the verb
is transformed from active to passive voice, or The cutting of the health
care budget has been completed, with not only a move into passive voice
and the elimination of the actor, but also the transformation of the verb
cut, into the nominalization cutting, to replace the actor as the subject.9
The elimination of the government agent shields it from the disfavour
of those impacted by the health care budget cuts, reinforcing, at least on
the surface, the status quo.
In terms of protest language, however, generally only that in the form
of chants or slogans take the surface form of a sentence-type structure
such as these from the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear in 2010: “If
your beliefs fit on a sign, think harder!” or “You’re Mad as Hell and I’m
48    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Not Going to Take it Anymore.” Other instances of protest language

take the shapes of other genres like poems or songs. Regardless of genre,
such surface structures perform illocutionary acts of protest where the
saying equals the doing of protest. The fracking of the surface struc-
tures of a protest play, manifesto, or poem reveals at the level of deep
structure the underlying performative utterance of “I protest X,” with X
being the target of the dissent. As illocutionary acts, these various gen-
res are performative texts that not only interpret and describe the world,
but also activate Marx’s demand that although, “[P]hilosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, … is to change
it” (emphasis added, Marx 2000, p. 8; Miller 2007, pp. 7–8). These
performative texts are not indirect speech acts (Searle 1975) because lis-
teners/readers recognize and respond to them as acts of protest, not as
compliments or bets or promises, but as acts of protest, “securing the
uptake” (Austin 1994, pp. 116–117) of the illocutionary act. Uptake is
secured when listeners/readers recognize the implicatures generated by
the surface forms, of a chant, song, poem, or prose, as indexing a deep
structure functioning as “I protest X”, within the particular context of
the performative text. Civic change is the desired perlocutionary effect
of protest texts. Such a performative text craves the perlocutionary effect
of a changed community. This is the utopian impulse that underlies the
hoped for transformation that is inherent in much of protest language.
Recognizing the performative foundation of such protest texts reso-
nates with previous approaches, inspired by SAT, that consider longer
pieces of prose, as complex metaphorical speech acts, as opposed to
simple explicit performative utterances (e.g., Pratt 1977; Todorov
1990; Gorman 1999). The author is the equivalent of the speaker in
these more complex pieces, which are pragmatic productions within
their respective social, political, and cultural contexts (Berns 2009,
p. 97). Such a position counters the dismissive treatment of literary lan-
guage use, in opposition to natural language use, as parasitic by Austin
(1994, p. 20) or as pretend speech acts by Searle (1975). Instead, it
reveals an understanding of pieces of discourse, such as Panamanian
Dimas Pitty’s poem “In the Canal Zone” or the American “Declaration
of Independence” as performative, change-generating texts. Such var-
ying surface structures are rich transformations or re-modelings of the
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
49

deep structure of the explicit performative speech act of protest. The

degree of ornateness of the renovation is often connected with the risk
level of issuing the performative of protest, as the use of metaphor,
allusion, or other literary devices has the potential to offer plausible
deniability. Successful re-fashionings often harvest images or phrases
with strong roots within the community’s collective memory and acti-
vate networks of rich social capital, such as the African American pro-
test song “Strange Fruit,” which compares lynched bodies with fruit
hanging from the poplar trees of the Old South. The deep structure of
the explicit performative is the central structure from which there is a
Bakhtinian ebb and flow of centripetal and centrifugal forces at play in
the production of protest language. Thus, even though on the surface,
all of the instances analyzed in these subsequent chapters, of lyrics being
sung or poems being recited, appear to be periperformatives, they are in
actuality, at the level of deep structure, performatives of protest.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Like Arendt’s periperformative, the seemingly periperformatives of
chants, songs, poems, and prose explored in this text, prompt questions
of categorization and power, questions that are foundational in Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA). Developing in the late 1970s, partially
in reaction to the introspective formalist turn in linguistics following
Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (Fowler 1979),10 CDA promotes a study
of discourse-in-action that poses questions of how talk and text create,
perpetuate, and counter relationships of power based in dominance, ine-
quality, and/or injustice within social and political contexts.11 Grounded
in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Agger 1992), CDA is not
a unified theoretical approach, direction or specialization, but is instead,
an interdisciplinary perspective of theory, analysis, and application
found across the whole field of language-oriented study, from conver-
sation analysis to pragmatics, rhetoric, stylistics, ethnography, sociolin-
guistics, and media analysis (Van Dijk 2001, pp. 352–353). Interpretive
and explanatory, CDA practice addresses social problems by investigat-
ing how power functions discursively and how discourses, as forms of
50    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

social action, constitute society and culture. This practice assumes that
discourses are historical, conduct ideological work, and that the link
between text and society is mediated (Fairclough and Wodak 1997).
Based on these assumptions, most CDA studies pose variations of the
question of how those in power deploy specific discourse structures to
reproduce social dominance.
CDA approaches work to create a middle or meso ground of exam-
ination and discussion, bringing together fine-grained microlevel
concerns with large scale macrolevel ones. CDA works in the spaces
between fine-grained decontextualized microlevel analyses of a particu-
lar discourse text (e.g., a protest poem) and broad macrolevel Foucault-
type studies of discourse (e.g., discourse of fascism). Van Dijk (2001)
suggests that CDA bridges this gap between micro and macro con-
cerns—between members/groups, actions/processes, context/social
structure, or personal/social cognition—in several ways (p. 354). At
this meso-level, the gap between: members and groups can be addressed
through member’s language use as part of groups, organizations, and
institutions, which then function through the discourse actions of these
members, like the individual women chanting “My Dress My Choice”
participate as members of the Kilimani Mums; between actions and pro-
cesses through analysis of how an individual’s social acts are constituent
parts of group processes, such as Phil Ochs singing, “I ain’t Marching
Anymore” as contributing to the anti-Vietnam War movement; between
context and social structure by accounting for discursive interactions that
constitute social structures, like the interface between a local tax pro-
test and the national tax code; and between personal and social cognition,
such as personal memories and understandings of income inequality
as well as shared social memories and understandings of it, like in the
financial crisis of 2008. Both types of cognition influence individual
discourse actions whereas the shared realities shape a group’s discourse
actions.
A consideration of a very brief example, that of a name, related to
the gang rape and subsequent death in Delhi, India, of 23-year old
Jyoti Singh Pandey, known as Nirbhaya (Biswas 2012) helps illuminate
CDA concerns. On the microlevel is the examination of the one-word
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
51

pseudonym for the victim’s name, or lack thereof. Under the Indian
Penal Code, the names of rape victims are not allowed to be publicized
in the media unless permission is granted by the family. Pandey’s name
was made public by the Mail Today, a Delhi tabloid, without her fami-
ly’s permission. Prior to this disclosure she had been called Nirbhaya, or
“fearless one” as well as “Braveheart” and “India’s Daughter,” by various
groups and in the press.
Moving from the microlevel, CDA prompts the probing of specific
linguistic features, like the syntactic positioning (i.e., subject or direct
object) in the naming of Pandey as Nirbhaya in a particular media text,
in relation to questions such as “What power relations are activated in
the naming of Pandey as Nirbhaya, when it names Nirbhaya as Pandey,
or in the syntactic positioning Pandey/Nirbhaya in the text? To what
purpose is the pseudonym and given name used or not used in a par-
ticular syntactic position by the protesters, the press, the government,
the accused rapists?” Moving from the macrolevel, CDA prompts the
asking of systemic questions such as: Why does the Indian Penal Code
suppress the names of those who suffer from sexual violence? Why does
the family have the power to publicize or not publicize the name? How
are the systemic relations of power created, perpetuated, and/or coun-
tered in the naming, or not, of a rape victim? These questions bring
together the puffs of air, pixels on a screen, scratches on paper and
the larger social, political, and cultural forces they index in the middle
ground of speaking, posting, or writing.
The framework, which shapes the analyses presented in subsequent
chapters, may also be considered a meso-level model that integrates the
performative concerns of SAT and the power concerns of CDA in dis-
course (i.e., turn-taking), over discourse (i.e., who has access to the con-
versational floor), and of discourse (i.e., conventions of language) (e.g.,
Fairclough 2003; Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Wodak and Meyer 2009
p. 35). The decision to develop such a model is rooted in power’s foun-
dational condition in human interactions and of its discursive function-
ing through the felicitous performance of speech acts. Whereas Austin
posits an apolitical framework for performative speech acts, from which
politically-oriented thinkers like Sedgwick and Butler have developed
52    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

ideas of political and literary performativity, this text has politicized it

not to probe the notion of the performative speech act in general, but
instead to probe a particular political performative, protest. The general
CDA question, of how discourse structures are used to reproduce domi-
nant relationships, is reversed to instead: how is the discourse structure
of the protest speech act, manifest in a variety of genres, used to counter
dominant relationships?
To analyze samples of alternative discourse, politicization of the felic-
ity conditions allows a grappling with how grassroots power, through
the discourse of protest, can resist hegemonic power through linguis-
tic performance in a variety of genres. While Austin’s felicity condi-
tions are detached from politics in their idealizations in general, they
are not detached from politics in their realizations in particular protest
contexts. As Austin sketches out the form of the general performative
through his felicity conditions, I renovate these conditions to compare a
variety of performances of protest in action, functioning within distinct
social and political contexts, in an attempt to satisfy CDA’s demand
that discourse analysis be interpretive and explanatory (Van Dijk 2001,
p. 353).

Context

For this broad comparative study, the meso-level contact zone of

the speech act of protest, itself, provides the context in which each of
these protest performatives is analyzed. The focus on the deep stories
of the acts themselves, instead of the more complex discourse contexts
that are the hallmark of in-depth case studies, is the major drawback
to comparative work such as this. Nevertheless, the targeted deep sto-
ries of the contact zone are constructed with a concern for Van Dijk’s
(2009) direction that context does not consist of objective social prop-
erties of a situation but instead subjective relevant ones. As he states,
“a context is what is defined to be relevant in the social situation by
the participants themselves” (p. 5). In pragmatic studies, context influ-
ences which aspects of language and meaning are highlighted as rele-
vant or significant within a socially recognizable event, such as a news
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
53

interview, in which certain types of language use are expected and gen-
erally performed. When they are successfully performed, they attain a
pragmatic legitimacy,12 as hearers accredit them as legitimate examples of
a particular speech event within a context. This dovetails with Austin’s
(1994) uptake of a speech act, such as a bet, by the hearer who responds
according to the convention of the speech act, such as accepting the
bet.13 For pragmatic legitimacy, it is not necessary for hearer uptake of
the protest performative, but that the hearer recognizes it as a protest
performative. From this perspective, an aspect of context exists prior to
a particular use of protest language. However, this does not mean that
the language or the context is stagnant or rigid. On the contrary, as
Fish (1980) asserts, “language is not dependent on context, but since
language is only encountered in contexts and never in the abstract, it
always has a shape, although it is not always the same one” (p. 268).
This idea dovetails with Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, or the idea that at any
given time or place, there is a host of voices including social, political,
and cultural ones, that shape a word’s meaning for that particular time,
place, and event. For Bakhtin (1981), every utterance has a dense het-
eroglot nature which is practically impossible to recover for a contex-
tual analysis (Bartlett 2012, p. 13; Bakhtin, p. 428). As meaning is not
only heteroglot in condition but is also created retroactively, context can
never be totally stable or complete, as more meaning is being generated
over time.
Whereas, in sociolinguistics, context is constituted by talk and
action as a product of the immediate interaction between speakers
(e.g., Tannen 1994, p. 10), CDA recognizes that choices about talk
and action tend to be influenced by pre-existing social, political, and
cultural patterns. Fish (1980) contends that one is “never not in a sit-
uation… A set of interpretive assumptions is always in force”, includ-
ing in situations of protest (p. 284). These interpretive assumptions are
always populated by heteroglossic baggage and are often accompanied
by dynamics of power and risk. Bartlett (2012) notes that all speakers,
audiences, and words, themselves, possess social histories, and that,
“placing text within its historical and social context is what makes it dis-
course. Texts as linguistic objects are, in themselves, potentially infinite
54    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

in their creative possibilities; discourse, however, as a social practice,

as the situated use of language, is highly sensitive to its environment”
(p. 10). Due to the breadth of this work, the instances of protest lan-
guage, explored in the following chapters, are contextualized as dis-
course in a manner constrained by the sensitivities of the social practice
of the performative in SAT, as that which is necessary to analyze and
compare them as protest speech acts in Turkey, the United States, West
Germany, Britain, Romania, Guatemala, and Northern Ireland. Each
is certainly worthy of an individual case study that encompasses the
broader social, political, cultural and multiple other micro and mac-
rolevel discourses at work shaping it.
Nevertheless, the speech acts analyzed are those through which pro-
testers give voice to their causes to initiate civic change. These speech
acts are generally not the response the hegemonic powers had foreseen
or desired of their constituents; but, in their responses the potential of
an “event” as Derrida calls such moments of movement, are ripe and
worthy of attention (1988). This is a window from which to view Said’s
(1983) resistive language, to examine challenges to manufactured con-
sent and coercion, by crafting felicity conditions particular to the speech
act of protest. With the spirit of this positive strain, the criteria for
the performativity of grassroots language, within local discourses from
everyday activists to farmworkers, pop stars, poets, and political prison-
ers who have dared to re-imagine their communities, are renovated to
provide a frame for comparison.

Renovating the Felicity Conditions of Protest

Positing that the texts of these various activists are transformed explicit
performatives of protest, let us return to Austin’s felicity conditions to
support this claim of transformation. Keeping in mind Cotrell’s sug-
gestion that Austin’s first two conditions are more accurately presup-
positions while the last two are aspirations, these four conditions are
renovated to account for the speech act of protest specifically. These
conditions are the criteria by which pragmatic legitimacy can be
attained for speech acts of protest.
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
55

The Presuppositions

A Commonly Accepted Convention for Protest

Felicity condition number one has a number of inter-related dimen-

sions that work together to generate distinct speech acts: a commonly
accepted convention, particular words, particular people, particular
circumstances, and particular effects. It is the foundation of performa-
tivity. With regard to the specific speech act of protest, the dimension
of a commonly accepted convention is generated from within the cul-
tural milieu of the expression of dissent, including institutional frames
of specific contexts, the history of texts and organizations, and a vari-
ety of extra linguistic social and sociological variables at play. They are
also potentially shaped by intertextual and interdiscursive relations sur-
rounding the performance of a speech act. Culture shapes the normative
expectations of conversational exchange in private and public contexts,
including that of protest. Acknowledging the century old-debates, dating
at least from Plato’s Catylus, about how, and in which ways, social and
cultural conventions can shed light on how language does its work,14
convention is viewed simply as the norms, whether custom (i.e., unwrit-
ten law or social expectation), or law (i.e., legislated legal doctrine), that
direct or shape public expressions of dissent, rooted in the culture, his-
tory, collective memory, and political system in which the dissent occurs.
Factors such as whether or not public protest is legal or illegal, if there
are laws governing freedom of speech, if women, children and non-elites
have a right of public association, or if there is a history of satyagraha
(Gandhi’s soul force) as part of civil disobedience, shape the linguistic
conventions of protest: of being public, vocative, and oriented to change
(see below; see above or Appendix A for the original felicity conditions).
The Presuppositions

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #1: It must be a commonly

accepted convention that the uttering, for, on or in a public space,
of words that challenge social, political, or cultural hegemonic
power(s), by people interpellated as protesters, will lead to a mar-
gin-center convocativity on said challenge.
56    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #2: Protesters articulate and

support, in a public capacity, the counter hegemonic utterance(s)
and thus, occupy a position on the margin in tension with the
power center for that issue.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, protest is a public speech act, not a

private one. It tethers the individual to the communal, often via a group,
though not necessarily. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1987) is an indi-
vidual performative text, that links his personal civic conscience with the
American government’s support of slavery and the Mexican American
War, whereas Nelson Mandela’s opening defense statement at his 1964
trial, is an individual performative speech act that connects his personal
civic conscience with the South African government’s policy of apartheid,
via Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the armed wing of the
African National Congress. Authorship may be individual, like it is for
these two examples, or it may be a joint one with a primary author from
a group, such as the “Port Huron Statement”, a seminal student activism
document written mainly by Tom Hayden in 1962 for the Students for
a Democratic Society, or a communal author such as the “Declaration
of a State of War” (1970) against the United States government, by the
Weather Underground/The Weathermen in 1970. However, regardless
of individual or communal authorship, protest is generated for a public
audience to be handled in a public space. Critics may point out that this
may not always hold true, as in our Chuj dictionary example in the pre-
vious chapter. Agreed. However, it is the default position, the norm even
if not the universal, of protest to be public.
Along with a public orientation, the expectation of the vocative
is another norm at play in protest. This is a dimension related to the
public aspect of protest language. A vocative expression is one of direct
address in which the identity of the addressee generally appears in the
sentence. In protest, the addressee may be included directly or may be
implied. Regardless, a protest performative assumes a direct addressee
associated with a social, political, or cultural power(s), as well as second-
ary addressees—that of potential supporters drawn from witnesses/read-
ers of the performative act. Both of these groups occupy institutional
frames that are activated during the course of a protest. For example,
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
57

the Mexican military and government were the direct addressees of the
“Aquí están los asesinos” (“Here are the murderers”) protests about state
involvement with the disappearance of 43 students, from Ayotzinapa
Teacher Training College in Iguala, Guerrero in December 2014
(Reuters 2014). Secondary addressees included family and friends of the
disappeared who were unable or too fearful to join the protest.
In addition to the norms of vocative address in a public orienta-
tion, another convention is that of the goal of promoting civic change
through the performance of the speech act. The teleology of protest is
that of change, a movement from the status quo to the innovative. In
this movement, the desired perlocutionary effect is that of persuasion
that leads to change. This may be directly stated, such as “Don’t Attack
Iraq!” chanted in the streets of London in 2002 in an attempt to alter
British and American military policy, or it may be indirectly stated, such
as “Hands up! Don’t Shoot,” chanted in the streets in St. Louis in 2014
in an attempt to end police brutality. Derrida (1987) points out that
there is always the possibility of chance and necessity creating a novel
event despite the activation, repetition, or iterability of a convention
(pp. 58–59; discussed in Miller 2007, p. 232). The auto-tuned song
and viral Youtube video, of a parody of former Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi’s “Zenga Zenga” speech, by Israeli journalist Noy Alooshe, is
such a novel event. Allooshe’s remix, of the video of the nationally tele-
vised speech with the rap song “Hey Baby” by Pitbull featuring T-Pain,
highlights the phrase “zenga zenga ” or “alley by alley” from Gaddafi’s
statement: “I will call upon millions from desert to desert. We will
march to purge Libya, inch by inch, house by house, alley by alley”
(Alooshe 2011). The Libyan opposition adopted the phrase in an ironic
move of having Gaddafi, himself, provide the now pro-revolutionary
lyrics. This ironic co-optation cleverly satisfies the conventions of a voc-
ative call to civic change in a public venue.

Circumstances of Protest

In conjunction with these conventions, a renovated felicity condition

number one includes the necessary circumstances appropriate to a
58    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

protest. One of the underlying conditions connected with or relevant

to a protest performative is that of a disagreement, a conflict, between
at least one person and a hegemonic power in control of a social, politi-
cal, or cultural issue. These disagreements are often rooted in long-term
patterns of oppression or suppression that are sustained through extra
linguistic political and sociological variables, as well as institutional and
hegemonic discourses. There is a tendency for a flashpoint to illuminate
these disagreements, concentrating focus on a particular moment in the
time of an extended conflict. For example, in Hong Kong, the media-
dubbed Umbrella Revolution’s flashpoint of disagreement and extra-
linguistic variable was the Chinese government’s vetting and choosing of
candidates to stand in local elections in 2014. This was seen as the latest
in a long-running series of suppressions of democratic freedoms by the
Chinese government. This necessary circumstance, of disagreement for
protest language to be performative, is tightly linked to the convention
of the public via the performative’s production for, on, or in a public
space (Sedgwick 2003, p. 5). The possibility of highlighting disagree-
ment surrounding a community issue reveals the reality upon which
Gramsci reflects: that hegemony, social, political, or cultural, is never
complete—there is always a fault line that can be exploited by/through
public protest (Gramsci 1971, pp. 169–190; Bressler 2007, p. 344).
A second circumstance of the protest performative is that of critical
awareness. Gerlinde Mautner (2011) argues that “Critical awareness is
a prerequisite for resistance: you need to see what is going on even to
realize that you would want to do something about it” (p. 3). At first
glance, this appears to be an obvious assertion. However, on closer
examination, there appears to be a continuum of critical awareness for
resistance. One end of this continuum is held down by those protest-
ers who resist in an intentional manner; the other end is held down by
those protesters who are reacting to the disagreement, responding with
unchecked emotions. Butler (1997) contends that particular social con-
texts mark out a performative speech act. However, when these circum-
stances are delineated, they are then available, therefore, to be breeched
through acts of critical awareness, as Derrida (1987) points out
(pp. 58–59). This ambivalent dynamic within “the heart of performativ-
ity implies that, within political discourse, the very terms of resistance
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
59

and insurgency are spawned in part by the powers they oppose” (Butler
1997, p. 40). Indeed, protest is an active civic manifestation of the
Cooperative Principle, a response, rooted in thinking differently, to the
call of such powers.

The Particular Words of Protest

Whereas for Austin, the performative is built around particular verbs,

what is critical for a performative speech act of protest is that the
words chosen and used create a semantics of opposition. The pattern-
ing of words, along with suprasegmentals such as tone, articulates the
disagreement, publicly highlighted between the addresser and the
addressee, with the ultimate perlocutionary effect and goal of change.
Protesters craft such semantics of opposition through a wide variety of
ways, animating intertextual and interdiscursive relations on micro and
macrolevels. These include drawing on established language patterns
such as the casting of the binary of “Us versus Them” in “Uniţi Salvăm
Roșia Montană/United we save Roșia Montană” in the 2013 gold min-
ing protests in Romania, as well as through novel usages of language
such as the creation of hybrid slogans in “Can we haz peace?/Can we
make peace” at the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, or through poetic
images such as Dennis Brutus’ (2006) use of the color ‘cement-grey’
to represent the notorious South African prison on Robben Island in
“On the Island”.15 Due to the plasticity of language, protesters also may
draw upon features such as tone and cadence, or elements such as irony
or rhyme, to reinforce their message of change as in the “Only Solution
is a Communist Revolution” from Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Certain
words or phrases may also carry ideological baggage associated with
macrolevel discourses, such as the use of the word welfare as mentioned
in Fox’s commentary on Gramsci (2014) in the Introduction.

The Particular People of a Protest

French philosopher Louis Althusser’s insights regarding interpellation,

or the ideological hailing or calling out of an individual to subjugate
60    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

him/her, illuminate how a particular person becomes a protester. For

Althusser (2001), a hegemonic power “hails or interpellates [through
ideology] concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (p. 115). To illus-
trate this, Althusser uses every day examples such as when a police
officer calls out to someone saying, “Hey, you there!” He contends
that in that moment the ideology of the state, in the form of the police
officer, hails the addressee who, as he turns around in response, is inter-
pellated as a subject of the state. He states that the 180-degree turn, of
the individual in response to the agent of the state, is the moment of
conversion, and the very fact that no one recognizes this reveals the nat-
uralizing power of ideology at work (p. 118).
Althusser also asserts that, “individuals are always-already subjects,”
even before they are born. He supports this apparently paradoxical
claim stating, “[I]t is certain in advance that it [the child] will bear its
Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplace-
able. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject,
appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological config-
uration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived” (p. 119).16
Thus, this temporal concern is really one of chronological re-enactment
in the performance of ideology, of how the subject, which Althusser
claims is initially interpellated as “free” so that s/he may submit freely
to the subjection of the State, is regularly hailed by various powers to
“keep him/her in their place.”
Butler (1997) posits that “[i]f to be addressed is to be interpel-
lated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in
speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. When
the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one it injures”
(p. 2). This backfire is indeed what happens in the hailing of one who
becomes a protester. Nelson Mandela was born black into a world of
white hegemony. However, on the racial margin which he occupied,
the South African government’s hail of him as a subject to an apartheid
government misfired, and interpellated him in an unintended manner,
as a protester, not as a subjugated second-class citizen. In the thwarting
of this hail, Mandela, to draw from Simon Schama’s (1989) historical
insights, is transformed from that of the oppressed subject to that of cit-
izen in a moment of empowering political efficacy. This back-and-forth
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
61

call and response, in the misfire of the hail of interpellation, activates

the discourse notion of identity as relational and contingent, something
that develops and circulates in particular interactions within communi-
ties of practice. Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi in
India, and Corazon Aquino in the Philippines were interpellated by the
state within their local communities, echoing Tip O’Neil’s dictum that
all politics are local. Upon being hailed in such a way, the hegemonic
powers of the state then unintentionally sculpted these three individuals
into the protagonists in the narratives of their respective causes as they
took on the identity of protester for themselves.
Such sculpting brings to mind the critical notion that narrative identity
“can never be grasped without the Other, without change” (Clary-Lemon
2010, p. 8). Such a model posits an identity as emerging, growing, con-
tracting, always within a context, and always in relation to the Other.
Derrida (1993) refers to this Other as the Wholly Other (le tout autre )
when he focuses on the uptake by the addressee, the perlocutionary
force, of an utterance, its effect on the one who says “yes” in response.
In protest, this give and take between the Wholly Other and the self are
at play, in the production of identity and legitimacy, as well as a mani-
festation of the Cooperative Principle. The performative is a response to
the demand made upon you or me by the Wholly Other through which
we, in turn, create ourselves, the context, and new rules. For Derrida per-
formatives are linked to his notion of time as “out of joint”, as differance,
the combination of differing and deferring that indicates an absolute
rupture between past and present, which “inaugurates a future anterior,
or an unpredictable “à-venir,’ the democracy to come” (Miller 2007,
pp. 231–232, in relation to Derrida 1993). The call and response of the
Cooperative Principle is at play in that the individual’s response to the call
is a “reciprocal performative saying ‘yes’ to a performative demand issued
initially by the wholly other” with the ‘yes’ as a performative countersign-
ing or validating of the performative demand (ibid.).
The protest rends time, cleaves it into two, with the preceding
moment when the hegemonic power appeared absolute, in opposition
to the future moment of possibility.
Thus, with this reciprocity of hailing and counter-hailing, the subject
is oddly enough interpellated as a protester before s/he actually utters a
62    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

speech act of protest. It’s in this moment of thwarting, the misfire of the
hegemonic hail, that Mautner’s critical awareness oft comes into being,
an emerging awareness that something is wrong, accompanied by a con-
scious decision to address it, and of the very real particular effect of the
division between Us and Them.

The Particular Effects of Protest

Once the protest is performed, whether through oral, written, or social

media, another hail is issued. This time by the protesters, themselves. In
this counter-hail, protesters activate what I call convocativity—a convok-
ing, a bringing into convocation, of multiple audiences. It is a moment
of scattered direct address, a vocative through which addressees inter-
pellate themselves into Us or Them. While the protest speech act rends
time, this configurative split is the essential part of the convocative
moment, the main effect of the performative act of protest language.
Based on how the hail, issued by the performative act of protest to mul-
tiple audiences (i.e., the hegemonic powers, the protesters’ supporters,
the sideline spectators) is answered, the division between Us and Them
is manifested, as those now hailed, choose camps. Unlike traditionally
inherited characteristics of identity, such as race, gender, and caste,
convocativity is an intentional alignment with a community of prac-
tice, leading to a convocative identity, in relation to the protested issue.
Pragmatic legitimacy is reinforced when the protester fulfills the felicity
conditions and the addressees convoke themselves into communities of
practice in relation to the center and the margin.
Whereas the concept of convocativity does not satisfy CDA’s desire
for a theory of discourse and/or language that accounts for power as the
condition of social life, it does reveal interpellative fault lines of access
to and activation of power within the interactive relations between coer-
cion and consent. CDA traditionally asks: “how do (more) powerful
groups control public discourse (Van Dijk 2001, p. 355)?” However,
the concern here is an understanding of when state interpellation of
subjects misfires, exposing a crack in the control of hegemonic dis-
course allowing for protest (Gramsci 1971, pp. 169–190), whether state
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
63

tolerated (i.e., in a democracy) or not (i.e., in a totalitarian regime).

Convocativity occurs when control of public discourse is compromised,
consent of the subjects to the hegemonic power is refused, and protest
is performed. It is a product of the co-optation of public discourse from
those in power.
CDA, also, traditionally asks: “how does hegemonic public discourse
control the minds and actions of (less) powerful groups, and what are
the social consequences (i.e., social inequality) of this control? (Van
Dijk 2001, p. 355).” One venue, through which more powerful groups
control the minds and actions of less powerful groups, is through the
felicitous enactment of public speech acts such as inaugurations, accu-
sations, and political promises. Convocativity occurs when a fault line
is revealed in the control over public speech acts in particular and larger
discourses in general, allowing for the activation of creative power by
the interpellated protester in the form of the protest performative.
Convocativity is then a social consequence of this opening up of dis-
course generated by the protest speech act. It is a perlocutionary effect
of this speech act that resonates with Derrida’s differance, there is a tem-
poral differing—before the dehiscence and after it—and there is a tem-
poral and spatial deferring of other social consequences generated by the
act. This spatial differing and deferring manifests when the interpellated
protesters on the social, political, and/or cultural margins stand in ten-
sion with the hegemonic center.
This moment of margin-center positioning is a multi-faceted meso-
level dynamic in which (1) individuals become members of groups
through their speech acts; (2) the speech action of protest initiates the
process of separating Us from Them, initiating the development of
identity and legitimacy within an emerging community of practice; (3)
the links between the particular contexts and the larger social structures
indexed by the issues under contention are activated; and (4) personal
and social cognition are enacted through language by interpellated pro-
testers against a form of hegemonic power. In this moment, a protest
community of practice emerges crafting an identity rooted in individ-
ual interpellated protesters, endeavoring for legitimacy, in tension with
the hegemonic power of the Wholly Other. Convocativity, then, is
64    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

the configurative perlocutionary effect of a critically aware public voc-

ative of disagreement that calls for change through the semantics of
opposition.
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (1981) is helpful here to consider the
hegemonic hail as a centripetal force and its convocative counterpart as a
centrifugal one. This effect of delineating positions triggers Austin’s (1994)
warning about the unpredictability of speech act effects. He encourages
remembrance of the distinction between intended and unintended effects,
and that the speaker’s intended effects may not occur, while unintended
effects may indeed do so (p. 106). The misfire of a hegemonic power’s
interpellation of subjects into protesters is such an effect. This observa-
tion is also particularly apropos in performative acts of protest in unpre-
dictable contexts such as that which has developed in the Ukraine since
November 2013. The Ukrainian protests originated in a desire for closer
integration with the European Union, with speech acts, such as the neol-
ogism Yevromaidan/Euromaidan17 reflecting this desire. Euromaidan was
originally coined as a hashtag on Twitter on the first day of the protests.
However, these initial pro-Europe protests spurred pro-Russian coun-
ter protests that contributed to the “annexation” by Russia (anti-Russian
term) or the “accession” into Russia (pro-Russian term) of Crimea.
Because of the unpredictability of effects and contexts, Derrida’s con-
cerns with iterability or repetition rear their heads. Conventions, theo-
retically, are by definition repeatable, socially recognizable phenomena.
However, Derrida points out that this is problematic for performatives,
even for ones as sound and grounded as daring or promising. This is
due to the always possible adaptation or transgression of the felicity
condition, or the use of an “etoliated” utterance such as a poem or a
play, or the use of a third person subject instead of a first person one
(discussed in Miller 2007, p. 231) to perform the speech act. These
boundaries of appropriate circumstances, people, words, and effects are
elastic, of multiple cultures and languages, and in the current era ban-
died about by, in, and for social media.
The dovetailing of these performative concerns with the growth of
communications media is exemplified in the episode, “Chapter 29,” of
House of Cards, an American political drama (House of Cards 2015).
In this episode, the question of etoliation in a fictional medium meets
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
65

the reality of protest. The trouble, usually, with fictional performatives

is that their non-reality undercuts the actuality of performance. The
wedding in a play, like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, is not a “real”
wedding, but a “pretend” one. However, this seemingly clear line blurs
in a discussion of protest. Are the felicity conditions met if rather than
being etoliated, the protest itself is animated and invigorated, even if
performed in a fictional production? This is the House of Cards ques-
tion. In February 2015, the actual members of the Russian band Pussy
Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, appeared on the
show in which they play themselves. The episode includes a tense scene
of protest during a White House dinner at which Viktor Petrov, a fic-
tionalized Vladimir Putin, is in attendance.
At the end of the dinner, the band members stand, offer a challeng-
ing but factual toast to the Russian leader, pour out their drinks on
the table then make a dramatic exit. In this fictional story line, only a
fictional Russian president is present and can be insulted, not the real
Vladimir Putin. However, the protest in the show is the same type of
protest for which Pussy Riot served jail time in 2012—an open criti­
cism of President Putin—although they were sentenced on the charge
of ­“hooliganism” instead of a charge of critiquing the president. With
this fictional/nonfictional protest, Bhabha’s zone of hybridity (1994) is
­animated vividly. Was the protest toast just a fictionalized ratings stunt,
as an estimated five million viewers paid for the privilege of watching the
show? Or, did the medium of the fictional television show facilitate an
actual protest, just with a lower risk quotient for the dissenters?

The Aspirations

Thoughts, Feelings, Intentions

Whereas felicity conditions one and two frame what may be presup-
posed with acts of protest language, felicity conditions three and four
frame expectations of protest performatives and their performers. These
conditions are aspirational in the sense that the only evidence of the
protester’s intentions, thoughts, feelings, and follow through is in the
66    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

actual performance of the speech act, itself, which serves as an index to

the intensity of the aspiration.
The Aspirations

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #3: The actual performance of

the protest utterance indicates the presence of appropriate thoughts,
feelings, and intentions; whereas the type, interconnectedness, num-
ber, and/or risk context of the utterance(s) serves as an index of a
level of commitment to these thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #4: The performance of the
protest utterance(s) indicates that protesters will engage in subse-
quent social actions consistent with the protest position; the likeli-
hood of the taking of consistent social action is related to the type,
interconnectedness, number, and/or risk context of the protest
utterance as an index of levels of commitment.

As Fish (1980) states, “This means that intentions are available to any-
one who invokes the proper (publicly known and agreed upon proce-
dures), and it also means that anyone who invokes those procedures
(knowing that they will be recognized as such) takes responsibility for
that intention” (pp. 203–204). This third felicity condition dealing
with intention is what Austin called the sincerity condition. There is the
expectation that the speaker is sincere. Deetz (1982) offers a related
observation when he concludes that the language of speech and writ-
ing link “each perception to a larger orientation and system of meaning”
(p. 135). Thus, the assumption is that when someone engages in a per-
formative of protest, she or he is aware of the act’s position in relation to
larger orientations and systems of meaning. This awareness is part of the
overall critical awareness engaged in producing protest language.

Risk and Commitment

The depth of a protester’s commitment can be indicated by the level of

risk that is willingly accepted. This level of commitment is indicated
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
67

by the type of protest, whether it is staring down a tank in Tiananmen

Square in 1989 or a hashtag campaign on Twitter, the interconnected-
ness of a protest with other expressions of dissent, and/or the number
of protest speech actions performed. The level of risk depends upon the
context of the protest, including the type of regime in political power
(i.e., democratic republic or a totalitarian regime), whether the protest
performative is part of an act of civil disobedience or a legal protest, as
well as other factors at play in the socio-cultural milieu. For example,
the level of commitment of a group, such as the Ukrainian protesters,
who began demonstrating 21 November 2013, confronting not only
the Ukrainian government but pro-Russia protesters as well, is obvi-
ously much higher than someone from another country liking the pro-
testers’ page on Facebook. Liking the page on Facebook supports the
protesters in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, but it does not generally contain the
same degree of physical risk as being in the square, itself. Although with
the advent of metadata mining by national governments, this may be in
the process of changing as tracking online activity becomes more feasi-
ble for more actors. The dedication of Pussy Riot to freedom of speech
in Russia is indicated not only by their physical and virtual perfor-
mances of lyrics of dissent, but also by their willingness to be repeatedly
imprisoned by Russian authorities.

Subsequent Actions

Levels of commitment and risk impact the rhetorical punch of the per-
locutionary effect of persuasion for protest speech acts. The discourse
of persuasion involves, and is a form of, word work that describes, rep-
resents, or produces a particular version of reality to appeal to various
constituencies, prompting questions such as: How might the choice of
one verb instead of another impact an appeal? How do we cast Us and
how do we cast Them? How do particular choices reveal the hegem-
onic and ideological discourse at play regarding a particular situation
(Wetherell 2001a, p. 17)? Performatives of protest succeed rhetorically,
creating change in the world by persuading those they interpellate, to
move in the desired direction through the convocativity of the logos
68    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

of its arguments, the ethos of its leaders, and the pathos of the emo-
tions pricked. Subsequent action is much more likely if the community
of practice shares a history of collective memories in which wide and
deep stores of social capital are nourished through a history of politi-
cal efficacy. These collective memories, social capital, and experiences
of political efficacy shape the identities of members of communities of
practice as well as the communities themselves. Subsequent actions are
also much more likely to occur if the involved communities of practice
accept the legitimacy of the protest, itself, as a social, cultural, and/or
political act of dissent.
Hodge and Kress (1996) encourage rhetorical attentiveness of such
acceptance by close examination of transformations at the level of the
syntagm that obscure or highlight ideological leanings. Their work has
generally focused on how linguistic transformations operate in hegem-
onic discourse. However, this level of attentiveness needs to be main-
tained for an analysis of protest language beyond the syntagm as well.
Being acts of counter-power does not somehow ‘purify’ the language use
of the protester into a transparent medium of communication. On the
contrary, the complexities and positionings of language use are at work
and play in the fields of the protester and in those representative of
hegemonic power. However, protesters tend not to be as invested in the
maintenance of the status quo as the powers that be, and so their lan-
guage use is generally not as motivated to engage in the same types of
protective work of ideological obfuscation. This includes honing a par-
ticular awareness for the spokespersons for protest events or movements.
While Saussure and Foucault are rarely if ever in agreement on
linguistic questions, their otherwise opposing approaches dovetail
in regard to the power or influence of the individual speaker on dis-
course. Both assume that the individual speaker can have little control
or impact on ‘big discourse’ (e.g., the French language or the discourse
of democratic capitalism) (Wetherell 2001b, pp. 12–13). Whereas gen-
erally this assumption holds, the ethos of individual speakers of protest
performatives can have, at times, a dramatic impact on a particular issue
as well as the discourse surrounding that issue. Martin Luther King’s
repetition of the phrase “I have a dream” in one speech has permeated
American political discourse, and beyond, over the past fifty years.
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
69

Periodically, the persuasiveness of the right speaker at the right moment

can, indeed, impact big discourse.
This impact is richer and longer lasting if the speaker fulfills reno-
vated felicity condition number four, by following through with actions
consistent with the protest position, even in the face of personal risk,
demonstrating political efficacy and a strength of commitment to the
cause. Such actions reinforce the honoring of Austin’s sincerity condi-
tion that the speaker have the appropriate thoughts, feelings, and inten-
tions as posited in felicity condition number three. Such a fulfillment
of the aspirational conditions prompts consideration of the protest per-
formative speech act as a promissory speech act (Felman 1983). Not in
the explicit performative of “I promise you” but in the transformed and
extended performative of the hope of the imagined change.
These renovations of the aspirational conditions, along with their
presuppositional counterparts, serve as a proscenium arch under which
protest performatives are analyzed in the following four chapters. In
these chapters, the protest performatives, themselves, are contextual-
ized prior to the presentation of the analyses of the ways in which these
performatives fulfill the renovated felicity conditions. In these analyses,
various linguistic features, such as irony, hybrid coinages, metaphor,
or point of view, are examined to understand how they function to
promote change, to challenge authority, and/or to perform the act of
protest within their respective contexts. Austin’s felicity conditions are
renovated to infuse them with the power concerns of CDA, to open a
space for discourse analysts to explore how words work through vari-
ous genres to attain the pragmatic legitimacy of Butler’s insurection-
ary speech, and for activists to consider how protest language connects
with and builds communities of practice to produce change. They are
renovated in the hope that by comparing the deep structures of these
surface forms, the understanding of how identity, in moments of con-
vocativity and legitimacy functioning discursively, increases. They are
renovated in the hope that by learning more about how the language
of protest creates, perpetuates, and counters prevailing ideologies, we
can contribute to peace-building in our communities, because as Farley
(2005) suggests, we do exist and flourish in utter interdependence, one
with the other. Beginning in the next chapter, these hopes underpin
70    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

the analyses of two protest chants, “Everyday I’m çapulling” and “Sí se
puede” from the communities of practice of the Turkish protests of 2013
and the American United Farm Workers protests of the 1960s–1970s,
respectively.

Notes
1. Notice however, that there is a formality or register associated with
“hereby”. It works well in formal registers, but seems inappropriate,
almost “indirect” in the sense of forcing a nonliteral interpretation,
when moved down the formality ladder. Compare “I, hereby, apolo-
gize” with “I, hereby, sentence you…” It’s always surprising that people
who have not likely had the opportunity to appropriately use the more
formal phrases or registers do, in fact, seem to have accurate accepta-
bility judgments of the sentences with “hereby”, cf. “I, hereby, admit
that I ate all the chips” vs. “I admit I ate all the chips” and “I ate all the
chips.”
2. For Hodge and Kress, languages not only produce social reality but “are
systems of categories and rules based on fundamental principles and
assumptions about the world. These … are not related to or determined
by thought: they are thought” (5).
3. For a friendly overview of a wide range of theorists related to perfor-
mance studies, please see Philip Auslander’s Theory for Performance
Studies: A Student’s Guide. London: Routledge, 2008.
4. For a concise and reader-friendly overview of Austin’s speech act,
Speech Act Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and other approaches
to discourse, see S. Strauss and P. Feiz’s Discourse Analysis: Putting Our
Worlds into Words. London: Routledge, 2014.
5. John Searle reclassifies speech acts into five main categories—repre-
sentatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations—in
his seminal article “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts” in Language
in Society, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 10–23. Instances of protest language may
potentially be found in each of these categories. For example, while
“Stop the War!” is a directive and “I am the 99%” is a representative,
both still function as protest.
6. Strauss and Feiz’s definition of genre as culturally familiar discursive
patterns, like a memo, short story, or haiku, that convey propositional
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
71

content, in a particular context, to communicate with an audience, is

employed for these analyses. See their text, Discourse Analysis: Putting
Our Worlds into Words. London: Routledge, 2014.
7. As foundational to his dramaturgical sociology, Goffman devel-
ops his seven elements of performance—Belief, The Mask, Dramatic
Realization, Idealization, Maintenance, Misrepresentation, Deception—
in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Anchor Books, 1959. In doing so, he draws from Kenneth Burke’s
Dramatism, which may be explored in many of his writings, includ-
ing Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966, and Dramatism and
Development. Barre, MA: Clark University Press, 1972. Burke was
inspired by Shakespeare’s image from As You Like It: “All the world’s a
stage, And all the men and women merely players” (II, vii, 1037–1038).
8. Goffman states, “[A] certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected
so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous perfor-
mance at every appointed time” (1959, p. 56). For Goffman the “truth”
or “falsity” of a performance is rooted in whether or not the performer
is authorized to give the performance more so than in the actual per-
formance, itself. Successful performance for Goffman then is intri-
cately related to the legitimacy of the performer. For more information
on this, see A. Branaman’s “Goffman’s Social Theory” in The Goffman
Reader, edited by C. Lemert and A. Branaman. Oxford: Blackwell,
1997, pp. xiv–xxxii.
9. According to Hodge and Kress, “transformations are a set of oper-
ations on basic forms, deleting, substituting, combining, or re-order-
ing a syntagm or its elements. So The car was wrecked is transformed
from (someone or something) wrecked the car, with the actor (someone
or something) deleted and the elements of the syntagm reordered in
the passive. In transformational theory, it is assumed that transforma-
tions are always innocent (that is, they do not alter the meaning of the
basic form) and can always be reversed. In actual discourse this is, sadly,
not the case” (10). Hodge and Kress are concerned with E-language or
external language as opposed to I-language or internal language that
is the focus of Transformational Grammar and Minimalist Theory. In
modern Minimalist Theory, passives are base generated because there
is a demonstrable change in meaning from the shift in word order and
suppression of the agent. This is why there are only now two ‘phrase
structure rules’ and one transformation called move alpha or Move.
72    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

10. This critical response occurred across a wide variety of disciplines

as shown in: N. Birnbaum’s Toward a Critical Sociology. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971; C. Calhoun’s Critical Social Theory.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; B. Fay’s Critical Social Science. Cambridge:
Polity, 1987; and Fox, D. R. and I. Prilleltensky’s Critical Psychology: An
Introduction. London: Sage, 1997.
11. For an overview of the development of Critical Discourse Analysis,
see Teun Van Dijk’s entry, “Critical Discourse Analysis” in the
Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by D. Tannen, D. Schiffrin, and
H. Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 352–371. For an over-
view of the development of the study of language and politics, see
R. Wodak and R. de Cillia’s entry, “Politics and Language: An
Overview”, in K. Brown (editor-in-chief ), Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics. Second edition, vol. IX. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006,
pp. 707–719.
12. This is not to be confused with American sociologist Mark
C. Suchman’s concept of institutional pragmatic legitimacy as articulated
in “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches” in
The Academy of Management Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 1995, pp. 571–610.
13. For a discussion of uptake and illocution, see Maria Sbisá’s “Uptake and
Conventionality in Illocution” in Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, vol. 5.1/
Special Issue on Speech Actions, 2009, pp. 33–52.
14. For a grounding in these debates, please see the summaries of the
work of David Lewis, Stephen Schiffer, Robert Brandon, or Donald
Davidson among many others at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
convention/.
15. The poem begins, “Cement-grey floors and walls/cement-grey days/
cement-grey time/and a grey susurration/as of seas breaking/winds
blowing/and rains drizzling.”
16. For one of the most interesting and complex examples of this cultural
practice, see “The Bishop with 150 Wives” in the Canon Law Society
of Great Britain and Ireland Newsletter. No. 170, June 2012, p. 2. The
article explores the practice of not only naming women prior to birth,
but betrothing them as well, in the aboriginal community of Mission
Station, Bathurst Island, Northern Territory Australia.
17. This is a portmanteau of Euro for Europe plus the Ukrainian maidan or
square referring to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the main site of the protests
in Kiev.
 2  Mapping Theory and Method in the Neighborhood of Protest    
73

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 3
Exploring the Protest Language of Chants
“Everyday I’m çapulling” and “Sí se
puede”

Taksim Solidarity and “Everyday I’m çapulling!”

The protest chant “Everyday I’m çapulling!” was generated as an ironic
bit of fun during the 2013 demonstrations in and about Istanbul’s Gezi
Park1. To coin this speech act of dissent, a protest community of prac-
tice who described themselves as “a civil resistance,” co-opted an insult
directed at them by then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the
outbreak of the demonstrations, led initially by architects and environ-
mentalists concerned about construction in Gezi Park, Erdogan had
dismissed the protesters as çapulcu, a Turkish noun meaning “riffraff,”
“marauders,” or “looters.”
The origins of this satiric cooptation of Erdogan’s insult can be found
in the late evening of May 27, 2013. At 23:30, bulldozers rolled into
Gezi Park, Taksim Square, to prep the site for construction of a new
shopping mall in one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul.
Seventeen minutes later, a tweet for action was issued with twenty
architects and environmentalists responding, arriving in time to inter-
rupt the work. The group, whose numbers doubled by the next morn-
ing, instigated a peaceful sit-in against the proposed construction, of a
commercial replica of an Ottoman military barracks, to contain stores
© The Author(s) 2018 79
M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_3
80    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

and luxury flats. Attempting to clear the park, police exercised excessive
force, deploying tear gas, and pepper spray. “The image of a woman in
a red dress being showered with tear gas during this attempted dispersal
was shared across social media, galvanizing the protests as more people
came to the park the following day in defiance of the police’s heavy-
handed tactics” (Yaman 2014, p. 3).2 The Çapuller was born.
Variations of form and spelling of this noun-verb neologism
(chapuller, chapulling, çapuling, etc.) became synonymous with the
protests, morphing from a meaning of “bumming around” to that of
“fighting for one’s rights in a peaceful and humorous way” (Marasligil
2013). This humorous cooptation recycled the insult into a positive
symbol of civic action, while drawing on the American hip-hop smash
hit “Everyday I’m Hustlin” by Rick Ross (Sheets 2013). As Sheets
noted, a viral Youtube video of this mashup disarmed “the word (çapul)
by showing protesters engaged in non-looting activities” such as danc-
ing, marching, and chanting, “that aim to counter [Erdogan’s] use of
the word.” As fine artist Polen Budak, who created the Çapul Peace
Tree from bulldozed tree stumps, asserted, “It’s very degrading to call us
looters. In fact, it was Erdogan and his supporters who looted the city’s
green spaces and took them from us. People fought back with great
humor. They took the insult and they owned it” (Harding 2013).
The neologism took off, spawning an eclectic variety of material:
Çapulistan, a student campsite in Gezi Park; the Çapul Peace Tree from
which individuals hung messages and hopes; çapul art galleries in the
park and in Taksim Square; a çapulcu Twitter prefix; t-shirts, posters,
Wikipedia, and Urban Dictionary definitions; and another video on
Youtube explaining how to use the word (Sabral). This video, featuring
a young male protester in surgical facemask and goggles (a basic “gas
mask” for tear gas protection), reviewed how the Turkish stem of çapul
had been implanted within various English morphemes to create hybrid
nouns as well as a verb conjugation:

Chappuller (noun)
Chappullation (noun)
To chappull (verb)
I chappull everyday
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
81

I’m chappulling now

I chappulled yesterday
I will chappull soon
I was chappulling when the police attacked us
I’ve been chappulling for 6 days (shadowlaneify 2013).

Çapulling slogans and Twitter hashtags included the following:

Everyday I’m Çapuling; Stop Istanbullying; Resistanbul; Gas me baby
one more time; In Gezi We Trust; I know the rules but the rules don’t
know me; Have you ever çapuled so much, you thought you would
faint? The Incredible Halk (halk is Turkish for people); #OccupyGezi;
#direngezi (diren is Turkish for resist); #direngeziparki; #direnankara
(resist Ankara); Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Chapulité #Occupygezi.
Thus, for the performance of this speech act of protest, the surface
structure is a satiric assertion that “bumming around” everyday is
really a way to provoke change in Turkish social-political life. Its deep
structure, although initially “We, the architects and environmentalists
protecting Gezi Park, protest the construction in and demolition of
the park” expanded to “We, the people of Turkey, who value the envi-
ronment and secular democratic political culture, protest the growing
authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and
Development Party (AKP).”

The Deep Story of “Everyday I’m Çapulling!”

The excessive show of force by the police sparked outrage within 80 of

the 81 provinces of the country, leading to approximately 5000 total
protests through the summer, involving over 3.5 million Turks from a
wide variety of groups (De Bellaigue 2013; Yaman 2014, p. 2). As the
protests gained in momentum, the police deployed 87% of their annual
allotment of tear gas, along with pepper spray and water cannons, in
just 10 days. Ultimately Gezi Park was forcibly cleared by mid-June but
the police’s disproportionate response, to what had been overwhelm-
ingly peaceful demonstrations, generated global condemnation (Yaman,
p. 3; BBC News 2013).
82    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Erdogan and his supporters were quick to point out that the protests
did not constitute a “Turkish Spring,” referencing the 2011 Arab Spring
of democratic protests leading to the overthrow of several authoritarian
regimes, including Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak
in Egypt, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (BBC News 2013; Achilov
2013). Unlike these former Arab leaders, Erdogan was freely and fairly
elected according to international monitoring. By acting within the lim-
its of the law, he retained the support of the majority of Turks to win
his next election. The problem was that he had won by only a 2% mar-
gin. Not surprisingly, then, many Turks eagerly countered his casting of
them as “looters.”
Although triggered by the extra linguistic variable of the battle over
public space in Gezi Park, the intensity of discontent stemmed from
what many Turks viewed as the increasing Islamist-leaning authoritar-
ianism of Erdogan and his government, including policies, statements,
and actions that have undermined Turkey’s secular political culture.
Inter-discursively, off shoots from this have encompassed education
reforms to nurture a “pious generation” (Ozerkan 2013), laws restrict-
ing the advertising, purchasing, and consumption of alcohol (Hacaoglu
2013), attempts to limit abortion (Tremblay 2014), restrictions against
public displays of affection (Subramanian 2013), arrests, and prose-
cutions for blasphemy, including the pianist Fazil Say and Armenian-
Turkish writer Sevan Nisanyan (Letsch 2013; Watson 2013), and other
environmental concerns due to mega-construction projects such as
dams, bridges, and nuclear power plants (EJOLT 2013). An interdis-
cursive clash between the discourse and practices of Turkey’s progressive
secular culture clashed with Erdogan’s more conservative and traditional
religio-political discourses and practices.
As protester Gokhan Aya, a musician from Istanbul, stated in a BBC
interview, “Every day we are getting further away from democracy and
closer to autocracy with a prime minister who acts like a sultan. We are
absolutely tired of shopping malls and the turning of our green areas
and historic monuments into temples of commercialism” (Twigg 2013).
The Economist of June 8, 2013 parodied these sultan-like tendencies
with a cover displaying Erdogan as a sultan, with prayer beads and gas
mask, headlined “Democrat or Sultan?” These tendencies have provoked
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
83

apprehension within the European Union regarding Turkey’s applica-

tion for accession into the organization.
One of the chief concerns for the EU, as well as the Turkish pro-
testers, has been the restrictions of particular human rights that have
increased since Erdogan was initially elected in 2002 (The Guardian
2013b). In a democratic republic, there are interdiscursive expectations
and institutional requirements of freedom of assembly and freedom of
expression. Throughout this season of demonstrations, however, police
repeatedly violated these fundamental rights by engaging in brutal
responses with governmental approval. They did so, despite Turkey’s
national and international obligations not to do so, as outlined in the
Turkish Constitution, and through its participation in several interna-
tional treaties (Yaman 2014).3
The most basic tenet of the Social Contract, the state’s obligation to
protect its citizens—even when engaged in peaceful dissent—was vio-
lated when the police exercised indiscriminate and excessive measures to
disperse the peaceful demonstrations, resulting in eight thousand inju-
ries with at least eight deaths, four believed to be a direct result of police
action (Yaman 2014, p. 8; Letsch 2014). They also arbitrarily arrested
and detained over 5000 individuals, with at least 90 of these being
arrested for their use of Twitter. Artists, lawyers, writers, and actors were
arrested, detained, and/or indicted in relation to their participation in
the demonstrations. This included the arrest of 16 individuals who had
joined choreographer Erdem Gunduz in his “standing man” protest, in
which solitary individuals stood silently to bear witness (ibid., p. 8).4
Municipal authorities burned protesters’ tents (Today’s Zaman 2013a) as
well as tear-gassed a hotel that had been serving as a sick bay (Yaman
2014, p. 19).
In conjunction with these anti-assembly measures, the police took
39 journalists into custody, physically attacked at least 153 of them,
destroyed their equipment, such as camera lenses, and forced the dele-
tion of photographs (Yaman 2014, pp. 7, 12). These were just a few
of the many actions suppressing the freedom of expression that have
become more typical in Turkey. Reporters Without Borders has termed
Turkey the “world’s biggest prison for journalists” (Rollman 2013),
incarcerating one of the highest numbers of journalists in the world
84    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

(Sabral 2013). Amnesty International (2013) has also cited the incarcer-

ation, intimidation, and harassment of journalists as a cause for serious
concern, particularly in its relation to potential accession into the EU.
Gökhan Biçici, IMC TV field reporter, and editor, was forced to
delete photographs before being beaten and arrested by the police. After
they had begun to hit him, he shouted loudly that he was a journalist.
This seemed to incense the police, who Biçici recalled, “became really
violent … and started to beat me from all sides … All along that street,
the people looking from the windows were giving voice to an incred-
ible reaction” (Yaman 2014, p. 14). The police’s beating and dragging
of Biçici, captured on amateur video and posted on Youtube, became
iconic of the police’s overreaction to the protesters in general and jour-
nalists in particular (Dost 2013).
Not only were journalists targets but others, who had documented
the events in other ways, were also. Prime Minister Erdogan has
brought defamation suits against a number of his high-profile crit-
ics, e.g., writer, theologian, and publisher Ihsan Eliaçik, opposition
party MP Hüseyin Aygün, and caricature artist Mehmet Gölebatmaz.
Gölebmatz was even eventually charged with criminal defamation
(Yaman 2014, pp. 9–10), while at least 60 journalists had been fired for
their coverage of Gezi Park by August 2013 (Vela 2013; Cook 2013).
Collaborating with the government to manufacture consent by cre-
ating this chilling environment were the 70% of traditional Turkish
media outlets who are owned by corporations who conduct busi-
ness with the state (Today’s Zaman 2013b). This has resulted in a
Foucauldian discipline of self-censorship, curtailing criticism of the
government, particularly through the Gezi demonstrations. Not sur-
prisingly then, Turkish media chose initially not to cover the protests
exploding across the country, despite actual demonstrations occur-
ring right outside of various media headquarters. CNN Türk, at one
point, broadcast a special on penguins instead of the active dissent in
Gezi Park, resulting in the penguin becoming one of the main sym-
bols of the media’s self-imposed blackout (The Guardian 2013a). This
lack of coverage was why at the close of the Youtube video instructing
one in the use of the word çapul, the protester asserted that, “If you
don’t want to watch a documentary on penguins and [instead] know
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
85

what’s happening in Taksim, you should learn English” (Sabral 2013),

as English-speaking media, like the BBC, were covering the protests.
The European Commissioner Stefan Füle called the refusal to cover the
demonstrations a “deafening silence of the media in Turkey” (Today’s
Zaman 2013b).
Social media filled this vacuum with images and reports proliferating
on Facebook and Twitter. “Information started appearing on Facebook
and Twitter with eyewitness accounts describing brutal police action
against peaceful protesters,” said Elif Erim Koc, a student from Istanbul
(Twigg 2013). The sweeping social media coverage forced traditional
media sources to begin covering the protests. However, once doing so,
the pro-government media outlets attempted to delegitimize the pro-
testers and in turn justify the use of force against them through their
coverage of the demonstrations and clashes (Yaman 2014, p. 5). These
outlets branded the activists as vandals, looters, and terrorists, while
simply not covering the vast majority of peaceful protests. Ironically, the
use of excessive force backfired, for these media outlets and the govern-
ment, as it was so disproportionate to the actions of the demonstrators
that the protesters actually gained in legitimacy, globally, while the gov-
ernment lost it. Not surprisingly, the EU passed a resolution condemn-
ing the actions of Turkish police as well as the suppression of opposition
voices (Martinez 2013).
Subsequently, the Turkish government amended their Internet law
(Yaman 2014, p. 21) to require all Turkish internet service providers
(ISPs) to join an Ankara-based “association of ISPs” that can restrict
access to certain URLs, including individual Facebook, Twitter or
Youtube posts/pages. This law “has been widely criticized as ushering in
a regime of online censorship and surveillance with inadequate judicial
oversight” (ibid., Bilefsky 2012). Such coercive measures, which have
included the censorship of television content (Bila 2013), have been
taken to insure a continuous manufacturing of consent.
Within this oppressive context, the imagination of the Turkish dis-
senter blossomed, exploiting the Turkish communicative competence
for satire and humor, from the adoption of the penguin as symbol for
media self-censorship and greed, to the coining of “Everyday I’m çapull-
ing!” being chanted, printed on t-shirts, and painted on handmade
86    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

posters across the country. “Istanbul’s anti-government protesters have

inhaled tear gas and faced water cannon, but they are still laughing all
the way to Gezi Park,” declared one BBC report on the demonstra-
tions, which had the “air of a street festival by day” (Sabral 2013). These
street festival-like protests were characterized by ongoing jokes about
the prime minister’s failure to understand the youth of his nation, as
they carried signs demanding the government to “Stop Istanbullying!”
(Realsabry 2013).
Capitalizing on creative word and image play, the technologically
savvy dissenters via Tayyibinden, a portmanteau spoof on Sahibinden,
(the Turkish version of E-bay plus Erdogan’s name of Tayyip), offered
Gezi Park for sale: “A place far from the hustle and bustle of the city,
but in the heart of downtown. It’s an ideal space for the family. You can
use it comfortably. With planning permission for shopping mall. Ten
steps from Taksim Square with road access. Special subway entrance.
I’m selling it because I’m no longer interested in it. Sun from four sides.
Includes activities” (Sabral 2013). Other ads included one for an appro-
priated water cannon, and one for a smoke machine being sold because
of the need for an upgrade. Pictures posted on Facebook of Erdogan’s
supporters were modified to portray them as sheep with eyes glazed over
by headlights on a barricade. A protester named Faith who had clashed
with police told a BBC reporter that, “we may actually lose this revolu-
tion because of laughter” (ibid.).

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions of “Everyday I’m

Chapulling!”

Within this context, “Everyday I’m çapulling!” is situated under the

proscenium arch of the renovated felicity conditions for analysis (see
Appendix A). For felicity condition number one, the conventional,
circumstantial, semantic, and personnel dimensions of the chant are
examined. Then the effectual dimension of convocativity, relating the
first felicity condition to the second, is explored with regard to the posi-
tioning of protesters and power brokers on the margins and the center,
respectively.
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
87

Convention: Civic, Vocative, Oriented to Change

“Everyday I’m çapulling!” is a response to the call from the hegemonic

power inherent not only in the office of the prime minister, but in the
person of Erdogan himself, who has enjoyed tremendous popularity in
Turkish politics. The call issued as a dismissal satirizes the Cooperative
Principle; not surprisingly, in the uptake of this dismissal, the protest-
ers responded in kind. In doing so, they activated the presuppositional
felicity conditions for the performance of a speech act of protest. In
their antiphrastic co-opting of the word, the protesters initiate a seman-
tic shift of çapul from that associated with looting or riff-raff, anti-civic
actions, to that associated with active social and political engagement,
pro-civic actions. This satiric vocative humorously builds solidarity with
fellow protesters and potential supporters, inviting and encouraging
those bearing witness in Turkey and abroad, to form a community of
practice to join in the agitation for change. In doing so, it creates social
distance between the Prime Minister and this emerging community of
protesters.

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

The microlevel co-opting of the term indexes the varied sources of mac-
rolevel disagreement percolating throughout the protests, ranging from
the initial one over the use of public space in Gezi Park to the more
generalized dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP’s
undermining of secular culture. The immediate decisive actions of the
architects and environmentalists to confront the bulldozers and initiate
a sit-in indicate a working level of critical awareness. The demonstra-
tors who formed Taksim Solidarity, the core of the community of prac-
tice tasked with meeting government representatives, as well as by those
young Turks who produced the çapulling videos, also indicates this
awareness. Such awareness may have been at play for those unidentified
individuals who printed the t-shirts or painted the posters, along with
the entrepreneurial awareness that often accompanies creative protest
actions.
88    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Ironically, it appears that the media blackout of major Turkish tele-

vision and print outlets increased, rather than decreased, critical aware-
ness of events. Its “present absence” incensed Turks who would çapul for
hours at a time only to find CNN Türk airing cooking shows instead of
the unfolding events (Letsch 2014). With social media users providing
continuous live coverage, this apparently government-sanctioned pres-
ent absence backfired, interpellating many more citizens as protesters,
instead of denying or delegitimizing the existence of a small band of
“looters.”

Words: A Semantics of Opposition

In light of the increasing restrictions within Turkish society, particu-

larly those on freedom of speech, it has been “[n]o surprise that once
the liberals broke their silence over how they felt about Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative views and policies, an explosion
of expression followed in the form of satire, irony and outright mock-
ery of the popular leader on Istanbul’s streets and social media” (Sabral
2013). This is encapsulated in “Everyday I’m çapulling!” In this hybrid
coinage, the semantics of opposition are distinctly contextualized in that
to grasp the intent (a focus of the third felicity condition) of the utter-
ance, one must be “in the know” about the Prime Minister’s insult, as
well as the protests that generated this insult. This is unlike slogans such
as “No Nukes” which require little to no particularized background
information.
The initial prefixing of the Turkish stem into a lingua franca mor-
phology has served as an intentional grammaticalization of outreach to
the global community, an invitation that humorously piqued curiosity
by the linguistic juxtaposition of Turkish and English elements. This
juxtaposition encouraged cross-cultural and crosslinguistic understand-
ing and usage outside of Turkey, realizing the protesters’ desire to grow
the opposition by increasing awareness of the situation in Turkey:

Turkish çapul
English çapulling/chapulling
French capuller
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
89

Spanish capullar
German chapullieren
Greek chapuliki
Russian chapuliski
Italian chapullare.

This pragmatic morphological structuring, which is an externally-

oriented cross-community vocative, contrasts with chants or slogans
that are internally-oriented vocatives, such as “Careful Now” from the
fictional protest in Fr. Ted (1995) used in actual protests, as mentioned
in Chapter 2.
In the instances of the use of çapul with the modifier “everyday,” the
encouragement is not just to challenge and be civically engaged once,
but all the time, each day. Its renovated meaning activates the collective
memory of the responsibilities of a democratic citizenry to participate
in the civic life of one’s nation. As Kiraz Deniz Gurel, a musicologist,
offered

Erdogan called us çapulcu. It’s an insult. It means you’re a useless person,

without a job, nobody. But we’re not losers. We really have good, good
reasons for being here. We are young people and old people … Turkish
people are very humorous. They love making jokes. It was John Lennon
who said: ‘When you give violence, you get back violence.’ It’s easy to
respond with violence but humour is the better way. It means we are still
alive, we are still human. (Harding 2013)

Gural’s reflections indicate that although the community of practice

engaged in the semantics of opposition, they had not lost their sense
of humor, which was providing a venue through which they could con-
tinue to meet coercive violence with peaceful nonviolence.

Persons: The Interpellation of the Turkish Protesters

Erdogan’s labeling of the protesters as çapulcu misfires, “inaugurating a

subject in speech who comes to use language to counter [the] offensive
call” (Butler 1997, p. 2). Drawing on Althusser’s assertion (2001) that the
90    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

state interpellates its citizen-subjects to stay in their appropriate places,

two high-profile çapullers serve as representative participants: Mücella
Yapıcı, Secretary and spokesperson of Taksim Solidarity5 as well as
General Secretary of Chamber of Architects, Istanbul Branch (Translate
for Justice 2013) and Ihsan Eliaçik, writer, theologian, and publisher,
against whom Prime Minister Erdogan has won a defamation suit for
tweets the writer posted during the protests.
Initially, those on whom the government’s hail misfired consisted
only of a group of architects and environmentalists attempting to pro-
tect Gezi Park. According to Yapıcı, she and other architects were noti-
fied that bulldozers were uprooting trees in the park late in the evening
on May 27, 2013. When they arrived at the park, they immediately
asked if the project had been approved, if it had a license, and if they
could see the site manager. No one was available. They returned the
next morning, again asking these questions, including if there was a
license for a late night operation, but again no site manager was availa-
ble. As one of these first protesters reflected:

At 11:00 a.m., twenty or so plain-clothes men arrived. Then the riot

police came … they told us to back off and tear sprayed us. The woman
in the red dress and all of us suffered from gas. The state’s police was
spraying gas on us … while the bulldozers were entering the site. We
called the MPs. Sirri Süreyya Önder (MP from the Peace and Democracy
Party or BDP) jumped in front of the excavator. He talked to them and
they stopped. But people heard the news. Everyone arrived. This time
we said we will stay and guard the park. We brought tents. Then next
morning they tear gassed people sleeping in those tents. When we said we
would leave, they fired water cannon on all of us … But this is the prin-
ciple of Taksim Solidarity. For us, all political parties and movements are
our components … Now everywhere is Taksim, everywhere is resistance,
everywhere is Taksim Solidarity. (Translate for Justice 2013)

As a state actor, the police’s interpellation of this small group through a

hail of tear gas and pepper spray misfires dramatically, ultimately inter-
pellating millions of Turks, many of whom had never before publicly
voiced opposition to the government, to expand their identities to that
of protester (Peker 2013). The harshness of the government actions, in
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
91

combination with the diversity of individuals interpellated as protesters,

increased the community of practice’s social, political, and cultural legit-
imacy on the world stage. The community of practice for “Everyday I’m
çapulling” was astonishingly extensive drawing from nearly all ranks of
Turkish society, creating the “Gezi spirit” of Taksim Solidarity. As Cagri
Tosun, a technical director in Ankara, reflected, “This is a movement
without a head, without a leader. The bond between the people is what
gives the movement its momentum. This is resistance without guns and
leaders but with intellect, education, humour and a big heart at the cen-
tre of it” (Twigg 2013).
Ihsan Eliaçik, one such Turk of intellect, education, humor, and
heart, described this Gezi spirit as individuals

coming together in a broader alliance. For example, there [were] also

Kurds, Alevis, the religious poor, anti-capitalist Islamists, young revolu-
tionary Islamists, feminists, football fans and environmental campaigners.
People from all sections of the population were there. It is totally wrong
to view Gezi as a Kemalist uprising … The government said that we
were coup plotters, enemies of the state, and the agents of foreign pow-
ers. These are lies. In Gezi, atheists could discuss religion with believers
in prayer halls; during Friday prayers, the socialist youth would gather in
the square and protect those worshipping. We had nationalists waving
Turkish flags and pictures of Atatürk near Kurds celebrating [imprisoned
PKK leader] Abdullah Öcalan and dancing to their traditional music.
(Yaman 2014, p. 26)

In other words, those, who in the collective memory of the partic-

ipants had been interpellated as the Wholly Other previously in their
lives (e.g., nationalists versus Kurds), were suddenly and powerfully
interpellated into a united çapulling community of political efficacy,
acknowledging their differences while generating and investing in
cross-community social capital, in opposition to the sitting govern-
ment. The identity of Us is born and is strengthened. The legitimacy
of Our cause is supported by actions appreciative of the diversity
within Turkish society and through the performance of “Everyday I’m
çapulling!”
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Effect: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

With the hearer’s response to the performance of the vocative call

“Everyday I’m çapulling!” the particular effect of convocativity is acti-
vated, generating a division between those laughing with it and those
insulted by it. On the one hand, for those laughing with it, the humor
in the recycling of çapul into something positive dampens the fear of
challenging the government. On the other hand, though, this very
humor insults Erdogan and his followers because it not only mocks the
prime minister, but also encourages civic activity to challenge him, and
by default, the AKP. The performance of this chant as a protest speech
act convokes those who identify with the protests into a community of
practice of Us while simultaneously convoking those whom it insults
into Them.
However, this split is not necessarily clear-cut for some concerned
individuals. An Ankara academic, Zeynep Goktas reflects on the use of
vandalism by some protesters as to why he could not accept the legiti-
macy of the demonstrations. He stated, “I am a member of Greenpeace
and would have supported a protest that was about protecting trees—
but this has become something else. On what planet is destroying
cities and attacking innocent human beings the decent reaction to
anything?” (Williams et al. 2013). Nevertheless, Erdogan intensifies
the convocative split by attempting to redefine Us/Them by triggering
fears associated with internal Others, like Goktas does in his citation
of the few instances of violence, as well as external Others, citing affil-
iations between extremist Turkish citizens and forces abroad (Letsch
2014). Erdogan also accused the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP or The
Republican People’s Party), the main opposition party, of having “pro-
voked my innocent citizens” (BBC News 2013). His use of the posses-
sive “my” supported the protesters’ claims of a growing authoritarian
style, while that of the descriptor of “innocent” and the verb “provoked”
implied a guilt for wrong-doing within those who had simply chal-
lenged him.
The charge against the CHP is ironic in that as one of Mr. Erdogan’s
supporters pointed out, “the lack of a strong opposition leader lies
behind the protesters’ anger—even if they say it’s about Erdogan’s
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
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authoritarianism. The protesters have no one to represent them in

parliament. The two main opposition groups are nationalist rather
than leftist” (Williams et al. 2013). However, one year after the protests,
anthropologist and journalist Ayse Çavdar has contended that the pro-
tests have led to an increase in political efficacy in the country. “Gezi
fundamentally changed the foundations and the language of politics.
This is new because Gezi doesn’t suggest any power practices. Quite the
contrary—Gezi is a certain outlook on life, it’s the practice of judging
power. It suggests ethical guidelines for all of us” (Letsch 2014). It has
become part of the Lebenswelt and habitus of the protesters.
The practice of judging power could be seen in the convocative split
between protesters and the coercive hegemonic power of the govern-
ment, which increased dramatically through the protesters’ speech and
physical acts and the government’s counter to them. These responses
entrenched the government in the center as Erdogan mustered various
state powers to solidify his position, while pushing the protesters fur-
ther and further toward the margin, through practices ranging from
symbolic intimidation to physical harm. As one protester reflected,
“It started peacefully and people were having lots of fun. We chatted
to some of the police and I even took a photo with a policeman, who
no doubt fired teargas the previous day. They were telling us that they
are very reluctant to do what they are doing, and that they are simply
following orders. At one point we heard an announce[ment] that we
should disperse. We didn’t. Then they attacked with teargas bombs”
(Twigg 2013).
Throughout this improvisational dance between the prime minister
and the protesters, the Turkish President, Abdullah Gul, attempted to
bridge the gap between state power and grassroots power, by urging
calm and defending the right to hold peaceful demonstrations. “‘If there
are different opinions, different situations, different points of view and
dissent, there is nothing more natural than being able to voice those
differences …‘The messages delivered with good intentions have been
received’” (BBC News 2013). Gul casts the protesters’ intentions in a
positive light in an attempt to reenergize a non-ironic Cooperative
Principle and restore calm across the country. The protesters intentions,
feeling, and thoughts, the touchstones for renovated felicity condition
94    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

number three, are animated in their uptake and repeated use of their
freshly minted chant, “Everyday I’m çapulling!” Their community of
practice’s commitment to and performance of this protest speech act,
despite great risk, revealed evidence of appropriate subsequent actions,
fulfilling renovated felicity condition number four as well.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of Protest

Thoughts, Intentions, Risk

“Everyday I’m çapulling!” serves as a synecdoche of all of the satiric per-

formance of protest throughout the Turkish uprisings. The explosion
of its usage within a highly volatile domestic context stands as a strong
indicator of the presence of appropriate thoughts, feelings, and inten-
tions within the dissenters. Its very coinage reinforces the presence of
these factors. As the exact number of participants overall is unknown, as
well as the exact number of repeat participants, it is obviously not pos-
sible to definitively state that this claim holds for all of them. However,
the numbers, despite the high level of risk involved, indicate not only
this presence but also a strong degree of commitment. An interview
with several participants by the BBC’s Krassimira Twigg (2013) offers
reflections upon the intertwining of risk and commitment, resulting
from their convocative identity choice, within the Gezi spirit:

Elif Irem Koc, student in Istanbul: “police used water cannon, gas bombs,
trying to push people back. People would go closer to the firing line for
as long as they could before starting to choke and throw up. Then they’d
pull out to breathe, while others would move closer to police.”

Gokhan Aya, musician in Istanbul: “Everyone got enraged because the

protesters were peaceful, they did absolutely nothing. They were attacked
as if they were an enemy army. They thought they’d scare them away …
Not only did they not scare the protesters, but things escalated … Now
many people are taking leave, or quitting their jobs, in order to make it
out to the streets.”
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
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Dezi, computer engineer in Istanbul: “Me and my friends decided to see

what’s happening. We gathered information about how we can protect
ourselves. We made special solution for our eyes and mouth for the tear-
gas. We bought simple masks and swimming goggles … They fired tear-
gas or gas bombs … I’ve never been so scared in my life. I turned around
and started running in the other direction. My friend was hit by some-
thing on her chest. It was dark, we couldn’t see what happened. She was
crying and saying how hot it was … A friend of mine set up a medical
room in a mosque.”

These brief reflections reveal members of this protest community of

practice as registering an identity as critically aware citizens, engaged
in the convocative moment at the margins, enduring the risks of enact-
ing appropriate thoughts, intentions, and feelings, through their pro-
test performative to counter the hegemonic power of the Turkish
government.

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

For many of the protesters, this commitment has been holding upon
the first anniversary of the initial sit-in at Gezi Park. Cengiz, a 45-year-
old sociologist, who was at the park for over two weeks, reflected on
the anniversary, revealing an increased sense of political efficacy. “I am
neither afraid of police prosecution nor of judicial measures. I am not
feeling threatened and I am not worried in participating in demonstra-
tions or protests … People will stand up for their political demands
and their democratic rights. This will not disappear” (Starr 2013). This
sense of commitment is echoed by Mesut Sener, a civil engineer who,
linking arms with others to surround and protect the trees in the Park,
spent the first 16 days and nights in the park, “Gezi Park showed us
the potential of protests,” he said. “Gezi Park made everyone connected
… Now I’m aware [that] something bigger than the government exists.
More and more people are protesting. That gives me hope” (ibid.).
However, that which gives Sener hope gives the state disquiet. On
the first anniversary of the uprising, the government deployed 25,000
96    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

riot police to prevent a retaking not only of Gezi Park, but also of any
space that could accommodate a large gathering. The subway stop at
Taksim Square was closed and marchers who approached the park were
once again sprayed with tear gas and water cannon. As Turkish journal-
ist Abdullah Ayasun stated, “Last year, Erdogan learned a lesson: don’t
allow space such as big squares to be taken over by protesters” (Starr
2013). Nevertheless, despite the government’s blocking of both Twitter
and Youtube in retaliation, in an era of social media and mechanized
mobility, such coercive authoritarian tactics can suppress them only for
a time. The fulfillment of these aspirational and presuppositional condi-
tions through the performative of “Everyday I’m çapulling!” establishes
the pragmatic legitimacy of the chant as a performative speech act of
protest. Protesters, convoked on the margins in a community of prac-
tice, reinforced their identities as critically aware citizens, developing
social and political legitimacy for their cause, even as the citizenry ques-
tioned the state’s political legitimacy. The space of this discussion of the
chant serves as a contact zone, a place between microlevel consideration
of discourse features of the chant, and macrolevel concerns, ranging
from environmental protection of a park to freedom of assembly.
Unlike “Everyday I’m çapulling!” the second chant analyzed did not
have the benefits of social media available for it, but only those of more
traditional news and television media. From Istanbul and the çapullers
of the summer of 2013, this analysis turns to the American Southwest
and to grape-growing country, to hear the chant “Sí se puede” that
sound-tracked the migrant farmworkers movement.

The United Farm Workers and “Sí Se Puede”

On September 17, 1963 in Salinas, California, a crew of fifty-seven
Mexican male braceros (guest workers), who worked for the Earl Myers
Company and lived in its labor camp, caught their early morning ride
to work in one of the local vegetable fields. These men worked ten-hour
days harvesting crops for the local growers. At the end of the day, the
crew reboarded their “bus,” which was “a flatbed produce truck with an
affixed canopy and two wooden benches inside” (Flores 2013, p. 126).
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
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This makeshift bus was locked with chains from the outside, prohibit-
ing any communication between the workers and Francisco “Pancho”
Espinoza, the driver and foreman. Just before 4:30 p.m., Espinoza
drove the vehicle into an unmarked railroad crossing, as a train barreled
down upon them. By the time Espinoza heard the train whistle, it was
too late. The Southern Pacific Railroad freight train smashed into the
truck. Tony Vasquez, a field foreman who was with his crew nearby, wit-
nessed the collision saying, “Bodies just flew all over the place,” (ibid.).
This accident, which killed 32 farmworkers, catapulted the flaws of
the federal Bracero Program into the larger community’s awareness, as
Espinoza, along with the general guest worker program at large, were
blamed for the deaths. These deaths ended the Bracero Program and
generated the California Chicano movement, including the foundation
of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez,6
and Dolores Huerta (ibid., p.127).
Just over a decade after the Salinas tragedy, Dolores Huerta, the Vice
President of the UFW, stood proudly at the podium at the American
Public Health Association convention. She recounted the Salinas trag-
edy, noting that the mistreatment of migrant workers was widespread and
commonplace. At the close of her speech, Huerta publicly uttered for the
first time, “Sí se puede/Yes, it can be done,” as a protest against the agri-
cultural industry, which had failed to protect its employees. Huerta had
coined the phrase two years earlier in the spring of 1972. In May of that
year, Arizona had passed a law denying farmworkers the right to strike and
boycott during harvest season. When Chavez learned of the bill’s passage,
he returned to his home state of Arizona to commence a 25 day water-
only fast. Already bedridden from the effects of the fast, Chavez, along
with Huerta, met with Latino labor leaders who insisted that farmworker
activism was hopeless, repeatedly stating, “No, no se puede/No, no it can’t
be done.” Huerta, however, countered this insistence of defeat, pronounc-
ing, “Sí, sí se puede/Yes, yes, it can be done” (United Farm Workers 2015).
According to Huerta, this response was originally just an honoring
of the Cooperative Principle, a polite countering of a negative claim;
no one imagined that it would become the chant of a movement
(Cavanaugh 2014). However, Huerta’s counter to the exhausted labor
organizers has become a shibboleth of hope not only for the UFW or
98    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

other causes within the Chicano, Mexican American, or Latino com-

munities, but also for marginalized groups across the globe. Ironically,
through one of its English translations “Yes, we can” it became the
campaign slogan for the election of Barack Obama, the first African
American to hold the office of the American presidency, the epicenter of
political hegemonic power.
Although the surface structure of Sí se puede, like its sister chants
of Latino activism Viva La Causa and Abajo! Down with Grapes and
Lettuce, is that of a declarative statement, its deep structure is that of
the protest performative, “We, the farmworkers, protest the oppression
of our work, our class, and our race.” However, just as the deep struc-
ture of “Everyday I’m çapulling!” expanded in adaptation to its broad-
ening usage, so too has that of Sí se puede. In its English translation, in
the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama, its expansion to “We,
those of us on the margins, protest the hegemonic center” includes
all who live, or who have historically lived, in the American margins.
Regardless of whether it is marking a particular community of prac-
tice or a larger general one, performativity is at work when the chant
is sung. Huerta’s sharing of it with her convention audience in 1974
revealed how this back and forth call and response of Si Se Puede works
as a protest against the oppression migrant farmworkers have endured.
This now iconic Spanish phrase, immortalized by the persistence of the
UFW, is that of an affirmative chant that Huerta has used to end her
speeches for the past 40 years. Over this time, the usage of the chant, by
Huerta, farmworkers and others, has created a rich collective memory of
the struggles of the farmworkers, as well as that of Mexican Americans
and the broader minority/disadvantaged communities in the United
States. In order to understand how Huerta and subsequent users of this
phrase create an identity to call forth sympathizers and fellow advocates
in a community of practice, the context from which this chant origi-
nated is presented below.

The Deep Story of “Sí se puede”

By the time the UFW emerged in 1962, farmworkers had already suf-
fered decades of marginalization and oppression in the United States.
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
99

In the early twentieth century, the United States sought to “improve

hemispheric relations by curtailing U.S. interventionism and promot-
ing cooperation and mutual respect among the American nations”
through the implementation of the Good Neighbor Policy in the 1920s
(Henderson 2011, p. 199). As the US military mobilized for the Second
World War cooperating with Mexico became a priority. With more and
more able-bodied American men serving in the military or in other war-
time industries, the agricultural industry needed assistance from outside
labor.
In an effort, later noted as a high water mark in the history of US–
Mexican relations, the two governments instituted the Bracero Program
in 1942. This program arranged for some 4.5 million Mexican contract
laborers to work seasonally in the United States, granting certain rights
to them including the right to be: “well-treated, transported to and
from the recruiting centers, provided with adequate housing, food, and
healthcare, and paid the ‘prevailing wage’ in a given area” (Henderson
2011, pp. 199–200). However, many growers ignored these health
and living requirements, or even bypassed the use of contracts by hir-
ing illegal migrant workers, cutting into the wages and benefits of legal
migrants. In an ironic twist, the same program that stipulated the fair
treatment of braceros to foster economic stability for US growers and
Mexico’s middle class, instead fed the hegemonic economic power
of American growers off of the back-breaking work of migrant labor-
ers, while damaging Mexico’s previously flourishing economy (ibid.,
pp. 204, 214).
Though engagement in the Bracero Program was a step toward
international cooperation, the Cold War between the Soviet Union
and the US threatened the potential for acceptance of those margin-
alized in American culture in the 1950s. Out of the ideology of the
Cold War, arose a period of intense anxiety and paranoia over atti-
tudes or actions, of both the government and ordinary citizens, consid-
ered to be un-American. The Red Scare (c. 1947–1957) established an
American identity based on “a belief in individual freedom, unfettered
capitalism… and a suspicion of outsiders,” which sought to separate
itself as much as possible from anything considered remotely com-
munist or socialist (May 2011, p. 940). Utilizing advertisements and
100    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

extensive media coverage, many privatized industries sought to exploit

the paranoia of consumers. However, after nearly a decade of fear mon-
gering, the persistent suspicion of everyone from public officials to
schoolteachers as potential communist spies, “had discredited the most
vehement expressions of anticommunism” (ibid., p. 944). The excessive
call to conform to a homogenized American identity had instead served
as a hegemonic hail, calling forth marginalized groups to assert their
identity as legitimate citizens and expand the power of the margin, fue-
ling the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–1960s.
From 1942 until 1964, the Bracero Program allowed the eco-
nomic interests of US growers to occupy the center of power in the
small towns dotting the agricultural landscape of California. Migrant
farmworkers were so extensively excluded from the community that
even in 1963 “the U.S. government still classified [them] as ‘types of
loads’ for vehicles along with metal, wood, and hay” (Flores 2013,
p. 133). Though those in power in the local communities sought to
preserve the oppressive status quo, the national community during the
1960s was undergoing a cultural revolution that sparked higher levels
of communal self-awareness and identity. A major part of this revolu-
tion was spurred by the Civil Rights Movement, which promoted not
only increased justice toward and acknowledgement of the human
dignity of minorities, but also promoted open dialogue by giving
voice to the oppressed. As the nation made strides to include African
Americans, women, and Native Americans,7 into the idea of American
identity, groups such as the farmworkers were not represented. Even
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most prominent figure of the Civil
Rights Movement, acknowledged that the “separate struggles [were]
really one—a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity” (King
2002, p. 81). An association between Cesar Chavez and King became
intentional for the UFW, as not only was Chavez tremendously inspired
by King’s focus on nonviolent tactics, but the farmworker movement
also sought to increase its legitimacy by association with King’s cause
(Baer 2008, p. 80). As groups traditionally considered others began to
assert their rights in the United States, the farmworkers and their sup-
porting communities monitored the situation closely and patiently.
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
101

Before the advent of the UFW, several other farmworker organiza-

tions attempted to address the issues faced by the Chicano community
including: the Community Service Organization (CSO), the National
Farm Workers Association (NFWA), and the Agricultural Workers
Association (AWA). In his early years of activism, Cesar Chavez partic-
ipated in CSO and NFWA. For nearly a decade, Chavez worked with
CSO trying to improve living and working conditions in the Chicano
community. He left CSO after they denied his request to organize farm-
workers. At that point, Chavez developed the NFWA, a new outgrowth
of AWA, founded by Dolores Huerta. In AWA, Huerta had obtained
extensive field experiences in boycotting, developing her lobbying
experience alongside the Filipino community’s Agricultural Workers
Organization Committee (AWOC).
In 1962, Chavez and Huerta organized and held the first convention
of the new NFWA. During this early period, phrases and symbols, such
as “Viva La Causa/Long live the cause,” “Viva La Huelga/Long live the
strike,” La Virgin de Guadalupe/Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the black
Aztec eagle insignia, became associated with the group’s work and the
farmworker movement. Three years after that first convention, AWOC
asked Chavez and the NFWA to support them in a strike against the
grape growers in the Delano-area. The NFWA accepted the challenge
with 1200 member families—not individual members but families—
voting to support a strike and boycott that lasted 5 years, 1965–1970.
In 1966, deep into the boycott, Chavez instigated a 340-mile
pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, the capital of California.
­
Chavez’s completion of the march on Easter intensified the meaning
behind La Causa as it merged the religious/ritual and the economic/
political, linking symbols of Roman Catholicism with those of the
union (Taylor 1975, pp. 149–151). Due to the boycott and the march,
Schenley Industries, a major grape grower, capitulated and negotiated
the NFWA’s first union contract.
However, the success of this march and strike quickly dissipated due
predominantly to groups working against the NFWA, particularly the
growers and the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, who depicted
the strikers as leftist devils and communists (Etulain 2002, p. 2–24).
102    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

In the summer of 1966, the NFWA went on another strike and boy-
cott of the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation, forcing the company to allow
an ­election amongst its workers. To counter the NFWA, the company
brought in the Teamsters. Shortly thereafter, the NFWA and AWOC
chose to join forces, ultimately giving birth to the UFW. With this merger,
the paths of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez intertwined to the extent
that they became one of the most significant activist teams in the history
of the United States. Chavez served as the president and spokesperson
for the organization while Huerta, the only elected female official in the
group, served as vice president (Rose 1988, pp. 95–106).

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions for Sí se puede

With this deep story as prologue, the way in which this chant of the
United Farm Workers satisfies the requirements of the renovated felic-
ity conditions, beginning with the presuppositional ones, is presented
below (see Appendix A as needed). After considering the conventional,
circumstantial, semantic, and personnel dimensions of Sí se puede, the
effect of the convocative split then bridges the first and second reno-
vated felicity conditions, positioning the chanters of Sí se puede in
­relation to agribusiness and its supporters.

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

The conventional aspects of Sí, Se Puede are remarkable in the sense that
it successfully appealed to two separate audiences, though in different
ways. The civic dimensions of the chant address different facets of the
common good for both the farmworkers and the wider US ­population.
The UFW sought to improve the living conditions of farmworkers
by creating a union that “would establish a credit union, cooperative
food store, drugstore and service station, burial insurance, and a news-
paper, [while providing] its members with legal counseling and griev-
ance committees” (Jensen and Hammerback 2002, p. 4). By providing
resources for the farmworkers to navigate in a society that did not con-
sider them to be full-fledged members, the UFW fought for social and
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
103

economic equality of migrant workers, defending their human d ­ ignity.

Illustrated by a willingness to take on often demeaning, yet ­necessary
jobs, the farmworkers began to reimagine a community in which
they were social and political equals to the growers, receiving just com-
pensation for their work, and attaining humane living conditions. With
the help of the UFW, they drew upon the rich social capital of their
strong cultural network to support each other in ways that increased
their political efficacy.
The original vocative call of Sí se puede activates the Cooperative
Principle, calling out to workers, the growers, and the American peo-
ple as a whole, to change the unjust labor conditions for the farmwork-
ers. The ambiguity of the antecedent of the impersonal pronoun, “se/it,”
allows for the direct address of such a wide audience because the deictic
properties of “se/it ” are activated in situ.
In a time when farmworkers were considered to be so Other, so
un-American, Huerta’s Sí, Se Puede reassured migrants that they pos-
sessed the same dignity and rights as Anglo Americans. Coming from
impoverished situations in Mexico, and substandard living conditions
in the United States, farmworkers desired to reimagine a community
in which they would not be “peripheral residents acknowledged by
locals as necessary workers … racialized and sexualized as dangerous
masses” (Flores 2013, p. 126). Already oriented to change, Huerta and
Chavez worked to transform these stereotypes by uplifting the farm-
worker community through the creation of an activist community of
practice that ranged from the farmworkers to the average grocery store
customer.

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

The need for change in the UFW community of practice was rooted in
the elevation of profits over workers, by the powerful forces operating
in the American agribusiness. The hegemonic economic power of the
growers, reinforced by the political and legal powers of the government,
suppressed the rights of the farmworkers, giving rise to the core sub-
stance of the circumstance of disagreement. In terms of critical aware-
ness, Huerta, Chavez, and other union leaders obviously did not have to
104    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

articulate the problem at hand for the farmworker community of prac-

tice, who were quite aware of their degrading work conditions. They
were also painfully aware of the fragility of their economic situations
and the real danger of losing the jobs that they did have.
Because of this fragility, the union leadership had to work hard to
persuade farmworkers to join La Causa, to answer the hail of Sí se puede,
to move against the entrenched systemic economic, racial, and politi-
cal inequalities in their lives, to cease the manufacture of their consent.
For the farmworkers the critical awareness of the precariousness of their
livelihoods was omnipresent. Huerta and Chavez strove to develop an
additional sort of critical awareness—one that incorporated the possibil-
ity of change through direct nonviolent action and which made protest-
ing worth the risk. The workers needed to be persuaded that they could
actually reap the benefits of the sacrifices made and the risks taken to
improve their lives. This was particularly true during the 5 years of the
grape boycott and strike.
However, for the wider audience of Sí se puede’s vocative call, the goal
was to raise critical awareness of the farmworkers’ plight to the general
American public. The use of the chant in a range of demonstrations
combined with bumper stickers and posters reminding grocery shoppers
“Uvas No/No grapes” or “Abajo! Down with Grapes and Lettuce” built
critical awareness as the strikes ground on, year after year. The UFW
persistently and nonviolently called upon the American public to form
a boycott community of practice by respecting the strike and treating
those who grew and harvested their food with dignity.

Words: Semantics of Opposition

Coined in the third person singular with the impersonal pronoun of

“se, ” the chant is a counter affirmation to an implied negation of the
rights of farmworkers. The clear lack of an antecedent for the imper-
sonal pronoun seems to deviate from the norm of protest as a call that
establishes an identity for both protesters and supporters in opposition
to hegemonic power. This ambiguity, however, allowed for the reposi-
tioning of speakers in relation to a variety of Others dependent upon
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
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the situation. For the members of the UFW, these situations often pos-
sessed a distinctly religious element, as the UFW’s campaigns in and
out of the fields were permeated by religious symbolism and imagery.
Coming from a Mexican/Hispanic/Latino background, Chavez and
other volunteers shared their Roman Catholic faith in common with
the largely Mexican/Hispanic community of farmworkers. Many of the
iconic fasts that Chavez participated in were filled with prayer and daily
masses (Jensen and Hammerback 2002, p. 7). In recruiting efforts, the
UFW integrated religion with their activities; in a particularly difficult
recruiting period, the union held a 24-hour vigil followed by a Roman
Catholic mass. This proved an effective strategy as many laborers, who
took time from their work to participate in the mass, were then recruited
into the union.
In the instance of Sí, Se Puede, this religiosity also permeated
the style in which UFW speeches were presented to the audience. In
comments on her speech at the American Public Health Association’s
Annual Convention, Huerta likened the chanting together of Sí se
puede to “praying together in unison” (Cavanaugh 2014). In the speech,
as she called out rhetorical questions detailing the many sufferings of
the farmworkers, Huerta recreated the patterns of call and response
frequently observed during the Roman Catholic mass. These calls and
responses also evoked traditional rhythms and movements of the verses
and refrains of religious hymns. The idea of using the verse and refrain
pattern to persuade an audience was not new. From nearly the begin-
ning of Spanish colonization of Latin America in the sixteenth century,
church hymns had been used by the missionaries to convert the first
peoples of the Americas (Burkholder 2009, p. 406). By exposing indig-
enous Americans to European instruments and musical techniques,
Spanish missionaries evangelized many indigenous peoples. Missionaries
appealed to the strong interest in music of the Aztecs and the Incas by
composing church hymns in the style of European music while com-
posing lyrics in native languages such as Quechua. Since the birth of
the mestizo race/culture, the church hymn has held a persuasive role
in the collective memory of Latin Americans from Mexico to Peru.
It was not surprising that Chavez, Huerta, and the UFW drew upon
this tool to appeal to a predominantly Hispanic audience—especially
106    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

when convincing the farmworkers to risk joining the union or going on

strike.
Sí, Se Puede acts as a call that positions the supporters of La Causa
in opposition to its opponents. The utterance, which most closely
translates to “Yes, It Can (Be Done),” affirms that change is possible.
However, the English translation is a passive voice statement while the
Spanish is an active voice statement that simply leaves out information
about the actor (United Farm Workers 2015). In Spanish, the imper-
sonal pronoun “se ” does not specify who will be acting. This ambiguity
is essential to attracting a diverse range of supporters for the commu-
nity of practice, from a farmworker to a UFW volunteer, to an average
American Anglo citizen. The phrase also uses the third person singular
form of the verb “poder ” to highlight the ability to fight against a singu-
lar cause that unites all migrant farmworkers and their supporters—that
is, the fight to establish a just system in which they can live as a part of
the community.
In English, however, the verb “poder/can” is in passive voice, with an
absent agent. From the perspective of a marginalized group seeking to
gain the support of moderate Anglo Americans, it would be important
to maintain as unthreatening an identity as possible. The usage of the
passive voice reflects Chavez’s, and the overall UFW’s, “disarming…
approach in an age of radical and flamboyant rhetoric” (Griswold del
Castillo 2002, p. 88). The singular subject of the English translation,
“it,” represents a single problem that draws both protesters and support-
ers together. Thus, using both the English and the Spanish translations
to build solidarity, identity, and legitimacy with differing constituencies,
Huerta and the UFW were able to attract vastly different audiences with
one simple chant.

Persons: Interpellation of Protesters Through “Sí se puede”

Cesar Chavez, while working in the fields with his family, moved to a
community called “Sal Si Puedes,” or “Get out if you can” in the 1950s.
There he witnessed the injustices in the lives of farmworkers as well
as their devotion to their Roman Catholic faith. In this community,
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
107

through his relationship with a local Anglo priest, Father Donald

McDonnell, Chavez experienced an epiphany, as he realized the possi-
bility of merging his need to serve as a community organizer with his
faith tradition. Father McDonnell, who was building a mission ded-
icated to La Virgin de Guadalupe, also helped his parishioners “work
for better wages and living conditions for Mexican Americans both in
his barrio (neighborhood) and in nearby bracero (field worker) camps”
(Etulain 2002, p. 5). Accompanying Fr. McDonnell in his ministry
throughout the community allowed Chavez to explore how his religious
faith might inform community activism.
Shortly after beginning his relationship with Father McDonnell,
Chavez met Fred Ross, who invited him to take over the CSO chapter in
Decoto. In doing so, Chavez faced a variety of issues, including the chal-
lenge of persuading the farmworkers to protest. “Most of them said they
were interested, but the hardest part was to get them to start pushing
themselves, on their own initiative” (Chavez 1966). During these early
years of professional organizing, Chavez learned that although much of
what he did received no real appreciation, he would still do it, simply
because he wanted to see it done. This mentality has ultimately led to
the sustained success of the UFW. His interest and use of nonviolent
methods, combined with his religious convictions, garnered him com-
parisons with Dr. King, as well as with Mahatma Gandhi, particularly in
Chavez’s use of the fast as a strategic protest tactic (Etulain 2002, p. 13).
Like Chavez, Dolores Huerta thrived on working to see change
visible in the community. Like Chavez, she, too, received her start in
organizing in CSO, with a focus on voter registration drives, educa-
tional campaigns, and chapter fund-raising. In 1958, she joined with
several colleagues to form the AWA, an organization that later devel-
oped into AWOC. Her passion for social justice attracted people, pro-
pelling her into leadership positions, especially in her work as a lobbyist
on behalf of the unions with which she worked (Rose 2008).
Huerta’s lobbying skills and her maternal tactics attested to her char-
acter and dedication to La Causa. For Huerta, her identity as a mother
was not separate from her professional work. Instead, her maternal
identity informed her work, which encouraged other women to do the
108    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

same. Huerta created an environment in which she often nursed and

cared for her children in between meetings, forcing other lobbyists to
wait, as she integrated the life of her home with her profession. Her role
as a mother shaped her activism, with all of her children participating in
one way or another, as she promoted the idea of the family working the
picket line. Her children, aware of the sacrifices, were dedicated to the
cause as well.
This familial dedication was revealed in how Huerta affected change
in picket line tactics. To reduce the possibility of violence occurring,
particularly if growers were provoking pickers, Huerta proposed that the
women go in the front of the picket line. The idea was that most agi-
tators would not attack women, particularly if they had children with
them. She recalled that, “when you have women you also have children,
and children bring out a different type of feeling” (Clemmons 2008,
p. 116). This tactic was more successful for the farmworkers in the
Southwest than it was in Birmingham where women and children had
been sprayed with fire hoses and set upon by police dogs.
Her tenacious personality, combined with her lobbying skills, even-
tually earned Huerta full partnership with Chavez, overcoming gender
stereotypes associated with machismo. Having struggled together with
CSO and NFWA, they created an effective change-making organization
in the UFW. They held a mutual respect for each other, treating each
other fairly (Taylor 1975, pp. 149–151). Together they pursued a non-
violent agenda of change for the farmworker community, bringing to
bear their distinctive skill sets to the aid of the cause they held so dearly.

Effect: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

The unusual inclusivity of Sí se puede mobilized a multitude of differ-

ent audiences. In Huerta’s 1974 speech to the American Public Health
Association, the chant is preceded by rhetorical questions detailing the
injustices faced by the farmworkers: “Can we have this dream that we
are talking about? Health for everyone, brotherhood, peace? Without
disease and fear of oppression?” (Huerta 2008). As members of her and
Chavez’s various audiences responded to the chant, the convocative split
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
109

splintered groups of people, positioning some closer to the margin in

solidarity with the farmworkers, and others closer to the hegemonic
center represented by the growers.
Sí se puede’s impersonal yet individual actor address allowed for
two separate communities of practice to build identity on the margin.
The UFW’s first mission was to recruit and build support of the union.
The illocutionary dimension of Sí se puede reminded farmworkers that
the powerful growers fought actively to deny their rights, reinforcing a
need for the union. The perlocutionary dimension of the chant, in the
community of the marginalized workers, inspired them to remain faith-
ful to La Causa by organizing, donating time, money, or even lodging
organizers (Baer 2008, p. 79).
The other audience to which the UFW appealed was the ordinary
Anglo American. Although the average Anglo American was posi-
tioned closer to the center of hegemonic power, the rhetoric of the
chant, as well as its extensive media coverage, had cross-community
appeal, creating a loosely affiliated community of practice (Jensen and
Hammerback 2002, p. 7). The UFW was able to garner enough public
support to successfully boycott grapes not only from producers such as
Schenely Industries but from the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation as well.
The public pressure from the boycott on the growers allowed the farm-
workers to operate from the margin seeking to draw the center nearer
to themselves. At least partly due to the ambiguous and nonthreaten-
ing language of the original translation of the phrase, “Yes, It Can Be
Done,” the chant appealed to many who shared little in common with
the plight of the farmworkers. This ambiguity helped generate support
from other marginalized groups, as well as groups situated nearer to the
centers of power. Thus, the UFW used both public support as well as
strikes to pressure the growers into signing labor union contracts. The
migrant worker community enjoyed an abundance of social capital, as
shown by the extent of the efforts to send UFW volunteers across the
country, inviting farmworkers from other regions to participate in the
cause. High social capital was necessary as with only seventy dollars in
the UFW treasury at one point, many volunteers had to be “non-mate-
rialistic,” as Huerta described them, traveling simply with the clothes on
110    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

their back and their families, giving and receiving hospitality from each
other (Baer 2008, p. 80).
While the chant invited fellow farmworkers and Americans in general
to support the UFW cause, it worked a bit differently for those at the
other end of the convocative split, the growers and other representatives
and supporters of agribusiness. For this group, the call of the chant was
not only a performative of protest, but also one of warning, like that of
“Everyday I’m çapulling!” has been for Erdogan’s government. For the
growers, the repeated declaration of Si Se Puede implied and reinforced
the persistent nature of these protesters and their cause.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of Protest

Thoughts, Intentions, Risk

Along with animating the presuppositional felicity conditions in

distinct ways, Sí Se Puede also fulfilled the aspirational conditions
concerned with thoughts, feelings, and intentions as well as those con-
tending with risk, commitment, and subsequent actions. For members
and supporters of the UFW, quite often the risk included that of not
being able to feed and care for one’s family. This fear was omnipres-
ent in light of the strength of the political and economic power of the
growers.
Although the focus of the intentionality shifted depending on the
audiences addressed by the UFW, the chant of Sí se puede indicated
appropriate thoughts, feelings, and intentions of a protest of performa-
tivity against the working conditions of migrant farmworkers. When
used to address the farmworkers, it was intended to inspire a commu-
nity of practice and grow political efficacy. Inspiration with a corre-
sponding feeling of empowerment was necessary, as a major portion of
the workers’ annual incomes would normally be earned during strike
season, which was the harvest season. Not surprisingly, many workers
hesitated to take on this risk, especially as other workers were willing to
cross the picket line (Jenkins 1977).
Addressing the general American public drew on another dimension
of intention not intricately connected to risk. This aspect of intention
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
111

was that of increasing social capital across communities, to probe

the broader dimensions of the Social Contract, by building solidar-
ity through recognition of the value of the farmworkers to the larger
American community. The goal was to create a community of practice
linking farmworkers with other groups of Americans who had to feel
connected enough to at least boycott particular products.
The last dimension of intentionality of Sí Se Puede is that of a direct
protest against the hegemonic power of the growers. Users of the chant
intended for growers to develop a critical awareness of the humanity
and dignity of their workers and to treat them accordingly. The repeated
use of the chant, as a vehicle to build identity and legitimacy for the
cause, reinforced for the growers that the UFW was committed for the
long term and the demands of the farmworkers were not dissipating.
Just as Sí Se Puede called forth two communities of practice, of the
protesters and their supporters, so were the risk and commitment unique
to the community. For example, in one picket line incident, forty-
four demonstrators were arrested and incarcerated for a brief period
(Jensen and Hammerback 2002, p. 28). Other risks confronting farm-
workers included the loss of their jobs to those willing to cross the picket
line, as well as the possible loss of their meager living conditions, often
consisting of substandard housing, furnished with cardboard boxes
(Cavanaugh 2014). The risks that the average Anglo American faced
were minimal. All that had to be done was to sacrifice buying the boy-
cotted items harvested under unfair labor practices at grocery stores,
where an added element of social pressure was often present. UFW
volunteers posted themselves outside stores to encourage shoppers to
engage in ethical purchasing practices by boycotting items like grapes
and lettuce and by answering shopper questions about the strike and the
movement (Jensen and Hammerback 2002, p. 7).

Commitment and Subsequent Action

Mirroring the levels of risk that each group took, the levels of com-
mitment varied. The level of commitment for farmworkers had to be
extremely high, as they lived on less than two dollars a day, and many
still continued to support other migrants by opening up their homes to
112    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

them (Jensen and Hammerback 2002, p. 25). The commitment of the

general US audience ultimately had to be big enough to significantly
diminish the profit of the growers. This commitment to boycott certain
foods waxed and waned in periods of uncertainty as to which products
were being boycotted at which times. However, ultimately, it worked.
Si Se Puede continued to provide the motivation and call to the
greater Chicano movement that sprouted from the original intention
of the chant. With its initial primary focus of protesting the mistreat-
ment of the farmworkers, the chant’s original purpose and use has tran-
scended time, gaining traction within the American collective memory.
Through establishing its pragmatic legitimacy by fulfilling the renovated
felicity conditions of protest, the chant has expanded its purview. Now
it is used for a wide variety of issues other than La Causa in a range of
media and literature. For example, the children’s book Sí Se Puede/Yes
We Can! by Francisco Delgado tells a fictional story set against the back-
drop of the actual Janitor Strike in Los Angeles in 2000 (Nebbia and
White 2000). The strike at that time portrayed people in Los Angeles
chanting “Huelga ” and “Sí se puede,” just like during the UFW marches
from 40 years previous.
The chants’ inclusion in children’s literature encourages its continued
inclusion in the collective memory of the community. This move into
literature, especially children’s literature, perpetuates the story of the
movement and its subsequent actions and effects for another genera-
tion. Books such as Si Se Puede/Yes, we can! open up conversation, across
generations, about the history of the phrase and what it has meant in
the United States. A wide range of visual media have also employed the
phrase, from the Disney Channel movie Gotta Kick It Up to its use by
the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live, in the English trans-
lation as “Yes We Can.” Such usage has contributed to the evolution
of the connotative meanings of Sí se puede. This contribution and the
collective memory associated with the chant have added to its power as
the main slogan for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. The choice
to use the active voice, first person plural translation of “Yes, we can”
even further broadened its vocative call, while generating the convoca-
tive split between Americans who supported him, primarily Democrats,
and those who opposed him, mainly Republicans. Another comedian,
 3  Exploring the Protest Language of Chants …    
113

Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show on Comedy Central, spoofed the chant
in his adaptation of it as “Yes, We Koran” in his critique of American
Republicans’ call for President Obama to act more like King Abdullah
of Jordan. The chant’s effective usage in these various venues indicates
that its history will continue to unfold as one of invitation and change.
In the next chapter, the analysis shifts from the fight of the farm-
workers in the United States and the çapullers in Gezi Park, to an
exploration of the iconic song, We Shall Overcome, of the American
Civil Rights movement, another dynamic like the farmworkers’ move-
ment that emerged in the wake of the Red Scare, and then fully into
the Cold War in an interrogation of the West German antinuclear song,
99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons.

Notes
1. This is the location of Cumhuriyet Anıtı, the monument commemorating
the foundation of the secular Republic of Turkey in 1923.
2. The “woman in the red dress” was eventually identified as Ceyda Sungar.
In 2015, the Turkish police officer who had teargassed her was sentenced
to plant trees. See the Reuters story in The Guardian: http://www.the-
guardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/turkish-policeman-sentenced-plant-
trees-teargas-atta-woman-in-red-ceyda-sungur. 10 June 2015.
3. These include the following from the Turkish Constitution and interna-
tional agreements. Freedom of Assembly: Article 34 of the Constitution
of the Republic of Turkey; Article 21 of International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights [ICCPR]; Article 11 of the European Convention
for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
[ECHR]; Article 20 of the United Nations Declaration of Human
Rights. Freedom of Expression: Article 26 of the Constitution of the
Republic of Turkey; Article 19 of International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights [ICCPR]; Article 10 of the European Convention for
the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms [ECHR];
Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
4. Erdem Gunduz began the “standing man protest” as an attempt to get
around the police’s restrictions on gatherings in the park. He stood alone
silently with his hands in his pockets, staring at the portrait of Mustafa
114    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular republic of Turkey, which hangs

from the old cultural centre, for hours. Friends surrounded him outside
of the park to prevent supporters from going too close and risking the
wrath of the police enforcing the ban on gatherings.
5. This is a loose coalition of labor unions, opposition parties and civil soci-
ety groups that helped organize the protests and the protesters.
6. For more information about Cesar Chavez, see Jacques Levy’s Cesar
Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
7. To learn more about the Native American struggle for civil rights, visit
the American Indian Movement (AIM) website at: http://www.aimove-
ment.org.

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Rose, M. E. (2008). Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In M. T. Garcia (Ed.),
A Dolores Huerta Reader (pp. 39–52). Albuquerque, NM, USA: University
of New Mexico Press.
Rose, M. E. (1988). Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana
and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union, 1950–1980. Los Angeles, CA:
UCLA Dissertation.
Sabral, J. & Erdim, Z. (2013, June 7). Will Istanbul’s Protesters have the Last
Laugh? BBC News. Retrieved November 17, 2014, from http://www.bbc.
com/news/world-europe-22823730.
Shadowlaneify. (2013, June 5). Capuling (Chapulling) fiilinin ingilizce’ de kulla-
nimi. Youtube. Retrieved April 11, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=PD7fOcoAdu0.
Sheets, C. A. (2013, June 4). What is Capuling? ‘Everyday I’m Capuling’ Turkish
Protest Video Goes Viral. International Business Times. Retrieved November
23, 2014, from http://www.ibtimes.com/what-capuling-everyday-im-capul-
ing-turkish-protest-video-goes-viral-1291541.
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Starr, S. (2013, June 6). Gezi Park Protests Confirms Turkish Resistance to
Erdogan Oppression: Heavy Handed Suppression of Current Protests Fuels
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firms-turkish-resistance-to-erdogan-oppression-1.1822227?page=2.
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Protest Public Kissing Ban. Time. Retrieved November 24, 2014, from
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turning-point-for-turkish-media_320056.html.
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17, 2014, from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22753761.
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violations-against-writers-and-journalists/.
 4
Exploring the Protest Language of Songs:
We Shall Overcome and 99 Luftballons/99
Red Balloons

The American Civil Rights Movement and We

Shall Overcome
In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched Freedom
Rides across the American South to provoke the enforcement of fed-
eral racial integration laws on interstate bus routes. Before boarding
the bus for the journey from Nashville to New Orleans, 19-year-old
student Allen Cason told his parents he loved them and wrote his will,
just in case he was killed (Owens 2011).1 Waiting for the Freedom
Riders at the Montgomery bus station was a vicious mob, which sav-
agely attacked the riders with garden tools, chains, tire irons, baseball
bats, bricks, and pipes (Arsenault). Freedom Rider Bernard LaFayette,
Jr. remembered enduring their arrival recalling, “we were trapped,
nowhere to go. Our only hope was to stay together. We joined hands
in a circle and started singing We Shall Overcome. The song has dif-
ferent meanings at different times … Sometimes you’re singing about
problems all over the world; sometimes you’re singing about problems
in the local community. But in that bus station, it was a prayer, a song
of hope that we would survive, and that even if we in that group did

© The Author(s) 2018 121

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_4
122    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

not survive, then we as a people would overcome” (Seeger and Reiser

1989, p. 55).
The enduring appeal of We Shall Overcome, the anthem of the
American Civil Rights movement (c.1951–1968), lies in its simplic-
ity. This folk song consists of a four-line verse of repeated declarative
statements:

We shall overcome, we shall overcome

We shall overcome someday.
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe
We shall overcome some day.

This structure allows for creative adaptation such as the replacement

of “we shall overcome” with statements like “We shall walk in peace” or
with “some day” being replaced by “today” as in “We shall walk in peace
today.” Possessing such straightforward adaptable lyrics combined with
an easy to learn melody, the song was “sung on protest marches and in
sit-ins, through clouds of tear gas and under rows of police batons, and
it brought courage and comfort to bruised, frightened activists as they
waited in jail cells, wondering if they would survive the night” (Library
2015).
As what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “freedom song,”2 We
Shall Overcome is cherished around the globe, from Northern Ireland, to
Czechoslovakia, Tibet, South Africa, and Cuba, to Berlin, Buenos Aires,
and Beijing (Barry 2011). Its tide-like persistence has inspired those in
prison cells to those in presidential palaces to persevere against oppres-
sion. The lyrics of the song’s surface structure are highly malleable due
to its nature as a folk song, characterized by its anonymous authorship,
oral transmission, and verbal alteration of the song in its use (Denisoff
1983, p. 59). Regardless of the fluidity of its surface structure however,
its deep structure is that of a protest performative: “We, the commu-
nity of practice, protest oppression.” Unlike other protest performa-
tives explored in this text, this song has adapted to the needs of a wide
variety of communities of practice across the globe, drawing on global
collective memory and experience, while serving in a pronoun-like way
to reference the antecedent of the issue that the singers are challenging.
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
123

In this chapter, that issue is civil rights for African Americans in the
1950s and 1960s.

The Deep Story of We Shall Overcome

The headwaters of We Shall Overcome were sourced in the foundation

of the United States, in the performance of a similar speech act of pro-
test, the Declaration of Independence. Although, the Declaration’s
deep structure is one of protest against the British government of King
George III, on its surface, it, too, was a series of declarative statements.
Ironically, in that speech act, the Founding Fathers declared that “all
men are created equal,” even though slavery had existed in the American
colonies since 1619 and many of the Declaration’s signers were slaver
holders. The consequences of this original contradiction led to the
American Civil War (1861–1865) and the passage of the 13th, 14th,
and 15th amendments to the US Constitution, which granted African
Americans the same legal rights as white Americans. With the with-
drawal of federal troops in 1877, white Southerners elected “Redeemer
governments” of white Democrats, to redeem the segregationist ideals of
the Confederacy. These governments initiated the era of “Jim Crow,”3
the racial caste system that structured Southern life for nearly 100 years.4
The US Supreme Court sanctioned this system in 1896 by upholding
the “separate but equal” apartheid laws in Plessy v. Ferguson. Reinforcing
legalized segregation was the omnipresence of white on black violence,
most horrifyingly manifested in lynching. This practice of a mob serv-
ing as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner against one accused of
an actual or perceived wrongdoing, became a “race ritual of terror” in
the South (Callahan 2015). Victims were generally hung or shot, but
they were also often beaten, mutilated, burned, castrated, or dismem-
bered as well. In the 86 years before Dr. King was assassinated in 1968,
there were 4730-recorded lynchings in the United States, “includ-
ing 3440 black men and women …. In the mid-1800s, whites consti-
tuted the majority of victims and perpetrators; however, by the period
of Radical Reconstruction, blacks became the most frequent lynching
victims” (Pilgrim 2012). In 1951, Paul Robeson and William Patterson
124    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

claimed the number as over 10,000, in their United Nations petition,

“We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro
People” (Civil Rights 2015), discussion of which the US Government
suppressed.
Ironically, the Supreme Court’s redemption of itself, in its 1954
overturning of “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas, ignited the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Over the
next decade and a half, civil rights activists transformed American
society, primarily through nonviolent resistance: sit-ins, bus boycotts
and freedom rides, marches, voter registration drives, and the for-
mation of leadership organizations such as the CORE, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
These civic actions often were generally sound tracked by freedom
songs, with singers engaging each other and onlookers, to maintain
courage and calm in their nonviolent efforts. With the folk process
of “creative reinvention, borrowing, and cross-fertilization” at work
in We Shall Overcome, at least seven different tributary songs contrib-
uted to its evolution (Bobetsky 2014, p. 28). Bobetsky has traced the
song’s ancestry to that of the Italian hymn O Sanctissima or the Italian
Mariners Hymn, originally printed and set to a pre-existing English
text, Lord Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing, around 1792. This hymn spread
throughout the English-speaking Protestant United States. Also during
this period, the source for We Shall Overcome’s call and response struc-
ture, No More Auction Block, was being sung by African-American sol-
diers in the Union Army, as a secular spiritual.5 During the Civil War,
army bands often played during lulls in the fighting. As the Sicilian
Mariners Hymn was part of the repertoire of the 26th North Carolina
Regimental Band, it’s quite possible that the tune was heard by Union
soldiers and then integrated into their singing of No More Auction
Block. Other songs-as-tributaries include the hymn I’ll Overcome Some
Day by Reverend Charles Albert Tindley, I’ll Be Like Him Someday by
Roberta Evelyn Martin, I’ll Overcome Someday by Kenneth Morris and
Atron Twig, I’ll Be All Right an anonymous folk song, and finally the
labor song We Will Overcome. This labor song, most likely a descend-
ant of Tindley’s well-known gospel song, had already circulated through
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
125

the political sphere, as shown through its citation in the February

1909 United Mine Workers Journal, “Last year at our strike, we opened
every meeting with a prayer, and [sang] that good old song, ‘We Will
Overcome’” (Stotts 2010, p. 23).
At the Highlander Folk School, an interracial center for grassroots
organizing, the tributaries of the song ultimately flowed together.6 At
Highlander, music strongly shaped identities and discourses through
individuals such as Zilphia Horton, a white woman, who served as
the school’s musical director. She learned We Will Overcome as a labor
song, from African-American workers of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) involved in the 1946 America Tobacco Company,
strike in Charleston, South Carolina (Bobetsky 2014, p. 33). Horton
introduced the song to folk singer Pete Seeger in 1947, who published
it in the People’s Songs bulletin (Sing Out! 2014). At this point in the
song’s history, in the wake of union organizing and the emergence of
the communist Red Scare, the song’s title evolved into what it is known
as today, We Shall Overcome. According to song lore, Pete Seeger and
Septima Clark, a teacher at Highlander, changed the modal verb of will
to shall because it “sings better that way,” as the mouth is more open
singing the vowel sound of “ahh” than “ihh” (Stotts 2010, p. 26).
During this same time frame, folksinger Joe Glazer learned We Will
Overcome at Highlander. He recalled teaching it “to white textile work-
ers all over the South. These workers were from small mill towns and
were probably strict segregationists … [To them] it was a union song,
sung in a union hall. It had nothing to do with civil rights” (Stotts
2010, p. 26). Throughout the next decade, the song was passed among
union members, just as its predecessor hymn was shared in religious
congregations, and its freedom song ancestor was shared among the
slaves in the fields. The stage was set for the song to go viral—as viral as
a song might go in mid-twentieth century life.
In 1957, on Labor Day weekend, the Highlander Folk School cel-
ebrated its 25th anniversary, shifting its focus from workers’ rights to
civil rights. Rosa Parks, who ignited the Montgomery bus boycott in
1955, had recently attended training at Highlander.7 She returned
to the school for its celebration, accompanied by Reverend Ralph
Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two of the founders of
126    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

the SCLC. During the festivities, Pete Seeger sang We Shall Overcome.
It was the first time that Dr. King had heard the song. The next day,
King found himself humming the tune and commented to Ann Braden,
“‘We Shall Overcome.’ That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?”
(Stotts 2010, p. 30; Barry 2011; Seeger 2014).
Around this same time, a group of Highlander fundraisers in
California taught the song to singer Frank Hamilton, who in turn
taught it to UCLA graduate sociology student Guy Carawan. Carawan,
who succeeded Zilphia Horton at Highlander, incorporated it into
his repertoire, singing it across the country. The song was emerging as
the response not only of union leaders to the hail of exploitative busi-
ness, but also of civil rights activists to the hail of white hegemony. On
Easter weekend of 1960, Carawan performed the song at the found-
ing meeting of SNCC at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
SNCC, which had evolved from student chapters of SCLC, had already
demonstrated the power of the sit-in as an effective form of nonviolent
protest.8
According to Pete Seeger, a month after Guy Carawan taught it to
the 200 student leaders of SNCC, “it wasn’t a song, it was the song,
throughout the South.” With We Shall Overcome attaining the status
of the song, for an emerging civil rights community of practice, let us
examine this anthem under the arch of the renovated felicity conditions
to consider how it fulfills not only the presuppositional conditions, but
the aspirational ones as well.

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

The conventional dimensions, of the first presuppositional felicity con-

dition of being civic, vocative, and oriented to change, are each found
in the negotiated pronominal evolution of the “I” to “We” in We Shall
Overcome. Lucille Simmons, one of the American Tobacco work-
ers singing I Will Overcome on the picket line in 1946, “changed the
original lyric from ‘I’ to ‘We’,” when sharing the song with Zilphia
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
127

Horton, believing that it made it “more powerful for a mass movement”

(Smithsonian). Because pronouns are empty of semantic content until
paired with an antecedent in a particular context, they are ideal vehi-
cles for expressing solidarity and distance, with the first person plural of
“we” associated with solidarity and third person plural of “they” associ-
ated with distance. Within a given community of protest practice, “we”
tends to serve as a marker of collective identity of resistance.9 However,
the choice of pronouns in We Shall Overcome also reflected differences
between communities of practice regarding pronoun usage.
Activist-scholar Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the original
SNCC Freedom Singers, articulated these differences.

The left, dominated by whites, believed that in order to express the group,
you should say ‘we,’ … In the black community, if you want to express
the group, you have to say ‘I,’ because if you say ‘we,’ I have no idea who’s
gonna be there. Have you ever been in a meeting, people say, ‘We’re
gonna bring some food tomorrow to feed the people.’ And you sit there
on the bench and say, ‘Hmm. I have no idea.’ It is when I say, ‘I’m gonna
bring cake,’ and somebody else says, ‘I’ll bring chicken,’ that you actu-
ally know you’re gonna get a dinner. So there are many black traditional
collective-expression songs where it’s ‘I,’ because in order for you to get a
group, you have to have I’s. (Adams 2013)

This is the sort of “collective I” at work in protest slogans such as

“Everyday, I’m çapulling!”, in the anti-war assertion of “Not in My
Name,” or the free speech declaration of “Je Suis Charlie.”
However, Johnson-Reagon recalled that Cordell Reagon persuaded
her to change the “I” to “We” as he had learned it at Highlander. At
first, she was skeptical of “this guy who [had] just learned the song
and … [was] telling us how to sing it.” However, after thinking about
it, she recognized another nuance to the symbolic work that the change
would do. Saying to herself, “‘If you need it, you got it’”, she decided
that, “What that statement does for me is document the presence of
black and white people in this country, fighting against injustice. And
you have black people accepting that need because they were also
accepting that support and that help” (Adams 2013; Greenberg 1998,
128    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

p. 122). This pronoun shift expanded the sense of the civic within civil
rights demonstrating that it was not just an African-American issue, but
an all-races American issue.
As an interactive grassroots vocative, this shift resulted in the per-
formance of the song as a joint invitation, from all races, to all who
witnessed its voice in action. Finally, the change, rooted in peaceful
authentic conversation and negotiation, mirrored the type of change
the song’s lyrics yearned for: peaceful nonviolent change characterized
by close listening to generate informed action. Murphy has also noted
that, “the primary rhetorical impact of ‘We Shall Overcome’ [is] the
public documentation of a rhetorically formed public” (6). This pub-
lic, constituted through song, is a perlocutionary effect of this perfor-
mance of protest that “like a good piece of literature can change your
life” (Hamilton in Stotts 2010, p. 57).

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

This life-changing attribute animates the fundamental purpose of

speech acts of protest like We Shall Overcome. This yearning for change
in the song, reflected Steve Klein, spokesman for the King Center in
Atlanta, acted as “a benediction” when it was sung to close civil rights
meetings (Barry 2011). The ritualistic repetition reinforced participants’
critical awareness of the circumstances of disagreement concerning civil
rights for all Americans. As Murphy (2003) specifies, “each performance
of the song highlighted a group of citizens who collectively and pub-
licly identified themselves as committed to overcoming social injustices”
(pp. 4–5). Stotts (2010) affirms this saying, “People sang it at sit-ins,
demonstrations, and marches. They sang it as they were being dragged
away by police, and they sang it in jail. They sang it at churches, in
meetings, and on picket lines. They sang it on buses, at lunch counters,
and on the steps of county courthouses. They sang it holding hands.
‘We Shall Overcome’ spread throughout the South and throughout the
country, until everyone on both sides of the civil rights struggle knew
it—and knew what it stood for” (p. 34). In other words, the singers and
the non-singers were critically aware of this fundamental disagreement
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
129

corroding the American experiment, as their response to the song posi-

tioned them vis-à-vis their stance on civil rights, generating the convoc-
ative splintering into communities of practice.10

Words: Semantics of Opposition

The foundational semantics of opposition within We Shall Overcome are

situated within its very title, along with its chorus, “Oh, deep in my
heart, I do believe/ We shall overcome some day.” As stated earlier, the
change to the first person plural “we” shifted the focus to an overtly
inclusive group. The “we” also implies the absence of the “not-we,” of
those who do not wish to overcome. Those who do not wish to join are
implied to be part of another absence, that of the absent deictic direct
object of the verb overcome: what is to be overcome? The antecedents of
these direct object pronouns are whatever the public, created through
the discursive, rhetorical, and ritual action of the performance of the
song, requires them to be, e.g., segregationists and Jim Crow in the
American South, the Chinese government and its proposed reforms to
the Hong Kong electoral system, or Tony Abbott’s Australian govern-
ment and its skepticism on climate change. The context of “we” estab-
lishes the absent direct object’s deixis, or time, place, and issue of whom
or what shall be overcome. This plasticity of the deixis is one source of
the song’s malleability, allowing easy passage from one grassroots strug-
gle to another.
Connecting this implied direct object with its subject is the verb
phrase of “shall overcome.” As a modal auxiliary verb, “shall” has no
stand-alone meaning, but instead helps the singer enhance the degree
of certainty that the main verb “overcome” expresses for the future. It
is also associated with educated English not with the vernacular of folk
music. “Shall,” which is often used in indirect promises (e.g., “I shall
finish that immediately” versus “I promise to finish that immediately”),
conveys a sense of emphasis that reinforces the oppositional semantics
and tone of “overcome.”
As a compound word, “overcome” possesses an internal relationship
between the preposition “over” and the verb “come,” one of the most
130    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

flexible verbs in English. As a preposition, “over” as the first free mor-

pheme of the compound expresses a relationship between an agent (e.g.,
we) and the object of the preposition, whose expression is delayed due
to the appearance of free morpheme number two, “come” (e.g., the
absent deictic direct object or what is being overcome). We are in rela-
tion to something which we must transcend as part of an invitation to
“come over” to some place new. This underlying sense of arrival hints
at the utopian, a renewed civic community beyond segregation. It pro-
vides a sense of hope that “we” as the agent are doing the overcom-
ing, and not that we are to be overcome in the sense of overwhelmed,
a secondary definition of “overcome.” The hovering of this secondary
sense, however, increases the semantics of opposition as there is a critical
awareness of the overwhelming nature of Jim Crow by those committed
to either side of the issue.
The intensity of commitment is strengthened by the support of the
adverbial phrase of place, “Oh, deep in my heart,” introducing the cho-
rus that expresses the sincerity of the singer’s conviction, and reinforcing
the aspirational felicity condition of intention. This grounding of com-
mitment precedes the emphatic statement, “I do believe,” which in turn
takes the nominal clause “[that] we shall overcome” as its direct object.
Thus, the nominal clause in the chorus, that re-presents the declaration
of overcoming in the first verse, is the recipient, the direct object, of
the deep belief. This brings a syntactic dimension of the semantics of
opposition full circle in that “we” is the active agent subject doing the
overcoming in the title and verse of the song, and then, in the chorus,
serves again in the same capacity in the nominal clause, concretized as
the direct object, as a solid thing indicating the certainty under-girding
the belief of overcoming, someday.
This certainty is enhanced by the relentless anaphoric repetition
of the lyrics throughout the song. This repetition in turn supports
what folk music activist Ruth Crawford Seeger (1948) has called the
“keep-going-ness” characteristic of the performance of traditional
folk music. She encourages singers, “not [to] hesitate … to keep the
music going through many repetitions….Do not fear monotony: it
is a valuable quality” (p. 23). Its value lies in its relentlessness, which
is rejuvenated through the collective composition or “folk process” of
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
131

singers spontaneously adding new verses, to meet the exigencies of the

moment. It is, in its essence, the invitation of democracy with its con-
commitment of rights and responsibilities to the song and to the song’s
message.11
In combination with the repetitive lyrics, the basic melody, rhythm,
and optional instrumentation create a gentle-but-firm intensity pat-
tern in We Shall Overcome (Sellnow). This pattern engenders a release of
emotion (Murphy 2003, p. 4) consistent with steadfastness that is sup-
ported by the indefinite “someday” that indicates the singer is “in it for
the long haul.” This steadfastness is consistent with Crawford Seeger’s
(2001) claim that folk music often lacks the drama found in the per-
formance of professional music. She states, “The singer does not try to
make the song mean more, or less, than it does …. The tune makes no
compromises, is no slower nor faster, no softer nor louder. There is no
climax—the song ‘just stops’” (pp. 32–33). This steadiness invokes a
sense of calm and a firmness of opposition. Thus, in We Shall Overcome,
there is no dramatic arc like in 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, which
presents a parallel musical and narrative buildup to the climax of
nuclear war, followed by parallel denouements.12
The congruence of straightforward lyrics plus a simple melodic ren-
dering creates a soulful poignancy that rings true in the song. This
poignancy, a mark of authenticity in the semantics of opposition, is
also strengthened by the congruence of a ritualized physical action, the
tradition of singers crossing their arms and holding hands with those
on either side of them, that often accompanies the singing of We Shall
Overcome. Bernice Johnson Reagon remembers this ritual in action at
the founding of SNCC:

They started to sing this song, and everybody stood in the room, and
then, without any instruction, people reached for each other. … They
took their right hand and crossed it over their left, and then they had
to move together. It’s a funny thing about doing this. You have to move
together from the end of the row toward the center, because if you don’t,
the person in the center of the row will be destroyed. And you know,
sometimes, when you are fighting for freedom, you need some outside
help, which is why the [SNCC activists] come to town, to tell you that
you have to move together. (in Stotts 2010, p. 34)
132    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

This interlinking of singers created a physical center for the margin, a

coming together to withstand opposition to the hegemonic center.
It was from that day, of SNCC’s linked arms and hands held, that We
Shall Overcome emerged as the anthem for the Civil Rights Movement.

Persons: Interpellation of American Civil Rights Activists

Such ritual and tradition cultivated collective identity, meaning, and

memory (Eyerman and Jamison 1998, p. 43) among the civil rights
activists, who had been interpellated as protesters by the hail of the
hegemonic powers of segregation. However, many of them, particu-
larly those in leadership, had also been hailed by the hegemonic power
of American Christianity’s focus on responding to violence with love.
While the vast majority interpellated were African-American Christians,
ultimately, representatives of various races and creeds were interpellated,
as the horror of the violent enforcement of segregation was featured on
the nightly news and in daily newspapers. The pictures, films, songs,
prose, and poetry of the Movement exposed the viciousness of Jim
Crow’s hail and subsequent enforcements of it, particularly as it clashed
with fundamental tenets of Christianity. A plethora of excellent works
has explored the lives and motivations of many civil rights leaders.13 For
this study, three individuals whose names are not as well known, but
whose courage is representative of those in the Civil Rights Movement,
are highlighted: Barbara Rose Johns, an African-American woman
born in New York, but who ignited the effort to desegregate schools in
Virginia; James Zwerg, a white man from the American Midwest, who
was galvanized by an educational experience in Tennessee; and Bayard
Rustin, a gay African-American Quaker from Pennsylvania who edu-
cated Dr. King in the principles of nonviolence.
CORE dates the Civil Rights Movement to the courageous spark of
16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns (1935–1991), who organized and exe-
cuted a student strike at Robert Russa Moton High School, the African
American high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The school,
originally built for 180 students was substantially overcrowded with 450
students in 1951, the year Johns14 led her fellow students in the strike.
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
133

The all-white school board responded to the overcrowding by build-

ing three tarpaper shacks, freezing in the winter and sweltering in the
spring, to accommodate the overflow. Johns, a quiet introverted jun-
ior at the time, expressed her anguish about the school’s condition to a
music teacher, Miss Inez Davenport, who then asked her, “Why don’t
you do something about it?” (Congress 2015).
After exploring possible answers, Johns organized fifteen of the most
respected students on campus to lead a strike on April 23, 1951. On
that day, the students lured the principal off campus with a false claim
of truant students, and then distributed fake announcements for an
immediate all-school assembly. After the auditorium filled, the com-
mittee respectfully requested that the teachers leave, which they eventu-
ally did. At that point, Johns addressed the student body presenting the
needs of their school, then asked her classmates to protest the appalling
conditions by going on strike. Almost the entire student body boldly
stood up and walked out. When the principal returned, they refused to
go back into the school and peaceably left on the school buses at the
end of the day.
The committee requested a meeting with the school superintendent.
They were refused. The next day 200 students met with the NAACP
who asked them to call off the strike. The students refused. Recognizing
their commitment, the NAACP and the students’ parents chose to sup-
port the strike. On the third day, the students and their adult support-
ers chose to sue the county school board to end segregation. Their case,
Davis et al. v. the County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA,
et al. (1952), which they lost, ultimately was consolidated with others
in Brown.
Unlike Barbara Rose Johns, who was an African American daily suf-
fering under segregation in the South, James Zwerg (1939–present)
grew up in what he called the “lily-white community” of Appleton,
Wisconsin. Active in the First Congregational Church while growing
up, Zwerg began his studies in sociology at Beloit College just 4 years
after Brown. On his housing application, Zwerg stated he had no racial
preference for a roommate. He was paired with Bob Carter, an African-
American student. As his friendship with Carter developed, Zwerg
grew painfully aware of the systemic racism within his community.
134    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Intellectually curious as to how he might fare if the tables were turned,

Zwerg applied for the College’s exchange program with Fisk University,
a historically black institution in Nashville.
At Fisk, Zwerg joined SNCC, and in doing so like Barbara Johns and
her committee, developed social capital, increasing his political efficacy,
in a supportive community of practice. In spring 1961, Zwerg volun-
teered to be a Freedom Rider from Nashville to New Orleans, despite
the grave risks involved. Prior to departure, Zwerg like his fellow activ-
ists, penned a letter to his family “to be delivered if I am killed” (Guzder
2011, p. 28). Zwerg boarded the bus, sitting in the front with fellow
Midwesterner Paul Brooks, an African American from East St. Louis,
Illinois, while the other eight Riders, including John Lewis and Salynn
McCollum, the one white female, sat in the back. The journey pro-
ceeded peacefully until they reached the Birmingham city limits.
After stopping the bus, police ordered Brooks to the back of the
bus; he politely refused. Police ordered Zwerg to move so they could
arrest Brooks; Zwerg politely refused. Both men were arrested and sep-
arated upon arriving at Birmingham Jail. Throwing Zwerg into a cell
with twenty other white men in various states of intoxication, the
police hoped that the inebriated men would beat Zwerg (Guzder 2011,
p. 30). However, Zwerg spoke through his fear to his cellmates about
the Freedom Rides, learning along the way that many of them were
Catholics who often felt marginalized in the Baptist South. In order
to let his fellow riders know he was safe, Zwerg sang “keep your eyes
on the prize/hold on” during which several of his cellmates joined him.
Their voices carried through the cell blocks informing his fellow Riders,
placed in “protective custody,” that he was fine. Throughout the night,
Zwerg serenaded the jailed community with We Shall Overcome. His
cellmates never touched him.
Upon release the next day, Zwerg reunited with his fellow rid-
ers only to discover that all the drivers refused to drive.15 Securing a
driver the next day, they arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound ter-
minal, as a police squad car pulled out. The Riders disembarked with
no police protection for at least the first twenty minutes. Zwerg exited
first, cramming his clenched fists into his pockets, praying fervently
for the strength to “see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
135

living.” He was beaten into unconsciousness for daring to “betray” his

race. Regaining consciousness for a few moments, he realized he was
in a moving car filled with Southern voices. He assumed he was being
taken to be lynched. Instead, he was taken to Montgomery’s St. Jude’s
Catholic Hospital.
Unlike the youthful Zwerg and Johns, Bayard Taylor Rustin (1912–
1987) was already a seasoned activist by the time Brown was passed.
From his grandmother, Rustin learned “certain Quaker principles: the
equality of all human beings before God, the vital need for nonvio-
lence, the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect,”
even if they were African American and gay, like he, himself (Haughton
1999). Like the white heterosexual Zwerg, these religious principles
had interpellated Rustin in the core of his identity. Seeking an outlet
for social and racial justice in the United States, Rustin worked with A.
Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Fellowship
of Reconciliation (FOR), which became the CORE, the American
Friends Service Committee, the Socialist Party, and the War Resisters
League. Surviving incarceration twice for his civic actions, he trave-
led to India and Ghana, between 1947 and 1952, to learn more about
nonviolent movements. On his return from India, Rustin concluded
that, “We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers”
(Gates 2013).
In 1953, Rustin was arrested for public indecency, allegedly for a sex-
ual act in an automobile with two white men. Homosexual behavior
was a criminal offense in all American states at that time. For Rustin,
who had never hidden his sexual orientation, this arrest marked the first
time that it had garnered public attention. FOR demanded his resig-
nation and Rustin (2003) recognized that for him, “sex must be
sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer.”
Nevertheless, Rustin still agreed to assist Dr. King in integrating
Gandhian nonviolent principles in the Montgomery bus boycott. As the
boycott wore on through the winter of 1955–1956, Rustin activated
his creativity. In February 1956, the Ku Klux Klan paraded through
an African-American neighborhood to frighten boycotters. The neigh-
borhood response was pure Rustin, who recalled that, “We told every-
one to put on their Sunday clothes, stand on their steps, and when the
136    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Ku Kluxers come, applaud them. Well, they came, marched three

blocks, and left. They could not comprehend the new thing. They were
no long able to engender fear” (in Seeger and Reiser 1989, p. 9). The
segregationists then attempted to disgrace the leadership by arrest-
ing them for “conspiring to boycott.” However, they did not count on
the leadership’s acceptance of arrest with pride, for as Rustin reflected,
“Martin made going to jail like receiving a Ph.D.” (ibid., p. 21).
Ironically, in 1960, Rustin’s nemesis was not these same segregation-
ists, but instead US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a domi-
nant African-American Democrat from New York. When Rustin and
King decided to march on the Democratic National Convention in
Los Angeles, Powell threatened to lie to the press, claiming that Rustin
and King were lovers. It was a shameful but effective political move by
Powell, as King distanced himself from Rustin. As images of police dogs
attacking children riveted global attention on the civil rights struggles,
the timing was right for a national mobilization. King, released from
his Birmingham Jail cell, reconciled with Rustin, asking him to organize
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Roy Wilkins of the
NAACP, balked at this choice, stating that Rustin’s liabilities as a gay,
ex-communist, conscientious objector, would detract from the focus of
the civic action. Ultimately, A. Philip Randolph agreed to direct with
Rustin as deputy.
This task required all Rustin’s diplomatic skills as he united the major
civil rights groups including Randolph’s Brotherhood, SNCC, CORE,
SCLC, the National Urban League, and the NAACP, along with the
National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice and the American
Jewish Congress, in a massive action that involved over a quarter of a
million people, each one needing transportation to and from the Lincoln
Memorial, toilets, food, and first aid. They needed Bayard Rustin. His
brilliant efficiency was made manifest in Organizing Manual No. 2.16
In just 12 pages, Rustin (2015) articulated the philosophical and
political underpinnings of the march, identified its leadership, stated
the ten demands of the marchers, and managed details down to sug-
gested contents of the two boxed lunches marchers should bring with
them. The details included the information: “Along the line of march
100,000 voices, accompanied by bands and choirs, will sing ‘WE
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
137

SHALL OVERCOME’” (p. 9). Later that day, after King electrified the
crowd with his dream, Bayard Rustin’s rich tenor shared the march’s ten
demands with the 300,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial.

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

The American responses to the hail of the legal and cultural hegem-
onic speech acts of discrimination manifested themselves in a variety
of ways. Some rabidly supported the segregation of blacks and whites
in American society; some were more moderate17; and for some others
the hail backfired, inventing a community of practice that came to be
known as the Civil Rights Movement, rooted in the vernacular voices of
civil society. Hauser (1999) asserts that these vernacular voices of civic
rhetorical action can and do create public groups that shape public dis-
course and opinion (p. 33).
The creation of these publics through protest speech actions insti-
gates the convocative split, positioning speakers in relation to the issue
of civil rights. The singers of We Shall Overcome constituted and devel-
oped identity within the community of practice that challenges state
legitimized segregation. Such identity instigation spurs the dialectical
interaction of the folk process of collective composition, which nur-
tures solidarity on the margins by building social capital among sing-
ers and sometimes listeners, while simultaneously creating distance
from the hegemonic center. Shirley Adams recalled that activists drew
strength from within themselves through the music and from each other
because, “[w]hen you sing those songs, you are usually with people you
care about” (Barry 2011). In other words, the performance of these
speech acts of protest increase social capital as well as political efficacy.
Songwriter and activist Sarah Pirtle echoes Adams’ connections stating,
“When we sang [We Shall Overcome], the world changed in that very
minute. As we sang it strong with our eyes closed, we were singing the
truth into being. Each word had power and insistence. We were telling
each other that this world we can feel in our bones is coming to be” (in
Stotts 2010, p. 57). Pirtle’s reflection exemplifies Austin’s fundamental
performative idea that the saying is the doing.
138    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

As such a speech act, the song helps produce an image of a renewed

community beyond segregation, further demarcating the convocative
split between those whose ideal community is arranged as “separate but
equal” and those whose ideal is one of integration. As a moment of ide-
alized community then, the speech act is not only one of protest, but
of promise and warning as well. This adaptable protest-promise-warn-
ing developed into “tradition” and “ritual” that marks one in relation to
the issue of dissent. As Eyerman and Jamison (1998) suggest, “Singing
a song like ‘We Shall Overcome’ at political demonstrations is a ritual
event … [that] serve[s] to reunite and to remind participants of their
place in a ‘movement’ and also to locate them within a long-standing
tradition of struggle … But collective singing rituals can also capture,
in a brief, transient moment, a glimpse of, and a feeling for, a spiritual
bonding which is both rational and emotive” (pp. 35–36).
The activation of these traditional and ritual elements in turn
enhance the convocative split between center and margin, intensi-
fying identity and social capital within the community of practice,
between those rejecting the innovation of new traditions and rituals
and those engaged in their creation. The elasticity of the lyrics of We
Shall Overcome, set within the traditional, ritualized frame allows dia-
chronic connections, whether one is in the contemporary Ukraine or
1965 Selma, and synchronic ones within the moment of the individual
performance, providing a safe space for inventiveness. Perhaps the most
well known in situ adaptation is Jamila Jones’ bold improvisation, “We
are not afraid … today” in the midst of one of the many FBI raids on
the Highlander Center (Murphy 2003, p. 5; Brown 1989; Glen 1996,
p. 232). This ritualized flexibility promotes discursive constitution of
the movement across time and in the moment, while intensifying the
convocative split between those struggling for continuity and those
struggling for change.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions

Along with animating the presuppositional felicity conditions, We Shall

Overcome also fulfills the aspirational felicity conditions, particularly
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
139

due its panhuman vocative call to perseverance in the struggle for a bet-
ter world. The global reality of the song in contemporary protest taps
into the ever-growing lore and collective memory which the song con-
tinues to generate, reinforcing the presence of appropriate thoughts and
intentions, with a corresponding awareness of potential risk.

Thoughts, Intentions, Risk

During the Civil Rights Movement, participation in the collective per-

formance of We Shall Overcome indicated the presence of pro-integra-
tion thoughts, feelings, and intentions. After this song became the song
of the Movement, critical awareness, not just of the issues surrounding
civil rights, but the song as a convocative identity marker, was high
throughout the United States, especially in the South. This awareness,
intentionality, and corresponding emotion ran in tandem with the
heightened risks of involvement that included incidents of bombings
(e.g., Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham resulting in the
death of four young girls, 1963), the usage of water cannons and police
dogs on peaceful demonstrators including children (e.g., ‘Children’s
Crusade’ in Birmingham, 1963), and murder (e.g., NAACP activist and
Army veteran Medgar Evers, 1963).
The singing of We Shall Overcome often served as a strategy to cope
with the terror that accompanied participation in the Movement,
increasing solidarity and political efficacy, while strengthening commit-
ment to a reimagined American community. This is poignantly illus-
trated in the verse coined by Jamila Jones. At the close of a weekend
workshop on desegregation, the police raided the Highlander Center,
cutting electricity and ransacking the facility. As Highlanders sat vulner-
able in the darkness, they began to sing We Shall Overcome. Jones, then
a young high school student, introduced the verse “We are not afraid …
today.” The Movement lore is that the police quipped, “If you have to
sing, do you have to sing so loud?” to which the Highlanders responded
by singing louder (Stotts 2010, p. 33).
Civil rights worker Willie Peacock recalled being part of a group that
sang We Shall Overcome for thirty minutes, struggling to control their
140    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

fear in the face of a violent Ku Klux Klan crowd. He said, “[W]hen we

finished singing, there was no fear. It put you in touch with a larger
self that couldn’t be killed” (in Stotts 2010, p. 40). Freedom Rider-
turned-US Congressman John Lewis affirmed this, stating that, “‘It
gave you a sense of faith, a sense of strength, to continue to struggle, to
continue to push on. And you would lose your sense of fear. You were
prepared to march into hell’s fire’” (ibid., p. 41; NPR 1999). In other
words, the singers declared in this context an intentional pro-integra-
tion identity, legitimized by their choice of risk over safety, in their con-
vocation on the margins.

Commitment and Subsequent Action

And they did march into hell’s fire, many times, including on March 7,
1965. On that day, they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge
between Selma and Montgomery in the quest for voting rights and in
protest of a state trooper’s murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. After block-
ading the bridge, police attacked the 525 marchers with tear gas, whips,
and clubs. More than fifty marchers were hospitalized in what became
known as “Bloody Sunday” (Learning 2012). This photographed and
televised violation of the Social Contract, by those sworn to protect
American citizens, revealed the United States not as a land of the free,
but certainly as a land of the brave, as those denied their voting rights
had shed their blood at the very hands of those who were supposed to
protect them. Identity of protester and segregationist was intimately
shaped by legitimate and illegitimate state behaviors. Their speech acts
reflected how their identity was shaped. For the protest community of
practice, the singers of We Shall Overcome repeatedly fulfilled the ren-
ovated felicity conditions of protest, marking them as convoked on the
margins, in a pragmatically legitimate performance of a speech act of
protest.
During the Civil Rights Movement, through the telescoped eye of
the news camera, the world witnessed the centripetal force of the state
enacted upon the bodies of its citizens through the use of the fire hose,
nightstick, and police dog. This witnessing of these points of impact
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
141

generated an inverse centrifugal force as the shockwave of the spray of

the cannon, the thud of the nightstick, and the teeth of the dogs rever-
berated throughout the United States and abroad. The ferocity of the
commitment repeatedly demonstrated—by both segregationists and
civil rights integrationists alike—struck the blows that began the frac-
turing of the legal hegemony of racism in the United States. In a tel-
evised speech to Congress watched by 70 million people, President
Lyndon Baines Johnson (2015) presented the Voting Rights Act of
1965, outlawing discriminatory voting laws, while providing for fed-
eral oversight of registration in endangered precincts. In this speech,
Johnson, a southern Democrat from Texas, declared:

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape
a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at
Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it
was last week in Selma, Alabama. There is no Negro problem. There is
no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an
American problem. …
It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full
blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it
is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crip-
pling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we…shall…overcome. This
great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope
to all—all black and white, all North and South, sharecropper and city
dweller. These are the enemies—poverty, ignorance, disease—they are our
enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too—
poverty, disease, and ignorance—we shall overcome.

By citing the song, Johnson was taking his lead from Dr. King who
had, himself, cited it in his 1964 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace
Prize. However, all were not pleased with Johnson’s use of the song or
with the song’s perceived passivity and its implications of nonviolence.
Even as the song generated the convocative split between the legal and
cultural hegemony of racism and the margins, it also produced a con-
vocative split within the margins, between those committed to use
“whatever means necessary” (e.g., Malcolm X) and those who pursued
equality for African Americans only through nonviolence. Murphy,
142    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

highlighting Fraser’s idea of the “plurality of competing publics” (Fraser

1997, p. 75) has noted that some activists perceived We Shall Overcome
as passive and idealistic, thus creating a counter public of the Civil
Rights Movement, exemplified by Stokely Carmichael’s shift of SNCC’s
focus to “Black Power” in the latter stages of the movement (Murphy
2003, p. 6).
This splintering of the margins has continued today. The pro-
tests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown, a
young unarmed African-American man by a white police officer, has
sparked disagreement between nonviolent veterans of the Civil Rights
Movement and younger protesters (Brown 2014). Clearly, racial inte-
gration remains incomplete in the United States. Although the country
has now twice elected Barak Obama, the first African-American presi-
dent, strains of racism, discrimination, and fear continue to permeate
various aspects of American life as evidenced by Brown’s death and that
of others. Nevertheless, despite this hope delayed, the strains of We Shall
Overcome has simultaneously continued to nourish Americans as well as
others around the globe. Others around the globe, in fact everyone on
the globe, is the focus of concern for the second protest song examined
in this book, “99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons,” by the 1980s German
pop rock band Nena, which tells the story of an accidental nuclear war.

Nena and 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons

On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet Army officer
charged with pressing the red START button as a retaliatory response
to a US nuclear first strike, chose not to do that very thing. The Soviet
early warning system had signaled—erroneously—the firing of up to
five US nuclear missiles launched at the Soviet Union. Fortunately for
the world, the computer of Petrov’s brain was more sophisticated than
the computer at his workstation. As he reviewed the incoming data,
he said two thoughts crossed his mind. The first was of the unlikeli-
hood that the US would only launch 5 missiles, not enough to wipe
out the USSR, when they had thousands at battle readiness. The sec-
ond was that “I imagined if I’d assume the responsibility for unleashing
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
143

the third World War—and I said, no, I wouldn’t” (Long 2007). Further
investigation proved that the Russian satellite had picked up the sun’s
reflection off the tops of the clouds and mistook them for a US missile
launch.
Accidental nuclear war was avoided, but the continuing threat led
to a musical performance of protest about the dangers of such an acci-
dent, 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, by Nena, from their eponymous
first album, Nena (1983). This song, a techno-pop dirge for the human
race, tells the story of a nuclear conflict triggered by the confusing of
99 balloons with nuclear missiles. This blockbuster hit, written by the
band’s guitarist Carlo Karges, tapped into the hypertension that char-
acterized life lived under Cold War scenarios, such as that from which
Lt. Colonel Petrov saved the planet. The German version of the song hit
number one on the German, Austrian, Australian, Japanese, and Swiss
charts, number two on the US Billboard Hot 100, and number one on
the Cash Box Top 100 pop charts (Song Facts 2014). The English ver-
sion hit number one on the Irish, Canadian, and British pop charts, one
of two songs about nuclear war that hit number one in the UK in 1984,
the other being Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes Go to War.”
Originally, Nena had not intended to produce an English version.
However, the folk legend is that a DJ in Los Angeles at KROQ dis-
covered a copy and began to play it (Song Facts 2014). It was wildly
popular. This prompted the members of the band to try writing an
English translation, but they couldn’t get the sound of it quite right.
Their manager approached Kevin McAlea, who was then playing with
Barclay James Harvest, to give it a try. Having asked a German friend
to translate the general gist of the song, McAlea focused on the “sound
the lyrics were making” instead of the meaning of the song. The mem-
bers of Nena were so pleased with the adaptation that they immediately
recorded and released the English version.
As shown by the lyrics in Fig. 4.1, the English version is not a direct
translation of the German. Whereas, McAlea’s version captures the
sentiment and message of the original German, the language is not as
stark in certain lines of the song. For example, in the closing verse, the
German version refers to 99 years of war, “99 Jahre Krieg,” whereas the
English version refers to “99 dreams” of war. However, the plot line and
144    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

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Fig. 4.1  Lyrics and translation for 99 Luftaballons/99 Red Balloons

tempo of the song is the same in both languages, with a slow tempo in
the first verse in the narrative buildup to the misidentification of the
balloons as nuclear missiles, followed by a quickened tempo during the
scrambling of warplanes and the ensuing war, itself. The tempo slows
again in the final verse about the devastating aftermath of a nuclear war.
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
145

The surface structure of this performance of protest is that of a tech-

no-pop dance song, whereas its deep structure of this performance of
protest is that of: “We, the members of Nena, protest the super power
behaviors that recklessly threaten humanity with nuclear destruction.”

The Deep Story of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons:

“It Is 3 Minutes to Midnight”

Nena invited everyone to dance to its hit song in a world “whose con-
tinued existence [was] in doubt,” as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein,
and other leading intellectuals had summed up their antinuclear posi-
tion in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955. In this declaration,
they asserted that, “The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing
all minor conflicts, [is] the titanic struggle between Communism and
anti-Communism” or the Cold War (Russel et al. 2001). The visual
metaphor for this titanic struggle is that of the Doomsday Clock, cre-
ated in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, as an indicator of
how close the world is at any given moment to engaging in nuclear war.
The closer the time is to midnight, the closer the world is to a nuclear
holocaust. In 1984, the clock chimed at three minutes to midnight, as
Nena’s haunting voice launched 99 Luftballons to the top of the pop
charts around the globe. This was the closest the world had come to
the witching hour since 1953, when the clock had been moved to two
minutes to midnight, after the United States and the Soviet Union had
tested hydrogen bombs within nine months of each other. This time,
however, the scientists had moved the hands of the clock not because of
tests of new weapons, but because “U.S.-Soviet relations [had reached]
their iciest point in decades” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2015). US
President Ronald Reagan had christened the USSR an “evil empire”
and the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had condemned Reagan’s diplo-
macy as merely, “‘obscenities alternating with hysterical preaching’”
(McEnaney 2000, p. 3). The Bulletin informed the world that “Every
channel of communications has been constricted or shut down; every
form of contact has been attenuated or cut off. And arms control nego-
tiations have been reduced to a species of propaganda.”
146    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

This “species of propaganda” fed the foreign policy of détente known

as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) or the belief propounded by
Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, “that by stockpiling
many weapons neither side has anything to gain by initiating a first
strike because of the retaliatory capability of both to send the other
back to the Paleolithic” (Schermer 2014). Thus, the idea emerged
that MAD would deter an outbreak of nuclear war. In 1979, the West
under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
had decided that if then-current diplomatic efforts with the Soviet
Union failed, it would enact its “Double Track” strategy of deploying
intermediate range, Pershing II, “Euro missiles,” in response to the
Soviet placement of SS-20 mid-range missiles. The tension increased as
“[s]tacked around the world at the beginning of the decade, there was a
minimum of 50,000 nuclear warheads belonging to the two main pow-
ers, whose combined explosive capacity exceed[ed] by one million times
the destructive power of the first atomic bomb which was dropped on
Hiroshima” (Coates 2006, p. 51).
As the Americans and the Soviets played global roulette, feeding an
irrational arms race that would contribute to the bankruptcy of the
USSR, many concerned citizens took labor activist and songwriter
Joe Hill’s advice of, “Don’t mourn. Organize!”18 Groups such as the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and European Nuclear
Disarmament (END) mushroomed in Europe with sister organiza-
tions, such as the Great Peace March, extending across the globe. The
era was characterized by massive rallies in Europe and the United States.
For example, on October 10, 1981, nearly 300,000 demonstrators,
from diverse backgrounds, marched in Bonn, the capital of the Federal
Republic of (West) Germany in opposition to the superpowers’ arms
race and the German role in it. Similar mass rallies sprang up across
Europe and the United States, with more than one million people par-
ticipating in a Nuclear Weapons Freeze demonstration in New York’s
Central Park on June 12, 1982. In the following autumn of 1983,
about five million Europeans marched against the deployment of Euro
missiles (Klimke 2012).
In their founding statement, END, a pan-European organization pro-
moting peace “from Poland to Portugal,” noted that the American-led
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
147

NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had more than enough nuclear
weapons stockpiled not only to annihilate each other, but also to “endan-
ger the very basis of civilized life” (Coates 2006, p. 47). Prominent
scientists, such as R.P. Turco and Carl Sagan supported this claim, intro-
ducing the horrific concept of “nuclear winter” into the global vocabu-
lary (Turco 1983), while a plethora of serious works compelled readers
to contemplate the end of all life, including Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the
Earth (1982).19 In this work, Schell prepares us for Nena’s song when
he states, “‘The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair
trigger, waiting for the “button” to be “pushed” by some misguided or
deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the
instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point—
that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless
moment—is a fact against which belief rebels” (p. 182).
The fear of nuclear holocaust was ubiquitous. The television media
reinforced it as “one hundred million Americans tuned into ABC’s
postapocalyptic drama The Day After, a program so troubling that
Secretary of State George Schultz felt compelled to appear immediately
after the end credits to assure viewers that the Reagan administration
was doing all it could to avert doomsday” (Lynskey 2011, p. 357). For
the American military professional, the United States Marine Corps
manual provided detailed advice for survival and counterattack. For the
British civilian, the British Home Office published Protect and Survive,
which terrified the population instead of reassuring it (British).
Antinuclear fears proliferated through other popular culture ven-
ues such as film, with movies such as The China Syndrome (1979),
War Games (1983), and When the Wind Blows (1986), as well as in
music with songs such as Kate Bush’s “Breathing,” Frankie Goes to
Hollywood’s “Two Tribes Go to War,” the Clash’s “Stop the World,”
Genesis’ “The Land of Confusion,” Righeira’s “Vamos a la playa,”
Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” and UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming.”
Musicians formed activist groups to participate in peace campaigns such
as the continental European group, Künstler für den Frieden/ Artists
for Peace, which “served West German musicians, artists, actors, and
intellectuals as a platform for political protest” (Gassert 2014), and its
American counterpart, Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), led
148    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

by Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, which organized a series of No

Nukes concerts (Lynskey 2011, p. 358).
With the formation of these groups consisting of professional per-
formers in conjunction with grassroots activists, nuclear protest grew to
be much more professionalized, with event managers and more com-
mercially popular music, to appeal to a wider audience. Consumption
of this more commercialized music, like 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons,
became a form of “protest-light,” pre-dating the “Like” of Facebook.
Protest during this era also became more transnational as American and
European civil rights activists crisscrossed the Atlantic to promote global
peace (Groupee 2014). Within this increasingly globally oriented envi-
ronment, the nuclear arms race intensified, increasing the probability of
annihilation by mistake.
It was of such a devastating miscalculation that Nena sings, as
the child’s toy of balloons is mistaken for an enemy nuclear attack.
Considering that Europe was the most militarized zone on the planet
in 1984, with between 10,000 and 15,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled
on the continent for tactical use in the European theater, this was not a
far-flung daydream, but a real and present fear (Coates 2006, p. 51). A
cartoon published with END’s founding statement shows a globe with
a bomb crater, in the location of what had been Europe, with a cap-
tion attributed to American and Soviet superpowers of, “Phew. That was
close” (Fig. 4.2).
Europe was sandwiched between two belligerents who were on erratic
speaking terms, threatening the continent with becoming a hecatomb
in which would be buried not only hundreds of millions of people but
also the remnants of a civilization (Coates 2006, p. 53). Europe had
morphed from blood-soaked center of two world wars to an unwilling
continental host of a potential global shoot-out. The focal point, the
proverbial OK Corral of this shoot-out, was the divided German city of
Berlin, a city cut through its heart by a wall separating the East from the
West.
In the shadow of the Berlin Wall, musicians tapped into a vein of
German culture and history in which pulsed a dynamic relation-
ship between politics and song that had been active at least since the
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
149

Fig. 4.2  Phew, that was close by Brick

Vormärz era, the 40-year period of German Romanticism preceding the

Märzrevolution/March Revolution of 1848. During this period, music
was often debated and employed as a “service art” to politics (Garratt
2010, p. 69). This conception of music as a change-agent in German
society survived and flourished after World War II straight through the
Cold War in a divided Germany. From the rise of the student move-
ment of the 1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political pro-
test song was a “prominent feature of the cultural landscape in divided
Germany” (Wallace 2008). This remained true in the early 1980s when
songs such as 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons were prominently fea-
tured in the antinuclear focused campaigns of the newly founded West
German Green Party. The Greens crisscrossed the country, in a 30-foot
flower-painted bus, the “Green Caterpillar,” cruising for enough votes
to earn seats in the Bundestag (United Press 1983). The campaign of
the bus tour fused culture, poetry, and music with peace-politics.
Within these layers of Cold War context, 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons
animated the first two renovated felicity conditions, the presupposi-
tions, for the performance of this pop rock performance of a protest
speech act.
150    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions of 99 Luftballons/99

Red Balloons

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

The conventions, of the civic, the vocative, and the orientation to

change, are distinctive for 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons as opposed to
other instances examined here in that the civic dimension of this protest
performative was not only the topic of the 1980s, but also the only one
dealing with the obliteration of the human species. Before August 1945,
there were simply “bombs,” but after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there
was the proper noun of The Bomb. The threat of The Bomb simply was,
and continues to be, not like any other threat, issues, or concerns. All
others assume the continuation of the planet as well as the continuation
of the species homo sapien, whether one is marching and chanting in
the sunshine of Istanbul or scratching out poems in the cold and dark
of Ceausescu’s Romania. This one does not. The song taps into fear and
hope for change by articulating the sentiments of the Russell-Einstein
Manifesto when it stated, “All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is
understood, there is hope that [we] may collectively avert it. We have to
learn to think in a new way.” The song’s narrative encourages an under-
standing of the peril to change popular thinking through its portrayal of
the intimate relationship between human error and bellicosity.
The convention of the vocative call of this performance of protest is
a doubled phenomenon with an internal vocative within the song itself
and an external vocative directed towards the song’s listenership. This
convention also serves as bookends for the song, both in German and
English, with internal direct address occurring in the first and final
verses. Within the song, the original German vocative does differ from
its English counterpart. In the German, the narrator-as-bard, as vessel of
the collective memory, opens the song by asking the listener: “Hast du
etwas Zeit für mich/ Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich/ Von 99 Luftballons/
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont.” (Literal English: “Have you some time
for me, / then sing I a song for you/ about 99 balloons/ on their journey
to the horizon.”) The “I” is making a respectful request on the listen-
er’s time; it is the I’s tale that she offers to tell You. It is not a shared
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
151

adventure initiated together, but one that had taken place before, and
is now being reported by the I. In the German, the balloons are already
on their way to the horizon when the singer asks if you want her to sing
you a tale. Neither the singer nor the listener was involved in initiat-
ing the chain reaction that leads to a “Welt in Trümmern liegen ” or the
“world lying in ruins.” The narrator is nuclear war’s Horatio, left to tell
the tale of humanity.
In the English adaptation of the song, the narrator opens with a
direct address recollection of “You and I” going to a little toyshop to
buy red balloons which We release at dawn: “You and I in a little toy
shop/ Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got/Set them free
at the break of dawn/Til one by one, they were gone.” In this open-
ing, “You and I” work together as an “inclusive we” as opposed to the
I-distinct-from-You singular pairing, in the German version. However,
in the final verse of the song, the German and English versions converge
with the narrator engaging in a vocative memorial of You:

“If I could find a souvenir/Just to prove the world was here/ And here is a
red balloon/ I think of you, and let it go.”
“Heute zieh’ ich meine Runden/ She’ die Welt in Trümmern liegen/ Hab’
‘nen Luftballon gefunden/ Denk’ an dich und lass’ ihn fliegen.”
“Today I make my rounds/see the world lying in ruins. I found a bal-
loon, /think of you and let it fly away.” (literal English translation)

By inviting consideration of the devastating outcome of failed détente,

this memorial vocative encourages alternative thinking to MAD. The
pathos of this orientation to change persuades because it indexes the
human propensity to make mistakes, as well as to react out of anger or
hysteria instead of responding out of reason. The tragic dimension of
this propensity is highlighted by the release of a child’s toy as the unin-
tentional trigger of destruction, as opposed to an intentional nuclear
attack launched by the super powers. As a speech act, it is not only one
of protest, then, but also one of warning, of the dangers of high stakes
geopolitical gamesmanship. The juxtaposition-syncopation of the lyr-
ics of a lament with a highly danceable techno beat masks this warn-
ing, perhaps making its message more palatable, less frightening, while
152    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

making the song, itself, more memorable, increasing the possibility of it

actually encouraging change.

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

The need for change in super power foreign policy and engagement is
the crux of the song and the circumstance of disagreement. The disa-
greement is between those engaged in the irrational rhetoric of “all
options are on the table,” including the nuclear option of first or retal-
iatory strike, versus those aligned with Russell and Einstein, pointing
out that nuclear war is not an option under any set of circumstances. As
the 1955 Manifesto points out, the general public, as well as many in
authority, had failed to grasp that an atomic war would not just mean
an obliteration of cities, but could mean an actual obliteration of the
human race. The Manifesto then posits the point of disagreement taken
up by Nena: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you: stark
and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race;
or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative
because it is so difficult to abolish war.”
Rising above this difficulty, rooted in a plethora of psychological,
political, and economic factors, requires an active citizenry with a criti-
cal awareness. It is of such a citizenry in relation to such a difficulty that
President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961), spoke in
his farewell address to Congress in 1961. Due to his service as Supreme
Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF) for the Battle of
Normandy during World War II, Eisenhower was uniquely positioned
to posit such a challenge:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of

unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-in-
dustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing
for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
153

with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may
prosper together.

To borrow Eisenhower’s phrase, an alert and knowledgeable citizenry

possesses a critical awareness of the global arms race that had hijacked
and continues to do so, a significant segment of the world’s economy.
Berlin as ground zero certainly possessed such a citizenry, including the
band members of Nena.

Words: Semantics of Opposition

For 99 Luftballons the semantics of opposition are crafted in the tra-

dition of the German political song characterized by the “expression
of utopianism on one hand and by dashed aspirations on the other,”
a dichotomy often described as the deutsche Misere (German misery)
(Robb 2007, p. 4). Carlo Karges, the song’s lyricist, taps into the ulti-
mate dashed aspirations by creating a bard who takes on the narra-
tive role-play of an Everyman figure, come to tell the tale of a bygone
world, to an audience of Everymen. Humanity is the addressed com-
munity of practice. Within the context of the song, the antecedents of
“I” or “You” could be anyone, because nuclear annihilation involves
everyone. By crafting this Everyman role through a dramatic mon-
ologue or Rollengedicht, Karges draws from the rich reservoir of nar-
rative role-playing in German political songs from those of the 1920s
Weimar cabaret featuring Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring to the
dramatic monologues of Franz Josef Degenhardt in the 1960s and
beyond (Robb 2010).
The use of the semantics of political songs as an effective means to
oppose nuclear power had already been established in West Germany
by the end of the 1970s. During this decade, Liedermacher (singer-
songwriters) and folk groups contributed significantly to successful
campaigns to prevent construction of nuclear power plants (Holler
2007, p. 141). Historically, these Liedermacher wrote songs in which the
delivery style, language register, and musical accompaniment ­reinforced
the role-play and the political stances being advocated. They assumed
154    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

that the audience recognized the roles and stances being promoted,
which in turn entailed a degree of political, historical, or literary aware-
ness within the audience (Robb 2007, p. 67). In the original German,
Karges’ lyrics indicated an assumption of audience awareness of possi-
ble nuclear war, along with audience recognition of the Everyman nar-
rator-bard as presenter of the semantics of opposition: “Und dass so was
von so was kommt ”/“and that such a thing comes from such a thing.”
This opposition is reinforced in the English adaptation by McAlea,
through the choice of the single syllable word “red” to preserve the
rhythm of the original German lyric of Luft. He could have chosen
green or blue, also single syllable color terms, but red was the color asso-
ciated with the Communist Bloc; it was the color of the Wholly Other
for the West.
Along with color and history, 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons drew
on slogans as well as a narrative framing of argument to facilitate the
semantics of opposition. Frith (1998) has asserted that modern pro-
test pop has a tendency to turn on slogans, such as 99 red balloons, or
Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” instead of turning on an intellectual
argument (165). However, like the Kampflied (camp songs associated
with the class struggle) of Brecht and Eister, 99 Luftballons possessed
elements of both (Robb 2007, p. 69). It presented a simplified argu-
ment highlighting the increasing possibility of catastrophic human
error through the highly memorable voice of Gabriele “Nena” Kerner, a
highly danceable beat, written and provided by Nena keyboardist Uwe
Fahrenkrog-Peterson, and a highly singable slogan and refrain provided
by Carlo Karges.

Persons: The Interpellation of Nena and Listeners as Nuclear War

Protesters

In 1982, Karges attended a Rolling Stones concert that was part of the
European Tour for Tattoo You. During the concert at the Waldbühne
(the “Forest Theatre”) in West Berlin, not far from the Berlin Wall,
there was a massive balloon release. Karges watched as those balloons
drifted into the sky, and “began to fantasize about how … one balloon
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
155

might be mistaken for an enemy plane. How the East Germans might
fire at it. And how the West Germans might fire back. In his imagina-
tion, he saw the entire world consumed by war. All because of that one
balloon” (Kasem 2011).
Whereas for many, if not most, protesters, their interpellation comes
from a hail from the hegemonic power more directly, for Karges and
the members of Nena, the hail was issued through the innocence of a
concert balloon release. However, the news and expectations of daily life
during this phase of the Cold War were so saturated with nuclear anxi-
eties that the time was ripe for such an imaginative fantasy. Fortunately,
Karges’ creativity sketched these anxieties into a story that resonated
across borders and languages.

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

When Russell, Einstein, and their fellow scholars published their

Manifesto, asking whether or not human beings would denounce war,
they posited a mass question to a mass culture. “Shall we, instead,
choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?” The post-
apocalyptic image of 99 knights of the air, shooting down balloons
with nuclear missiles, is a response for the masses via pop music, not
folk music, a more traditional medium of the protest song. However,
although not a folk song, it did capture what sociologist R. Serge
Denisoff has called the magnetic and rhetorical dimensions of the pro-
test song. Magnetic songs have traditionally encouraged solidarity and
commitment to a cause, while rhetorical songs have worked to change
the listener’s political opinions. The two versions of this song have
accomplished both of these duties through the telling of an engag-
ing story that (1) encourages solidarity by issuing an Everyman call to
awareness and (2) prompts a change of thinking and responding to the
Wholly Other, to live “beyond war” (National Peace 2013), to identify
and legitimate a global community of practice.
The choice of solidarity with the anti-war position of
99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons identifies the listener either with the
MAD camp of the hegemonic super powers, or on the margins in the
156    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

No Nukes camp. This choice of identity has been rather tricky as the
choice of the anti-war position risked one being ridiculed as one who
is naïve about the Other, while the choice of the “all options on the
table” position risked the denial of painfully acquired scientific, moral,
and legal evidence gathered on the use of nuclear weapons since 1945.
Another way the convocativity effect generated by this particular song
is peculiar is that it convoked the super powers as a unified entity occu-
pying the hegemonic center, in opposition to all those who rejected the
nuclear arms race, occupying the margin. It was not a typical convoc-
ative split between a grassroots organization and a hegemonic power,
such as the United Farm Workers in opposition to agricultural corpora-
tions. Instead, the two superpowers congealed in the hegemonic center,
joined by other MAD-oriented powers such as British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher’s government. Against this center of power, the pan-
global grassroots antinuclear community of practice stood in opposi-
tion. This is the sort of transnational covocative split generated by the
Occupy Movement, with the 1% holding down the hegemonic center
and the 99% across the globe occupying the margins. This position-
ing of margin and center fulfills the second of the renovated felicity
conditions, and invites consideration of how the song also fulfills the
Aspirational Felicity Conditions as discussed below.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of “99 Luftballons/99 Red

Balloons ”

Thoughts, Intentions, and Risk

Although the trigger of the conflagration differed in the German and

English versions of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, the song’s narrative
indicates the appropriate thoughts, feelings, and intentions of a protest
performative against nuclear war. In the German version, an unnamed
general activates a fighter squadron when the balloons are mistaken for
UFOs on the horizon. There is a command to sound the alarm if it is
so, but it turns out that they are only balloons. However, the great war-
riors in the 99 jet fighters, seeing themselves as Captain Kirk of Star
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
157

Trek fame, choose to shoot them down in a high tech fireworks display.
The problem, however, is that the neighbors, the East Germans and the
Soviet Union, misunderstood and thought they were being provoked.
So, they, too, shot at the horizon, leading to 99 years of war, leaving
no room for victors. In McAlea’s English version, after You and I buy
the balloons and let them go at dawn, it is a faulty early warning com-
puter system that flashes that something is out there, tripping panic
bells and red alerts. The war machine springs to life, opening one eager
eye to focus on the red balloons. There are meetings and decisions to
“worry, worry super flurry call the troops out in a hurry” ordering the
99 Captain Kirks to “identify, clarify, classify,” and scramble in the sum-
mer sky. However, these reconnaissance activities are taken as a threat by
the Other to the Other, and nuclear war ensues.
Intentionality for this lyrical protest performative, like the vocative,
is an internal and external dynamic. Externally for the protesters, them-
selves, Karges had stated that the intention or “the message [was] simply
not to let little things grow into big things that can no longer be con-
trolled” (Kasem 2011). Internally, within the song, the intentions of the
Captain Kirks were not to engage the Other in a nuclear war; however,
unintentionally the hyped-up, disproportionate responses of the Other
to a perceived threat lead to an accidental nuclear war. The dire warning
that such a thing could come from such a thing.
Ironically, the act of singing a protest warning of the ultimate risk of
nuclear doom was not a particularly risky activity in the West overall,
or in West Germany in particular. From the rise of the German student
movement in the 1960s through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
political song was a consistently vibrant and often disconcerting pres-
ence on both sides of the Wall. During this time, the West German gov-
ernment “demonstrated the political flexibility required to integrate the
dissident thrust of the political song into mainstream culture” (Wallace
2008, p. 212), although its East German counterpart failed to do so,
fueling an active counter culture up to German reunification. The fact
that 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons was a global pop culture phenom-
enon also diluted the risk associated with it as a type of protest song.
Its commercial and mass appeal along with its topic—no one who is
sane is hoping for a nuclear winter—minimized the risk associated
158    
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with this performance of protest. Since reunification and the collapse

of the Soviet Union though, the German political song has faded into
the country’s music scene, no longer a fashionable vehicle for discon-
tent. However, German musical history, of Vormärz and the Weimer
Republic, indicates that music as change-agent ebbs and flows in the
culture, and that once again German music will emerge with aspirations
and intentions of generating change in society.

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

The trajectory of Nena, the band, as well as that of the antinuclear

movement, paralleled that of the German political song. Commitment
to the antinuclear movement waned in light of the re-structuring of
geo-political life at the end of the Cold War, even though nuclear weap-
ons and nuclear reactors have remained a threat, just not as prominent
a one. The current international concerns about North Korea’s nuclear
program, along with the 2015 international negotiations on Iran’s
nuclear program, and the 2011 Japanese protests over the reopening
of nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, however, indi-
cate continued global concern with the dangers of nuclear weapons and
power. Nena, the group, disbanded in 1987, and Nena Kerner subse-
quently pursued a solo career. Carlo Karges died in 2002. Other band
members continue to be involved in the music industry.
Through her solo career, Nena Kerner has continued to perform the
song, recording other versions (2002, 2009), one of which includes lyr-
ics in French (2009). Even as the threat of nuclear war has faded from
global protest consciousness, despite the Doomsday Clock being set at 2
½ minutes to midnight in 2017,20 the song has remained vibrant being
covered by bands such as Goldfinger, while being used in television
shows such as the American sitcoms Scrubs and 30 Rock. In 2006, the
cable music station, VH1 Classic, sponsored a charity event for survi-
vors of Hurricane Katrina on the American Gulf Coast. Viewer-donors
chose the music videos for station airplay in exchange for their contri-
butions to the relief fund. One viewer-donor gave $35,000 for continu-
ous play for one hour of 99 Luftballons and 99 Red Balloons, which were
aired from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., on 26 March 2006 (PR Newswire 2006).
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
159

In late 1989, Nena released her first solo album, Wunder gescheh’n
(“Miracles Happen”) referring to her pregnancy with twins. She per-
formed the title track at the Konzert für Berlin/ Concert for Berlin three
days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the major events marking
the ending of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. The title track
came to be associated with the ideas of birth and regeneration as repre-
sented by a newly reunified Germany. Nena has continued to demon-
strate her commitment to future generations as evidenced through
her release of several albums of songs for children, her mentoring of
young singer-songwriters such as Sharron Levy, and her founding of
an alternative school with Philip Palm, Thomas Simmerl, and Silke
Steinfadt. The Neue Schule Hamburg, opened in 2007, following the
Sudbury model in which students “choose through a democratic pro-
cess, how their environment operates,” dramatically increasing student
responsibility for their individual learning (Collins 2014). Such sub-
sequent actions and commitment to the common good completes the
fulfillment of the renovated felicity conditions for the pragmatic legiti-
macy of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons as a performative speech act of
protest.
Moving from the limelight of the center stage of global protest to a
secondary stage, the international antinuclear movement has been in
some ways a victim of its own success. In 1988, the Bulletin for Atomic
Scientists re-set the Doomsday Clock to “6 minutes to Midnight”
because the United States and Soviet Union had finally signed the
historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. According to the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (2015), this was “the first agreement to
actually ban a whole category of nuclear weapons. The leadership shown
by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev
[made] the treaty a reality, but public opposition to U.S. nuclear weap-
ons in Western Europe inspire[d] it.” Bruce Kent (1999), who served
as general secretary of the CND from 1980 to 1985 and as chairman
from 1987 to 1990, reinforced this observation in his reflections on the
successes and failures of the peace movement. He claimed that although
the movement failed to “woo governments or journalists away from
the notion that security lays in some ever-to-be-sought-after numerical
balance,” it did manage to generate a public, transnational debate on
160    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

nuclear defense and security issues, which had been shrouded in secrecy
since the Second World War (p. 15).
This open debate changed minds as early as 1979 when Lord Louis
Mountbatten stated that, “As a military man who has given half a cen-
tury of active service, I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race
has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons.
Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which
they have generated” (in Kent 1999, p. 14). He has been joined in such
thinking by previously staunch deterrence advocates like General Lee
Butler, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Strategic Command,
responsible for Air Force and Navy nuclear forces. Many former deter-
rence supporters, who have recognized not only the lack of military
purpose for nuclear weapons but also the illegality of their use as stated
in the World Court’s 1996 advisory opinion on it, have become mem-
bers of the over 2000 organizations across 90 countries that make up
Abolition 2000. This organization, along with others such as the US
National Peace Academy, has continued to campaign for the complete
abolition of nuclear weapons. In 1990, South Africa, under F.W. de
Klerk’s apartheid government, terminated the country’s secret nuclear
weapons program, becoming the first country to voluntarily give up its
nuclear weapons program (NTI 2014). That same year, 1990, Mikhail
Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the
peace process by slowing the arms race and increasing rates of arms con-
trol and disarmament (Norwegian 1990).
Since Nena took the stage in 1984 to warn of the bug in the software,
more nuclear power reactors have closed than opened in recent years
(Babbage 2013), while Germany, Nena’s reunified home country, has
begun phasing them out completely (BBC 2011). In the middle of the
second decade of the second century that has housed nuclear weapons,
the glowing example of moral conviction and cool-headedness of Soviet
officer Stanislav Petrov has continued to shine even as the Doomsday
Clock now stands at 2 ½ minutes to midnight.
In the next chapter, two performances of protest with surface struc-
tures of poems are interrogated. The first, “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s
Crusade,” was composed by Ana Blandiana, during the same year Nena
sang of the red balloons, in Soviet-era Romania during the Cold War.
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
161

The second, “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is a sweet and good thing” was
composed by British poet-soldier Wilfred Owen during the Great War,
only 30 years before the Doomsday Clock first chimed.

Notes
1. For an overview of the experience of the freedom riders and the Civil
Rights Movement and its Veterans, please visit: http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/roster.
2. It was and is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a freedom song
that invigorated the movement: “[T]here have been those moments
when disunity could have occurred if it had not been for the unifying
force of freedom songs and the great spirituals … There are so many
difficult moments when individuals falter and would almost give up
in despair. These freedom songs have a way of giving new courage
and new vigor to face the problems and difficulties ahead” in Serge
Denisoff’s Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green, Kentucky:
Bowling Green State University Press, 1983, pp. 75–76.
3. The name Jim Crow comes from the nineteenth century minstrel
show character that ridiculed African Americans. See the University of
Illinois at Chicago’s “Origins of the Term Jim Crow” at: http://www.
uic.edu/educ/bctpi/historyGIS/greatmigration/gmdocs/jim_crow_ori-
gin.html. University of Illinois at Chicago. 2015.
4. This system was characterized by a variety of oppressive policies:
Political policies, e.g., restrictions on voting rights through measures
such as the “grandfather clause,” preventing anyone whose ancestors
did not have the right to vote before the ‘War of Northern Aggression’
from voting; Medical policies, e.g., maintenance of separate medical
facilities, including those for the blind; Economic policies, e.g., the
practice of redlining, which arbitrarily denies or limits financial services
based on race or income; Social policies, e.g., law that forbad African
Americans and whites from playing checkers or dominoes together;
Sexual policies, e.g., anti-miscegenation laws forbidding intimate con-
tact between the races; Transportation policies, e.g., separate seating
on buses, trains as well as separate taxis; Educational policies, e.g.,
maintenance of separate school systems.
162    
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5. Bob Dylan has also cited No More as his inspiration for his pro-
test classic of Blowin in the Wind. Please see Bobetsky (29) and Mark
Rowland’s interview, Talking Bob Dylan 1978. 23 September 1978.
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/bob-dylan-2.
6. Highlander was an example of what Aldon Morris, in his classic The
Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for
Change, named a “halfway house” for the movement. These “halfway
houses assisted in disseminating the tactic of nonviolent direct action,
developing mass education programs and publicizing local movements”
(Morris 140). In doing so, it served as a space in which ordinary cit-
izens gathered to deliberate and strategize about exigent public issues
while planning actions, discursive as well as physical. To connect with
Fraser’s observations in Justice interruptus on identity and rhetorical
action, these halfway houses facilitated interactions between members
of “subordinated groups [to] invent and circulate counter discourses,
which in turn permitt[ed] them to formulate oppositional interpreta-
tions of their identities, interests, and needs” (81).
7. Please visit: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/
encyclopedia/enc_highlander_folk_school/, for an overview of the
Highlander School and the Highlander Education and Research Center
or see J.M. Glen’s Highlander: No Ordinary School.
8. Please see the North Carolina History Project (“SNCC”) for brief
overview of the foundation of SNCC, but Morris for an in-depth
presentation.
9. For more information on pronoun usage in protest songs and other
areas, see Brown and Gilman’s classic study of the pronouns of power
and solidarity, as well as Brown and Levison, Duszak, Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet, Helmbrecht, Lakoff, MacKay, Tannen.
10. Over subsequent decades, due to these positioning and benediction
properties, the singing of the song has often served as a mark of legiti-
macy for a nonviolent protest around the globe.
11. Murphy suggests that, “The identifiable and repeating pattern of ‘We
Shall Overcome’ allows not only for increased participation in the sign-
ing of the song, but also increased participation in adapting lyrics to fit
the immediate context in which collective moments operate” (5). This
facilitates real-time grassroots compositions with verses being added in
the moment. “Along with Jamila (Jones’) reassurance that ‘We are not
afraid,’” Pete Seeger, added, “We’ll walk hand in hand” and “The whole
wide world around”. Others added, “We shall stand together,” “We
 4  Exploring the Protest Language of Songs …    
163

shall live in peace,” “The Lord will see us through,” “We shall be like
Him,” and “The truth shall make us free” (Stotts 38). This adaptability
appears at odds with activist singer songwriter Phil Ochs’ definition of
a protest song, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you can-
not mistake it for bullshit” (Sample). We Shall Overcome is specific in
that it is recognized by publics and discursively creates publics in its
performance about an issue, but it is malleable with the antecedent for
the absent direct object as open.
12. Jackson Browne’s Lives in the Balance provides a picaresque middle
ground, offering vignettes of hegemony and resistance within an alter-
nating fast-paced staccato pattern associated with high intensity pat-
terns and professional performance like 99 Luftballons, as well as slower
interludes associated with low intensity patterns and folk performance
like We Shall Overcome.
13. Please see Appendix C for suggested readings on these leaders.
14. Johns was also the niece of civil rights activist Vernon Johns. For

more about Barbara Johns and the Moton Museum see: Biography.
Barbara Johns. 11 January 2015. http://www.biography.com/peo-
ple/barbara-johns-206527; Moton Museum. “Barbara Rose Johns
Powell.” Moton Museum: Student Birthplace of American Civil Rights
Revolution. 11 January 2015.
15. The riders spent the night in the Birmingham bus terminal within
harm’s reach of a mob of 3000 angry white Southerners led by the
Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, himself, Robert Shelton
(Gudzer 31). Once again, during the night, the reassuring notes of We
Shall Overcome comforted the activists.
16. To read Rustin’s extraordinary document, visit: http://www.crmvet.org/
docs/moworg2.pdf.
17. Dr. King in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” discusses why it was
often more challenging to work with moderates than with extremists.
18. According to legend, these were the last words of Joe Hill who had
been charged and executed for murder, in Utah in 1915. However,
he actually sent one more telegram to William “Big Bill” Haywood,
founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), ask-
ing Haywood to drag his body out of Utah, so that he wouldn’t be bur-
ied there.
19. These works include: Nuclear War: What’s in It for You? by Ground
Zero; Protest and Survive, co-edited by E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith;
Life after Nuclear War: The Economic and Social Impacts of Nuclear
164    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Attacks on the United States by Arthur M. Katz; Controlling the Bomb

by Lewis Dunn; Radiation and Human Health by John W. Goffman;
Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic
Radiation by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon; and Nuclear
Culture: Living and Working in the World’s Largest Atomic Complex by
Paul Loeb.
20. In 2017, the clock was set at 2 ½ minutes to midnight as opposed to
the safest setting of 12 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the collapse
of the USSR.

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 5
Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry:
“Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade”
and “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is
Sweet and Good”

Ana Blandiana and “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s

Crusade”1
In the 1960s, the birth rate in the Socialist Republic of Romania
was one of the lowest in the world with an average of 1.9 children
per woman (Kligman 1998, p. 24).2 This reality disturbed President
Nicolae Ceausescu who equated the robustness of his Marxist state
with the ability of its women to reproduce its workforce. To deal with
this reproductive political exigency, Ceausescu issued Decree 770 on
October 1, 1966, banning all forms of contraception including abor-
tion unless: the mother was over 40, had already borne four children,
her life was endangered, or the pregnancy was the result of rape or
incest. This decree terminated not only the Romanian practice of abor-
tion as the primary and legal method of birth control, but also cen-
sored all information on family planning strategies or birth prevention.
Individual citizen consent to this radical shift in Romanian private life
was never sought from the masses (Sorea 2002, pp. 277–278; Kligman
1998, p. 6).

© The Author(s) 2018 171

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_5
172    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

From the moment of its issuance, Decree 770/1966 injected this

macrolevel anxiety of the social reproduction of the state into the most
intimate dimensions of daily Romanian life. Consisting of eight arti-
cles, the Decree articulated exceptions to the law, the institutionaliza-
tion of its provisions, and the sanctions for its violation. These sanctions
included everything from a celibacy tax, on childless couples over the
age of 25, to the imprisonment of women who obtained illegal abor-
tions (Flister 2013, p. 295). All women of childbearing age endured
monthly monitoring and gynecological exams in a system in which the
state already had total control over education, employment, and other
aspects of health care. Any detected pregnancies were tracked through
term by medical personnel at the hospitals to which the women were
assigned. From 1966 forward, the practice of medicine was co-opted by
the state to control the individual female bodies within the Romanian
body politic. “State authorities regarded the foetus as the property of the
socialist society and giving birth as a patriotic duty. All women refusing
to have four or five babies deserved to be branded as “criminal infring-
ers of the laws of natural reproduction” (Baban 1996, p. 51)” (Sorea
2002, p. 278). The Decree governed the private lives of Romanians for
23 years, until Ceausescu’s death, in 1989, at the hands of the Decretteii,
the cohort of children he had decreed into existence.
Five years prior to the dictator’s death, Ana Blandiana, the interna-
tionally renowned Romanian poet, composed “Cruciada Copiilor” or
“Children’s Crusade” as a response, from an unconventional point of
view, to the realities of life under the Decree. While the freedoms of
movement, association, and speech were severely restricted, poetry
served as a primary art of resistance. Blandiana wielded this art so effec-
tively that she was banned three times by the communist government
before its collapse. The locutionary act of “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s
Crusade” was one of the poems that contributed to the final interdic-
tion on her work by the government (see below for Romanian and
English versions).
As a performative of protest, the surface structure is that of a pul-
sating eleven-line poem, from an Orwellian third-person point of view,
portraying birth as a mass production via assembly line for the state.
As a response to the state’s call to reproduce a workforce, this poem
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
173

activates the Cooperative Principle, by being “simultaneously an elegy

and a mock eulogy of [the] pronatality discourse which ceaselessly inter-
pellated the Romanian nation for 23 long years” (Sorea 2002, p. 277).
Unlike an elegy, this poem is delivered in the tone of a report, an update
to a plant manager. The deep structure of this performance of protest is
that of: “I, Ana Blandiana, in solidarity with the community of prac-
tice of those suffering under the communist regime, protest its natal
policies.”

Cruciada Copiilor Children’s Crusade

de Ana Blandiana by Ana Blandiana
Un întreg popor An entire nation,
Nenascut înca Still unborn,
Dar condamnat la nastere Yet doomed to birth,
Încolonat dinainte de nastere, Ranged in battalions before birth,
Foestus lânga foestus, Foetus next to foetus,
Un întreg popor A whole nation
Care n-aude, nu vede, nu-ntelege, Unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping,
Dar înainteaza Yet advancing
Prin trupuri zvârcolite de femei, Through the writhing bodies of women,
Prin sânge de mame Through the gore of mothers
Neîntrebate. Unconsenting.
Translation by Daniela Sorea

The Deep Story of Context of “Cruciada

Copiilor/Children’s Crusade”

The broad context for this particular performance of protest is that of

the Cold War milieu of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, the period of
aggressive détente between the socialist-communist totalitarian regimes
of the East, anchored by the USSR, and the democratic capitalist
regimes of the West, anchored by the United States. Romania, during
this time, was allied with the USSR, whose domination over satellite
countries was pervasive, periodically even over their reproductive poli-
cies. As the USSR had legalized abortion in 1955, Romania, in an act
of solidarity, did so in 1957. The public motivation for this legalization
174    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

was the emancipation of women; the political motivation was to curry

Soviet favor for the Romanian regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
(Kligman 1998, pp. 48–49).
After Dej’s death in 1965, Ceausescu, through his new leadership
role in the Communist Party and the government, was determined
to position Romania as more geopolitically independent than other
Soviet satellites. His bravest display of this independent streak was his
refusal to join the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet leadership justified this inva-
sion claiming, “that Moscow had the right to intervene in any country
where a communist government was threatened” (U.S. Department of
State Office of the Historian 2014). Ceausescu denounced this move
citing the right to self-determination. This refusal focused global atten-
tion on Ceausescu’s independent streak, consolidating his popularity at
home and in the West. His popularity in the West spiked again when
the Romanian Olympic team participated in the 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics despite the Soviet Union’s boycott of the games, placing
third, behind the United States and West Germany, in the overall medal
count.
However, the Soviets should have been aware of Ceausescu’s maverick
streak, as shortly after taking power, he issued Decree 770. Whereas it
was said that Dej had nationalized production, it was Ceausescu who
had nationalized reproduction (Flister 2013, p. 295). Under a policy
of establishing politica demografica/political demography to grow the
Romanian workforce, Ceausescu surprised his country and the Soviets
by revoking the previous natal policy. The Soviets expressed their dis-
pleasure while the West barely noticed. Although Romanian reproduc-
tive policies initially had some support in the West in the 1970s, that
support turned to condemnation over the next decade, as hunger rates
skyrocketed throughout the country. By the 1980s, even international
aid workers hesitated to interfere with the natal policies due to fear of
being prevented from rendering other types of aid, such as food sup-
port, to the Romanian people (Kligman 1998, p. 262).
While Decree 770/1966 is the primary discursive context for
Blandiana’s poem, other policies, such as those governing speech,
also inform the poem by having shaped its moment of production.
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
175

The Decree was understood as part of The Plan, created by the State
Commission for Planning, the principal instrument of economic con-
trol, governing all aspects of social life. From the state’s perspective, it
was a woman’s great honor and patriotic duty to bear future workers
for the state. Failure to comply resulted in “correctional” punishment,
ranging from a loss of pay for the worker and the doctor, prevention of
the doctor from future gynecological practice (Kligman 1998, p. 57), or
even imprisonment (Sorea 2002, p. 278).
Scînteia, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, covered the Decree
in detail, in fulfillment of Article 1 of the press law, which stated, “the
press fulfills the high socio-political mission … to militate permanently
for the translation of the Romanian Communist Party’s policies into
life” (Gross 1990, p. 98). This was to insure all Romanians were well
informed of the policy. Initially, Ceausescu’s wish for an increase in
the fertility rate came true with it nearly doubling in 1967 to 3.7 chil-
dren per woman. This resulted in the birth of the cohort known as the
Decretteii, which included the student leaders of the protest that led to
Ceausescu’s overthrow and execution.
Under the Decree, state propaganda valorized the archetypal image
of woman as mother above all other aspects of adult female life. This
valorization was reinforced within the traditional patriarchal patterns of
the Romanian family, as well as the Romanian Orthodox Church. With
the Decree, the state had also commandeered the power of the patri-
arch within his own family, as he, too, must abide by the law. Ceausescu
instituted himself as the national pater familias appropriating the pater-
nalism of Romanian culture to legitimize his policy. Propaganda mate-
rials not only portrayed the Romanian leader as the wizened, gentle
father of the Romanian Family, but also referred to the nation as tara
mama, the motherland, with the Communist Party as the partid parinte,
the party parent (Kligman 1998, p. 124). The regime, which had also
passed strict anti-divorce laws, therefore, had a strange and ambivalent
relationship with the family. To raise the birth rate, the family had to be
lauded; however, as the cornerstone of bourgeoisie life, the family had
to be destroyed.
In the 1970s, the exalted image of woman as mother broadened to
that of woman as creator—of children and economic goods. This was
176    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

in keeping with Ceausescu’s agenda of omogenizare/homogenization, in

which Romanians, male and female, were to be homogenized as pro-
ductive party members and citizens of the socialist state. This process
failed to acknowledge the gender asymmetry of the double workdays of
women, with paid work outside the home and unpaid work inside the
home.
Despite the prohibition on contraception, by 1973, the birth rate
had again started to fall, dropping to 2.4 children per woman. In
response, the regime revised the Decree to restrict access to abortion
to women over 45 who had borne at least five children successfully
(Kligman 1998, pp. 58–59, 136). State propaganda then returned its
focus once again to woman as mother, with the number of children as
the top criterion of female success. While the government pressured
its citizens to have more children in the early 1980s, it simultaneously
undertook an austerity program to pay off the nation’s foreign debt. To
accomplish this, the regime rationed many staples of daily life including
gas, heat, food, and electricity. This drastically reduced the standard of
living for most Romanians, who suffered malnutrition, endured winters
with no heat or electricity, and waited in long queues to obtain milk,
bread, or toilet paper. By controlling these necessities, along with that of
reproduction, the regime controlled daily life at its foundation. Dissent
was generally checked by the extensive Securitate, the Romanian secret
police. As the material conditions of daily life deteriorated through-
out the country, State propaganda promoted “scientific nutrition” for
women and children. Increasingly, it became more and more difficult to
reconcile the state’s demand to have more children with the reality that
one could not feed one’s existing children, or even one’s self, properly.
Despite widespread malnutrition, the government proclaimed
through their scientific nutrition program that the pregnant or nurs-
ing mother should consume 30 eggs a month, even though she was
only allotted 10 eggs per month. The regime also insisted that a higher
birth rate would lead to a more productive workforce, and a healthier
economy, while female participation in the workforce would lead to
increased fertility (Kligman 1998, pp. 138–141). However, the govern-
ment’s scientific nutrition program was an idea with no basis in real-
ity. By the time the Romanian people rose against the pater familias
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
177

in 1989, Romania had one of the highest infant mortality rates in

Europe and the highest maternal mortality rate, primarily due to ille-
gal abortions, in Europe. After more than 15 years of life under Decree
770/1966, in the 1980s, “the birthrate had declined to the 1966 level of
14.3 live births per 1000 inhabitants. Moreover, for every one live birth
in 1983 there had been 1.3 illegal abortions” (ibid., pp. 133, 147).
A primary reason for the people’s revolt was the jarring incongru-
ity between what the regime said and the realities of a harsh life of
ever-deepening poverty. As Kligman (1998) notes, a peculiar occurrence
helped unravel the Ceausescu regime in that, “contrary to Marxist the-
ory, ideological rhetoric rather than material conditions came to repre-
sent social life” (p. 36). Official rhetoric continued to be promulgated
despite the growing disconnect between words and reality. This resulted
in daily life taking on a surreal tone with official rhetoric becoming
“more real” than physical objective realities. Romanians conformed
publicly while resisting in their thoughts or black market activities.
“Hence the importance of ideological discourse for the functional legit-
imation of the Ceausescu regime must not be dismissed as ‘just so many
words.’ These discursive practices were understood in terms of the ‘mag-
ical power of words’ and their power to embody what the state should
be, if not what it was” (ibid., p. 36). The saying, in other words, did not
and could not make it so. The regime’s repeated and ritualized speech
acts claiming that Romania had reached the peak of civilization were
simply empty puffs of air, failing cynically to fulfill the truth dimension
associated with a constative utterance, which in turn led to the failure to
obtain the felicity conditions associated with intent or effects of the per-
formance of the claims made. Not surprisingly, irony became endemic
in Romanian social life. This nurtured a brittle freedom of speech as
Romanians glazed party slogans with irony to mock a government that
imprisoned dissenters.
This omnipresent fear of impending punishment, in conjunction
with the jarring disconnect between what the state said and the empir-
ical realities of daily life, led many Romanians to adopt an attitude of
dedublare or duplicity as a form of resistance and political efficacy. On
the surface in public, these Romanians appeared complicit with state
policies and practices; but under that same surface, in private, they
178    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

dissented through the power of irony, repeating the vaulted governmen-

tal claims with a tone of derision.
Because irony in the hands of a poet with the skills of Ana Blandiana
can prove an effective weapon, state censorship permeated dedublare
life. As Blandiana notes, “we had to fight with censorship for every
verse” (Frandzen 2014), as even every typewriter script had to be reg-
istered with the Securitate (Kligman 1998, p. 38). Blandiana noted
that the censorship was so intense that many writers, including herself,
developed an “internal censor,” dictating what could or could not be
written.
Within this milieu of internal and external censorship, registered type-
writer scripts, and mandatory gynecological exams, Blandiana risked
composing protest poetry, including “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s
Crusade.” This poem, which was not generally available until after
1989, had been published in the winter of 1985, leading to the sec-
ond time that Blandiana’s work was banned. A student magazine,
Amfiteatru/Amphitheater had requested poems from the poet. Telling
the students that she did not think the ones she had available were pub-
lishable, Blandiana eventually gave them several poems after the editors
had insisted that student magazines were not closely monitored. The edi-
tors published the poems without the necessary signatures of approval.
Blandiana recalled that, “the scandal was enormous [as the state]
denounced the magazine because of the kinds of poems they found in it”
(Frandzen 2014). The students were immediately fired from their posi-
tions on the magazine and the state enacted its second interdiction on
Blandiana’s work. A group of 37 Italian writers petitioned Ceausescu on
Blandiana’s behalf. Concerned with currying international favor with the
West, the government informed her that she was permitted once again
to publish. However, she recalled, “Things were never how they were
before. From that moment on, [she] knew that all binoculars and spot-
lights were on [her]” (ibid.).
One of the four poems Blandiana had offered the students was
“Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” which she said was “very well
known” as were two of the others, “Totul/Everything” and “Eu Cred/I
Believe.” For Blandiana, “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” repre-
sented the tragedy of women being forced to bear children they could
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
179

not care for or seeking illegal abortions, resulting in deadly hemorrhag-

ing. “The doctors were only allowed to intervene in the presence of a
[state security agent]” and so “very often the woman would die before
the [agent] came. It was a hellish situation and so I wrote this poem …
imagining a crusade of children that came from women’s bodies with-
out even their consent” (Frandzen 2014). The extremely high mater-
nal death rate was due to home practices such as the insertion of soap
bubbles or a knitting needle into the uterus to induce miscarriage, or
the alternative of a “back street” abortion, strapped to a table with no
anesthesia or sterilized equipment. Many women died from infection or
from bleeding to death as the state prosecutor prevented medical pro-
fessionals from caring for the “treacherous citizen” (Sorea 2002, p. 282).
The title of the poem, “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” taps
into the horror of this reality, by indexing other sources of violence
denoted in English by the same phrase: (1) two deadly medieval chil-
dren’s crusades of 1212, one of French and the other of German origin,
to help retake Jerusalem for Christianity, as well as the (2) Children’s
Crusade of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, to further the American
Civil Rights movement (Stanford 2015). The French and German chil-
dren of both the medieval crusades perished in their quests, while the
American children were sprayed violently with fire hoses, clubbed with
police batons, and set on by police dogs.
There is a brutal irony in the fact that many Romanian women were
risking their lives to obtain illegal abortions because of the depriva-
tions of daily life for the children they had already borne. A common
joke of the day was for a child to promise to grow up big and strong
for the state, but not to eat anything along the way. Another dimen-
sion of irony associated with the title is the semantic ambiguity at play
in the Romanian “Cruciada Copiilor.” This phrase may be translated
as either “the war waged by the unwanted children against their bear-
ers and implicitly against those that doomed their mothers to give birth
to them, or the war waged by a hostile world against the unborn chil-
dren” (Sorea 2002, p. 280). The title thus echoes with both its medieval
and twentieth-century predecessors, with the French and German chil-
dren, setting off to wage war on behalf of their God, and the American
children counter-demonstrating against a world hostile to them.
180    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Sorea contends that the title’s ambiguity reveals that, “the poem could
be viewed both as the lament of the unconsenting mothers and as the
ironical echo of the official discourse eulogizing motherhood. Since it
ironically echoes the propaganda discourse, Blandiana’s poem is what
Hutcheon calls a ‘counter-song’ (literal translation of the Greek parodia )
to the pro-birth demand issued by the voice of authority” (ibid.). As
such a counter-song, “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” animates
the renovated felicity conditions for the performance of the poem as a
protest text in ways conducive to the genre of poetry in an era of dedub-
lare and omogenizare (see Appendix A).

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions of “Cruciada

Copiilor/ Children’s Crusade”

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

“Cruciada Copiilor/ Children’s Crusade” exemplifies the civic, voca-

tive, and orientation to change conventions as it tethers Blandiana to
the public horror that was coerced pregnancy under Ceausescu. In her
visceral revisualization of the birth process as industrialized production,
by unconsenting female masses of writhing masses of undifferentiated
fetuses, the poet issues a vocative call to her fellow Romanians, born
and unborn, while challenging the communist regime.
Such a call of solidarity and challenge jars the reader into contrast-
ing the freedom and individuality of birth as opposed to oppression and
homogeneity. By employing the martial phrase-images of official state
discourse—“an entire nation,” “ranged in battalions,” “advancing”—the
poem depicts birth as a site of grotesque state-demanded homogene-
ity. The images of repetition echo the compulsory parades of marching
“productive workers,” in honor of the pater familias. “The amorphous-
ness of the fetuses ranged in battalions (in Romanian incolonati means
not only ranged in battalions, but also ranged in parade columns ) recalls
the amorphousness of the ‘working people’ trained and summoned to
march and pay homage to their leader in the course of minutely organ-
ised kitsch mega-parades” (Sorea 2002, pp. 280–281). This image, of a
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
181

military-industrial parade of advancing “still unborn” battalions, pain-

fully exposes the perversion of the Social Contract, of the state’s exist-
ence for the protection of its citizens, not the citizen’s existence for the
production quota of the state. The poem warns the state, that if it, too,
does not change, then it, too, will remain still unborn, merely a fetch or
a shade of a still-born state.

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

This warning signals the disagreement between citizen Blandiana and

her government regarding its domination of even the most private
dimension of Romanian family life. Blandiana not only thinks differ-
ently from her government, but she challenges her government to think
differently. The state had usurped a woman’s privacy by erasing the line
between public and private while forcibly displaying each woman’s body
in the public glare of the lights of the gynecological examination room.
Certainly for Blandiana, a woman living under Decree 770/1966, the
lack of the right of refusal generated within her Mautner’s require-
ment of critical awareness (2011) for the composing of this poetic per-
formance of protest. The poet through the poem’s representation, of a
nameless, faceless writhing mass ensconced in gore, animates Butler’s
(1997) claim that in political discourse, “the very terms of resistance
and insurgency are spawned in part by the powers they oppose” (p. 40).

Words: Semantics of Opposition

Blandiana crafts a semantics of opposition, of resistance and insur-

gency, by manipulating a number of different linguistic and poetic ele-
ments, such as collocation, repetition, and indefinite nouns, working
in conjunction with the homogenizing and martial imagery already
mentioned. One unexpected collocation is that of “condamnat ” or
“doomed” with the idea of birth. Doomed normally associates with
death, and a particular type of death—one in which there is no per-
sonal agency or control over the situation—rather than birth. Doom is
something bad done to you. A state dooms by condemning the guilty to
182    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

death for violating the common good, instead of celebrating the begin-
nings of a new life. Along with this collocation, which reinforces the
jarring future-designated anachronism of fetuses ranged in advancing
battalions, Blandiana repeatedly uses negative prefix particles (n + stem)
in an attempt to halt the advancement of the battalions, to prevent
the compulsive expulsion of the still unborn from their unconsenting
mothers.

Nenascut unborn
n-aude unhearing
nu vede unseeing
nu-ntelege ungrasping
neîntrebate unconsenting

Generally, groups advance not through nullifying their senses,

unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping, but instead by intentionally acti-
vating their senses, and often with the consent of the participants. In
the poem, though, there is no intentional choice as mothers’ bodies
writhe in the gore of a martial violence enacted upon them. The fetuses
advance, deaf, blind, and ignorant of their doom to serve in the needs
of the state. It is interesting to note that Blandiana does not include
dumb, an absence of voice, perhaps as she, herself, speaks for them.
The repetition of these negatives also reproduces a rhythm associ-
ated with marching troops. Battalions usually march to advance against
something or over something. In this case, against or over is one and the
same as the lock-step troops march over and against the unconsenting
tara mama, the mother land, marching across the very body-land that
sustains them and calls them forth. There is unsettling foreshadowing
here if one considers that it was members of the Decretteii who marched
across tara mama to execute the pater familias in 1989. Such an inexo-
rable advancement across the motherland may be read as a parallel to
the Marxist idea of the inexorable advancement of the revolution of the
proletariat, the dialectic of history cast in human metaphor.
In this dystopic presentation of birth, no one is differentiated or
marked as individual. This lack of distinction forms the opening trope
of the poem (line 1) and is reiterated in its middle (line 6), as Un întreg
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
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popor/the “entire nation,” an oft-repeated trope in official party dis-

course (Sorea 2002, p. 285). In Romanian, întreg offers the idea of being
“complete” or “not partitioned,” a situation in which individual iden-
tity is not recognized, only that of the collective noun of nation is. This
reflects Ceausescu’s program of omogenizare/homogenization, which is
reinforced by Blandiana’s repeated use of indefinite, instead of definite,
forms of the nouns that refer to the carriers of a coerced pregnancy:

Trupuri/Bodies  lural form used as indefinite

p
Femei/Women plural form used as indefinite
Sânge/Blood singular form used as indefinite
Mame/Mothers plural form used as indefinite

This elimination of individual identity is also driven home in the

closing of Blandiana’s poem with the word Neîntrebate/unconsent-
ing. Citizenship as the basis of the Social Contract is rooted in consent
just as the Cooperative Principle is. Consent is also that which patients
grant for medical procedures and care. When the citizen-patient is
unconsenting, there is a fundamental violation of the individual. This
leads back to the idea that any nation conceived without consent will
remain still unborn. The integrated use of these literary elements in
creating this image of writhing amorphousness reveals a cruelty, in the
homogenization program’s demand for the nonexistence of the individ-
ual qua individual, but only as individual as pars pro toto, a synecdo-
che, a part of the whole.

Persons: The Interpellation of Ana Blandiana as Protester

The communist regime inculcated a profound sense of social indebted-

ness within its citizenry to subordinate them to the symbolic as well as
real political, social, and economic dimensions of life under totalitar-
ianism. This “social(ist) indebtedness was not predicated on reciprocal
equality, but rather on paternalist (therefore hierarchical) gratitude,”
inhibiting the potential growth of social capital within the population
at large (Kligman 1998, p. 124). Within this frame of indebtedness, the
184    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

state interpellated individuals as productive or nonproductive workers,

nominally based on the Marxist dictum “[f ]rom each according to his
ability, to each according to his need.” Theoretically, then, “persons were
to be recognized, or publicly acknowledged, by their performance as
workers, not by factors that marked their distinctive identities” (ibid.,
p. 25). This reflected the programmatic ideal of omogenizare, which
supposedly eliminated class and social differences, contributing to the
image in the West of Soviet bloc countries consisting of faceless masses.
This led to the practice of the state granting legitimacy only to produc-
tive workers trained in the ethics, morals, and practices of communism.
However, from the moment of the issuance of Decree 770/1966, such
interpellation was complicated by female workers also needing to be
simultaneously interpellated as Woman-Mother or Woman-Creator, as
well as productive worker.
Deviance from such generalized interpellation was dangerous as
it was viewed by the regime as treacherous to the good of the nation.
Those who participated in such activity, including dissidents agitating
for individual rights were re-interpellated as Other against whom neces-
sary precautions would be taken. These precautions ran the gamut from
symbolic violence, such as the Securitate’s surveillance of one’s home day
after day, to imprisonment, torture, and execution. Although Ceausescu
preferred the use of symbolic violence, he did not hesitate to employ
its physical counterparts. However, for many, the symbolic violence was
sufficient as it reinforced the inculcation of a Romanian communist
habitus, to adapt Bourdieu’s idea (1991), so that it became just another
part of daily life. For a writer, this way of being included the self-censor-
ship of which Blandiana spoke.
As Althusser contends (2001), the state interpellates its citizenry in
ways necessary to maintain order by keeping people in their respective
places. However, this is problematic when the official discourse is grossly
out of step with the realities of day-to-day life. State formation and rou-
tinization entail complicity between states and their citizens, activating
the consent side of Gramsci’s coercion/consent dyad. In Romania, this
form of complicity partnered with dedublare and duplicity for a dis-
tinct Romanian flavor (Kligman 1998, pp. 3, 261). However, this con-
sent disintegrates when citizens are no longer able to manage their daily
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
185

lives in a reasonable fashion, because they are standing in line all day
for bread, while simultaneously being force-fed propaganda declaring
the prosperity of the state. At this point, the state’s speech acts misfire,
“inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter
this offensive call” (Butler 1997, p. 2). A subject like Ana Blandiana.
Born Otilia-Valeria Coman in 1942, in Timosoara,3 Ana Blandiana
was the daughter of teacher-turned-Orthodox priest Gheorghe Coman
(1915–1964) and an accountant Otilia Diaconu Coman. Her father,
a popular preacher was imprisoned regularly through the communist
years. He was released the last time as part of a general amnesty but died
in an accident shortly thereafter. Blandiana recalls that the threat and/or
reality of her father’s imprisonment permeated her childhood, stating,
“It was pretty common for priests to have their bags packed and have
warm clothes prepared in case [of arrest]” (Frandzen 2014).
Her father’s imprisonment was the cause for the first interdiction
against her work, shortly after her poetic debut in 1959. She recalls that:

I was a student in school and with a group of other students … we

would read poems to each other. We decided to have a contest on who
could come up the most sonorous pseudonym, and Blandiana is the
name of the town where my mom was from. So, I put Ana together with
Blandiana to rhyme and used it with some poems … We all sent poems
to a magazine in Cluj (we were in Oradea) … I sent a couple of poems
using this pseudonym. I mean, it was just a little joke but then two of
my poems were published under the name of Ana Blandiana. As proof
that I was young and I didn’t really know what a pseudonym actually was,
I got scared and wrote to the magazine saying, ‘Please excuse me, you
know, I was just kidding, it’s not my name.’ An editor from the Tribuna/
Tribunal magazine said, ‘You know what? Your name is staying how it
is. From now on your name is Ana Blandiana.’ Unfortunately however
it wasn’t even two weeks before Oradea authorities found out who they
were talking about and they sent … [a] memo to all of the publications
in the country … which it stated, ‘We call your attention to the fact that
the daughter of the enemy of the people Gheorghe Coman, who is now
in prison, is hiding under the name of Ana Blandiana and should no
longer be published.’ So, this was the first interdiction … I once said in
an interview … that the paradox of my destiny was that I was known as
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

a banned writer before I was even known as a writer. No one knew who
I was, I had only published two poems and yet the whole literary com-
munity knew that there was a little girl who was banned. (excerpted from
Frandzen interview 2014)

Thus, Blandiana is interpellated by the state as a protester, a Deviant

Other, down to her very name, originally not because of her own acts
of protest, but because of her birth to a father whose work challenged
the state. Originary guilt by association. Doomed before birth. Another
dimension of interpellation is also at play in this particular poem, as
Blandiana breaths life into Althusser’s claim (2001), presented in Chapter 2,
that individuals are interpellated as subjects even before they are born.
This poem, however, does not present the hailing of the unborn by tra­
ditional patriarchal Romanian families, but instead the hailing by the pater-
nalistic state which has usurped the power of the family.

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

Blandiana’s vocative call to fellow Romanians and the state initiates the
convocative split resulting from the poem. The reception of Blandiana’s
vocative by her audiences generates the convocative split between the
forces of the state and the common Romanian citizen. As objectifica-
tion of the Other operates in both directions, the lines between Us,
the nameless, faceless Us upon whose bodies decisions are enacted, and
the parallel nameless, faceless Them, who make the decisions about
our bodies, are delineated. The communicative competence of dedub-
lare is activated, as her fellow citizens’ dexterity in handling irony facil-
itates this delineation, between the hegemonic power of the state and
the growing number of citizens in the community of practice on the
margin. The identity of this community had to be nurtured in secret,
like that of the writers of the Chuj dictionary mentioned in Chapter 1,
hidden from the (il)legitimate State that repressed the development of
democratically oriented political efficacy. Social capital was nurtured
only with great risk in attendance.
As the issue of Amfiteatru containing “Cruciada Copiilor/ Children’s
Crusade” was pulled from circulation, Blandiana’s weekly newspaper
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
187

column was suspended and she began to receive threatening phone

calls. However, the poem had become Samizdat, a Russian term for
banned writings reproduced and circulated by hand, with readings
broadcast on Radio Free Europe and a translation in Newsweek, as
it traveled the Romanian black market (Beyond the Forest 2014). As
Samizdat, these poems solidified the oppositional tension between the
covert communities of practice on the margin and center.
This moment of convocativity further solidified Blandiana’s marginal
position in relation to the government, fulfilling renovated felicity con-
dition number two’s focus on the resultant positioning of the protester
in relation to the hegemonic power. In this positioning, the movement
of the discursive centripetal force of the poem lunges at the center-state,
while the discursive centrifugal force of the Decree is splattering out-
ward toward the margins (Bakhtin 1981, p. 33). Lefort (1986) observed
that, “At the foundation of totalitarianism lies the representation of the
People-as-One” (Herzogenrath 2010, p. 254). Poets such as Blandiana,
who respect the identity of the individual, possess the skill to trig-
ger the severing of the People-As-One from those abused by its coer-
cive power, and for those abused to flee to the margins. As “Cruciada
Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” satisfies the presuppositional felicity con-
ditions, including that of convocativity, it also satisfies the aspirational
felicity conditions with their focus on intention, feelings, thoughts, and
subsequent actions in relation to risk and commitment.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of “Cruciada

Copiilor/Children’s Crusade”

Thoughts, Intentions, Risk

The risk level involved with Blandiana’s performance of this poetic

speech act indicates the appropriate thoughts, feelings, and inten-
tions of protest. For someone who grew up in the shadow cast by her
father’s imprisonment, her risk in challenging the government indicates
the strength of her commitment to personal and communal freedom.
This is particularly true for her as a writer whose work had already
188    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

been banned and her college admittance delayed due to her father’s
imprisonment. The danger of challenging the regime was reinforced by
Decree 153/1970, which broadly defined nonconforming persons as
“social parasites.” This decree was arbitrarily applied for political pur-
poses, leaving the Romanian public with an “inchoate sense of vul-
nerability” (Kligman 1998, p. 33). With the publication of “Cruciada
Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” and the other three poems she had given
the students, she risked the loss of her job, harm to her family, and
to herself, including imprisonment, even though her work was only
banned for a short period of time during this second interdiction.
However, this second ban was followed by a third one, due to the
publication of the poem “Motanul Arpagic/Tom Cat Onion,” a barely
disguised fable, parodying Ceausescu as a tomcat. Beginning in 1988,
this third ban lasted until December 22, 1989, the day Ceausescu
was overthrown. In this final interdiction, not only was publication of
Blandiana’s future work forbidden, but her past work was suppressed as
well. Her very name was banned while her books were removed from
libraries (Blandiana 2014). At this point, her work could only circulate
as Samizdat (Jehat 2014). A Securitate surveillance team parked out-
side her home everyday, all day, eavesdropping on the life of her and
her husband, Romulus Rusan. The Securitate prevented other people
from visiting them, while their mail and telephone services were cut-
off to increase their social isolation, eviscerating interactions with
communities of practice while depleting social capital and political
efficacy. Their presence scared Blandiana, but as she has pointed out,
the pressure was above and beyond that necessary to frighten her. It
was also meant to frighten and intimidate everyone in the neighbor-
hood, as well as other Romanian writers (Frandzen 2014). In this way,
Blandiana served as a synecdoche through which the regime could
threaten all the people in her neighborhood and other dissident writ-
ers. Nevertheless, throughout this intimidation, Blandiana never con-
sidered emigrating, as she could not imagine being unable to return to
her homeland, or not writing for those who speak Romanian (ibid.).
Her identity was and is too intricately and intimately woven into that
of her homeland. Her determination to continue to write and pub-
lish, despite the risks to herself and those whom she loved, reinforced
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
189

the legitimacy of Blandiana’s work, as acts of protest and free self-ex-

pression of Romanian identity.

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

The environment of repression propelled Blandiana to hone her politi-

cal efficacy through metaphor and exploit her fellow Romanian’s com-
municative competence of dedublare. When asked why poets were such
powerful social figures at the time, Blandiana states that, “[P]oetry was
like the lungs through which everyone breathed. And this was because
poetry, by definition, contains metaphors … [I]t couldn’t really be cen-
sored because half of what is understood is added by the reader. This
created an almost magical collaboration between author and reader.
And this gave the reader the feeling that they were free” (Frandzen
2014). Dedublare provided much-needed sustenance for survival
through the era of Decree 770/1966.
Since the fall of Ceausescu’s regime, Blandiana has participated
in civic life in a number of different ways, particularly through her
and her husband’s foundation of the Academia Civica. This project
then gave birth to the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and
of the Resistance, which, in turn, has overseen the creation of the
International Center for Studies on Communism and the Sighet
Museum. The Museum is located in 56 cells of the former Sighet
prison, which once housed political prisoners during the communist
years. For Blandiana, these projects are ways to restore the collective
memory of the Romanian people. Blandiana (2015) states that, “[t]he
greatest victory of communism, a victory dramatically revealed only
after 1989, was to create people without a memory – a brainwashed
new man unable to remember what he was, what he had, or what he
did before communism.” The Memorial to the Victims of Communism
and to the Resistance counters this victory by resuscitating the nation’s
collective memory.
Subsequent actions, like this, complete the fulfillment of the reno-
vated felicity conditions, establishing pragmatic legitimacy and pro-
viding insight for how, through a disorienting point of view, rhythm,
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

irony, and other poetic devices, Blandiana performs a stunning speech

act of protest. Just over 70 years prior to Blandiana’s challenge to the
Romanian communist regime, another poet, Wilfred Owen, coura-
geously crafted word-images to challenge the art of war as a method of
sustaining and creating the Enlightenment communities of the West. It
is the blood-soaked battlefields of the Great War that serves as the point
of departure for the next analysis within the poetic genre of protest.

Wilfred Owen and “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is

Sweet and Good”
The Great War, 1914–1918. Ten million soldiers dead. Seven million
civilians dead. Twenty million wounded. Every continent involved save
Antarctica. How could it not have been the War to End All Wars? And
yet it wasn’t and the anonymity of these vast numbers and expanses
can prevent an understanding of the individual sufferings associated
with these enormous number of casualties. However, it is often in and
through the stories lived and shared by individuals that understanding
of the devastating consequences of mass violence can be attained. Susan
Owen, one mother of individual sons in the Great War, deciphered the
whereabouts of her eldest one, Wilfred (1893–1918), based on the pres-
ence of their code word “mistletoe” in his letters home. The first letters
of the lines, following the mention of the word, spelled out his destina-
tion. In the spring of 1917, Susan deciphered: “S-O-M-M-E” which as
one soldier-survivor reflected, “The whole history of the world cannot
contain a more ghastly word” (Brandt 2014, p. 54).
Into the region of this ghastly word, Wilfred Owen arrived on the
Western Front in January 1917. Later that year in April, he was blown
into the air of Savy Wood by a German shell, lying semiconscious in a
shell crater for several days. While the enemy shell had shaken him, it had
also, horrifically disinterred and shattered the body of his friend, Second
Lieutenant Hubert “Cock Robin” Gaukroger. Grappling with the mem-
ory, Owen wrote to his sister, Mary, that “it was not the Bosche [sic] that
worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
191

Cock Robin … who lay not only near by, but in various places around
and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t!” (Brandt 2014, p. 50).4
This experience triggered in Owen neurosthania, shell shock, what
is called today post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for which he
received treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. The
safety of Craiglockhart provided another type of shelter in which to
sustain another risk—that of writing poetry to give voice to those who
rotted on the barbed wire in No Man’s Land or who drowned in the
froth of their own lungs from poison gas. In his hand-written draft of
the preface for the book of poems he never lived to see published, Owen
declared:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory.
They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is
why the true Poets must be truthful. (Poetry Foundation 2015)

Through this warning, he intimates Shelley’s insight that by imagi-

natively sharing the experiences of others through poetry, humanity has
a chance to create new types of community. Through his requirement
of truth, he connects readers with the Keatsian (2016) dictum that
“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty/ and that is all you know on earth, and
all you need to know.” Beauty will out through the truth of poetry.
While Owen speaks of warning, it is a warning that burns through
the performance of protest by the poet’s narration of an appalling and
enthralling human experience. Appalling, as the stench of death, the
vision of havoc, the thundering of mortars, and the swarming of lice
overwhelmed the combatant with fear, disgust, and shock. Enthralling,
as the grandness of scale, the immensity of irrationality, and the fierce
bonds of brotherhood forged in this cauldron enslaved one to an
192    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

intensity of experience rare in human life. How could anyone, who

reads his poems from clean safe homes and classrooms, ever understand?
And yet, Owen, along with his brothers of the word—Sassoon, Graves,
Rosenberg, and many others—demanded that everyone do just that,
through the imaginative sympathy that Shelley encouraged, and Owen
risked, to tell the stories of his brothers in arms, through what he called
the “photograph” of a poem.
One of these photograph-poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is Sweet
and Good,” written during Owen’s annus mirabilis between summer of
1917 and autumn of 1918, trembles with the trauma of witness of a gas
attack at the end of a brutal march from the front lines (see below).

Dulce et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS!* Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
193

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The surface structure of this witness is a double sonnet whose title is

borrowed from Horace’s famous ode: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori/It is a sweet and good thing to die for one’s country.” However,
by the final line, its deep structure is revealed as one of irony, revealing
Horace’s dictum as a lie. Its deep structure is a profound speech act of
protest: “I, Wilfred Owen, soldier-poet, protest the slaughter of war.”

The Deep Story of “Dulce et Decorum Est/It is

Sweet and Good ”
The cataclysm that was the Great War has been discussed in signifi-
cant works from a vast range of perspectives.5 Many of these reveal that
the decades leading to the outbreak of hostilities had been punctuated
with war scares and international crises that had come and gone with-
out impacting the lives of ordinary people. This resulted in simultane-
ously a heightened sense of threat in European governments along with
a laissez-faire assumption by their citizens that future crises could also
be handled diplomatically (Hibberd 2002, p. 115).6 The Pentarchy
of Europe—Britain, France, Prussia-Germany, Austria-Hungary, and
Russia—had maintained relative stability on the continent for the pre-
vious two centuries, with each not wanting another to attain continen-
tal hegemony. As long as this precarious international balance held, a
sense of national security prevailed. However, the absent center could
not hold. With the unification of Germany through, and the defeat of
France in, the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), as well as the Russian
defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), political instability
grew. Disparities in technological growth complemented this instability.
Germany was emerging as an industrial and technological powerhouse,
194    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

while Britain and France’s share of manufacturing declined, and

Austria-Hungary and Russia lagged even further behind. The psycho-
logical and physical magnitude of Britain’s Imperial Navy and France’s
army of over a million men, respectively, in 1914 shielded many from
the fragility of the situation.
Insecurity seeped into continental life through the interplay of a
series of diplomatic crises. These included the Moroccan crisis (1905),
which positioned Germany in opposition to France and Britain,
Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia (1908–1909), and the Balkan
Wars (1912–1913). These crises led to the formation of alliances of
mutual support for any future conflicts. Germany reaffirmed its alliance
with Austria-Hungary originally forged in 1879, while Britain signed
a treaty with Japan in 1902 and entered into ententes with France in
1904, and Russia in 1907. The French and Russians had already forged
an alliance in 1894.
As economic power shifted in relation to industrial output, tensions
were amplified. Ironically, while German economic power increased, so,
too, did Kaiser Wilhelm II’s fears of encirclement by the “iron ring” of
the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia. A state of “latent war”
was afoot throughout the capitals of the Pentarchy in the decade lead-
ing up to 1914 (Schmitt and Vedeler 1988, p. 4). France and Britain
engaged in unofficial military and naval talks, even scouting potential
battlefields in Flanders and Picardy, as the Kaiser grew more belliger-
ent in talk and deed, expanding his army as well as his navy (Egremont
2014, p. 5).
When a shot in Sarajevo was fired by a 19-year-old student, Gavrilo
Princip, killing the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, the tide
turned. Alliances previously made were activated, ultimately resulting
in the formation of the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary,
the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria, and the Allied Powers of the Triple
Entente eventually along with Italy, Japan, and the United States. A
cascade of shortsighted decisions and miscommunications had let slip
the dogs of war that had lain sleeping at their masters’ feet. For Wilfred
Owen’s Britain, it would be its greatest war: “More than twice as many
British were killed in the First World War as in the Second. From 1914
until 1918 British forces were essential to the Allies’ success whereas,
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
195

after 1942, most of the fighting against Germany and Japan was done
by the Russians or the Americans” (Egremont 2014, p. 3). When the
loosed dogs rushed the field in August of 1914, Wilfred Owen was hap-
pily teaching English in France, hoping to improve his social prospects.
Over the next year, the war literally dug itself into the French coun-
tryside, sculpting thousands of miles of zigzagging trenches into the
Western Front. As the British Tommies crossed the Channel, convinced
it would all be over by Christmas, they carried with them the heroic
ideals of chivalry—honor, glory, and sacrifice. These ideals were among
the initial casualties in the First Battle of the Marne (September 1914),
which prevented the Germans from taking Paris, and the First Battle
of Ypres (October 1914), which marked the end of the opening phase
of the war. At these places, the chivalry once associated with warfare,
of Hector and Ajax releasing each other to fight another day, sustained
a crushing blow. As Christmas approached, each side fortified their
position, as the war of attrition sank into the landscape. The Christmas
Truce of 1914 was perhaps the last gasp of chivalry on the Western
Front for the next 4 years.7
Life in this landscape was characterized by a full frontal assault on
the senses. Visually, it was a ravaged landscape containing the remnants
of shattered lives. Villages, homes, and fields were blasted into nothing-
ness. Individuals, platoons, and units were blasted into semi-nothing-
ness, leaving behind an arm, a foot, or an identity disc to be sent to
families. Aurally it was marked by what novelist R.F. Delderfield (1972)
called the constant “mutter of small arms fire and the somber orchestra
of the big guns” (p. 5). The taste of the war was of the metallic sting
of blood, poisoned mud, and the sour water that filled mortar craters
into which soldiers dove when fired upon. The smell was that of the
decay of flesh, the stench of latrines, and the lingering odor of poison
gas. The touch was that of the clinging mud of Flanders, the cold slice
of barbed wire through skin, and the roughened hand of a comrade
pulling one out of harm’s way.8 This sensual assault was magnificent in
scale, advancing through the trenches and across No Man’s Land, cut-
ting every living entity into the rapture of its sweep.
This was not the sensory experience that had informed Wilfred
Owen’s early poetry. Along with the extralinguistic sensual realities of
196    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

the Great War, at least three interdiscursive discourses—literary, reli-

gious, and sexual—informed Owen’s performance of protest. The
strains of literary discourse included the English Romantics, the French
Decadents, the Georgians, and the Modernists, whereas the religious
discourse was that of the evangelical strain of the Church of England,
and the sexual discourse was that of illegal homosexuality.
Before the guns had sounded, Owen’s poetry was under the more
gentle influences of the Romantic tradition of English poetry. The
Romantics nurtured a reverence for the individual, the natural world,
idealism, physical and emotional passion, and the mystical (Academy of
American Poets 2015). This was the literary discourse to which Owen
apprenticed himself as Stallworthy (2008) says, to two master crafts-
men, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Drawing from classical
myth, Keats sought to reveal human suffering and desire with sensual-
ity and compassion. Owen’s earliest extant poem, “To Poesy” (1909–
1910), owes much to Keats’s poem “The Fall of Hyperion” in its images
of arms, face, eyes, hands, heart, tongue, brow, and brain (Stallworthy
2008, p. 68). This attentiveness to the body surfaces in Owen’s vivid
portrayals of the body in and at war.
Shelley’s politically passionate life and work fanned the flames of
compassion in Owen. Writing once that the rich “goad the poor to fam-
ine and then hang them if they steal a loaf ”, Shelley (1964) claimed
that national prejudices “are so violent in contradiction to my princi-
ples that more hate me as a free thinker, than love me as a votary of
Freedom, [nevertheless] I have at least made a stir here” (p. 271;
Demson 2010, p. 280). Shelley’s recognition of human pain and his
public articulation of it echo in Owen’s work. The Romantics’ compas-
sion for the human body, the value of the individual, and the dignity of
suffering, colored Owen’s vision so that when the face of a gassed man
slides off his skull, the poet is prepared to capture the experience with
compassion and authenticity.
Owen’s work was also shaped by the French Decadents, who rejected
bourgeois ideals, to focus on capturing beauty through immersion into
the imagination. For them, the modern artist “should be concerned
only with the refinement of sensation and the pursuit of beauty, even if
that meant exploring the darkest recesses of the human mind” (Hibberd
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
197

2002, p. 136). Rooted in the desire to shock, the Decadents courted

taboo ideas and behaviors including homosexuality and sadomaso-
chism, while extending the Romantics’ pursuit of beauty and sensation.
Drawing from the lushness of the Romantics and the directness of the
Decadents, Owen identified what he saw missing in the evangelical
Christianity of his upbringing: “imagination, physical sensation, aes-
thetic philosophy” (p. 98).
This lack was accentuated by Owen’s literary and social interactions
with the Georgians, named in honor of the commencement of George
V’s reign (1910–1936), and headlined by Rupert Brooke. Seeing them-
selves as the spearhead of a New Poetry, the Georgians rejected the
heightened emotion of Victorian rhetoric, celebrating instead plain lan-
guage within traditional verse. Initially, they enjoyed a widespread pop-
ular readership as they adapted traditional Romantic themes to the new
century.
In tension with this Georgian sensibility was that of Modernism.
While many of the Georgians were still celebrating rural life, the
Modernists were exploring the realities of urban industrial life. While
many of the Georgians depended upon traditional poetic forms, the
Modernists were experimenting with innovative forms such as stream
of consciousness. Through Edith and Osbert Sitwell and their avant-
garde anthology Wheels, Owen encountered the experimental work
of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others. (Hibberd 2002, pp. 322–323).
Characterized by a persistent irony, many Modernists chose not to with-
draw from civic life, but instead to write within a self-conscious vein to
reveal the contradictions and paradoxes of a world bent upon self-de-
struction (Jackson 1969).
In his brief life, Owen navigated these contemporary literary cur-
rents without jettisoning the gifts of the Romantics and Decadents. He
craved acceptance by his poetic peers as he moved beyond the sphere
of his family, particularly of his mother and her religious devotion to
evangelical Christianity. Prior to the war, the French Decadent Laurence
Tailhade had prompted Owen’s religious quest, giving him a copy of
Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse. Renan, another son of
a devoted and faith-filled mother, left the seminary after realizing that
the Bible was not literally true. By sharing Renan with Owen, Tailhade
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provided a role model for and reminder to Owen that he was not alone
on his spiritual journey (Hibberd 2002, p. 136). Whereas evangelicals
were committed to a Ministry of the Word, to convert others to be sol-
diers of Christ, Owen became committed to a ministry of the word to
convert others to be peacemakers. Ultimately, he declared his childhood
faith to be a “false creed” that “was largely a matter of language and
social pressures” (ibid., pp. 99, 96). Although initially, the use of words
to pressure chafed the poet’s conscience, this changed after he, him-
self, was transformed through life in the trench, battlefield, and hospi-
tal. This change is captured in his paraphrase of the 1918 Good Friday
theme from, “God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son”
to “God so hated the world that He gave several millions of English-
begotten sons, that whosoever believeth in them should not perish, but
have a comfortable life” (Owen 2015).
With a developing awareness of the world’s incongruities, Owen
rejected the religion of his youth, as he embraced an emergent under-
standing of his sexuality.9 To be homosexual in Britain at this time
was seen as “unspeakably wicked” and illegal. Within this homopho-
bic milieu, Owen befriended the Georgians, many of whom were gay,
including Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s mentor and hospital mate; Robert
Ross who was most likely Oscar Wilde’s first male lover; and C.K. Scott
Moncrieff, later the famous translator of Proust into English and a dec-
orated captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. These men were
all part of Ross’s circle, at the center of the “Oscar Wilde cult” that was
soon to be derided in the press (Hibberd 2002, pp. 275–298).
As autumn turned to winter in 1917, the war was at an impasse, and
public opinion was growling for a scapegoat. Ross, Wilde’s literary exec-
utor, provided one by granting permission for a private production of
Wilde’s 1891 “indecent” play Salome.10 This coincided with allegations
made by Noel Pemberton Billing, a far-right Member of Parliament,
who claimed that the German secret service possessed a Black Book list-
ing 47,000 prominent Britons, known to practice vices that “all decent
men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbos.” Theoretically, the
conspiracy of the “Unseen Hand” of Germany was blackmailing these
47,000 to subvert the British war effort (Dierkes-Thrun 2012).
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
199

In response to an ad for the forthcoming production, Pemberton

Billing wrote “The Cult of the Clitoris,” suggesting that the audience
would include many in the Black Book by implying that the star,
Maude Allen, was not only having an affair with Margot Asquith, wife
of former Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, but had also conspired with
the Germans. The actress sued for criminal libel resulting in a sensa-
tional trial involving Robert Ross. The jury found for Billing amidst
enormous publicity which traumatized Ross and his friends, including
Owen. While the press declared the MP’s success a great moral victory,
Ross “remarked that the public was kicking Oscar’s corpse to make up
for German successes” on the battlefield (Hibberd 2002, p. 322). Ross’s
comment pronounced the propaganda value of the trial as the war drug
into its brutal fourth year, requiring legislated conscription for the first
time in British military history.
In this sobering era of conscription, one of the most likely sources for
“Dulce et Decorum Est,” came from Owen’s experience on the Western
Front in January 1917. After completing his training in late 1916,
Owen was deployed to France at the turning of the year. Although ini-
tially he wrote that there is a “fine heroic feeling about being in France”
(Poetry Foundation 2015), that feeling was swiftly devastated by the
realities of the front. Wading through trenches holding in two feet of
freezing water even as they held the enemy out, living in a “hut” about
70 yards from a howitzer that deafened the gunners as it pounded the
enemy, Owen entered into what he called the “seventh hell,” the circle
of Dante’s Inferno that housed the violent.
On the weekend of January 12–13, Owen and A Company marched
six miles in the blistering cold over a shelled road and through a flooded
trench. Under machine gun fire and heavy shelling, the men whose
waders got stuck in the muck, simply had to pull their feet out and pro-
ceed barefoot through the freezing water across the icy ground. As they
stumbled forward, a gas attack occurred. Another possible source expe-
rience is from 6 April, when as Owen and A Company, relieved from
the Hindenberg Line were trudging back to their “distant rest,”  the gas
enveloped them (Hibberd 2002, pp. 234–235).11 While Owen’s mask
protected him from the gas, the bitter irony of warfare seeped into his
soul as he witnessed the dearth of sweetness in dying for one’s country.
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At Craiglockhart, Owen would carve this image into a word picture to

challenge “the old lie.” In doing so, his work animated the renovated
felicity conditions for the performance of an act of protest in distinctive
ways.

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions of “Dulce et

Decorum Est/It is Sweet and Good”

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

In an early sonnet, the “Poet in Pain,” Owen declared his desire to speak
for those “begnawed by seven devils” and those mute others, no mat-
ter the personal cost to himself. This reckoning revealed that Owen had
entered the war with his senses attuned to creating for the common
good even if from destruction. Reflecting on why he had to write about
the horror of combat, he asserted, “I do so because I have my duty to
perform toward the War” (Hibberd 2002, p. 296). This need to do his
duty, in the spirit of Nelson at Trafalgar, soldered itself to the authority
of his experience, legitimizing his identity as a poet and as a soldier’s
soldier.
From this position of strength, Owen issued a vocative to poets
who wrote state propaganda, particularly Jessie Pope. The initial draft
of “Dulce ” was dedicated to Pope, a writer and illustrator of children’s
books, whose simplistic rhyme and meter easily repeatable by children,
was ideal propaganda. Owen viewed her work as particularly despicable
with his disdain clear in the closing lines, when he challenges those who
“tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, /
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” Owen dedicated
a subsequent draft only to “a certain Poetess.” However, by the time
Siegfried Sassoon had shepherded the poem into publication in 1920,
even that had been eliminated, opening up the vocative to include all
who glorify war. Through his rejection of propaganda plus his field
experiences, Owen not only legitimizes his identity as poet and sol-
dier, but also grapples with Shelley’s poetic necessity: to share imagina-
tively in the lives of others so as to develop the pity that promotes social
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
201

change. For Owen, this pity exploded into a rhetorically powerful civic
empathy that broke open the depths of Owen’s orientation to change.

Circumstances of Disagreement and Critical Awareness

The circumstance of disagreement for Owen was the exact lack of criti-
cal awareness by those in power and their complacent supporters. In his
protest, Owen did not turn against the war or the soldier in the field.
However, he did want those at home to agitate on behalf of the soldiers
in the field. The power of propaganda through posters proclaiming that
“THE WOMEN of BRITAIN say GO!” and through groups such as
“The White Feather Girls” often squelched the courage of would-be-ag-
itators (Gullace 2014).12 Owen’s frustration was heightened due to
the actual proximity of England to the battlefront. It was said that the
guns at the Somme were heard all the way in London; they certainly
were heard in the fields of Kent. For Owen, his own bitterness was not
directed at the Enemy, but instead at fellow citizens, “who might relieve
us and will not” (Poetry Foundation 2015). When soldiers received
leave time, they came home to an English countryside apparently
untouched by the war. Disoriented upon returning to the front, the
alienation of the average Tommy from his homeland grew profoundly.

Words: Semantics of Opposition

Owen writes to capture this alienation so that future generations might

live “under an inoffensive sky, that does not shriek all night with the
flights of shells” (in Hibberd 2002, p. 223). As the various poetic
devices, themes, and strategies used in Owen’s work have been richly
explored,13 two particular dimensions that animate the semantics of
opposition are highlighted here. First, is Owen’s use of the traditional
form of the sonnet to dislodge traditional sentiments. Second, is the
tension between form and content, at the hinge of the vocative, at
which the poem swings from description to reflection.
For the 28 lines of the poem, Owen combines the form of the Italian
sonnet with that of the English sonnet. The Italian consists of an octave
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

made up of two quatrains that poses a question, and a sestet that pro-
vides an answer; both octave and sestet generally possess an a b b a four-
line rhyme scheme. The English form consists of three quatrains, with
an alternating rhyme scheme of a b a b, in which a thought is developed
in each, punctuated by a closing couplet. The duality within these forms
nurtures a dialectical movement of contrasting ideas toward resolution.
In “Dulce,” this dialectic originates with the title itself and the form.
At a quick glance at the title and form of the opening Italian sonnet that
initiates the poem, it appears that Owen’s usage resembles the mawkish
exploitation of the title by Sydney Oswald or Harold Jarvis, both of whom
had written pro-war poems of the same name (Williamson 2010).14
However, the inversion of the English form foreshadows the ironic inver-
sion of the title into the poem’s “old lie.” By the close of the poem, the
code-switching, or the offering of the title in Latin but the poem in
English, reinforces this inversion, while paralleling the code-switching
of Owen, from the chivalric code of heroic self-sacrifice, to Owen shell-
shocked, scathingly dissecting the code, to reveal its hollow center.15
Thus, the classical title plus the traditional format lead the reader
initially to assume the poem’s content reinforces Horace’s definition
of a good death. However, upon reading the first line, it is clear that
this is not true. Within the first fourteen lines, Owen telescopes from
a generalized description of a group of soldiers, including the narrator,
“we cursed through sludge,” in the first two quatrains that comprise
stanza one, to the painfully individualized ecstasy of fumbling for a gas
mask, in the sestet that comprises stanza two, “Quick, boys! … I saw
him drowning.” In stanza one, readers are confronted not by a modern
image of the Knights of the Round Table, ramrod-postured young men
in crisp uniforms returning from heroic and dashing deeds, but by a
Dickensian scene of beggars, bent-double in sacks, knock-kneed, cough-
ing, like wretchedly impoverished old women. In stanza two, the terror,
by which these once healthy, acutely aware soldiers had been trans-
formed into blood-shod, deaf, dumb, and blind cripples, is exposed as
the silent gas advances upon its victim.
Within sonnets, changes in rhyme scheme generally indicate a shift
in focus as seen in “Dulce,” whereas the volta, the essential “turn” in a
sonnet, signifies the moment of the dialectic. For this poem, three such
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
203

turns actually occur, one internally within each of the two sonnets
proper, and one signified by the presence of the inverted English cou-
plet as the bridge, between the description offered in the Italian son-
net and the reflection and challenge offered in the English one. In the
Italian sonnet, the volta typically occurs at line number nine as Owen
demonstrates with “Gas! GAS!” at the introduction of the sestet in
“Dulce. ” In the English sonnet, the volta is more mobile with it appear-
ing in line nine (e.g., Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII) or introducing the
final couplet (e.g., Spenser’s Sonnet LIV), or elsewhere. In the English
sonnet of “Dulce,” Owen maintains the volta at line number nine (line
25 overall) as he moves into the vocative direct address of “My friend.”
However, between these turns at their respective line nines, Owen
extends the duties of the volta, paralleling the gap between the Nation
at Home and the Nation Overseas. He accomplishes this by inverting
the English sonnet, presenting the couplet first, followed by the three
quatrains, to use it as the dialectical fulcrum from which the poet’s gaze
revolves. This searing gaze pivots from the sight he has beheld, to his
own nightmare of “helpless sight,” and ultimately, to an unflinching
gaze-hold on his readers in the final stanza.
In this stanza, Owen speaks directly to generate civic empathy in the
tradition of Shelley, to walk in the place of the Other, by challenging
his readers to pace in the “smothering dreams” behind the wagon into
which the guttering, gassed man had been flung. He jolts his readers by
his witness of a hellish death on behalf of the nation-state. In this clos-
ing stanza, drawing upon the surface of the vocative, Owen addresses a
generalized “inclusive you” as well as a particularized “my friend.” This
combination of the generalized and the particular intensifies the univer-
sality of his address by citing all three nominal persons: “my” as first
person; “you” as second person; “friend” as third person. No one, not
even himself, is spared his protest of the perpetuation of the old lie. The
poem in toto serves as a metonym for the experience of the war in its
entirety, leading back to the critical nature of the particular to commu-
nicate the general. Owen does not craft a semantics of opposition by
documenting ten million dead; he does it by breathing hideous life into
a single one. For what are the blood-shod begging? Truth and pity. The
poetry is in the pity as Owen had asserted.
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

Persons: The Interpellation of Wilfred Owen as Protester

Owen crafted this semantics of opposition at the beginning of his inter-

pellation as a protesting poet. Prior to the war, Owen did not question
the status quo, unconsciously accepting the hegemonic hail of post-Vic-
torian English culture that had interpellated him in the conservative
vein of the aspiring English gentleman. However, with the coming of
the First World War, the British state re-interpellated its entire citizenry
in terms of this event. In this sense, it foreshadows Romanian omoge-
nizare, with all citizens not interpellated as productive workers, but as
productive supporters of the war effort.
Born in Oswestry on the Welsh border of Shropshire, Wilfred was
the oldest of Tom and Susan Owen’s four children. Susan, who had
grown up in a prosperous family, was determined that her eldest son
return the family to a level of financial and social gentility. Tom, an
Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railways, encouraged his son to
pursue steady employment. Economic and social insecurities riddled
Owen’s emerging sense of identity. In his short life he explored various
personae to address his family’s desires: dutiful son, parish assistant,
English teacher abroad, and soldier. However, underlying all of these,
ultimately, was that of a poet (Hibberd 2002, p. 183). As a poet, he
pried open the Gramscian cracks within his personal and national ideo-
logical systems.
This deconstruction began in 1911 when Wilfred accepted a posi-
tion as a lay assistant to a vicar to discern a possible religious vocation.
Through this experience, Owen became increasingly disillusioned with
the Church’s limited response to the great needs of the people in the
parish. Owen was discovering more Church teaching in his reading of
Shelley at the time than he was in the Church’s treatment of the “least
among you.” After a proverbial dark night of the soul, Owen aggrieved
his mother by declaring, “Murder will out, and I have murdered my
false creed” (Hibberd 2002, p. 96).
After returning home, he accepted an offer to teach English in
France, which he did until enlisting in the autumn of 1915. By enlist-
ing, Owen answered the hegemonic hail par excellence on behalf of the
nation-state. After kissing the Bible upon which he had sworn the oath,
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
205

he wrote to his mother declaring either on purpose or by mistake, “I am

the British Army!” (Hibberd 2002, p. 165). He had become homog-
enized as Private Owen, TF, Number 4756, 28th London Regiment
(Artists’ Rifles), on October 21, 1915, among the final surge of volun-
teers. Gazetted to the Manchester Regiment, he served with their 2nd
Battalion in France from December 1916 through June 1917 before
being invalided home (Sassoon 1920).
Lieutenant Colonel William Shirley, founder and commanding
officer of the 2nd Battalion, exhorted his men with Horace’s famous
line, “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.” However, the Colonel
countered that “living for one’s country would often be more use-
ful and more difficult than dying for it” (Hibberd 2002, p. 172). For
Wilfred, a freshly commissioned second lieutenant in A Company, the
Horatian sentiment, along with Nelson’s dedication to duty, still held
true. That dedication was immediately tested by the brutality of the
front in January 1917. In and out of the front line over the next few
months, A Company endured some of the worst field conditions on the
Western Front. They spent 4 days under intense fire in a dugout near
Serre, which Owen commemorated in “The Sentry;” 2 days and nights
lying out on the “burning snow” near Beaumont Hamel, surrounded by
frozen corpses, recounted in “Exposure;” and 9 straight days in action
(April 13–21, 1917) around Savy Wood in which he had sheltered with
the pieces of 2/Lt. Gaukroger’s body.
In March, Owen fell into a fifteen-foot hole, suffering a concussion,
entombed for over 24 hours. This event seems to have initiated his shell
shock which finally overtook him after Savy Wood. At this time, Major
J.F. Dempster appears to have uttered a sharp remark to Owen, ques-
tioning his courage. Owen’s record reveals nothing of a formal or infor-
mal charge of any sort of cowardice.16 Due to the fragility of the poet’s
state of mind, however, even an innocuous comment may have been
perceived as an insult. Regarding his interpellation as a protester, Owen’s
perception that Dempster had, in turn, perceived him as cowardly, con-
tributes to Owen’s deep concern for his legitimacy, as a soldier to speak
on behalf of soldiers, as a poet. Throughout his convalescence, Owen
struggled to self-affirm his credibility: “I hate washy pacifists as temper-
amentally as I hate whiskied prussianists … Therefore I feel I must first
206    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

get some reputation of gallantry before I could successfully and usefully

declare my principles” (in Hibberd 2002, p. 276). He did just this even
as the intensity of his combat experience triggered his interpellation as a
protester. Once begun, all it required was guidance from a respected fel-
low soldier-poet for Owen’s counter interpellation to be fixed.
Owen arrived at Craiglockhart in June 1917, meeting Dr. Arthur
Brock 2 days later. Brock advocated ergotherapy or a “work cure” to
promote reintegration for shell shock patients. For Owen, the work
was poetry. The next month saw the arrival of Siegfried Sassoon at
Craiglockhart. Sassoon was everything Owen wanted to be: upper class,
public school and Cambridge educated, daring under fire, and an estab-
lished poet. Sassoon (2016) had been “assigned” to the hospital for neu-
rasthenia because of his open letter of protest against the war, “Finished
with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” in the summer of 1917. Sassoon
had declared that he could no longer participate in the prolonging of
the war’s suffering which he had found to be evil and unjust. He states
that, “I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against
the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are
being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this
protest against the deception which is being practised upon them.”
Sassoon also wanted to force a reckoning on those at home who were
callously complacent, lacking imagination to comprehend the agonies
being suffered by the average soldier (Sassoon in McSmith 2014).
Sassoon assumed he would face a court martial, but the War
Department was unaccustomed to this type of conscientious objector.
Not only was he the recipient of the Military Cross, whose exploits into
No Man’s Land had earned him the sobriquet “Mad Jack,” but he was a
popular poet from a respectable and wealthy family. In the preceding 3
years of war, the state had discreetly court-martialed and executed those
who had turned Other. However, shooting “Mad Jack” for his already
known protest would prove a public relations fiasco. Thus, when fellow
poet and officer, Robert Graves, intervened, arguing that Sassoon was
suffering from shell shock, the War Department quickly agreed, sending
Sassoon to Craiglockhart.17
Ironically, this hegemonic attempt to silence Sassoon not only
provided Mad Jack time and safety in which to write, but also the
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
207

opportunity to mentor the poet whose work now arguably shapes

public understanding of the Great War more than any other literary
figure. Two weeks after Sassoon’s arrival, Wilfred Owen, by then the
editor of the hospital magazine The Hydra, shyly introduced himself.
Sassoon nurtured the Keatsian ideal of the relationship between Beauty
and Truth in Owen’s work, challenging him to articulate the truth of
his experience, no matter how raw, in his poetry. He exhorted him to
“Sweat your guts out writing poetry!” (in Hibberd 2002, p. 267). The
expression of the truth of experience would exude the beauty of authen-
ticity, of the risk of piercing the human vulnerability being shared.
Within the glow of Sassoon’s encouragement for “Dulce ”, Owen drew
from the harsh lushness of the Romantics and Decadents for lurid
details, and the Georgians for plain language. This integration rein-
forced Dr. Brock’s emphasis on facing down the terrors which Owen
carried within himself.
His immersion in the barbarism of the war, followed by a convales-
cence with Sassoon, re-interpellated Owen, shaping his identity as a
poet and as a protester. The incessant hail of the state’s propaganda once
again misfired, conjuring a new subject who “[came] to use language
to counter this offensive call” (Butler 1997, p. 2). At the close of 1917,
he wrote to his mother that although he had not entered the year as a
poet, he did go out of it as one, “I am held peer by the Georgians; I am
a poet’s poet” (Hibberd 2002, p. 294). When he returned to battle on
September 1, 1918, 21 years to the day before another German army
would execute blitzkrieg over Poland, he did so confidently, declar-
ing “I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part” (Poetry
Foundation 2015).

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

With regard to the margin-center opposition of the convocative

split, Owen’s protest in “Dulce et Decorum Est” differs from the other
instances explored. First, this protest was not publicly issued until after
Owen had perished at Oise-Sambre Canal. Second, while alive, Owen
upheld his oath as a soldier, thus remaining tightly tethered to the
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

hegemonic power of the state, even as he interrogated its power. He tri-

aged his loyalties, with primacy given to his fellow human beings, exem-
plified by the soldier in the field, followed by king and country.
“Dulce,” which would have most likely been banned by government
censors during the war, is now one of the most famous British poems,
appearing on secondary and university reading lists throughout the
English-speaking world. In this sense, it has been co-opted by the status
quo. In this sense, it is not an artifact of the margins, as a work of art
that shocks through a sharp execution of form, rhyme, and meter, but
one of the center. It is also not an artifact of the margins in regard to its
contemporary citation in discussions of chemical weapons, but again,
one of the center. There is no direct evidence that the poem, finally
published in Poems with an introduction by Sassoon, influenced the
1925 Geneva Protocol, banning the use of chemical weapons. However,
there is evidence of its influence on the contemporary international
conversation about these weapons. For example, the New York Times
quoted the poem in its coverage of the Syrian use of chemical weap-
ons in 2013 (Erlanger 2013), while the complete poem was posted on
the Chemical Weapons Convention webpage in 2014 (Munro-Nelson
2014).
However, when “Dulce ” is summoned outside of these arenas to a
more generalized antiwar arena, it returns to its original position, as an
artifact of the margin. Illocutionary intention is again in consort with
perlocutionary effect. A most poignant example of this is “Last Post” by
Carol Ann Duffy (2009), Poet Laureate for the United Kingdom. For
this poem, Duffy, the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly
LGBT person to serve as Laureate, draws on “Dulce ” for inspiration. In
it, she reverses time so the war dead live and speak again. Duffy states
that the war in Afghanistan was in her mind when she chose to start the
poem with the inverted volta from “Dulce.”

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Within this Afghan frame, “Dulce ” vibrates as a touchstone of col-

lective memory, as a room in the memory palace of war, to question
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
209

the human commitment to wage war. This citing is not restricted to

denouncing chemical weapons or commemorating the Great War, but
to honor all who have suffered and died at the hand of Mars, to encour-
age choices beyond war.
So the poem, nestled in its safe houses of the Great War or the
Geneva Protocol, can unify individuals from the center to the margins.
However, the poem, set loose to run over the fields of contemporary
conflicts, gives readers pause. It possesses the power to split readers,
to call them to support the center—for example the American use of
drone strikes—or to challenge this choice and position themselves on
the margins of the immense power of the global arms complex pro-
moting drone usage. In other words, when the poem is functioning in
one of its highly specific contexts, it can unify disparate communities
of practice. When it is applied more generally to a contemporary con-
flict, then it generates the convocative split of a protest performative.
In this specific-to-general process, the citing of the poem resembles the
singing of We Shall Overcome. The song sung as a commemorative act of
the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement by the US Congress
unified center and margin.18 The song sung in support of a current civil
rights issue, like marriage equality generates a covocative split, between
those against it, such as Stand Up For Marriage, and those for it, such
as the Human Rights Campaign (Harris 2009). This plasticity reflects
Owen’s own. He desired simultaneously to possess an identity legiti-
mized by the center, even as he desired to identify as a marginalized sol-
dier, legitimized by the horrors of battle, on behalf of the marginalized
soldier.
Appropriately, in the spirit of Owen the warrior poet, the poem-in-
action manages to fulfill both types of duty—to conscience at the center
and the security of the state, as well as to conscience on the margin and
the security of soldiers and unthinking civilians. In this way, the poem
serves the Social Contract through a broadened understanding of it,
not just as an agreement between citizens and their government, but as
one of human beings to their species like with 99 Luftballons/99 Red
Balloons. Along with expanding the Social Contract and the animation
of the presuppositional felicity conditions, the poem also fulfills the
aspirational ones as well.
210    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of “Dulce et

Decorum Est/It is Sweet and Good”

Thoughts, Intentions, Risk

Along with fulfilling the renovated presuppositional felicity conditions,

Owen’s poem also fulfills their aspirational counterparts. The very com-
position and subsequent editing of “Dulce ” indicates the appropriate
thoughts and feelings of a performance of protest. Owen desperately
wanted to be a voice for those unable to speak for themselves. This desire
prompted him to return to the front to prove his gallantry, to become a
legitimate voice for the average soldier. Writing to his mother in October
1918, he declared, “‘I came out in order to help these boys—directly by
leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their suf-
ferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the
first’” (Hibberd 2002, p. 352). By following Sassoon’s order to sweat his
guts out writing poetry, he had managed already to do the second as well.
Owen’s publishing intentions were not in doubt. Prior to his death,
he had published five poems: “Song of Songs” in The Hydra and The
Bookman; “The Next War” in The Hydra; “Miners,” “Futility,” and
“Hospital Barge” in The Nation. That he had intended to publish a col-
lection, possibly called Disabled and Other Poems, is evidenced by his
draft preface and working outline. Having shared many of his poems
with his Georgian peers, Sassoon had already arranged a meeting with
Robert Ross to facilitate publication (Hibberd 2002, p. 281).
Discharged from Craiglockhart, Owen prepared to return to the
front. Hibberd (2002) has claimed that in the history of English poetry,
“there can be few braver, more extraordinary undertakings” than Owen’s
poetic work in the spring of 1918 (p. 309). During this final spring, he
personified the Duke of Exeter’s speech to the Dauphin in Shakespeare’s
Henry V, spending his days training to return to the “fierce tempest”
that had nearly robbed him of his sanity, and his evenings turning his
gaze unflinchingly inward, crafting “bloody constraint” into poetry (Act
II, Scene iv). As an officer, Owen knew he would do his duty and return
to his men; as a poet, Owen knew he would do his duty to speak for his
men. His subsequent action of return was not an easy one; he did not
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
211

crave the fight. He wanted a home posting so that he might live and
write. However, he put his name on the draft, spurred by the discovery
that Sassoon, mistakenly shot by a British sniper, was no longer in the
field. With Sassoon out of action, Owen (1984) figured another poet
must enter the fray as he stated in his poem, “The Calls”:

For leaning out last midnight on my sill,

I heard the sighs of men, that have no skill
To speak of their distress, no, nor the will!
A voice I know. And this time I must go.

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

Reflecting on Sassoon’s example, Owen confessed, “Now must I throw

my little candle on his torch, and go out again” (Poetry Foundation
2015). In going out again, Owen dug deep, mirroring the Welsh coal
miners whose work fed the engines of the British Empire and the sap-
pers who tunneled into No Man’s Land to track and kill the Enemy. In
doing so, he was interpellated once more. While in combat on Joncourt
Ridge, Owen stayed with one of his soldiers, named Jones, as he bled
out on Owen’s shoulder. For 30 minutes, Owen comforted him, paused
in compassion, to honor the dying during the dying. Afterwards, with
his tunic soaked by Jones’ blood and his “senses charred,” Owen expe-
rienced the ecstasy of focus he articulated in “Dulce,” as he plunged
back into the battle, declaring that the only word to describe it was
“SHEER”.19 He confessed that, “It passed the limits of my Abhorrence.
I lost all my earthly faculties, and fought like an angel” (in Hibberd
2002, p. 348). As this martial angel, he was instrumental in claiming
over 200 prisoners and 24 machine guns. In the midst of the German
counterattack, Owen and another soldier commandeered two of the
machine guns, swinging them into action against their former own-
ers. For this act, the poet, who had once feared to be a coward, earned
the Military Cross. The poet-soldier had been interpellated once more.
No more an aspiring English Gentleman, or a Tommy off to war, but
instead Michael, the Archangel of Battle defending his brothers in arms.
His gallantry and courage were proven through his valor and death.
212    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

These subsequent actions, resulting in his ultimate sacrifice, fulfilled the

renovated felicity conditions, establishing the pragmatic legitimacy of
Owen’s speech act of protest, “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
In “the mystery and cruelty of things” as Swinburne (2015) once wrote,
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was killed on November 4, 1918 while build-
ing a bridge.20 Literary legend has it that as the church bells of England
joyfully peeled the Armistice, on November 11, 1918, the telegram
announcing Wilfred’s death was delivered to Susan and Tom Owen. Their
individual son had become one of the millions of casualties in the War
to End All Wars. From the courage of this soldier under fire in the Great
War, the next analysis turns to a contemporary example of Mayan civilian
courage under fire, at the hands of their own military, in the highlands of
Guatemala. This is followed by the final analysis, of a Northern Irish exam-
ple, of courage in response to the British domination of that region.

Notes
1. In the introduction to an interview with Ana Blandiana, Naomi
Frandzen states that Blandiana “is one of Romania’s finest contempo-
rary poets. She has published 16 volumes of poems, 6 books of essays
and 4 works of prose. Her writings have been translated into 16 lan-
guages. Although Blandiana began writing in 1959, she is perhaps
best known for her courageous poems from the late 1980’s against the
repressive Ceausescu regime.”
2. This chapter is particularly indebted to the work of Gail Kligman for
background information on reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania and
Daniela Sorea for her translation of “Cruciada Copiilor”, her analysis of
the poem, and her feedback on several questions I had about the poem
during the writing of this chapter.
3. Also known as the “hero-city” as it was where the revolt, to remove
Ceausescu from power in 1989, developed (www.jehat.com).
4. I encourage the reading of Wilfred Owen’s Collected Letters, edited by
his brother, Harold Owen, and John Bell.
5. See Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory or Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August, and more recent contributions such as John Keegan’s
The First World War, Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
or Allen Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War.
 5  Exploring the Protest Language of Poetry …    
213

6. The context for this discussion of Wilfred Owen is deeply indebted to

Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: A New Biography.
7. For more information on the Christmas Truce, please visit the BBC’s
“What really happened in the Christmas Truce” at the iWonder page at
www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zxsyrd.
8. For an in-depth study of the sense of touch in First World War litera-
ture, see Santanu Das’ Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature.
9. Hibberd concluded in Wilfred Owen: A New Biography that it was
“undoubtedly true” that Owen was gay (xix).
10. The play was still under its 1892 ban from public performance

(Hibberd “Wilfred Owen”, p. 299) ostensibly due to a sixteenth-cen-
tury law that prohibited the portrayal of biblical characters on an
English stage (Dierkes-Thrun).
11. For a recent source discussion, see Bryan Rovers’ “Wilfred Owen’s

Letter No. 486” as a Source for ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in ANQ.
12. This group of young militant women thrust white feathers at men
of military age, wearing civilian clothes on the streets of England,
demanding that they enlist. The shame of this public “induction” into
the “Order of the White Feather” stayed with many of its recipients for
the remainder of their lives, whatever the reason had been for their lack
of uniform (Gullace).
13. See Dominic Hibberd’s Owen the Poet or Adrian Caesar’s Taking It Like
a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets. Also see, The Complete
Poems and Fragments, by Wilfred Owen edited by Jon Stallworthy.
14. These had been published by Galloway Kyle (a pseudonym for the pub-
lisher Erskine Macdonald) in the poetry-as-propaganda collections of
Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men and More Songs of the Fighting
Men.
15. Consider in relation to Paul Northgate in “Wilfred Owen and the
Soldier-Poets”, The Review of English Studies who states, “In Owen’s war
poetry, reference or allusion has almost always an ironizing function.
The primary thrust of this irony is in one of two directions-towards the
situation of war itself, or towards the source of the allusion.”
16. See Dominic Hibberd’s discussion of this in Appendix B of Wilfred
Owen: A New Biography (pp. 374–375).
17. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart one week before the political firestorm
erupted after an antiwar Liberal Member of Parliament, Hastings Lee-
Smith, read the letter in the House of Commons on July 30, 1917, and
The Times published it the next day (Hibberd “Wilfred Owen”, p. 264).
214    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

18. For more on this occasion, see Olivia Waxman’s “Watch Congressional
Leaders Join Hands and Sing ‘We Shall Overcome’.” June 25, 2014.
Time Magazine. www.Time.com. 12 December 2014.
19. Evidently, the word had come to Owen from the headlines, which had
read, ‘ADVANCE BY SHEER FIGHTING,’ ‘SHEER FIGHTING’ in
the Daily Mail of September 19 and October 3, 1918, respectively. See
Note 11 of Chapter 19 in Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: A New
Biography.
20. Although Owen had known he was to receive the Military Cross, it had
not yet been presented. He died not knowing that he had finally been
promoted to First Lieutenant, retroactive to the preceding December.

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 6
Exploring the Protest Language of Prose:
Condemnations of the Totonicapán
Massacre and The Diary of Bobby Sands

Condemnations of the Totonicapán Massacre

In the predawn hours of October 4, 2012, fifteen thousand unarmed
residents of the K’iche’ Mayan community of Totonicapán (Chwi
Miq’ina’ ),1 in the highlands of Guatemala, peacefully blocked traffic
at the Cuatro Caminos2 on the Pan-American Highway. The commu-
nity was protesting frequent power outages and recent hikes in electric-
ity rates. At this same time, Maya community leaders were waiting to
dialogue on the issues with President Otto Perez Molina in Guatemala
City, who had sent the National Civilian Police and the Army to clear
the thoroughfare. After an exchange of stones and tear gas, the soldiers
opened fire, despite Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla’s order
not to interfere with the peaceful demonstrations. They killed six pro-
testers on the spot; thirty-three were wounded. At first President Perez
Molina, a former general in the Guatemalan military, denied that shots
had been fired, claiming the troops were unarmed. Then the govern-
ment claimed that the shooting was a drive-by, carried out by armed
hoodlums in a pickup truck. Cell phone pictures posted online, how-
ever, soon disproved both of those versions. The Prensa Libre, a lead-
ing national newspaper, carried a front-page picture of Nobel Peace
© The Author(s) 2018 219
M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_6
220    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Laureate Rigoberta Menchú picking up shell casings from military

weapons at the massacre site. The outrage was immediate, both nation-
ally and internationally. Church officials, international agencies, and
human rights organizations condemned the shootings, which sparked
larger demonstrations by indigenous communities across the country.
The Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC) (2012) issued a
five-point statement in Spanish and English denouncing the killings,
while the civil government of Totonicapán (2012) issued its own in for-
mal Spanish, and the Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’ (2012)
did so in Spanish and the local Mayan language of K’iche’ (see the end
of this section for the texts of these documents).
This use of multiple languages to interconnect with a broad range of
audiences situates these speech acts on a metalanguage level that points
toward an intimate relationship between protest and indigenous lan-
guage rights. The native speakers, of the over twenty different Mayan
languages spoken in Guatemala, have had to fight for the survival of
their languages just as they have had to fight for other basics of mod-
ern life, including electricity. Since the ending of the 36-year civil war
(1960–1996) in Guatemala, a variety of indigenous rights, of language,
justice for the murdered and disappeared, religion, and resource control,
have not materialized due predominantly to a lack of resources and the
political will to implement the 1996 Peace Accords. Within this envi-
ronment, less than 1% of export-oriented agricultural producers still
control 75% of the richest farmland, reflecting one of the starkest man-
ifestations of income inequality on the planet (Minority Rights 2008),
in a country with the highest homicide rate in the world (Crisis Group
2013). Consistent with such security and financial resource disparity
is that the right to teach, publish, and engage the justice system in an
indigenous language remains elusive. Thus, while the surface structures
of condemnation explored in this study are targeted at the Totonicapán
massacre, many other issues saturate the milieu of these performances
of protest. With this in mind, these condemnations are direct expan-
sions of the deep structure of “We, members of the local, national, and
international communities, protest the continued violence against the
indigenous peoples of Guatemala at the hands of the government and
military.”
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
221

GHRC Condemns Massacre in Totonicapán, Guatemala

1. The Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA (GHRC) con-
demns the military’s violent response to community protests on October
4, 2012, and expresses solidarity for victims and their families. Early
that morning, over 15,000 indigenous protestors of the 48 Cantones
of Totonicapán took to the streets, blocking traffic at five points on
national highways. At the same time, community leaders waited to
meet with President Otto Pérez Molina in the capital to carry forward
a dialogue process. The communities were protesting excessive electric-
ity rates, changes to the professional teacher training requirements, and
proposed constitutional reforms. The National Civilian Police and the
Military were sent to disband the protest and restore the flow of traf-
fic. Despite the Interior Minister’s order to maintain distance, a military
contingent of 89 soldiers under the command of Colonel Juan Chiroy
Sal advanced at the Cumbre de Alaska and confronted the protesters.
According to preliminary investigations, eight soldiers fired their weap-
ons into the crowd. Six protesters are confirmed dead, and at least 33
others injured. Thirteen soldiers also reported injuries.
2. GHRC has been closely monitoring the situation, and has received
reports from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights in Guatemala (UNHCHR), the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the
Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, DC, the International Commission
against Impunity (CICIG), and NGO partners in Guatemala.
3. GHRC commends the thorough investigation by the Public
Prosecutor’s Office and National Forensic Science Institute (INACIF).
The prompt arrest of Colonel Chiroy and 8 other soldiers for the crime
of extrajudicial execution, among other charges, is an important depar-
ture from Guatemala’s long history of impunity for crimes committed
by the armed forces.
4. GHRC supports the right of the 48 Cantones to peacefully protest,
and joins national and international organizations in emphasizing that
the restoration of freedom of movement is not legitimate justification
for the aggressive suppression of the freedom to protest. Moreover, we
recognize that these protest measures (roadblocks, marches, etc.) are
222    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

only necessary because of the lack of political access and historic exclu-
sion of the great majority of poor, agricultural and indigenous commu-
nities in Guatemala.
5. GHRC joins the UNHCHR in reminding the Guatemalan govern-
ment that extrajudicial or arbitrary executions committed by mem-
bers of the Armed Forces implicate the Guatemalan State for its lack
of action to prevent such atrocities. The tragic violence on October 4
highlights systemic problems, such as the erroneous assumption that the
military is willing to play a subservient role to the police. The National
Civilian Police is the only institution trained to provide citizen security;
the continued use of the military in these operations creates the condi-
tions for the repetition of such violence in the future.
6. In light of these events, GHRC calls on the Guatemalan government
to:
a. Follow through with the current investigation and prosecution of
those responsible for extrajudicial executions, provide just reparations to
the victims, and move forward with any agreements that came out of
the dialogue process with community leaders.
b. Immediately institutionalize the removal of the armed forces from
involvement in responses to protests, forced evictions, and other civil
conflicts; provide a clear timeline for the prompt removal of the armed
forces from all aspects of citizen security.
c. Revoke Congressional Decree 40-2000, which legalizes the use of the
military to support police in combating organized and common crime.
d. Promptly move forward with the necessary reforms to the National
Civilian Police, providing sufficient budget and institutional support for
the reforms to be successful.
e. Fully respect indigenous rights and implement a comprehensive, par-
ticipatory, and effective dialogue process. We consider this to be a crit-
ical step toward ending the exclusion of indigenous communities and
ensuring the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Washington, DC—October 18, 2012
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
223

Original Spanish Totonicapán Government Condemnation

Pronunciamiento Público Urgente
El pueblo Maya-K’iche’ de Totonicapán, dirigido por las autoridades
indígenas de los 48 cantones, el día de hoy Kajib’ Iq’ dentro del cal-
endario sagrado maya (4 de octubre del 2012), realizaron una man-
ifestación pacífica, en la carretera interamericana; con el objeto de
demandar del Gobierno de la República de Guatemala para que atienda
sus demandas fundamentales que se resumen de la siguiente manera:
(A) Que se revise el alza desmedido a la tarifa del suministro de energía
eléctrica, en el municipio de Totonicapán. (B) Inconformidad por la
propuesta de reformas a la Constitución Política de la República de
Guatemala, que plantea el Organismo Ejecutivo, puesto que carece de
un reconocimiento pleno de los derechos y de oportunidades para el
desarrollo de los pueblos indígenas, e inconsulto a pueblos indígenas.
(C) Inconformidad por la imposición de una tergiversada y mal llam-
ada reforma educativa, que afecta fundamentalmente el derecho a la
educación de la población rural e indígena de Guatemala. Sin embargo
aun cuando se ha tenido una delegación del pueblo de Totonicapán para
que fueran atendidas sus demandas en ciudad de Guatemala en casa
presidencial, las autoridades estatales han hecho caso omiso a dichas
demandas, dejando burlada a la delegación indígena Maya-K’iche’ del
pueblo de Totonicapán encabezada fundamentalmente por autoridades
indígenas. Como respuesta directa del gobierno de Guatemala, se envió
un fuerte contingente amenazador de policías y miembros del ejército
de Guatemala, que se hizo presente para reprimir dicha manifestación
pacifica. La represión ha dejado hasta el momento a cuatro (4) perso-
nas fallecidas y una cantidad aun no determinada de heridos. Violando
con ello derechos fundamentales como los son; derecho a la vida, a la
libre expresión, a la libre determinación de los pueblos. Los mismos se
encuentran reconocidos en legislación nacional e instrumentos inter-
nacionales ratificados por Guatemala. Ante dichos acontecimientos
REPUDIAMOS LA CRIMINALIZACIÓN DE LA PROTESTA
SOCIAL en contra de los hermanos y hermanas de Totonicapán, y
como organizaciones de derechos humanos exigimos a: Gobierno de
Guatemala:
224    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

- El respeto a los derechos a la libre expresión, de los y las habitantes del

municipio de Totonicapán.
- Que se ordene el inmediato retiro de las fuerzas armadas del territorio
de Totonicapán, para evitar que se siga vulnerando el derecho a la vida
de las personas de dicho municipio.
- Que se inicie una investigación exhaustiva para dar con los responsa-
bles de la muerte de los hermanos de Totonicapán, que participaban en
dicha manifestación pacífica.
- Que el Estado de Guatemala asuma el resarcimiento, a las familias de
las personas fallecidas, para que sus familias puedan vivir dignamente.
- Que se garantice la seguridad de las autoridades indígenas Maya-
K’iche’ de Totonicapán, para evitar agresiones a su integridad, el de su
familia y su patrimonio.
- Que el gobierno de Guatemala y los Organismos pertinentes del
Estado, atiendan las demandas justas y de derecho que exige el pueblo
Maya-K’iche’ de Totonicapán.
Procurador de los Derechos Humanos:
- Que presente de forma urgente el informe circustanciado de los
hechos acaecidos en la carretera interamericana, por dicha manifestación
pacífica y que se pronuncie a favor de los derechos de los guatemaltecos.
A la comunidad internacional:
- Que se pronuncien en favor del respeto a los derechos de las comuni-
dades indígenas de Totonicapán.
- En el momento propicio a que las embajadas acreditadas en nuestro
país, se pronuncien hacia el respeto a los derechos de los pueblos indí-
genas y que en el marco de la cooperación hacia nuestro país, se condi-
cione la atención y demandas de los pueblos indígenas.
- A los relatores especiales del Sistema de las Naciones Unidas, y del
sistema Interamericano para los Derechos Humanos y para Pueblos
Indígenas; condenar los hechos que han cobrado la vida de al menos
cuatro personas y realizar una visita in situ para determinar los extremos
de las demandas de los pueblos indígenas y promuevan medidas que
garanticen los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.
Paxil_Kayal, Kajib’ Iq’, eqanel Oxlajuj No’j
Octubre 04 del 2012
tzukimpop@gmail.com
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
225

Capítulo Guatemala de la PIDHDD; Movimiento Tzuk Kim-pop;

Asociación Uk’aslemal Xocopila’; Consultores Sociales CONSOC;
Asociación Juvenil, Sinergia Juvenil; Proyecto Lingüístico Santa
María; Asociación de Vecinos el Alto de Totonicapán; Municipia No’j;
Asociación para el desarrollo Sostenible de la Mancomunidad Huista;
Convergencia para la Emancipación Política y social de las Mujeres
Quetzali; Centro Experimental para el Desarrollo de la Pequeña y
Mediana Empresa Rural; Proyecto de Desarrollo Santiago PRODESSA
English Translation of Totonicapán Government Condemnation
Totonicapán Urgent Public Statement
The village Maya K’iche’ Totonicapán, led by indigenous authorities of
the 48 cantons day
Today Kajib’ Iq’ within the Mayan sacred calendar (October 4, 2012),
held a peaceful demonstration on the Pan-American Highway; in order
to sue the Government of the Republic of Guatemala our fundamental
demands are summarized as follows: (A) That the excessive rise in the
rate of supply of electricity in the town of Totonicapán be reviewed. (B)
Disagreement with the proposed amendments to the Constitution of
the Republic of Guatemala, proposed by the executive branch, because
they lack a full recognition of the rights and opportunities for the
development of indigenous peoples, and a lack of knowledge of indig-
enous peoples. (C) Disagreement with the imposition of a distorted
and so-called education reform, affecting mainly the right to educa-
tion of rural and indigenous populations of Guatemala. Nevertheless,
even though there has been a delegation of the people of Totonicapán
to serve their demands in Guatemala City at the presidential residence,
state authorities have ignored these demands, leaving mocked the
Indian delegation of the Maya K’iche’, the people of Totonicapán, led
primarily by their indigenous authorities.
As a direct response, the government of Guatemala, sent a strong con-
tingent of police and the Guatemalan army to threaten and suppress
this peaceful demonstration. So far, the Repression has resulted in
four (4) dead people and an amount not yet determined of injured.
Thereby violating fundamental rights including: right to life, to free
226    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

expression, and to self-determination of peoples. These rights are rec-

ognized in national legislation and international instruments ratified by
Guatemala.
Given these events, we reject the criminalization of social protest against
the brothers and sisters of Totonicapán, and as human rights organiza-
tions demand that:
Government of Guatemala:
- Respect the rights to free speech, and the inhabitants of the m
­ unicipality
of Totonicapán.
- The immediate withdrawal of armed forces from the territory of
Totonicapán in order to avoid continued violation of the right to life of
the people of that town.
- That a thorough investigation be conducted to find those responsi-
ble for the death of our Totonicapán brothers, who participated in this
peaceful demonstration.
- That the State of Guatemala assumes compensation for the families of
the deceased, so that their families can live in dignity.
- That the security of the indigenous authorities of the Maya K’iche’
from Totonicapán is guaranteed to prevent attacks on their integrity,
family and heritage.
- Guatemala’s government and relevant state organs meet the just and
legal demands of the Maya K’iche’ people from Totonicapán.
Counsel for Human Rights:
- Urgently submit the report describing the events that occurred on the
Inter-American Highway, for said peaceful demonstration and to rule in
favor of the rights of Guatemalans.
To the international community:
- To speak out in favor of respect for the rights of indigenous communi-
ties such as Totonicapán.
- In the appropriate time, for embassies recognized in our country now,
to speak out for the rights of indigenous peoples and within this frame-
work of cooperation toward our country, the attention and demands of
indigenous peoples are conditioned.
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
227

- To the special rapporteurs of the United Nations System and the

Inter-American System for Human Rights and the Indigenous Peoples;
condemn the acts that have claimed the lives of at least four peo-
ple and conduct a site visit to determine the ends of the demands of
indigenous peoples and promote measures to guarantee the rights of
indigenous peoples.
Paxil_Kayal, Kajib’ Iq’ eqanel Oxlajuj No’j
October 4, 2012
tzukimpop@gmail.com
Guatemala Chapter of PIDHDD; Movement Tzuk Kim-pop; Uk’aslemal
Association Xocopila’; Social Consultants CONSOC; Youth Association,
Youth Synergy; Linguistic Project Santa Maria; Neighborhood Association
Upper Totonicapán; Municipia No’j; Association for Sustainable
Development Commonwealth Huista; Convergence for Social Policy
and Emancipation of Women Quetzali; Experimental Centre for
the Development of Rural Small and Medium Enterprises; Project
Development Santiago PRODESSA
Facebook Communications on the Totonicapán Massacre from
the Comunidad Lingüistica Maya K’iche’
October 6, 2012
Spanish Statement
La Comunidad Lingüísitca K’iche’ está de luto por la muerte de los
hermanos del departamento de Totonicapán. Instamos a todas las
demás comunidades lingüísticas de la Academia de Lenguas Mayas de
Guatemala unirse al dolor que vivimos …
The community lingüísitca k’iche’ is mourning for the death of the
brothers of the department of Totonicapán. We call on all the other lan-
guage regions of the academy of Mayan languages of Guatemala to join
the pain that we live …
Automatically Translated
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228    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

K’iche’ Statement
Comunidad Lingüistica Maya K’iche’
October 6, 2012
Sib’alaj kaq’utut qak’u’x rumal le xk’ulmataj pa ri k’iche’ tinamit rech
Chwi Miq’ina’. Qeta’m chi le xkita ri qanan qatat che ri q’atib’al tzij,
rajawaxik chiqe nimalaj qonojel rumal che tajin kuriq k’ax ri tinamit pa
kiq’ab’ ri musib’ ri tajin ketaqan pa qawi’ nimalaj qonojel.
Ri tata’ib’ ri xeqakoj che q’atib’al tzij tajin kakiya uk’utik le qas k’o pa
kijolom. Are’ man kakaj taj kujch’awik, man kakaj taj kujwa’lijik, man
kakaj taj kaqato’ qib’ pa ri nimalaj k’axk’olil ri tajin paqawi’.
Xekamisax chi nik’aj qachalal jas ri xk’ulmataj, Sansirisay, Panzos,
Santiago Atitlán, k’iche’, Tzoloja’, Rab’inal, konojel ri kamisanik ri’
xkiya kan nimal b’is paqak’u’x ri tajin kak’asitaj chi jumul kumal taq
we k’ax we tajin kaqariqo. K’a junik’pa’ chi q’ij saq kaqakoch’och’ej we
itzelal ri?
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The Deep Story of the Condemnations

of the Totonicapán Massacre

The October 2012 demonstration and massacre, themselves, provide the

immediate context of the linguistic performance of the three organiza-
tions’ protests of the violence. According to a United Nations report,
upon the arrival of the National Civilian Police and the Army, pro-
testers threw stones into three army vehicles, which in turn teargassed
the crowd (Paley and Watts 2012). While the protesters were fleeing,
the army opened fire with live ammunition. These events at the Cuatro
Caminos are the flashpoint of the surface and deep structures of the con-
demnations issued by the three organizations. These events, however,
are certainly not isolated. Instead, they are situated on an historical con-
tinuum punctuated by what Mayan leaders often refer to as the three
holocausts: the first in the wake of the sixteenth-century Spanish con-
quest and its aftermath, the second in the wake of the devastating land
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
229

dispossession during the nineteenth century’s Liberal Revolution, and

the third being the genocide of the Maya during the 1980s (Minority
Rights 2008). These punctuations seep into all aspects of protest in this
country. In this way, the 2012 violence and corresponding protests are
rooted in a long history of oppression. Such gross abuse of the Social
Contract has been grounded in a perversion of state security being not
for the people of the state, of whom approximately 50% are of Mayan
ancestry, but instead for the protection of international financial inter-
ests and the governmental structures supporting them. State-sanctioned
violence and the corresponding fear of it are consistently the most pal-
pable extralinguistic variables at play.
The Guatemalan military has historically been the most brutal in its
treatment of indigenous peoples compared with other Central American
military involvement in civil conflicts of the late twentieth century.
During the civil war, over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.
The vast majority of these were from indigenous communities and the
vast majority of perpetrators were connected with the military. During
the war, massacres, death squads, disappearances, kidnapping, rape,
and torture generated a plague of fear throughout the country. Only
in a few cases have those responsible been held accountable. The war,
backed by the United States, sought to eliminate Marxist-communist
revolutionaries through the military’s “scorched earth policy” result-
ing in more than 626 massacres of Mayan villages between 1978 and
1984 alone (Guatemalan Human Rights Commission 2011). However,
although the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, and remain a primary
interdiscursive touchstone for civic action within the country, the lev-
els of violence have once again skyrocketed, climbing higher than dur-
ing the actual civil war. This is intimately related to drug trafficking in
the country. It is estimated that approximately 60% of the country is
controlled by traffickers (ibid.). According to US government esti-
mates, nearly 30% of the cocaine destined for the United States in 2007
was moved through Guatemala. However, by 2010, that number had
nearly tripled to 80% (International Crisis Group 2012). The abilities
of the National Civilian Police have been nearly crippled by this mas-
sive increase, opening the door wider for increased use of the military to
handle domestic crime.
230    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

This government pattern of militarization of law enforcement was

at work at the electricity protests. Although both the police and the
military were dispatched to the Pan-American Highway to disperse
the protest, the police were supposed to clear the highway nonvio-
lently, as it is the institution that is charged with protecting individ-
ual rights, preventing and investigating crime, and maintaining public
order (International Crisis Group 2012). According to the GHRC, the
Interior Minister had ordered the police and soldiers to maintain a dis-
tance from the protest. Nevertheless, a contingent of 89 soldiers under
the command of Colonel Juan Chiroy Sal confronted and fired upon
the demonstrators. The military’s disregard for the police to combat
domestic crime or handle domestic matters has been a chronic problem
in the country’s history. Recently, UN-sponsored programs under the
auspices of the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG)
have been providing training, for members of the police as well as pros-
ecutors, in the hope of professionalizing the force and developing pre-
ventive and community-oriented policing.
A powerful interdiscursive discourse at the base of the electricity pro-
tests is that of the economic theory that the development of natural
resources generates wealth for everyone. This discourse echoes American
President Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics” of the 1980s. The
ongoing pro-development discourse, between the government and its
international business allies, such as Energuate, the British-owned target
of the electricity protests, has consistently silenced any opposition. They
have been pursuing investments in mining and hydroelectric power in
particular, claiming they stimulate economic growth, leading to increased
revenues to fund infrastructure and social programs for all Guatemalan
citizens. However, indigenous groups counter that any wealth generated
from such industrial projects is destined to accrue to the exclusionary
economic elite, while any environmental and social costs are to be borne
by the already poor. If 60% of the entry-level jobs in Guatemala require
computer skills and only one out of ten indigenous Guatemalans attend
middle school, the actual potential employment opportunities for this
group appear quite slim (Cooperative for Education 2014).
To draw an analogy from a rather crass protest sign from Occupy
Wall Street, the protesters believe that “They piss on us and call it trickle
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
231

down.” If the electricity industry is an indicator, they are correct. Energy

rates in Totonicapán doubled in 2012 to nearly $15 a month while the
average Guatemalan family only brings home about $4 per day (Paley
and Watts 2012; Cooperative for Education 2014). The 48 communities
in Totonicapán pay a flat charge on their energy bills from Energuate for
street lighting that is not actually available in the communities. According
to Maynor Amezquita, an Energuate communications officer, the com-
pany only charges what the National Electric Energy Commission allows
them to charge. Energuate’s parent company, Actis, has stated that the flat
charge on customer’s energy bills is unfair and that they were lobbying
the Guatemalan government to change it (Paley and Watts 2012).

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions of the Condemnations

of the Totonicapán Massacres

This protest indicates the extent to which the meshing of the interests
of business and government has failed to benefit the vast majority of the
Guatemalan people. It also reveals that the concept of subsidiarity, the
notion that those impacted by decisions should have a voice in mak-
ing them, is not in practice in Guatemala. As the Crisis Group (2013)
states, “To minimise the risk of new confrontations [the government]
must also address the legitimate demands of indigenous communities
for access to electricity, education, and land, as well as their right to be
consulted about decisions that affect their culture and livelihoods …
The government needs to give indigenous populations a voice and a
stake in the formulation and implementation of policies” that impact
them. This desire to speak out on behalf of the community is present in
the condemnations examined here, beginning with their fulfillment of
the presuppositional felicity conditions.

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, Oriented to Change

The condemnations from the GHRC, the Totonicapán government,

and the Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’, are a response to the
call of state violence, a call issued as a primal violation of the Social
232    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Contract. The responses correspond with the gravity necessary to con-

front another atrocity in a long line of atrocities. In doing so, these
groups animate the presuppositional felicity conditions for speech acts
of protest. In the issuing of their condemnations, they draw attention
to the crimes committed as well as the issues that had energized the pro-
testers. Each group does so with different rhetorical concerns in terms
of audience and thus of different vocative focus. The release from the
GHRC was aimed at an international as well as a national audience as
indicated by its citation of the UNHCR and its publication in both
English and Spanish. The Totonicapán government release, however,
was aimed primarily at internal power communities. It, too, was written
in Spanish, in a very formal register, despite the fact that K’iche’ is the
most widely spoken language in the local community. It serves as a call
out to the Guatemalan government, the Human Rights Ombudsman
for Guatemala, and the wider international community. Finally, the
Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’ issued their two brief state-
ments in Spanish and then in K’iche’, restricting the K’iche’ vocative to
the indigenous community, which lost six of its members in the protest.
Unlike all the other statements, this more intimate though still public
posting on Facebook in K’iche’, a language read by few outsiders on a
website tagged with an https protocol, ends with a different kind of call
to action: “K’a junik’pa’ chi q’ij chi saq kaqakoch’och’ej we itzelal ri?/Once
again, in all the days to come, are we going to continue to stand for
such offense?” (see texts above).
This question reminds readers that each organization is engaged
with the tragedy due to their roots in the civic process, and their per-
sistent desire for change within it, in this Central American nation.
Not surprisingly, they not only condemn the violence, but then they
also recommend changes, like the GHRC, or they express compas-
sion for their community members, like the Totonicapán government
and Comunidades. In these instances, due to generation after genera-
tion of violence, one is tempted to consider these groups as manifesta-
tions of Duras’ description of hope as that of an illness, as mentioned
in Chapter 1. They must be infected with hope to practice the courage
of stability necessary to remain civically engaged, struggling for change
in a country ravaged by greed and violence since 1524. That sort of
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
233

tenacity lends gravitas and a profound legitimacy to their vocative to

renew their community.

Circumstance: Disagreement & Critical Awareness

The circumstance of disagreement of the condemnations of the massa-

cre is rooted in the circumstances of disagreement of the October 2012
protest, which were triggered by a hike in electricity rates by Energuate
and the government. However, this was not the only issue for which the
protesters had risked shutting down the highway. They were also march-
ing to voice concerns about proposed constitutional reforms as well as
changes in education services, particularly in the area of professional
teacher training. Faced with the dearth of opportunities to participate in
dialogue with the government on these issues despite repeated attempts,
protesters mobilized with high levels of critical awareness of the dangers
involved in participating in demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience.
President Perez Molina had at one point indicated that the protesters
were marching illegally without a permit and that is why the military’s
action was warranted. However, he backed away from this tact. The
violence enacted on this peaceful protest resembled that once enacted
on Dr. Martin Luther King when he engaged in civil disobedience by
marching without a permit in Birmingham. Bull Connor, Birmingham’s
sheriff, did not win international approval for the aggression his police
force visited on the peaceful protesters in his city. Neither did Perez
Molina. Although this has happened countless times in Guatemalan
history, it has rarely been captured and made public as it was this time.

Words: Semantics of Opposition

Whereas the Perez Molina government fails to engage in practices of

subsidiarity, the protest performances under consideration here reveal
a type of linguistic subsidiarity engaged in by the three organizations.
In a moment of discourse synchronicity, each of these groups issues a
vocative to different communities, appropriate to their positions in rela-
tion to those communities. In doing so, they each activate the semantics
234    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

of opposition, on a metalanguage level, in rhetorically effective ways

through their choice of language and register.
First, consider the GHRC’s statement (2012). Its five points are
detailed in English and then in Spanish. The translation is faithful to
the original. The statement progresses from condemnation in

• point 1 (“The Guatemalan Human Rights Commission/USA con-

demns the military’s violent response to community protests …”);
• to commendation of the prosecutors and forensic experts in point
3 (“GHRC commends the thorough investigation by the Public
Prosecutor’s Office and the National Forensic Science Institute…”);
• to support for basic freedoms in point 4 (“GHRC supports the right
of the 48 Cantones to peacefully protest…”);
• and finally in point 5 to a focus on international scrutiny of the
acts of the Guatemalan government (“GHRC joins the UNHCHR
[United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights in Guatemala] in reminding the Guatemalan government that
extrajudicial or arbitrary executions committed by members of the
Armed Forces implicate the Guatemalan State…”).

The civil government of Totonicapán also published a formal statement

on the Internet (Government of Totonicapán 2012). Though K’iche’
is the language indigenous to Totonicapán, this statement appears in
Spanish. Moreover, the Spanish is polished and erudite. Not only do
the authors use standard Spanish correctly deploying subjunctives and
datives of interest, aspects usually omitted from mocking parodies of
indigenous Spanish, but they also show familiarity with the intrica-
cies of government, citing the Constitución Política de la República de
Guatemala/the Political Constitution of the Republic of Guatemala.
While they adhere to the linguistic norms, forms, and format of a pub-
lic document, they also assert their indigeneity by using the autoch-
thonous spellings of names and dates given. K’iche’ is written with the
grapheme k with /‘/ indicating glottals, while Hispanicized variants
would render this Quiche. The date is given first in the 260-day count
of the Mayan ritual calendar, Kajib’ Iq’ “Four Wind,” with the year-
bearer (the day on which the 365-day solar calendar began) stated as
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
235

“eqanel Oxlajuj No’j/(year-)bearer Thirteen Thought.” Below this line

the date is repeated in the Spanish/European calendar: Octubre 4 del
2012. This document performs its protest in formal Spanish language
and format, while using K’iche’ language and spellings emblematically.
On social media the language of protest took a more intimate turn.
The Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’, the branch of the Academy
of Mayan Languages of Guatemala that encompasses all the K’iche’
speaking townships, made two statements on their Facebook pages on
October 6, 2012. The first is a simple statement in Spanish, which is
translated here as: “The K’iche Linguistic Community is in mourning
for the deaths of our brothers from the Department3 of Totonicapán.
We urge all the linguistic communities of the Academy of Mayan
Languages of Guatemala to join us in the pain which we are suffering.”
This posting is followed by a much longer piece in K’iche’, written
according to formal Mayan oratorical canons with parallelisms. As one
section reads: “it is not new that which has happened, it is not new that
which has occurred, it is not new that we help one another in this great
suffering that is upon us.” This entry begins with a statement of mourn-
ing: “Sibalaj kaq’utut qak’u’x rumal le xk’ulmataj pa ri k’iche’ tinamit rech
Chwi Miq’ina’/Our hearts are throbbing due to what has happened to
the K’iche’ town/people of Chwi Miq’ina’/Above the Hot Springs.” This
statement is followed by a litany of other Mayan towns that have suf-
fered massacres. This is the post which ends with the call to action of:
“K’a junik’pa’ chi q’ij chi saq kaqakoch’och’ej we itzelal ri?/Once again, in
all the days to come, are we going to continue to stand for such offense?”
This question is not a rhetorical one but one that gives the reader pause
for considering his or her options. It certainly is a fundamental example
of a question whose answering enacts the convocative split inherent in
protest performatives (Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’ 2012).

Persons: The Interpellation of the Protesters Against the Totonicapán

Massacre

The answering of such a question positions one vis à vis the powers
that be. The hail of the hegemonic state-business-military complex has
236    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

interpellated many Guatemalans into silence, in the desperate hope of

continued survival, for centuries. However, this hail has also misfired
repeatedly, with individuals and groups making the Althusserian turn
toward hegemony not in silence or endurance, but in indignation and
refusal. These counter-interpellated activists have worked together, and
with those who have been silenced either through intimidation, tor-
ture or death, to staunch the hemorrhaging of violence in the coun-
try. For this analysis, the various organizations (GHRC, Canton of
Totonicapán, Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’) are considered
as interpellated corporate persons, speaking on behalf of the individ-
uals, which comprise their respective communities of practice. The
community of practice of Totonicapán makes up one of the best-organ-
ized and least-violent areas of the country (Camp 2008; Plaza Publica
2012), despite the extreme poverty of the region in which 82.2% of
the people, 90% of whom are of indigenous ancestry, are malnourished
(PRESANCA II 2011). While struggling to eat, they have managed to
protect the forest environment of Totonicapán through organizing and
working together, generating praise and support from groups such as
Cultural Survival.
María del Carmen Tacam (2012), a law student and the first single
woman ever to serve as President of the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán,
has represented her people as one who listens to her constituents, while
mediating between the community and other forces in the country. The
already discussed denouncement by her governing body was reinforced
by those of the GHRC and the Comunidades Lingüística K’iche’.
Founded by an American nun, Sister Alice Zachmann, SSND, amidst
some of the worst violence of the early 1980s, the GHRC (2011)
responds to threats and attacks against human rights workers by provid-
ing direct support, advocacy, and solidarity. The organization focuses on
five themes: militarization; truth, justice, and historic memory; access
to land and natural resources; women’s rights; and criminalization and
impunity. The Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’ is the branch
of the Academia de Leguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG)/Academy of
Mayan Languages of Guatemala that encompasses all of the K’iche’
speaking townships. The Academy, founded as an autonomous organ-
ization in 1990, promotes an awareness and dissemination of Mayan
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
237

languages by supporting linguistic, literary, educational, and cultural

services and projects (ALMG 2014). This includes TV Maya which
televises in a Mayan language three times a day for 30 minutes each
time. As a branch of the Academy, the Comunidades Lingüística Maya
K’iche’ advances K’iche’, one of the twenty-two Mayan languages spo-
ken in Guatemala, through classes, cultural programs, and the pro-
duction and selling of books, including textbooks for second language
learning such as Nab’e wuj rech K’iche’ Ch’ab’al (Alvarado 2012).

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

Just as the question posed at the close of the second Facebook posting
by the Comunidades initiates the convocative split, so, too, do the other
performances of protest in K’iche’, English, and Spanish. The splits
affected from these performances of protest are interesting in relation
to concerns of identity and legitimacy and the power of social media.
The rhetorical choices of language and register activate legitimacy and
identity markers while reinforcing identities within the communities of
practice. For the GHRC, with its primary focus on raising awareness
about the atrocity on the international scene, the use of both English
and Spanish affirms their legitimacy as actors trying to reach the widest
possible audience, particularly those in positions to assist in the situa-
tion. They are, ironically, using the languages associated with hegemonic
power within Guatemala but are doing so in the service of the K’iche’
community. In this sense, although they are using colonial languages,
they identify themselves as a type of outsider organization, positioning
themselves on the margin with the protesters.
From the position of the Totonicapán local government, indigenous
leaders had to demonstrate their ability to manipulate the formal reg-
ister of educated Spanish to demonstrate their legitimacy in relation to
the Guatemalan government and other hegemonic audiences that have
dismissed the protesters as uneducated thug-peasants. Also to appeal to
larger international Spanish-speaking audiences, the use of a more for-
mal register can often allow more easily for cross-dialect communica-
tion. Their use of K’iche’ language and spelling markers reinforces their
identity as social and politically aware speakers who practice hybridity
238    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

as necessary. This hybridity convokes a split in their internal audiences,

positioning those who recognize the legitimacy and worthiness of it on
the margin with the protesters.
Finally, the choice of posting on Facebook in K’iche’ invokes and
affirms the identity of the local community being addressed and con-
vokes by telescoping the split between this smaller group of people,
positioned on the margin in varying degrees of relation, to groups rang-
ing from the GHRC to the hegemonic center of the Guatemalan gov-
ernment. Because the language is read by so few people outside of the
local community, and because of the history of the fight for Mayan lan-
guage rights, the piece is a powerful marker of solidarity.
The media used for the conveyance of these performances of pro-
test also contribute to the convocative split. The Comunidades’ use of
Facebook builds solidarity while excluding those outside of the linguistic
community. It also activates a potential generational split with younger
K’iche’ speakers being more likely to use this type of social media.
However, Facebook and other forms of social media allow a group to get
a message out quickly. Pictures of the Totonicapán were posted online—
that is what forced the government to accountability. Thus, the use of
these new communication tools facilitates a strange turning, unusual
vibrations between the center and the margin, resulting in President
Perez Molina, once himself investigated for human rights abuses, sud-
denly willing to cooperate with the arrests and prosecutions of the sol-
diers involved in the shootings. British energy executives also try to
distance themselves and their company from the actions of the govern-
ment in an attempt to build solidarity with their captured audience of
customers. They are suddenly minding the gap between the company
and its customers instead of the Guatemalan government. Yeats’s (1904)
insight that “the center cannot hold”4 seems quite accurate in the glare
of the stage lights of social media, as the hegemonic center blinks.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions of the Condemnations

of the Totonicapán Massacre

These acts of condemnatory protest complement each other as they

reveal the appropriate thoughts, feelings, and intentions within these
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
239

writings of organizational dissent. Their willingness to speak out despite

the increase in violence perpetrated against human rights workers in
Guatemala in recent years stands as a testament to the level of coura-
geous commitment of the individuals in these organizations. The fol-
lowing are key facts regarding human rights workers according to the
GHRC (2011):

• Increase in attacks from 2000 to 2011: 681%

• Highest number of attacks: 409 in 2011
• Number of cases prosecuted: 2.2%
• Number of prosecutors murdered in 2008: 6
• Number of journalists killed since 2006: 7
• Number of telephone threats 2000–2012: 288
• Number of murders of HR defenders in 2012: 12
• Number of written threats in 2010: 128
• Most attacked defenders: Indigenous people/Environmentalists
(99 in 2011).

Former Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz serves as an exemplar of a

Guatemalan human rights worker who demonstrates the levels of inten-
tion, risk, and commitment associated with a successful performative
of protest. Practitioners of CDA have been accused of choosing exam-
ples that reinforce their claims. The choice of Paz y Paz is a high profile
public figure that does indeed reinforce such a claim. Not all mem-
bers, of the communities of practice that counter hegemonic violence
in Guatemala, have had the same experiences, thoughts, intentions, or
risks as the former AG, but many of them have. However, she was cho-
sen because she is a public figure, currently in exile in the United States,
and, thus not as vulnerable as many of the other Mayan protesters and/
or human rights advocates involved in the tragedy of Cuatro Caminos.

Thoughts, Intention, Risk

Due to a surprise appointment in 2010, Paz y Paz was serving as

Attorney General at the time of the Totonicapán massacre. At great
personal risk, she immediately dispatched 175 prosecutors and
240    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

investigators to the scene to collect bullet shell casings, blood samples,

and DNA evidence. According to Tacam (2012), they also interviewed
protesters and those in hospital, particularly as the local hospital buck-
led under the weight of so many injuries at once. The success of the
investigation contributed not only to Paz y Paz’s legitimacy but to that
of CICIG, as well as for its professional training of the investigators Paz
y Paz had sent into the field. During this time and throughout her ten-
ure as AG, the security detail for Paz y Paz and her family consisted of
16 different guards working around the clock wherever she went due to
the high level of threat against her and her loved ones.
In a remarkable development, nearly unprecedented in Guatemalan
history, the police cooperated with the investigations. The Army, under
the order of President Perez Molina, also cooperated in the charging and
arrest of Colonel Juan Chiroy Sal and eight army privates. Perez Molina
not only cooperated with Paz y Paz, but he even initially pledged never
to use troops again in place of police to monitor protests. He has since
backtracked on this statement, even as he continues to curry interna-
tional favor, especially with the United States, which had banned mil-
itary aid to the country during the civil war, until the rule of law was
securely established (Ruiz-Goiriena 2012).

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

Cooperating with Paz y Paz was politically expedient as she enjoyed

broad international support. At the time, she was the only Guatemalan
official to have met with then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She possesses the international legitimacy that Molina’s government
craved. However, despite her success, Paz y Paz’s subsequent actions
simply became too much for the hegemonic powers of Guatemala. In
2013, the champion reformer experienced a short-lived success in the
now-overturned conviction of José Efraín Ríos Montt. The United
Nations Truth Commission found that nearly 50% of the war crimes
committed during the war occurred under the rule of Ríos Montt, a
former general who became de facto president in a 1982 coup d’état.
Paz y Paz brought charges against the former ruler for genocide and war
crimes. Her victory, although brief, represents the first and only time
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
241

that a former head of state has been convicted of war crimes in his/her
home national court, as opposed to an international court. During the
trial, victims had the opportunity to face their perpetrator and tell their
stories in their own languages. However, despite the damning evidence,
the conviction was overturned.
By February 2014, Paz y Paz’s tenure in the Attorney General’s office
ended, as she was forced to leave her job months before the end of her
term. Citing “transitional” provisions in the constitution, the Court
forced her to step down. The justices, whose decision was unanimous,
did not clarify the nature of the provisions or why they were being acti-
vated against Paz y Paz (International Justice Monitor 2014). In the
wake of this, Paz y Paz returned to academia as a Distinguished Scholar
in Residence at Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace
and Security. Her subsequent actions have resulted in what is hopefully
a short exile. Paz y Paz’s subsequent actions serve as one example of a
member of this community of practice’s fulfillment of this final part of
the renovated felicity conditions. The satisfaction of these conditions
overall attains the pragmatic legitimacy of these condemnations as
speech acts of protest, even though they differ from the preceding anal-
yses by being issued by corporate persons in multiple languages. These
corporate pronouncements, which reinforce each other discursively,
engage a wider range of local and international discourses of political
and economic power to recognize the legitimacy of their countering of
the hegemonic discourse of Guatemalan economic and political powers.
Just as the use of an indigenous language in a trial matters, so, too,
does the language of a protest. It matters that the GHRC statement be
accessible to international as well as international scholars, politicians,
and activists, hence, the choice of English and Spanish. It matters that
the Mayan protesters of Totonicapán not be dismissed as ignorant hin-
terland peasants, so the Totonicapán leaders published their formal pro-
nouncement in pristinely Standard Spanish, signaling their indigenous
legitimacy through strategically deployed K’iche’ spellings of names and
dates. It matters that the Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’, the
body that represents all the K’iche’ townships, expresses its sorrow and
outrage in both a publically accessible language, Spanish, and in a more
intimate medium, K’iche’. It matters that the K’iche’ used be formal
242    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

and that this community be affirmed, both K’iche’ and Maya identity
upheld and legitimated.
Such a beloved indigenous language also mattered in a Northern Irish
prison cell in 1981. To conclude these analyses of the performances of
protest across genres, attention is shifted away from the Guatemalan
highlands of 2012 to this prison cell. However, instead of corporate
authorship of a group performance of protest, this last piece is enacted
by a lone author, Bobby Sands.

The Diary of Bobby Sands

A glimpse into the Northern Irish jail cell of Bobby Sands recalls Jan
Paluch in Prague, Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, and Tarek al-Tayeb
Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, although this time, the method
of self-immolation is hunger instead of fire. In his quest for a uni-
fied Ireland, Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger
striker, perished in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze/Long Kesh Prison on
the outskirts of Belfast, Northern Ireland, after 66 days without food
in 1981. During the first 17 days of his hunger strike, he countered
the IRA dictum, “Whatever you say, say nothing,” by composing
a prison diary, the Diary of Bobby Sands, in which he protested the
British rule of Northern Ireland, as well as articulated his hopes for a
united Ireland (Sands 2013).5 Throughout his captivity, Sands resisted
the British by writing essays, songs, poetry, and the autobiographical
novel, One Day in My Life (2001), capturing the brutality of life in
the prison. These pieces were generally composed on scraps of paper,
often toilet paper, with bits of pen, smuggled in and out of the prison
via the body cavities of himself and others. His diary is his last piece of
public writing.
Although Sands was incarcerated the second and last time for the
possession of a handgun in an attempted bombing of a furniture show-
room, he proved to be much more persuasive when he employed non-
violent tactics of protest: writing poetry, running for office, and hunger
strike. There is certainly an argument to be made that hunger strike
is a violence of the worst kind, as it is self-inflicted. However, in the
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
243

opening entry of his diary, March 1, 1981, Sands sets forth his logic to
pursue this violence done not to the Other, but instead to himself, and
his family, in his irredentic quest.

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God

have mercy on my soul.
My heart is very sore because I know that I have broken my poor
mother’s heart, and my home is struck with unbearable anxiety. But I
have considered all the arguments and tried every means to avoid what
has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my com-
rades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity….
I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-Block, or to
gain the rightful recognition of a political prisoner, but primarily because
what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed
whom I am deeply proud to know as the ‘risen people.’

As he stood on this threshold, Sands wrote a surface structure of a diary,

performing an illocutionary act of protest whose deep structure was that
of the performative utterance of

“I, Bobby Sands, one of the risen people,

protest the British occupation of Northern Ireland.”

Like the other pieces of protest language explored in this book, the
Diary, as an illocutionary act, is “a performative text”: one that not only
describes the world, but also changes it, activating Marx’s demand for
political change as its perlocutionary effect (Miller 2002, pp. 7–8; Marx
and Engels 1976, p. 8).

The Deep Story of the Diary of Bobby Sands

For Sands and his Diary, the broad historical and socio-political context
is the 800 years or so that Ireland, or at least part of Ireland, has been
ruled by the United Kingdom. To understand why this man of only
27 years would starve himself to death in protest, a broader context of
his captivity, and that of his ancestors, is beneficial.
244    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

In 1156, Pope Adrian IV, the first and only English pope, “issued
the Bull of Laudabiliter which granted the lordship of Ireland to Henry
II, King of England. Pope Alexander III confirmed Henry II’s right to
conquer Ireland” (Metress 1995, p. 10). Thus, in 1171, Henry II, an
English Catholic king, landed with his troops in Waterford, becom-
ing the first English monarch to walk and claim the Irish landscape.
This subjection was reinforced with Henry VIII’s declaration of the
Kingdom of Ireland in 1541. Over succeeding centuries, the history of
the Emerald Isle grew more painful and complex with Anglo-Irish alli-
ances formed, shattered, reconfigured, and shattered again. This spiral
was punctuated by generally oppressive policies and abuse by British
overlords who were then in turn often met with violent Irish resist-
ance. Sands taps into this painful and complex history throughout the
Diary by activating relevant and significant aspects of the Catholic-
Republican-Nationalist6 (CRN) collective memory, especially that of
hunger strike.
Hunger strike is itself an ancient weapon for the Irish with a place
in the Senchus Mor, the medieval Irish civil code, which recognized
Troscad, the fasting on or against a person, as well as Cealachan, achiev-
ing justice by starvation. “If the hunger striker was allowed to die the
person at whose door he starved himself was held responsible for his
death and had to pay compensation to his family. It is probable that
such fasting had particular moral force at the time because of the
honour attached to hospitality and the dishonour of having a person
starving outside one’s house” (Beresford 1994, p. 14). In the twentieth
century, the shadow of dishonor cast its darkness again, through asso-
ciation with the Great Starvation, or the Gorta Mór, of the mid-nine-
teenth century, which resulted in two million people, out of only a total
population of nine million, being lost to death or migration in a 10-
year period (Metress 1995, p. 63). Of those two million, conservative
estimates suggest that at least half of them died from starvation or star-
vation-related illness, while another two million immigrated between
1845 and 1855 (Donnelly 2011).
British economic policies, such as the orders that “no free food
could be distributed while private dealers had it for sale” or that “[r]
elief organizations were not allowed to undersell dealers” increased the
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
245

rate of starvation that had begun with the blight of the potato crops in
1845 (Metress 1995, p. 63). These policies were shaped by the British
social and cultural dehumanization of the Irish Other. Such alterity to
self was expressed not only through policies, but also by political figures
of the day, such as Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary treasurer
(1807–1886), who stated, “The greatest evil we have to face is not the
physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and
turbulent character of the people” (ibid., p. 66). This turbulent charac-
ter evidently was often thought, by British leaders like Trevelyan, to be
bound to the Irish people through their Catholicism. Not surprisingly,
even some of the charity-funded soup kitchens required food recipi-
ents to convert, from Catholicism to Protestantism, to receive a bowl of
soup and a portion of bread. This proves rather ironic given that it was
a Catholic English king, Henry II, who had set this series of events in
motion.
Thus, the semiotics of hunger resonated deeply within the psyches
of the descendants of those who had survived the Great Starvation.
The tradition of St. Patrick, the iconic Irish saint, engaging in hunger
strikes against his god tinged this dishonor with religious overtones to
complement the social ones. However, hunger strike as a weapon sank
into the background of Irish politics between the Middle Ages and the
early twentieth century. Its return was heralded by the play The King’s
Threshold, by W.B. Yeats in 1904—ironically and appropriately for
Sands the poet—a play about the struggle over the rights of poets to
participate in government. After the Easter Rising of 1916 through
the events of 1981, hunger strike reentered the Irish armament with
a vengeance. In his diary, Sands cites hunger strikers such as Thomas
Ashe, former heard of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, forerunner to
the IRA, and poet Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork and officer
commanding the local brigade of the IRA, who had died in British cap-
tivity in 1917 and 1920, respectively.
Centuries of physical, psychological, and religious oppression served
as prologue to the violent era of Northern Irish history known as The
Troubles, which began with British police using batons and water can-
nons to break up a civil rights march on October 5, 1968, and ended
with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998.
246    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

During this 30-year period, the death toll at the hands of paramilitar-
ies, Republican and Unionist, and British security services exceeded
over 3600. At least 50,000 were physically injured, and countless more
psychologically maimed, in a population of only 1.6 million people
in 2001 (BBC 2013; CAIN 2013). During this era, the practice of
Internment, the “imprisonment of suspects without trial,” was initi-
ated on August 9, 1971 and lasted until December 5, 1975. “During
that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic/Republican
while 107 were Protestant/Loyalist” (Mulholland 2003, pp. 77, 79).
In the aftermath of Internment, the British government instigated
Criminalization7 on March 1, 1976, concluding that all those convicted
of a terrorist offense would no longer be classified as Special Category
Status, the equivalent of Prisoner-of-War (POW) status, but, instead, as
Ordinary Decent Criminal (ODC) status. Part of the intention of this
recategorization was to reframe the Irish problem as a “law and order”
issue instead of a war involving legitimate combatants. As Sands (2013)
stated in his Diary entry of March 10, 1981, the issue “is purely polit-
ical and only a political solution will solve it. This in no way makes us
prisoners elite nor do we (nor have we at any time) purport to be elite.
We wish to be treated ‘not as ordinary prisoners’ for we are not crim-
inals. We admit no crime unless, that is, the love of one’s people and
country is a crime.”
Within the interdiscursive context of Criminalization, political pris-
oners were incarcerated in the H-Blocks, a particular area of the prison
constructed for those classified as terrorists. This brutal environment, in
which writing materials were banned, was characterized by regular beat-
ings, invasive body searches, forced bathing and scrubbing with metal
brushes, and strict limits on prisoner interactions. As the abuse inside the
H-Blocks intensified, Sands and the other prisoners engaged in a series of
increasingly feral protest actions as a response to Criminalization. For the
Republicans, the discourse shift signaled by their recategorization from
POWs to ODCs, undermined their very identities. “Criminalization
was a denial of a belief held dear by Republican Ireland—that husbands,
wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, grandparents and great grandpar-
ents who had suffered and died for Irish independence had done so in
the high cause of patriotism” (Beresford 1994, p. 26).
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
247

Thus Sands and the other prisoners escalated their resistance with the
only weapons they had left—their bodily waste (fluids, solids, odors)
and then their bodies, themselves—through the path of blanket protest
(refusal to wear prison clothes), the no-wash protest (refusal to risk the
journey to the showers to wash) the dirty protest (refusal to empty their
slop buckets due to fear of beatings), and ultimately of hunger strike.
These creative uses of the most primal of tools increased the prison-
er’s power to define their situation increasing this type of legitimation
(Reyes 2011). Sands, however, had an additional weapon, that of a bit
of a biro pen and scraps of paper.
Criminalization and the struggle for the legitimate identity of the
POW lead to another contextual variable that prompted Sands to write
the Diary. At the time of the 1981 hunger strike, “there were more
members of the IRA in the Kesh than there were active volunteers out-
side” (Beresford 1994, p. 33). Also outside, many if not most, Catholic
constituencies, were ambivalent to, or horrified by, the IRA’s violent
strain of Republicanism. In light of these contextual realities, Sands’
Diary serves as a felicitous performative of protest, which satisfies the
renovated presuppositional and aspirational felicity conditions.

The Presuppositional Felicity Conditions

of the Diary of Bobby Sands

Conventions: Civic, Vocative, Oriented to Change

By choosing words as a vehicle for the performance of protest, Sands

engaged a deep Irish tradition. Historically, protest through lan-
guage has been a tenacious thread in the webs of significance that
generate, shape, and rejuvenate Irish culture. A few examples include
plays, i.e., W.B. Yeats’ (1904) The King’s Threshold, manifestos, i.e.,
William O’Brien’s (1881) “No Rent Manifesto,” and poetry, i.e., John
Keegan Casey’s (2013) “The Rising of the Moon.” In all of these gen-
res, the writers have created a vision in a quest for the common good.
Like Wilfred Owen’s poetry, however, Sands’ writing was situated in
an unsettling civic dimension of a public space—as in that which is
248    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

controlled or owned by the state. Owen’s public, and highly contested,

space was a state-sanctioned external battlefield in another country.
Sands’ public, and highly contested, space was a state-owned jail cell in
an internal colony. The British state, however, vigilantly policed these
public spaces seeking national security, the basis of the Social Contract.
However, as Coogan (1997) has pointed out, for Catholics in 1981
Northern Ireland, the Social Contract was frayed nearly beyond rec-
ognition. “The injustices suffered by Catholics were such that it is nei-
ther unfair nor inaccurate to say that the Catholics in Northern Ireland
received the sanctions of the law but not its protections” (p. 46).
Through a direct address vocative of the Diary, Sands articulated this
disparity in relation to the decision to hunger strike for his readers, by
persuading through the logos of his argument, the pathos of his subju-
gation and response, and his personal ethos of Irish warrior poet. He
is calling out, for the last time, to supporters and potential support-
ers to rise to the cause of a united Ireland. In this sense, it is a strange
sort of vocative as it was an internal one of the margins, only indirectly
addressed to the British Other of the hegemonic center. Instead, he
wrote to build solidarity by outlining the common ground for those not
being protected by the law. He called out to those CRNs, previously
ambivalent to or appalled by the violence of the IRA, to join the com-
munity of practice struggling for a united Ireland.
Whereas Sands had failed to convert his fellow CRNs to his cause
with a gun, his writings, his courage in hunger striking, and his deci-
sion to run for Parliament while on hunger strike, converted so many
that he was actually elected. With less than a month to live, on April
9, 1981, the constituency of Fermanagh-South Tyrone chose Bobby
Sands to represent it as a Member of Parliament (MP) at Westminster.
The possibility of politics replacing violence as a medium of change in
Northern Ireland had begun its ascension. While employing such non-
violent methods, Sands exploited the reality that Gramsci had pointed
out: that hegemony, social, political, or cultural, is never complete—
there is always a fault line that can be exploited through public protest
(Hall 1977; Bressler 2007, p. 344). Sands exploited this fault line in his
desperate desire, rooted in the woundedness not only of the Catholic
community but in the broader, inclusive community of all who had
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
249

suffered during The Troubles, for change—a change for which he was
willing to sacrifice his life.

Circumstances: Disagreement and Critical Awareness

Rooted in the 800-year occupation of Ireland, the particular circum-

stances of disagreement in the Diary, and of the hunger strike, was
the restoration of the five demands associated with POW status: (1)
the right not to wear a prison uniform; (2) the right not to do prison
work; (3) the right of free association with other prisoners; (4) the right
to organize own educational and recreational facilities; and (5) the
right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week (Beresford 1994,
p. 41). Each of these rights was taken away with the implementation
of Criminalization. Prior to this, political prisoners, such as Sands dur-
ing his first prison term, had possessed these rights. Sands had taken
full advantage of them, learning Gaeilge along with political philoso-
phy while incarcerated. The articulation and choice of these rights as the
central point demonstrated a critical awareness of synecdoche, of these
rights representing an entire configuration of society. Sands stated this
in his opening entry when he linked that what was won and lost in the
prison was won and lost for the Republic. This critical awareness was
rooted in the intimidation experienced by his family and himself, dur-
ing his formative years living in Abbot’s Cross and in Rathcoole, both
predominantly Protestant suburbs of Belfast.

Words: Semantics of Opposition

Sands created a semantics of opposition in a variety ways in his seven-

teen entries, in particular through his crafting of the binary of Us versus
Them, by the naming of the Other and the casting of the self as the
object of transitivity. The casting of the self, as recipient or direct object
of a transitive verb, is then reinforced by the consideration of Sands’
synecdochic merging of himself with the Irish people in the closing dis-
cussion of the aspirational felicity conditions for this performance of
protest. In the first entry of the Diary, Sands engaged in the expected
250    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

negative Them representation by naming the warders as Other: Screws,

slobbers, and would-be despots. One of the ironies in this binary exam-
ple—and in each entry in which he mentions the Screws—is that Sands
capitalized the word, the mark of a proper noun in English.

There is no sensation today, no novelty that October 27th brought. (The

starting date of the original seven man hunger-strike) The usual Screws
were not working. The slobbers and would-be despots no doubt will be
back again tomorrow, bright and early.

The next day (March 2, 1981), Sands practiced both negative and
positive representation, attributing to himself and his fellow prisoners
considerable tolerance, while attributing to the Screws pettiness and
vindictiveness.

We have shown considerable tolerance today. Men are being searched

coming back from the toilet. At one point men were waiting three hours
to get out to the toilet, and only four or five got washed, which typifies
the eagerness (sic) of the Screws to have us off the no-wash. There is a lot
of petty vindictiveness from them.

This dyad was further reinforced throughout the remaining entries.

From the entry of March 6, 1981, however, Sands contrasted this nam-
ing with another sort of casting: that of casting prisoners as objects. He
employed a series of transitive verbs in a rhythmical rejection of being
the direct object of British agency and of the British casting of the
Irish struggle as criminal. Situating the Republicans as the direct object
grammatically reinforced the idea of the IRA as a defensive organization
and not an offensive one.

They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individu-
alism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent
law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.

Along with dissimilating Republicans from Screws through transitivity

and naming, Sands also made clear his politics with his use of imagery
involving exploitive capitalists in his entry of March 11, 1981.
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
251

Even should there not be 100,000 unemployed in the North, their pit-
tance of a wage would look shame in the company of those whose wage
and profit is enormous, the privileged and capitalist class who sleep upon
the people’s wounds, and sweat, and toils.

In the penultimate entry of March 16, 1981, Sands merged his negative
presentation of capitalism and the Screws, presenting his harshest char-
acterization of the Screws and by extension the British. In this entry, he
combined his anger at the degradation of capitalism with his anger at
his warders, by arguing that the mercenary Screws were no longer con-
ducting the mirror searches, in which prisoners were required to squat
over a mirror to ensure they were not hiding anything in their anuses,
because the Screws were no longer being paid for it. Through the con-
cretization and signification of this degrading practice in writing, Sands
articulated the inchoate trauma, by naming it within a context of a sar-
castic rhetorical question, completed not with the expected question
mark, but instead with an unexpected end mark, the exclamation point.

There was no mirror search going out to visits today—a pleasant change.
Apparently, with the ending of the no-wash protest, the mercenary
Screws have lost all their mercenary bonuses, etcetera, notwithstanding
that they are also losing overtime and so on. So, not to be outdone, they
aren’t going to carry out the mirror search any more, and its accompany-
ing brutality, degradation, humiliation, etcetera.
Why! Because they aren’t being paid for it!

The farce of Criminalization was painfully present in this entry. ODCs

were not subjected to mirror searches; only POWs renamed as ODCs
were. Although this entry captured a bit of the everyday horror of life in
the prison, Sands had also exemplified the Irish characteristic of a “tear
and a smile” when he personified food as the Other in the entry for
March 14, 1981 (Coogan 1997, p. 31).

Tonight’s tea was pie and beans, and although hunger may fuel my imag-
ination (it looked a powerful-sized meal), I don’t exaggerate: the beans
were nearly falling off the plate. If I said this all the time to the lads, they
would worry about me, but I’m all right.
252    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

It was inviting (I’m human too) and I was glad to see it leave the cell.
Never would I have touched it, but it was a starving nuisance. Ha! My
God, if it had have attacked, I’d have fled.

Persons: The Interpellation of Bobby Sands as a Protester

This tear and a smile take on staring down his food also activated what
Coogan (1997) has called the Irish “code of endurance” (p. 20). The
very decision to endure, like the Maya, to choose not to break, despite
the maggots covering one’s body and food, despite the stench of the
feces on the wall, despite the physical brutality of beatings and searches,
stood as a form of protest. In the endurance, Sands continued to reject
the British interpellation of him that had begun prior to his joining the
IRA, when his mother was doggedly harassed by a Protestant neigh-
bor in Abbot’s Cross that prompted the move to Rathcoole. In the
new neighborhood, the Sands lived on a street with only six Catholic
families on it. Once, the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramil-
itary group, staged a march down it. The Sands family sat in the dark,
“Bobby sitting in vigil on the top of the stairs, clutching a carving knife,
his sister Marcella beside him with a pot of pepper” (Beresford 1994, p.
58). While walking home one day, he was knifed by a Protestant gang.
Marcella provided first aid to prevent their mother’s discovery of what
had happened. Not long after, a rubbish bin lid was thrown through
their living room window. His family moved again, this time to the
Catholic enclave of Twinbrooke in West Belfast in 1972. Recognizing
the pattern of his family’s plight as those of his new neighbors as well,
Sands joined the IRA not long after.
However, it was the categorization of Sands, himself, and the other
political prisoners as ODCs that served as the hegemonic misfire that
triggered the hunger strike. Whereas Althusser (2001, p. 118) claimed
that no one necessarily recognizes the hegemonic hail as ideological, it is
safe to say that Bobby Sands, like Ana Blandiana, Barbara Johns, or the
Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’, along with their fellow protest-
ers, did indeed recognize this as ideological—even if neither he nor they
would use Althusser’s vocabulary to name it in this way.
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
253

Althusser (2001) also claimed that, “individuals are always-already

subjects” (p. 119) before they are born. Like the African-Americans who
were already interpellated by their skin color into the Jim Crow South,
Bobby Sands was born into the margins of Northern Irish society, a
Catholic, into Protestant hegemony. On this margin, the hegemonic
hail of him as a subject to the British crown misfired, interpellating him
in an unintended manner, as a protester, not as a “decent law-abiding
robot.” In the thwarting of this hail, Sands was transformed from that
of the subjugated peasant subject to that of a citizen in a moment of
empowering political efficacy.
Although entering Long Kesh/Maze prison with the identity of a
relatively low-impact IRA member, Sands developed in prison into an
unusual high-impact leader. The clearest recognition of his growth was
his election as an MP for the United Kingdom. As David Beresford
(1994) noted, “For the Republican prisoners of Long Kesh the choice
of Sands as commanding officer was an instance of the moment produc-
ing the man. It was not as if he were a natural leader. Superficially he
was a fairly ordinary prisoner” (p. 55). Beresford’s reflection on Sands’
evolution in prison animates the Critical Discourse understanding of
identity as relational and contingent, something that emerges, circulat-
ing in interactions ensconced in local discourse contexts (Bucholtz and
Hall 2005; Mannheim and Tedlock 1995). This emergence manifests
the critical notion that narrative identity “can never be grasped without
the Other, without change” (Clary-Lemon 2010, p. 8).
Such a model posits an identity as emerging, growing, and con-
tracting always within a context and always in relation to the Other as
shown throughout the analyses in this book. This is what Beresford’s
work hints at when he claims that the moment-in-opposition-to-the-
British made Sands-as-leader. Sands, himself, came close to stating this
exact binary on March 6, 1981.

I pity those who say that, because they do not know the British and I feel
more the pity for them because they don’t even know their poor selves…

The formation of the poor selves/British—Us/Them dyad is the general

hegemonically oriented perlocutionary effect of protest performance,
254    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

the convocative split. However, in the case of the Diary, this split pos-
sesses an implicit and explicit dimension.

Effects: Convocativity, Moving in Performance to the Margin

Implicitly, Sands’ writings sharpened the prevailing convocative split

between the Catholic community and British hegemony in Northern
Irish life. During The Troubles, this fissure acted as its own sort of grav-
itational force holding nearly every body of mass in the Catholic com-
munity in fearful opposition to every body of mass in the Protestant
community, and vice versa. For every violent action of the CRNs, there
was to be expected an equal and opposite reaction by the Protestant-
Unionists-Loyalists (PULs). Within this social simulation of Newton’s
third law, Sands activated a margin-internal convocative split as he
offered his last thoughts on the wounds born of his struggle and his
desire for a free homeland, to reach out to those of the Catholic com-
munity, and other possible supporters including those in the United
States and elsewhere, who had not yet been persuaded to join him and
his comrades.

… they know I have been thinking that some people (maybe many peo-
ple) blame me for this hunger-strike, but I have tried everything possible
to avert it short of surrender. (March 6, 1981)

In this internal orientation, this protest language resembles the K’iche’

condemnation of the Totonicapán massacre. The Diary like the
Facebook condemnation operates to solidify support, building solidarity
and social capital within a community of practice, while increasing a
sense of political efficacy through the simple articulation and endurance
of atrocity.
The hunger strike unified Sands’ body, and those of the other hun-
ger strikers, into a text to be read by those identifying with his cause
on the margin and those identifying with the hegemonic power of the
British government. Through the writing of his death on his body, in
conjunction with his writings on the scraps of toilet and cigarette paper,
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
255

Sands convoked the community into camps in relation to the larger

issues as telescoped in the five demands. The hunger strike horrified and
unified a large enough percentage of the Catholic population to elect
Sands to Westminster, while it simultaneously horrified and unified the
Protestant community in opposition to its barbarity. The satisfaction of
these presuppositional felicity conditions sets the stage for consideration
of this performative of protest with regard to the various dimensions of
the aspirational felicity conditions, of thought, intention, risk, commit-
ment, and subsequent action.

The Aspirational Felicity Conditions

of the Diary of Bobby Sands

Thoughts, Intention, Risk

The actual performance of Sands’ intentions, thoughts, and feelings

serves as an index to the intensity of the aspiration. The depth of his
commitment, however, was painfully verified by his choice. During his
incarceration, punishments were swift, brutal, and frequent; during his
dying they were slow and measured. His risk was total. As stated pre-
viously, such a willingness to risk is often fueled by a utopian impulse,
a yearning for a changed world. This was certainly the case for Sands.
Crafting his narrative of/in the early days of his hunger strike, he offered
insights to those he convoked into why he chose to engage in subse-
quent social action, to starve to the death, consistent with his protest
position. He articulated this commitment vividly through synecdoche,
of identifying himself as a part for the whole, pars pro toto.

Commitment and Subsequent Actions

Sands’ represented himself in relation to all who had, were, and would
struggle for the realization of the Irish Socialist Republic. There was a
“metonymic chaining” through the entries, working its way out via pars
pro toto, the particularizing synecdoche that acts as a sort of “Collective
256    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Singular”—a situation in which I as a part of the Whole represents We,

the Whole. This is a device that can be used for positive and negative
representation, by generalizing and essentializing stereotypes that apply
to a whole group of persons (De Cillia et al. 1999, p. 165), establishing
Us as Us and Them as Them.
On March 14, 1981, Sands nearly defined this linguistic element:

I have always taken a lesson from something that was told me by a sound
man, that is, that everyone, Republican or otherwise, has his own particu-
lar part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too
young to do something.

In other words, each—young or old—was pars pro toto, just as each

contribution whether it be great or small, contributed to the Whole,
to the Collective Singular. Sands activated this device throughout his
Diary, resulting in a chain of synecdoche at play through several entries
in which he presented an “historically expanded we” (De Cillia et al.
1999, p. 164).
March 1, 1981

I believe I am but another of those wretched Irishmen born of a risen

generation with a deeply rooted and unquenchable desire for freedom.
I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-Block, or to
gain the rightful recognition of a political prisoner, but primarily because
what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed
whom I am deeply proud to know as the ‘risen people’.

From the Entry for March 9, 1981,

Well, I have gotten by twenty-seven years, so that is something. I may die,

but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and lib-
eration of our people.

From the Entry for March 12, 1981,

I am making my last response to the whole vicious inhuman atrocity they

call H-Block. But, unlike their laughs and jibes, our laughter will be the
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
257

joy of victory and the joy of the people, our revenge will be the liberation
of all and the final defeat of the oppressors of our aged nation.

This series of examples revealed Sands’ concern for a positive representa-

tion of pars in relation to toto, reinforcing the legitimacy of the pris-
oners’ claim of being POWs and not common criminals. Common
criminals were not concerned with how their part contributed to, illu-
minated, and strengthened the expanded We of the Risen People. This
is not to romanticize the IRA. As De Cillia et al. (1999) have pointed
out, “Metonymies enable the speakers to dissolve individuals, and hence
volitions and responsibilities, or to keep them in the semantic back-
ground” (p. 165). Certainly, Sands’ synecdochic focus backgrounded
the violence perpetrated by the IRA, obscuring responsibilities for the
death and injury of their victims. As Foucault (1984) has indicated,
“The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing … [serv-
ing] to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts:
there must be—at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his con-
sciousness or unconscious—a point where contradictions are resolved,
where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized
around a fundamental or originating contradiction” (p. 111).
Through this performative text, Sands generated a coherent whole
rooted in an originating contradiction of a call to violence to achieve
peace. This strategy reinforced Clary-Lemon’s (2010) observation on
narrative identity, that it is crafted to present a coherent whole. For
Sands, his synecdochic chain merged him with his cause: he was those
who have fought and died for the Republic, they were he. In this melt-
ing and blurring of the edges of individual and community, Sands
crafted his cause as the archetypal Irish Warrior Poet, and to para-
phrase De Cillia et al. (1999), he did so shimmering in the aura of the
mytho-poetic Homo Eire. Ultimately, it was how Sands closed the diary,
in his final and only entry written completely in Gaeilge, that reinforced
this idea of the Warrior Poet as Homo Eire, surviving the filth of Long
Kesh to herald not only the new dawn, but also the rising of the moon.

Ní hé cinnte gurb é an áit as a dtigeann sé. Mura bhfuil siad in inmhe an

fonn saoirse a scriosadh, ní bheadh siad in inmhe tú féin a bhriseadh. Ní
258    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

bhrisfidh siad mé mar tá an fonn saoirse, agus saoirse mhuintir na hEireann

i mo chroí.
Tiocfaidh lá éigin nuair a bheidh an fonn saoirse seo le taispeáint ag dao-
ine go léir na hEireann ansin tchífidh muid éirí na gealaí.
If they aren’t able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won’t break
you. They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the free-
dom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the
people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we’ll
see the rising of the moon.

This final line in which the Historically Expanded We dominates as sub-

ject was also a synecdoche for all of Irish poetry, as it is also part of the
famous final line to Casey’s poem, commemorating the Great Rising of
1798.

Well they fought for poor old Ireland, And full bitter was their fate
(Oh! what glorious pride and sorrow Fill the name of
Ninety-Eight).
Yet, thank God, e’en still are beating
Hearts in manhood’s burning noon,
Who would follow in their footsteps,
At the risin’ of the moon!

When the moon rose on May 5, 1981, the clanging of the trash bin
lids on the streets of Belfast rang out a dirge of a hope delayed. Bobby
Sands was dead. Nine other equally committed hunger strikers would
starve themselves to death before it was over in the autumn. Although
the Good Friday Accords would not be signed for another 17 years,
the choice of the ballot over the bullet, with Sands’ election the month
before, signaled a dramatic shift in the possibilities for a reimagined
community in Northern Ireland.
By drawing on the accepted convention of the word as a weapon
of protest in Irish culture, by being interpellated as a protester, and by
committing to the public performance of protest language despite the
risk of his life, Sands offered a performative text that was one of protest
and of promise. Like Marx and de Man who both “have liberation as
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
259

their ultimate goal” and “recognize that this will be facilitated by eman-
cipatory speech acts, not by mere description of a bad state of things”
(Miller 2002, p. 8), Sands satisfied the presuppositional and aspirational
conditions of a pragmatically legitimate speech act of protest. In doing
so, he spoke the proverbial truth to power in his struggle not only to
describe and interpret the realities of the world of himself and his peo-
ple, but also to animate Marx’s demand that the point has never been
just to describe and interpret the world, but to change it.

Notes
1. Most large towns in Guatemala have Nahuatl-based names dating from
the initial Spanish incursion in 1524.
2. The Cuatro Caminos is a well-known intersection of roads that lead to
Quetzaltenengo, Guatemala City, Huehuetenango, and Totonicapán.
3. Departments in Guatemala are the rough political equivalents of states
in the United States.
4. William Butler Yeats begins his poem, “The Second Coming” with the
lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear
the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; …”.
5. For the entire diary, please visit the Bobby Sands Trust at www.bobby-
sandstust.com or http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/
readings/diary.html.
6. Liam Clarke, the Political Editor at The Belfast Telegraph states, “In
Northern Ireland, religion is still the strongest determinant of voting
intention and that is closely tied to family background. This tribal divi-
sion is sanctified by a slick, new quangospeak, which divides the popu-
lation into neat PUL (Protestant/unionist/loyalist) and CRN (Catholic/
republican/nationalist) camps. Politicians and civil servants feel comfort-
able using such terms…” from “Tina Mckenzie’s Openness about Her
Dad’s IRA Past Shows She Is a Classy Act,” 7 November 2013. http://
shar.es/1fUAqo.
7. Criminalization was one part of a three-pronged security strategy by
the British to subdue the Irish uprising. The other two prongs were
Ulsterization, the increase in police to replace the British Army in the
frontlines of the conflict, and Normalization, the recategorizing of the
conflict as a law and order issue of gang activity, instead of a military war.
260    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

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PRESANCA II. (2011, May 26). Noticias Medios: Desnutricion en Totonicapán:
82%. PRESANCA II. Retrieved March 19, 2015, from http://www.sica.int/
busqueda/noticias.aspx?IDItem=59912&IDCat=2&IdEnt=916.
Reyes, A. (2011). Strategies of Legitimization in Political Discourse: From
Words to Actions. Discourse & Society, 22(6), 781–807.
Ruiz-Goiriena, R. (2012, October 21). Soldiers’ Arrest Marks Shift in
Guatemala. The Guardian. Retrieved March 19, 2015, from http://www.
theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/10493543.
Sands, B. (2001). One Day in My Life. Blackrock, County Dublin: Mercier
Press.
Sands, B. (2013, September 9). Prison Diary. Bobby Sands Trust. Retrieved
September 9, 2013, from http://www.bobbysandstrust.com/writings/
prison-diary.
Tacam, M. (2012, October 4). Represion estatal en Totonicapán. YouTube.
Retrieved November 15, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=9BXgLSqqlxo&feature=youtube.be.
 6  Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations …    
263

Yeats, W. B. (1904). The King’s Threshold and on Baile’s Strand: Being Volume
Three of Plays for and Irish Theatre. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved March 31,
2015, from www.gutenberg.org/files/41102/41102-h/41102-h.htm.
Yeats, W. B. (n.d.). The Second Coming. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved October
19, 2015, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062.
 7
Considerations and Conversations in 
the Neighborhood of Protest

The eight analyses of protest language explored in this text have indeed
activated Marx and Engel’s (1976) demand to change the world. In con-
junction with their illocutionary intentions of challenging hegemonic
power, the interpellated speaker-actors of these performances—from
Sands to Taksim Solidarity—have increased their own political efficacy,
while nourishing the social capital, convocative identity, and pragmatic
legitimacy of their speech acts. In doing so, they animate Levy’s decla-
ration of, “Neither resignation nor defeatism: it’s time to fight back”
(2008) to serve as models for others. These are some of the perlocu-
tionary effects of irredentism in action. Through speech acts of protest,
the Turkish people, members of the UFW, Civil Rights activists, Nena,
Blandiana, Owen, the Maya, and Sands have animated the Cooperative
Principle in the real politic of their communities of practice, while index-
ing and growing the collective memories of these communities. By exca-
vating these acts of insurrectionary speech across genres—chants, songs,
poems, prose—a range of the human capacity to speak out against that
which wounds the world is revealed, so that, as Thoreau asserts, commu-
nities can choose not to pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels, but
may instead imagine and work toward a Social Contract honored in a
democracy to come. In the first portion of this final chapter, a reflection
© The Author(s) 2018 265
M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_7
266    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

and summary of findings of these eight analyses are presented, followed

by a discussion of several questions raised during the writing of this book.

Reflections on the Application of the

Presuppositional Felicity Conditions
The Presuppositions

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #1: It must be a commonly

accepted convention that the uttering, for, on, or in a public space,
of words that challenge social, political, or cultural hegemonic
power(s), by people interpellated as protesters, will lead to a mar-
gin-center convocativity on said challenge.
Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #2: Protesters articulate and
support, in a public capacity, the counter hegemonic utterance(s)
and thus, occupy a position on the margin in tension with the
power center for that issue.

Conventions of Protest: Public, Vocative, and Oriented to Change

Upon reviewing the presence of the criterion of being a public act in

the protest texts examined for this study, a number of findings are
worth noting. One of these is the range of focus of these civic actions,
moving from the general to the particular and vice versa. Nena’s 99
Luftballons/99 Red Balloons provides the most generalized focus as it
was concerned with the annihilation of the planet, with a more targeted
focusing of a United Ireland for Bobby Sands, and an even more targeted
focus on energy rates in Guatemala or coerced pregnancy in Romania.
The focus of “Everyday I’m Çapulling” (Sheets 2013) broadened from its
original focus, on the cutting down of trees in Gezi Park, to larger soci-
opolitical questions at play in Turkey at the time, such as the increasing
Islamist leanings of the secular Turkish government. “Sí se puede” (United
Farm Workers of America), “Dulce et Decorum Est” (Owen 1984), and
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
267

We Shall Overcome (Sing Out!) also began with more particular foci, but
in their usage across several decades, activists have employed them for a
wider range of public concerns than their original ones.
The choice of genre can provide space for a sort of accounting, or
explanation, for what prompted the civic reaction of the protest speech
act. The genre of prose allows for a more detailed accounting for acts
of oppression over time in Northern Ireland/Ireland and Guatemala,
whereas the genre of poetry allows only for a more targeted synecdochic
and metaphoric accounting for particular national contexts, such as
Decree 770/1966 and World War I. The shorter genres obviously do
not permit the inclusion of much if any type of situational accounting
for the performance of the speech act.
For Sands (2013) and Owen (1984), the criterion of the public is
rooted in a profound sense of duty, particularly military duty in rela-
tion to basic security questions of the Social Contract. Although one
is British and the other Irish, they hold in common a shared commit-
ment to their home with a deep sense of duty to speak on behalf of
their communities of practice. This duty is rooted in their identity as
legitimate voices, for their respective soldiers in the field, while they
speak on behalf of these soldiers, from physical spaces controlled by the
State. Finally, with regard to this criterion of the public, a range of lan-
guage choices reveal protesters’ desire to reach a range of audiences. The
range includes the highly specific Facebook post in K’iche’ (2012) to
connect with a particular Mayan community, to Blandiana’s poem in
Romanian to connect with her fellow citizens. Beyond national borders,
this range also includes the simultaneously active translations of the
GHRC Condemnation in Spanish and English and the German and
English 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, which reach out to the global
community as do the hybrids of “Everyday I’m Çapulling,” “Dulce et
Decorum Est,” and Sands’ Diary. Like the K’iche’ Facebook post’s highly
focused audience, “Sí se puede” is originally focused on a particular com-
munity, farmworkers; however, it expanded in the 2008 American pres-
idential election season to the English, “Yes, We Can.” Finally We Shall
Overcome continues to exploit English as a lingua franca as the most
well-known protest song on the planet.
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M. L. Gasaway Hill

The choice of language is intimately connected with the criterion of

the vocative as the protesters studied here made language choices suited
for their communities of practice and for those whom they were trying
to persuade. The vocatives of these protest texts patterned on a contin-
uum of directness with all nominal persons, first, second, and third per-
son, being used to address listeners and readers, generating distance or
encouraging solidarity, depending upon the semantics of opposition and
the resulting convocative split.
Wilfred Owen’s (1984) vocative is the most direct when he states,
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent
for some desperate glory,/The old Lie …” This vocative creates dis-
tance between Owen and his civilian readers who continue to blindly
support the war. Carlo Karges (Nena 1983) and Kevin McAlea (Nena
1984) also use direct address in 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons, respec-
tively. However, in both they move to bridge the gap, to build solidarity
between narrator and listener in the internal vocatives within the songs,
“Hast du etwas Zeit für mich/Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich/Have
you some time for me,/then I’ll sing a song for you” and “You and I
in a little toy shop” and in the external vocative between Nena and the
fans listening to the songs. Their internal vocatives work as first person
plural direct address, as an “inclusive we” rather than as a distancing
mechanism like in Owen’s poem. This is not surprising as their pub-
lic focus is on all of humanity. The vocatives of the Guatemalan con-
demnations range from the local community, with direct address in
K’iche’ that builds solidarity within a particular community of practice,
to more formal Spanish and English prose which uses predominantly
third person to establish distance, presenting the facts of the atroci-
ties at Cuatros Caminos as objectively as possible, so as to persuade the
addressed national and international communities of practice through
the logos of their speech acts. The vocatives of “Sí se puede,” We Shall
Overcome, and The Diary of Bobby Sands, move in the same ways as the
K’iche’ Facebook post, from an affirmation building solidarity within
their communities of practice, which is then taken up by external oth-
ers, who convoke themselves in relation to these speech acts in the
moment of the convocative split. Finally, “Everyday I’m Çapulling”  and
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
269

“Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” operate with indirect vocatives

through the use of satire and metaphor/dedublare, respectively. The
Turks through the co-opting of Prime Minister Erdogan’s insult are cre-
ating distance with him and his political supporters, even as they are
building solidarity and identity within a protest community of prac-
tice through their satiric chant. Blandiana, within her poem, plays on
the irony of mass production to address “an entire nation” about an
entire nation consisting of unconsenting fetuses and mothers, building
solidarity with Romanian families struggling for survival, while creat-
ing distance between them and the hegemonic center of the Romanian
state.
An interesting finding regarding the criterion that the protest speech
act be oriented to change is that of a temporal dimension. We Shall
Overcome and “Sí se puede” are future-oriented speech acts of affirma-
tion. These are contrasted with other future-oriented acts, such as 99
Luftballons/99 Red Balloons or The Diary of Bobby Sands, which are ori-
ented to change but also serve as a warning of what is to come if change
is not enacted. The dystopic sense of warning in 99 Luftballons/99 Red
Balloons is also present in “Dulce et Decorum Est” when it challenges
readers with the possibility of walking in another’s shoes, “If in some
smothering dreams you too could pace/Behind the wagon that we
flung him in…” Blandiana’s portrayal of the “still unborn” in “Cruciada
Copiilor/Children’s Crusade” also communicates this sense of warning.
While Sands’ Diary offers a warning and a vision for change, it addi-
tionally provides an assessment of the events leading up to this speech
act. This is also the case for the Guatemalan condemnations from the
GHRC and the Totonicapán government (Government of Totonicapán
2012) in which they initiate their condemnations with a statement of
facts about the Cuatro Caminos protest and then list explicit changes
and recommendations to be made in the future. To create a temporal
sense of events begun in the past and inexorably moving toward the
future, “Everyday I’m Çapulling” activates a type of continuous present
with its use of the adverbial “everyday” plus the progressive aspect (-ing)
form of the verb, while Blandiana exploits the repetition of negative
verb forms to create a sense of temporal inevitability.
270    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

Circumstances of Disagreement and Critical Awareness in Protest

The criteria of circumstances of disagreement and critical awareness

have been found to be closely linked. For those born into a circum-
stance of disagreement—Bobby Sands, the Civil Rights marchers, the
members of the United Farm Workers, and the Maya—the critical
awareness of their position on the margins was/is part of their birth-
right. Blandiana developed this understanding in her childhood with
the imprisonment of her father but in particular when she herself is
renamed by the Romanian government and as she and her work are
repeatedly banned as she grows into adulthood. For Nena, disagreement
and awareness developed as the Cold War intensified, holding the entire
globe captive in its rigid binary thinking. For Wilfred Owen, however,
it took the horrors of trench warfare and the loss of millions for him to
disagree, to develop a critical awareness, and then to persuade others to
develop such an awareness.

Particular Words: Semantics of Opposition in Protest

The criterion of the semantics of opposition reveals the plasticity of

language in how wordplay can be used for serious work. Several pat-
terns emerged in regard to this characteristic of a performative of protest
regarding tone, repetition, word choice (including pronouns), and point
of view. The tone of the protest texts analyzed for this study ranges
from the ironic and satiric to the sincere and the objective. Satire and
irony are used by the Turkish protesters in the co-opting of Erdogan’s
insult, by Bobby Sands in several instances including his portrayal of
his captors, by Wilfred Owen in his revelation of the “old lie,” and by
Ana Blandiana in her reversal of the individuality of birth to mass pro-
duction of workforce. In contrast, sincerity is revealed in Bobby Sands’
desire for a United Ireland and a risen people, in the affirmation of
ability in “Sí se puede,” and the insistence that things will change in We
Shall Overcome. Like Sands drawing on both sincerity and irony, 99
Luftballons/99 Red Balloons does the same with the tone of the inter-
nal musical narrative being one of sincerity, while that of the external
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
271

listeners being one of irony as a child’s toy leads to nuclear destruction.

In the Guatemalan condemnations, sincerity takes on a tone of objec-
tivity in the persuasion of logos in the retelling of the events of Cuatro
Caminos, as well as reinforcing the reasonableness of the changes pro-
posed in the GHRC and Totonicapán statements.
Along with these patterns of tone, the use of repetition in a variety of
forms animated the semantics of opposition within the instances ana-
lyzed. In the poems, Owen and Blandiana employ sound repetitions of
assonance and consonance in rhythmic ways to create for readers the
sounds of gunfire and marching, respectively. Sands, the GHRC, and
the Totonicapán government use repetition of casting and lists of griev-
ances, while the chants, themselves, are forms created for repetitive pro-
duction. We Shall Overcome not only repeats its opening line three times
per verse, but the overall form of the verse is so stable, due to repeti-
tion, that it allows for new content to fill it spontaneously without sing-
ers missing a beat. Part of the mass appeal of Owen’s “Dulce ” and 99
Luftballons/99 Red Balloons is their use of the repeatable structures of
the sonnet (Italian and English) and of narrative in the form of Freytag’s
pyramid (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denoue-
ment), respectively. Internal smaller structures are also repeated in these
instances such as the Maya parallelisms in the Totonicapán text and the
repeated use of indefinite nouns in Blandiana’s poem.
Along with the choice of the sonnet form, Wilfred Owen chooses
his words for “Dulce ” from “plain language” for his photograph poem.
This choice mirrors that of the GHRC in their Condemnation and of
Sands in certain parts of his Diary. Word choice is foundational for
the semantics of opposition as evidenced in: the creation of Us versus
Them in Sands’ Diary; the evolution of the pronoun “I” to “We” and
the verb “will” to “shall” in We Shall Overcome; McAlea’s choice of the
word “red” to maintain the rhythm of “Luft” in his translation of 99
Luftballons to 99 Red Balloons; and the collocation of contrasts such
as “doomed” and “birth” in “Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade.”
The power of pronouns is revealed through their malleability in “Sí se
puede,” We Shall Overcome, “Everyday I’m çapulling,” the direct address
in “Dulce, ” as well as the inclusive “You and me” in 99 Red Balloons.
Bernice Johnson Reagon’s reflection on the earlier usage of first person
272    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

singular in “I Shall Overcome” resonates with the first person singular

usage in “Everyday I’m Çapulling” with a clear critical awareness of who
is responsible for what, as well as an unspoken sense of solidarity within
the first person singular. This evolves into the spoken in the transition
to first person plural in We Shall Overcome. Word choice is also critical
for the creation of opposition through metaphor like Blandiana’s “bat-
talions,” or synecdoche like Owen’s gassed soldier representing all who
perished in the Great War, or graphemes used in the K’iche’ Facebook
post to index all of the Maya.
Such creative deployments facilitate the production of different
points of view in these instances as well. The Turkish chant, the anti-
nuclear war and Civil Rights songs, the Great War poem, and the Irish
diary are all written from a first person point of view. The Guatemalan
condemnations use third person point of view primarily, while the
Farmworkers’ chant with the ambiguity of its proform “se, ” as well as
Blandiana’s poem, also offer a third person point of view. These points
of view reinforce the vocatives initiated in their respective performances
by the interpellated protesters who uttered them.

Particular People: Interpellated Protesters

In the protest performances analyzed, the renovated felicity condition

criterion of the particular person manifests in interpellated protest-
ers who occupied a wide range of positions in relation to the hegem-
onic powers from which they eventually dissent. Bobby Sands, Ana
Blandiana, the Maya, the farmworkers, and many of the Civil Rights
Movement activists were born into the margins and had been inter-
pellated as marginal by the State from before their birth, as Althusser
(2001) asserts. For Sands, Blandiana, the farmworkers, as well as many
of the Civil Rights activists and the Maya, their religio-cultural affilia-
tions are part of this marginalization dynamic. For many of the Turkish
activists, it is the reverse, with the Turkish government’s marginalization
of the secular contributing to their interpellation as protesters.
For numerous individuals highlighted in this work, flashpoints or
particular events unfolded that interpellated them as protesters. The
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
273

Salinas Tragedy interpellated many farmworkers, the energy rate hikes

interpellated many of the Maya, and the violence enacted at Selma or
in Birmingham interpellated many Civil Rights protesters. The focus
of Bobby Sands’ final protest was his re-categorization, his re-interpella-
tion by the British government, from being a Prisoner of War to being
an Ordinary Decent Criminal. For Ana Blandiana, it was her on-going
Othering, particularly through the banning of her work, by the Romanian
government that interpellated her, resulting in her rejection of omoge-
nizare. Many of the Turks interpellated by their government’s insults and
policies were not marginalized individuals, just as Wilfred Owen wasn’t
a marginalized Englishman. However, the State’s hail, for the Turks con-
cerned about Gezi Park to refrain from engagement or for Wilfred Owen
to continue to lead his men in battle, misfired. Environmental concerns
initially ignited the Turkish protests while Owen’s experience in battle
ignited his own. For Owen, as for Sands, the interpellation as protester is
linked intimately with ideas of duty, and the legitimacy attained by doing
one’s duty, along with the reinforcement of identity in doing so. The
hegemonic hail of the members of Nena was not the product of one state,
like these others, but of the Cold War détente spearheaded by the USSR
and the United States under which the people of East and West Germany
lived, while the corporate persons of the GHRC, the Totonicapán gov-
ernment, and the Comunidades Lingüística Maya K’iche’ simultane-
ously exist as active participants in political, social, and cultural life in
Guatemala and as protesters when necessary. Critical awareness merges
with performance after the interpellation of a protester as individuals craft
identity and legitimacy in relation to the hegemonic center.

A Particular Effect: Convocativity in Protest

Pragmatic legitimacy is reinforced when protesters fulfill these pre-

suppositional felicity conditions, and they, along with the addressees
of the vocative of the counter hail to çapul or to overcome, convoke
themselves into communities of practice in relation to the center and
the margin. Convocativity is a social consequence of the opening up
of public discourse, the revelation of the interpellative fault lines of
274    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

access to and activation of power within the dynamic tension between

moments of consent and rejection. As stated in Chapter 2, convocativ-
ity is the configurative perlocutionary effect of a critically aware public
vocative of disagreement that calls for change through the semantics of
opposition. In the analyses presented in Chapters 3–6, this effect is the
positioning and identification of an interpellated protester that under-
scores a sense of legitimation, for the individual and communities of
practice, by the successful performance of the protest speech act. For
“Everyday I’m Çapulling,” the convocative effect is played out across
a variety of language and cultural groups due to its hybrid coinage, as
well as the emergence of çapul as a prefix in several languages includ-
ing French, Spanish, and German among others. The role of social
media in this instance, as well as for the Guatemalan condemnations,
offers initial insights into how protest and the convocative split can
spread rapidly across languages and cultures. For the condemnations,
the convocative split also activates questions of identity and legitimacy
not only in relation to the power of social media but also in the rhe-
torical choices, of language and register that then activate identity and
legitimacy markers, while creating solidarity and distance in regard to
the range of addressed communities of practice. The GHRC chooses
English and Spanish—hegemonic languages of colonialism—in the
service of the Mayan community and positions itself as an outsider in
solidarity on the margin. The Totonicapán government selects for-
mal Spanish to counter the national government’s casting of them as
thug-peasants while the selection of the formal dialect can also ease
understanding across dialects of Spanish. These are both legitimacy con-
cerns and the use of the K’iche’ language and spelling markers reinforces
indigenous identity within the community of practice on the margin,
while the Facebook post in K’iche’ reinforces identity within the com-
munity of practice as a marker of convoked solidarity in it.
The Diary of Bobby Sands also activates a margin-internal split, like
the K’iche’ post, as he addresses his home community of practice in
the hopes of them understanding what has led to his protest of hun-
ger strike, and is only indirectly addressing those in hegemonic power.
He creates solidarity through the split with Catholic-Republican-
Nationalists (CRNs) in his choice of Irish for his final entry while
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
275

creating distance with the Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PULs) British

Others. Whereas “Sí se puede” initially convoked farmworkers in an
affirmation of solidarity, it has now become part of the American activ-
ist lexicon in Spanish and in its English translations, and can convoke
for issues beyond those originally promoted by the UFW.
The convocative effect of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons is odd because
of the irrationality at play in Mutually Assured Destruction. The “all
options are on the table” camps in the Soviet Union and the United
States convoked these two superpowers together in opposition to other
countries, with the hegemonic center jointly held and everyone else
patterning on the margins in relation to the combined superpowers.
The convocative splits resulting from We Shall Overcome and “Dulce et
Decorum Est” are also odd as the illocutionary intention aligns with the
perlocutionary effect of convocativity only in particular contexts. When
the poem is presented in particular contexts such as in relation to the
Geneva Protocols on chemical weapons, it can unify across disparate
communities of practice, tethering margin and center. However, when
it is applied in contemporary conflicts, such as British involvement in
Afghanistan, it returns to its original position on the margin, as an artifact
of protest. This dynamic is similar to the singing of We Shall Overcome
in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1965 Civil
Rights Act in which it unified contentious groups. However, sung at a
contemporary protest, it still results in a margin-center convocative split.
A review of the analyses shows a relationship between convocativ-
ity, legitimacy, and violence involved with a protest. The decision of
bystanders to convoke themselves in the margins with protesters is often
related to the view of the protest as legitimate, which is related to per-
ceptions of and/or presence of violence. For many CRNs in Northern
Ireland, the final protest of Bobby Sands was too closely linked with
the violence of the Irish Republican Army. As quoted in Chapter 3,
Zeynep Goktas, an Ankara academic, stated that he supported the envi-
ronmental positions of the Gezi Park protesters, but he could not be
supportive of the violence enacted by some of them. As a result, like
those Northern Irish CRNs, he would not be convoked on the mar-
gins with the protesters. The question of violence prompts the security
questions of the Social Contract even if the State repeatedly violates
276    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

it as shown in the analyses of Turkey, Northern Ireland, Guatemala,

Romania, or the United States. The legitimacy of the State is compro-
mised when violence is revealed via traditional media (e.g., US during
Civil Rights Movement) or through social media (e.g., Turkish protests,
Guatemala). Both poets, Blandiana and Owen, exploit the violence of
the State, revealing it as illegitimate, through their images of violence, in
areas of birth and death as controlled by the State, respectively. For the
Romanian context of Blandiana’s poem, there is a parallel of the omoge-
nizare process and convocativity, with how well an individual has been
homogenized paralleling how one might be positioned in regard to the
hegemonic center and the margin of communist Romanian society.

Reflection and Summary of the Application

of the Aspirational Felicity Conditions
The Aspirations

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #3: The actual performance of

the protest utterance indicates the presence of appropriate thoughts,
feelings, and intentions; whereas the type, interconnectedness,
number, and/or risk context of the utterance(s) serves as an index of
a level of commitment to these thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #4: The performance of the
protest utterance(s) indicates that protesters will engage in subse-
quent social actions consistent with the protest position; the likeli-
hood of the taking of consistent social action is related to the type,
interconnectedness, number, and/or risk context of the protest
utterance as an index of levels of commitment.

Thoughts, Feelings, and Intentions of Protest

Just as the presuppositional felicity conditions for the performance

of speech acts of protest are animated in a variety of ways in the texts
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
277

examined for this study, the aspirational felicity conditions have also
been animated in multiple ways, to varying degrees. Regarding reno-
vated felicity condition number three, the thoughts, feelings, and inten-
tions of the protesters are concretized in their performances of their
respective speech acts. As Stanley Fish (1980) contends and as noted in
Chapter 2, the acts, themselves, are the only available evidence for the
presence of a speaker’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions. The perfor-
mance of these protest speech acts, by these speakers within their various
communities of practice, marks their thoughts, feelings, and intentions
as those of individuals identifying as critically aware citizens, positioned
in the convocative moment, to challenge that which has wounded their
worlds. Through their performances, the writers, singers, poets, and
chanters, reinforce their identities, legitimized often by their choice of
risk over safety, in their convocation on the margins, in their positioning
of themselves in relation to the power structures they question.
This is Austin’s (1994) sincerity condition and it is repeatedly hon-
ored by the instances explored here as demonstrated in the dramatic
risks many of the protesters underwent in order to have their say. The
level of risk involved in the performances of the various protests ranged
from very little, such as the singing of 99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons,
to economic sacrifice and insecurity, such as for the farmworkers, to
emotional and psychological violence, such as Blandiana’s surveillance
by the Securitate, to incarceration, such as in Turkey, and finally to
physical violence and death, such as at the bus station in Birmingham,
Cuatro Caminos, the Somme, and Northern Ireland. The risk of engag-
ing in these performances of protest is mitigated and heightened
depending upon the context of its performance. Initially, “Everyday I’m
Çapulling” was intermittently risky, but as the weeks wore on, its per-
formance became more so. We Shall Overcome adapted to the needs of
the moment, often serving not as marching song but as a calming soli-
darity builder, sung in volatile moments of risk, such as in bus stations
by Freedom Riders or in jail cells, as indicated by John Lewis and other
Civil Rights activists. However, in particular contexts, like when it was
sung by the US Congress in 2015 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
the passage of the Civil Rights Act, singing the song does not involve
278    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

risk. This is similar to the use of Owen’s “Dulce ” which is not a protest
when it appears on the reading lists of British school children, but is
when poets like Carol Ann Duffy (2009) incorporate it into work ques-
tioning current British policy. If the poem had been published while
Owen was in uniform, he most likely would not have been protected as
Siegfried Sassoon was after his published protest, but would have faced
severe repercussions at the hands of his commanding officers.
Originally, the risk of chanting “Sí se puede” included not only the
risk of physical violence, but also the financial risk of farmworkers not
earning money during the harvest season, jeopardizing their families’
economic survival. The use of the chant now, or its English counter-
part, generally involves much less risk. However, the risks for those who
penned the Guatemalan condemnations continue to increase as the vio-
lence enacted on the Maya, along with that enacted on human rights
workers, has steadily increased since the signing of the Peace Accords in
1996. This is why, for the aspirational felicity conditions a public figure,
Claudia Paz y Paz, is highlighted and not one of the Mayan activists
present at Cuatro Caminos.
Blandiana’s risk of disappearing into the Romanian penal system or
worse was omnipresent from the time she was a child until the fall of
Ceausescu in 1989. For Bobby Sands, the risk ended with his choice of
the hunger strike that led to his death. For the British and Romanian
governments, Sands and Blandiana, as public figures, were exemplars
whose punishments might serve to deter others. Ironically, the greatest
risk articulated in the examined protests, the risk of nuclear war, was the
least risky speech act of protest to perform.

Commitment and Subsequent Action in Protest

As with the level of risk, the aspirational conditions of commitment

and subsequent action run across a continuum from full-time activ-
ist or public servant such as Freedom Rider-turned-US Congressman,
John Lewis, to an increased political efficacy such as for Mesut Sener
in Turkey (Williams and Krassimira 2013), to disengagement for many
of the Turks who participated in the Spirit of Gezi as well as many of
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
279

the farmworkers and Civil Rights movement activists whose attention

is now focused elsewhere. The most dire point on this continuum is
anchored by death, such as that of Bobby Sands, along with the deaths
of Civil Rights activists such as Medgar Evers. However, in terms of liv-
ing public concern, Gabriele Nena Kerner remains civically engaged,
founding schools and performing, while Ana Blandiana and her hus-
band have founded Academia Civica and the Memorial of the Victims
of Communism and the Resistance, along with the International Center
for Studies on Communism and the Sighet Museum. They are working
to restore the collective memory of their country in the aftermath of the
Ceausescu regime. The corporate persons that composed the condem-
nations of the events at Cuatro Caminos continue to work tirelessly for
the people of Guatemala with a focus on human rights for the GHRC,
on local issues for the officials of the Totonicapán government, and on
language rights and practice for the Comunidades Lingüística Maya
K’iche’. The United Farmworkers union continues its work on behalf of
agricultural laborers and others across the United States, as evidenced by
its recent support of the passage by the California Assembly of AB1066,
which granted agricultural workers the same right to overtime pay as
other Californians. The Bobby Sands Trust continues to promote and
work for the vision of a united Ireland as envisioned by the Member of
Parliament who was a poet that starved himself to death in protest of
the treatment of the “risen people.”

Threads of Thought for Future Conversations

The Possibility of a Meta-narrative of Grassroots
Activism

These reflections and summaries of the application of the renovated

presuppositional and aspirational felicity conditions feed into what the
scholar-activist Bernard Lee asserts when he states that, “you don’t know
what something means until you see how it impacts your understand-
ing of the world, and how that understanding of the world impacts the
280    
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life you are living out in the world.”1 This reciprocal give and take, of
the meaning-making of protest in relation to ever-emergent commu-
nications technology, is gentrifying the performative neighborhood of
protest. Social media can upgrade local protest into global phenomena,
generating sentiment and support in constituencies heretofore unaware
of the social, political, or cultural issue under dispute. This is Foucault’s
creative power in hyperdrive.
It appears at this moment, that for the first time in human history,
it is possible for the emergence of a global meta-narrative of grassroots
activism. Such a meta-narrative, or master narrative to use Lyotard’s
(1984) term, would need to be anchored in deep symbols, or “the values
by which a community understands itself, from which it takes its aims,
and to which it appeals as canons of cultural criticism” like the grand
story of the Enlightenment, which takes reason as a deep symbol (Farley
1996, p. 3). Potential deep symbols for a global meta-narrative of social
activism include that of the signifier human rights from the United
Nations “Declaration of Human Rights” along with the predicate nom-
inative structure of “I am ______” cited in Chapter 1. The animation
of this predicate nominative structure or of the term human rights can
index, through social media, a growing reservoir of global collective
memory of protest and activism not yet restricted to or by a hegemonic
center.
While a global meta-narrative of citizenship is now possible, chart-
ing its lines or its potential staying power requires looking through the
glass darkly in terms of models of effective leadership and attainment
of goals. Unlike mass protests such as those in Manila in 1986 led by
future president Corazon Aquino or student protests in Paris in 1968
led by future European Green Party deputy Daniel Cohn-Bendit,2 the
“new protest” of the past decade or so, including the Arab Spring or
the Occupy movement, has generally rejected hierarchical structures of
organization along with traditional notions of leadership. According to
Paul Mason (2012), part of this rejection results from a growing dis-
trust of power as we use new technologies to learn more about the eco-
nomic and political abuse of power by those in power. However, other
recent protests, such as the Chilean student protests of 2011, have
cobbled together a hybrid model. Drawing upon traditional sources of
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
281

leadership from student groups, these students utilized social media to

engage and inform supporters, as the protest grew from a localized com-
munity of practice focused on educational inequities at home, to one
in solidarity with global economic inequities highlighted in the Occupy
protests (Guzman-Concha 2012).
This hybridity at work in Chile, as well as the nonhierarchical affili-
ations of similar protests, combined with the organizing immediacy of
platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, does indeed encourage civic
participation. However, the nonhierarchical arrangement does not
encourage the clear articulation and promotion of a group’s message
or goals. For example, if structural change is the goal for Occupy Wall
Street (OWS), then the movement has been a failure. However, if the
goal is to change the topic of public conversation, then OWS has been a
success, having shifted the conversation in the mass media from deficit
reduction to economic inequality (Mitchell 2013, p. xiii).
Urban geographer Tali Hatuka suggests that the waves of social pro-
test instigated via social media produce fractured and porous alliances
that may not be enough to promote change (Beaumont 2013). The
concern then becomes what level and type of change is being encour-
aged through the dissent. At this point, this sort of activism appears
to be a better fit for short-term shifts rather than long-term structural
change. The possibilities of the cumulative effect of a series of such
shifts remain to be seen. Tarrow’s (2011) focus on the necessity of
social networks for the success of social movements may be modified
through the creation of global virtual communities of practice. While
the current fractured alliances may not be enough to facilitate structural
change, Hatuka also asserts that, “Now the event itself is the message”
of dissent via social media (Beaumont 2013).3

The Medium Is the Message

This insight of Hatuka’s recalls Marshal McLuhan’s (1964) insight that

the medium is the message: The 1950s technology of the telephone and
the printed call to action required a centralized leadership and hier-
archy to relay a message to supporters and to produce event turnout.
282    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

In contrast, today, anyone with an Internet-enabled device can issue a

call to action via tweet or Facebook post; even immediate events can
produce high turnout through these means, and the event need not
have a central leader. Fifty years ago, McLuhan wrote:

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things
as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded
that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is
merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—
that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is
introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new
technology … For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the
change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
(p. 1)

The new communication technologies are clearly changing, and invig-

orating, the scale, pace, and patterns of the human affair with and of
protest, as shown in Guatemala in 2012 or in Turkey in 2013.
However, it is important not to overlook the reality that the visual
media tools of television and the camera have been preparing individ-
uals and communities for decades for this transformation. The visceral
pathos set loose within television viewers, of police dogs snarling at
Alabama’s children in the 1960s, changed the course of the Civil Rights
Movement. The still photographic images of fleeing children burned
with napalm changed the course of the Vietnam War. The emotional
learning wrought through these visual technologies transformed intel-
lectual understandings of the woundedness of these groups of people.
They prompted a desire for change with a hope that the change was not
just possible but imperative. This visual training has helped activists and
governments adapt to the scale of protest being extended from the local
to the global at a pace of the near immediate.
The first blooms of this are present in the use of the Internet to mass
mobilize protesters against the Iraq War. On 15 February 2003, in 800
different cities worldwide, 30 million people took to the streets in oppo-
sition to the American-led invasion (Chrisafis et al. 2003; Beaumont
2013).4 With the advent of social media, those nascent web skills of
sending email flyers to organize the Don’t Attack Iraq/Not in My Name
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
283

campaign, matriculated to other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook,

and Youtube. Use of these new tools has stimulated awareness and
action from Gezi Park to the Cuatro Caminos with patterns of protest
taking on the biological metaphors of “contagion” and “viral” (Mitchell
“Preface”, x). A basic pattern has been the posting of a protest-in-forma-
tion via social media, followed by its contagious spread through a vari-
ety of media channels, as in Gezi Park.
Totonicapán reveals another emergent pattern: the loss of much
hegemonic control over the flow of information. Although the
Guatemalan government initially denied that the military had opened
fire on the protesters, once the pictures had been posted online, they
retracted that story and admitted the truth. This retraction of the denial
resonates with Mason’s (2012) observation as to how and why trust in
government has declined in our era. In this situation, the creative power
of taking and posting a picture that results in a government taking
responsibility for its military action, however, not only leads to further
distrust of the government, but also simultaneously nourishes individual
and group political efficacy. The possibilities, as well as the actual acts,
of dissent through an electronic device now begin to shape identity as
the ethos and legitimacy of the user-as-citizen activist is nourished in
these outbursts of insurrectionary creativity. This harkens back to Walter
Benjamin’s (1966) claim of the democratic potential of mass technol-
ogy, which as Simon Frith (1998) asserts is that, “‘the rise of ‘mass cul-
ture’ mean[s] new forms of social activity, new ways of using aesthetic
experience to define social identity’” (Robb 2007, p. 68).5
Along with identity being influenced in these interactions, another
game is also afoot in that different platforms seem to facilitate different
levels of formality and intimacy related to language and register choice.
Whereas Facebook is an effective platform for the condemnatory protest
of the Totonicapán massacres to be posted in K’iche’ for members in
the immediate physical space of the community, the format of a formal
press release issued on the GHRC’s website in English and Spanish is an
effective platform to reach out to members of the global human rights
community in a global virtual space. There are different levels of solidar-
ity and distance here that parallel that of pronoun usage when Us and
Them are cast in opposition, as Bobby Sands or the Freedom Singers
284    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

did. Like pronouns, these platforms can also be used to build solidarity
or establish distance, while shaping identity. Please note that the use of
the concept of platform here quite broadly includes not just new social
media, but traditional media including the human voice and hand sig-
nals, as well.
Due to the city ban on microphones in Zucotti Park, OWS’s “human
mic,” of speakers uttering a few words that are then repeated by oth-
ers and passed through the crowd, involves using hand signals and the
human voice, the two oldest of the old school media. This facilitated
high solidarity due to the intimacy of the crowded setting. However,
OWS used new platforms such as its website and Facebook to share its
Occupy Manifesto, to attract supporters, and to activate Hatuka’s loose
alliances, while increasing social capital. Occupiers also engaged with
traditional media by interacting with reporters and photographers from
print and broadcast media outlets who covered the occupation. Even
as many of these traditional media outlets have struggled to keep pace
with the changing technologies, users of the changing technologies still
need the traditional outlets, as they confer legitimacy upon a perfor-
mance of protest. If the BBC or the New York Times doesn’t bother to
cover a protest, how long is its shelf life? This, too, may change over
time, but it seems to be where we are right now.
Thus, the need for traditional media, for even the oldest fashioned
“extensions of ourselves,” doesn’t seem to be going away. Instead it, too,
is being gentrified in energizing and transformative ways with news-
papers updating their blogs and broadcast networks posting extended
interviews on their websites. The medium continues to be the message
even as the 140-character limit of a microblog becomes the textual
equivalent of a 10-second sound bite. Such brevity is enough to convey
information, support for a cause, or an emotional state in an individual
post. What is to prove interesting is figuring out how meaning is created
in multiple postings over time. Scholars such as Zappavigna (2012) and
McCracken (2011) have initiated these questions of meaning-making,
claiming that while microblogging is parodied as the social media of
choice for the self-absorbed (“I had pancakes for breakfast!”), it actu-
ally is a venue for nascent interpersonal meaning, as “valued (and thus
highly retweeted) tweets ‘tend to make an observation, take a stance, or
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
285

crack a joke—none of which fall under the umbrella of using Twitter to

tell the world what you are doing’” (McCracken in Zappavigna 2012, p.
50).
However, brevity-oriented platforms are generally insufficient to
articulate the complexities of many of the social, political, and cultural
issues that energize marchers to take to the streets. How would Dr. King
tweet a “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? Change agents of scale, pace,
and pattern must not jettison deep thinking and reflection on their
way to the forum. This is clearly a both/and moment, not an either/or
moment. The electronic device is needed at the protest, but so too is the
human voice. However, before leaving Dr. McLuhan at the march, clar-
ification of a point about his insight, of the medium is the message, is
needed. It, too, capitalizes on a predicate nominative structure of equa-
tion, like Je suis Charlie; it just does so in the linguistic third person
instead of the first. McLuhan isn’t equating the content of the human
message with the medium’s message. We must not confuse the message
of scale, pace, or pattern of the medium—BBC, YouTube, Instagram—
with the content of the message expressing what it means to be human.
Having and using a medium, any medium, is not being. This seems
exceptionally difficult to remember given the seductive properties of the
shiny new devices that often distract us from the issues at hand.
The danger of conflating media with meaning parallels Senator
Robert F. Kennedy’s (1968) insights on conflating the American gross
national product with what makes life worthwhile. In 1968, as the
United States was engulfed in anti-war protests, Senator Kennedy
sharpened this distinction for the students at the University of Kansas.

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year,
[but] if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross
National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and
ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for
our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the
destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic
sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars
for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and
Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order
286    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow
for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy
of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength
of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of
our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither
our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion
to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes
life worthwhile …

The New Commons in the Neighborhood

Just as in 1968, we needed not to equate the health of children or the

intelligence of public debate with the GNP, in this age of devices we
must not equate the meaning of the medium with the meaning of the
messages of human desire for a better world. Whereas innovative com-
munication technologies increasingly metabolize scale, pace, and pat-
tern, they also provide the innovative public space of the virtual. We
have only begun to scratch the surface of the breadth and depth of vir-
tual public space.6 These initial etchings, though, outline restorative
possibilities, for the irredentic desire to attain a flourishing community,
ranging from the quick text message to in-depth discussions on the dig-
ital commons. These virtual common rooms, such as openDemocracy.net,
facilitate on-going conversations across the globe on issues pertaining to
the common good.
This freshly opened frontier facilitates new linguistic surface struc-
tures, such as the microblog, through which activists may energize per-
formatives of protest. Whereas the performatives explored in this text
have all occurred in physical public space, two of them were subsidized
heavily by virtual public space, the Totonicapán massacre condemna-
tions and the Turkish “Everyday I’m çapulling!” At this stage, it appears
that the proscenium arch of protest felicity conditions functions in a
similar fashion in the virtual as well as the physical realm. This holds
even for the protesters in the Anonymous hacktivism campaigns.7 The
actual wearers of the Guy Fawkes masks who constitute these cam-
paigns are certainly particular people on whom hegemonic hails have
misfired, even as the anonymity of the mask portrays these hactivists as
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
287

Everyman. Of course, this revives the dangers of conflation once more.

Just as if everything is ideological, nothing is. If every protester is an
Everyman, then no one is the particular person hailed by the hegem-
onic powers. Also, the challenges of the aspirational felicity conditions
remain, as so often to judge speaker intentions, thoughts, and feelings
are based solely upon the performance of the insurrectionary speech
acts, themselves.
The renovated felicity conditions may require more remodeling for
the digital environs, especially as innovative multimodal performances
of protest are created, reconfigured, mashed-up, or even reversed as dur-
ing OWS. In Zucotti Park and other Occupy sites around the world,
the occupiers reversed the foundational predicate nominative structure
of Speech Act Theory of “saying something is doing something,” to
“doing something became saying something” (Mitchell 2013, p. xi).
The tenacity of the web to cherish these innovations, along with all
other traces of digital footprints via digital archives like the Way Back
Machine, activates in a novel way Hannah Arendt’s (1998) notion of
the “space of appearance,” which comes “into being whenever men [and
women] are together in the manner of speech and action, and there-
fore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm.”
She continues declaring, “[u]nlike the spaces which are the work of our
hands, the [space of appearance] does not survive the actuality of the
movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with
the dispersal of men [and women]… but with the disappearance or
arrest of the activities themselves” (p. 199). However, the digital spaces
of appearance do not just survive comings and goings, they are indeed
built upon them.
These digital spaces of appearance resemble the concept of immedi-
ate language context, or the context that is created in the moment of
the discourse interaction, in Discourse Analysis. In these interactions,
identity can be molded, challenged, frayed, or affirmed, while alter-
ing degrees of political efficacy and social capital along the way. This
holds true in virtual public space as well, at least as indicated by initial
research into cyberbullying and other political, sociological, and psy-
chological scholarship involving technology.8 Returning to McLuhan’s
(1964) distinction between the medium’s message and the human
288    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

message in thinking about virtual public space, Bakhtin’s (1981) notion

of dialogic heteroglossia and Gergen’s (1991) notion of multiphrenia
are confronted. This confrontation is necessary because maintaining the
distinction between the person and the machine requires the querying
into factors shaping individual consciousness in the interactive realm
of the virtual. One sign spotted at OWS captures this, declaring, “We
just bought real estate in your head” (Taussig 2013, p. 11). No longer is
real estate available only in hometowns, or on media devices, but also in
individual consciousness.
Dialogic heteroglossia gets at the reality in consciousness that in any
linguistic utterance, like that of a protest chant, there are many voices
in multiple conversations that midwife the performance of the utter-
ance (Bressler 2007, p. 339). The voices of the poison gas manufacturers
and those of Owen’s fellow soldiers assist the birth of “Dulce et Decorum
Est,” whereas the voices of the Ku Klux Klan and SNCC assist the birth
of We Shall Overcome. The voices of political leadership, Prime Minister
Recep Erodgan and President Barack Obama, are present in “Everyday
I’m çapulling!” and in the morphing of “Sí se puede” into “Yes we can,”
respectively. The impact of virtual public space facilitating this heter-
oglossic dynamic, of many voices in multiple conversations on individ-
ual or group identity in terms of protest, is unchartered territory.
Gergen’s (1991) postmodern notion of multiphrenia, however, does
counterbalance some of the optimism about the gifts of virtual public
space. Keeping in mind the interactive foundations of identity and legiti-
macy, multiphrenia characterizes an individual’s consciousness not as a sta-
ble identity but as one structured by competing cultural value systems. In
an era saturated with heteroglossic-mediated communication, the cacoph-
ony of competing value systems can pull an individual in a multiplicity of
directions, often resulting in anxiety, aporia, or enduring senses of inad-
equacy—of never being enough for everyone everywhere (Farley 1996,
p. 12). This is one of the potential dark alleys in virtual public space.

Policing the Neighborhood/Community Policing

These internal dynamics raise the specter of the vulnerability of the pro-
tester when agitating for change in the virtual public space. When one
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
289

physically attends a protest, s/he generally possesses some critical aware-

ness of the potential danger inherent in a situation in which competing
ideas are represented. For those uncertain about entertaining these risks,
or not being able to attend for other reasons, the opportunity to partic-
ipate in hashtag activism is appealing. Hashtag activism requires mini-
mal engagement in a mild show of support, such as the sharing or liking
of a post or the retweeting of a tweet. There can be a rather naïve expec-
tation that participation of this sort is risk-free, based on the assump-
tion that various hegemonic powers are not paying attention to online
activity. This is not the case, as Edward Snowden (2014) and others
have revealed the end of privacy as previously known.
Now, everyone can be Ana Blandiana with the Securitate sitting in
the car outside of their home. Corporations mine personal data to
access tastes and buying patterns so they may then tempt shoppers with
“exclusive invitations” to buy more. Banks and insurance companies
can follow the sludge trails of online searches when one enters “bank-
ruptcy” or “cancer,” into a search engine, jeopardizing chances of a loan
or treatment. The State claims it is doing just that when it engages in
metadata surveillance of all cell phone calls. And to some degree, it is.
Just as, sometimes, it is pleasant for Amazon to make a suggestion for
one’s reading pleasure. However, the specter of Cold War totalitarianism
hovers over this contemporary form of a state’s surveillance of its own
people and others. Whereas Blandiana at least had a working knowl-
edge that it was the Securitate under the control of Ceausescu who
owned her file, no one now knows for certain who owns their private
information, including what they may protest, when, where, how, or
why. Files are now encrypted in a cloud instead of being locked in a
filing cabinet. They are shared between corporations and governments
oftentimes without the knowledge of the subjects of these files. They
are maintained “just in case.” A plethora of dystopic images floods the
mind. Welcome to the virtual counterpart of Foucault’s (1979) pano-
pticon, the guard tower situated in the circular prison from which one
can observe all inmates. If we were in Tolkien’s (1994) Middle Earth, we
could see the Eye of Sauron flash over us.
To counter this invasion of the personal, individuals have organ-
ized to advocate for digital rights and freedoms, forming such groups
290    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

as: Electronic Frontiers Foundation (US), Communia (EU), Open

Rights Group (UK), Foundation for P2P (Netherlands), and Pirate
Parties International. Some of these, like EFF, assist protesters in cop-
ing with intrusive state surveillance in protest participation. For exam-
ple, on their website, they offer a “Cell Phone Security Guide for US
Protesters” to help protesters circumvent the tracking of their cell phone
usage while attending a protest (Electronic 2014). Recently, the EFF
joined the American Civil Liberties Union to file an amicus brief in
Klayman v. Obama, a case challenging the government’s right to engage
in the mass surveillance of cell phone and Internet metadata. Another
advocacy group, the NGO Pirate Parties International (2016), with
affiliates in 41 countries, views itself as a “political incarnation of the
freedom of expression movement” that works within the political sys-
tems of host countries to protect digital rights.
Lori Andrews (2012) in her book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw
What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, even pre-
sents “The Social Network Constitution” in an attempt to protect our
rights—assuming we have rights—in the digital world. Particularly
important for protesters is her inclusion of the “Right to Free Speech
and Freedom of Expression” along with “Freedom of Association.” This
is language that resonates with American readers and Internet users but
may seem utopian for protesters in countries where these rights don’t
exist in their physical public spaces, let alone virtual ones. Nevertheless,
the idea of a governing global document of rights, complimenting the
UN Declaration of Human Rights, is an attractive one, as the need for
it is growing more apparent. Andrews’ work also asserts that “Facebook
Nation” is literally redefining the Social Contract. Dimensions of it,
yes—but not the entire thing. We are not disembodied ghosts in the
machine but living, breathing, bleeding embodied homo sapiens who do
need basic and reasonable State protections—from terrorist violence,
from corporate exploitation, and, even from home governments, all of
which consist of other homo sapiens who can be objectified in blanket
terms, just like Bobby Sands’ Screws, and who in turn can objectify its
citizens by tagging them with labels such as çapuller. In many ways, the
linguistic ability to classify and reify Us and Them is at the root of all
security questions, including the one that has hovered over the writing
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
291

of this book: what has happened to the Mayan protester who posted the
pictures of the Totonicapán massacre? What security measures were in
place to protect that brave individual in one of the most violent spots
on the planet? I don’t know.

New Neighbors and Living in the Mess?

Such anxieties regarding security and its relationship to privacy, iden-

tity, and individual freedoms are central to public discourse today. It’s
a bit scary. And very messy. As forewarned at the outset of this book,
embarking on a journey with the traveling concept of performativity
tends to spawn a mess in its wake. Whereas Austin’s Dr. Frankenstein
is a theory of speech acts rooted in sentence level performatives, the
public space of the virtual, along with the electronic tools with which
protest can now be performed, allows for multimodal performatives of
dissent. These multimodal productions test the limits of the relationship
between the medium and the message, as the medium is consistently
in flux. Thus, we find ourselves back with Hillis Miller (2007) sighing
at the family resemblances between the performativity in the singing
of a protest song, the playing of a Mozart sonata, and the enacting of
King Lear. The multimodality of the digital commons welcomes all of
these back to the neighborhood for a family reunion to introduce them
to their newly arrived relatives: the blog, the post, and the viral video
along with so many others. Each distinct. But the family resemblance
remains palpable. You can take the act of performativity out of the
neighborhood, but you can’t take the neighborhood out of the act of
performativity. Perhaps that is too simple, but it does get at the sense of
the relationality of the modes and media of performance, their creative
intertwinings, in virtual and physical space.
These intertwinings tender opportunities for the conventions, of the
civic, the vocative, and an orientation to change, to take new forms to
voice social, political, and cultural disagreements in a critically aware
fashion through the semantics of opposition. They extend invitations to
do so to the widest swath of people in human history. Everyone with an
interactive device upon whom the hegemonic hail has misfired possesses
292    
M. L. Gasaway Hill

a medium, through which they may connect with other interpellated

protesters, to convoke self and others in a community of practice on
the margin, in a relationship with the center. How absolutely necessary
in a moment in which income inequality is skyrocketing, the planet is
warming, and war is raging.
In this fulcrum moment of human history, opportunities to use these
new tools to heal the wounds of desire shouted out in protest, to prac-
tice freedom of expression, to end war, and to stop the pillaging of the
Earth, proliferate. There is so very much to do. But, in the doing, the
potential for an emergent meta-narrative of grassroots activism, infil-
trated by an ideology of accountability of the center and the margins,
shimmers in the imagination and begins to take shape. Peter Seeger
and Bob Reiser (1989) once remarked that “The future of the world
will not be scripted. All we can do is plan for improvisation” (p. 8). The
improvisational possibilities of the performance of protest are bursting
forth anew each day to ease the burden and celebrate the gift of Wendy
Farley’s (2005) interdependence. How messy. How marvelous.

Notes
1. Lee is drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s discussion of the work of Hans
Georg Gadamer in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Paragraph 31.
2. Cohn-Bendit was a sociology student at the University of Nanterre when
he became the leader of the student protesters during the May 1968
movement in France. He was known as “Dany le Rouge ” or Dany the Red.
3. For an engaging articulation of the question of leadership and organi-
zation, see Bernard E. Harcourts’s “Political Disobedience” in Occupy:
Three Inquiries in Disobedience.
4. For an extensive study of these demonstrations set within a broader
context of protest, see The World Says No to War: Demonstrations Against
the War on Iraq, edited by Stefaan Walgrave, Dieter Rucht, editors with
preface by Sidney Tarrow.
5. According to Rob, Benjamin was contradicting Adorno’s assertion that
the mass cultural industry merely enslaved people (footnote 1, 93).
6. For a fascinating essay on public space, see “Image, Space, Revolution”
by W.J.T. Mitchell in Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience
7  Considerations and Conversations in the Neighborhood of Protest    
293

7. For an in-depth look at the evolution of Anonymous from a-social troll-

ing to political activism, read Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The
Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman.
8. For studies of cyberbullying electronic violence, we suggest visiting the
US Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Disease
Control, and the National Science Foundations websites as cited at the
end of this chapter.

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 Appendix A

Austin’s Original Felicity Conditions and the

Renovated Felicity Conditions

Felicity Condition #1: It must be a commonly accepted conven-

tion that the uttering of particular words by particular people in
particular circumstances will produce a particular effect.
Felicity Condition #2: All participants in this conventional proce-
dure must carry out the procedure correctly and completely.
Felicity Condition #3: If the condition is that the participants in
the procedure must have certain thoughts, feelings and intentions,
then the participants must in fact have those thoughts, feelings
and intentions.
Felicity Condition #4: If the convention is that any participant in
the procedure binds her/himself to behave subsequently in a cer-
tain way, then s/he must in fact behave subsequently in that way.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 297

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0
298    
Appendix A

Renovated Felicity Conditions for the Performance

of Protest Language

The Presuppositions

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #1: It must be a commonly

accepted convention that the uttering, for, on or in a public space,
of words that challenge social, political, or cultural hegemonic
power(s), by people interpellated as protesters, will lead to a mar-
gin-center convocativity on said challenge.
Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #2: Protesters articulate and
support, in a public capacity, the counter hegemonic utterance(s)
and thus, occupy a position on the margin in tension with the
power center for that issue.

The Aspirations

Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #3: The actual performance

of the protest utterance indicates the presence of appropriate
thoughts, feelings, and intentions; whereas the type, interconnect-
edness, number, and/ or risk context of the utterance(s) serves as
an index of a level of commitment to these thoughts, feelings, and
intentions.
Renovated Protest Felicity Condition #4: The performance of the
protest utterance(s) indicates that protesters will engage in subse-
quent social actions consistent with the protest position; the likeli-
hood of the taking of consistent social action is related to the type,
interconnectedness, number, and/ or risk context of the protest
utterance as an index of levels of commitment.
 Appendix B

Lagniappe: A List of Protest Resources

Along with the works we have cited throughout these texts, we also sug-
gest the following resources.
Some powerful films on protest include: Selma, directed by Ava
DuVernay (2014); Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (2008); the
Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles (2004); Romero, directed
by John Duigan (1989); Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough
(1982); and the Decretteii Children of the Decree film, posted on
YouTube by Floran Iepan on 28 February 2013, at: https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=ZgZJ-IV8Et0.
For an excellent collection of war poetry, investigate: Forché,
Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.
W.W. Norton. New York. 1993.
For more information on leaders of the American Civil Rights
movement, read Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–
1963 by Taylor Branch. Simon and Schuster. New York. 1989; or John
D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Free Press.
Simon and Schuster. New York. 2003; watch the PBS miniseries Eyes
on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1985; or visit The

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 299

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0
300    
Appendix B

King Center website for a bibliography at: www.thekingcenter.org/

books-bibliography#about.
For more information on initial research on 1960s protest songs,
see Serge Denisoff’s “Protest Movements: Class Consciousness and the
Propaganda Song” in Sociological Quarterly. Spring 1968. 228–247 and
“Songs of Persuasion: A Sociological Analysis of Urban Propaganda
Songs” in the Journal of American Folklore. 1966, 581–589. For more
information on Pete Seeger, see D.K. Dunaway’s How Can I Keep From
Singing: Pete Seeger. McGraw-Hill. New York. 1981. For more informa-
tion on Ruth Crawford Seeger, see Ellie Hisama’s “The Ruth Crawford
Seeger Sessions” in Daedalus, The Journal of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. 142.4. 2013: 51–63.
For more information on World War I poetry, investigate the fol-
lowing: The Oxford Book of War Poetry, chosen and edited by Jon
Stallworthy. Oxford University Press. New York. 1984; The First World
War Poetry Digital Archive at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/;
No Glory in War, 1914–1918, www.noglory.org; or the Red Animal
Project at: https://theredanimalproject.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/
poets-of-the-great-war-siegfried-sassoon-and-wilfred-owen/.
For thoughts on a world beyond war, visit: the National Peace
Academy at: http://nationalpeaceacademy.us/beyond-war/; Abolition
2000 at: http://www.abolition2000.org/?page_id=153; Ban All Nukes
generation at: http://bang-europe.org/take-action/; or the Peace Pledge
Union, the oldest secular pacifist organization in Great Britain at:
http://www.ppu.org.uk/index.html.
To learn more about teaching tolerance, Viva La Causa, and the
Civil Rights Movement, visit the Southern Poverty Law Center at:
http://www.tolerance.org.

Theoretical Concerns
For ideas on social capital, visit infed’s website at: http://infed.org/
mobi/robert-putnam-social-capital-and-civic-community/ or the World
Bank at: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/
 Appendix B    
301

EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/EXTTSOCIALCAPITAL/0,,
contentMDK:20185164~menuPK:418217~pagePK:148956~piPK:
216618~theSitePK:401015,00.html.
For a friendly overview of a wide range of theorists related to per-
formance studies, see Philip Auslander’sTheory for Performance Studies: A
Student’s Guide. Routledge. London. 2008.
For developing ideas regarding social space, see Performativity,
Politics, and the Production of Social Space, edited by Michael R. Glass
and Reuben Rose-Redwood. Routledge. London. 2014 or “Identity,
Conflict, and Public Space” a MOOC through Queens University:
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/identity-conflict-and-public-space-
contest-and-transformation/register.
If you are interested in exploring political aesthetics in hack-
tivism, see: “For the Lulz: Anonymous, Aesthetics, and Affect” by
Rodrigo Ferrada Stoehrel, Simon Lindgren, in the Journal for a Global
Sustainable Information Society (Vol. 12, No. 1, 2014), at: http://www.
triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/503/658.

Virtual Concerns
For a glimpse at how the European Union is facilitating discussion
of emerging issues in the public domain of the digital environment,
visit the COMMUNIA’s website: http://www.communia-project.
eu. Another site also engaged in this is the non-profit, Pirate Parties
International: http://www.pp-international.net/about.
To vote on Lori Andrews’ Social Network Constitution, visit: http://
www.socialnetworkconstitution.com/the-social-network-constitution.
html.
For a series of TED Talks on the “dark side of data”, visit: http://
www.ted.com/playlists/130/the_dark_side_of_data.
For an example of an active digital commons, operating under
Creative Commons licensing, that supports peace and reconcilia-
tion efforts, visit: https://www.opendemocracy.net/about or Global
Comment at: http://globalcomment.com.
302    
Appendix B

For an example of how translators are using communications tech-

nology to promote social justice, visit: Translate for Justice http://trans-
lateforjustice.com, an independent platform of voluntary translators
from all corners of the world.
For more examples on the impact of social media on protest, visit:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/140222/14-protest-
videos-went-viral-and-changed-the-world.
For an example of the usage of the Web in a particular ongoing pro-
test situation, visit the Electronic Intifada at: http://electronicintifada.
net.
 Index

A American Southwest 46, 96

Abajo! Down with Grapes and Lettuce Amfiteatru/Amphitheater 178, 186
98, 104 Amnesty International 84
Abernathy, Rev. Ralph 125 Anderson, B. 10
Abolition 2000 160 Andrews, Lori 290, 301
Academia Civica 189, 279 Anonymous 122, 124, 286, 293, 301
Academy of Mayan Languages of apartheid 16, 56, 60, 123, 160
Guatemala 227, 235, 236 Aquí están los asesinos 57
Achilov, D. 82 Aquino, Corazon 61, 280
active voice 37, 44, 106, 112 Arab Spring 5, 6, 82, 280
Adams, N. 127 Arendt, H. 45, 49, 287
Adams, Shirley 137 Arie, S. 282
African National Congress 16, 56 Arsenault, R. 121
Agger, B. 49 Arsu, Sebnem 85
Ali, Zine El Abidine 82 aspirational conditions 42, 69, 110,
Alooshe, N. 57 259, 278
Althusser, L. 60, 89, 184, 186, 252, aspirational felicity conditions 94,
253, 272 110, 138, 156, 187, 210, 238,
Alvarado, B.E. 237 247, 249, 255, 276–279, 287
Alyokhina, M. 65 Auden, W.H. 24

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 303

M. L. Gasaway Hill, The Language of Protest,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0
304    
Index

Auslander, P. 39, 70, 301 Blažek, Petr 6

Austin, John L. 1, 36, 38, 40, 41, Bloody Sunday 140
43–46, 48, 53, 64, 66, 277 Bobetsky, V. 124, 125, 162
Ayasun, Abdullah 96 Bourdieu, P. 9, 184
Aygün, Hüseyin 84 Bouazizi, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed 6,
Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College 15, 242
57 Bracero Program 97, 99, 100
Brandt, A. 190, 191
Bressler, C.E. 248
B Brezhnev Doctrine 174
Baban, A. 172 Bring Back Our Girls 13, 36
Baer, B. 100, 109, 110 Brooke, Rupert 197
Bakhtin, M. 8, 26, 53, 64, 187, 288 Brooks, Paul 134
Bangkok 12 Brown, D. 142
Barry, J. 122, 126, 128, 137 Brown, J. 138
Bartlett, T. 53 Brown, Michael 142
Bastille 4 Brown v. Board of Education of
BBC News 81, 82, 92, 93 Topeka, Kansas 124
Beaumont, P. 281, 282 Brutus, D. 59
Bednarek, M. 37 Bucholtz, M. 8, 9, 253
Belfast 44, 242, 249, 252, 258, 259 Budak, Polen 80
Benjamin, W. 25, 283 Budapest 13, 14
Benveniste, E. 38 Buenos Aires 13, 122
Beresford, D. 244, 246, 247, 249, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 27, 145,
252, 253 159
Berger, P. 37 Burkholder, J.P. 105
Berlin Wall 10, 42, 148, 149, 154, Butler, Judith 7, 37–39, 41, 42, 45,
157, 159 51, 58–60, 69, 89, 181, 185,
Berns, U. 38, 48 207
Bhabha, Homi 3, 65 Buttigieg, J. 17
Bila, S. 85
Bilefsky, D. 85
Biswas, S. 50 C
Blandiana, A. 23, 160, 172–174, Callahan, J. 123
178, 180–183, 185–190, 212, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
252, 265, 267, 269–273, (CND) 146, 159
277–279, 289 Campbell, A.G. 5
blanket protest 247
 Index    
305

Camp 8, 62, 96, 107, 154–156, 255, 141, 148, 163, 209, 245, 265,
259, 275 270, 272, 273, 275, 277, 279
Camp, M. 236 Civil Rights Movement 100, 113,
Can we haz peace?/Can we make 121, 122, 124, 132, 137, 139,
peace 59 140, 142, 161, 162, 179, 209,
Caple, H. 37 272, 276, 279, 282, 299, 300
çapul 80, 84, 87–89, 92, 273, 274 Clark, John "Brick" xii
çapulcu 79, 80, 89 Clark, Septima 125
çapuller(s) 22, 80, 88, 90, 96, 113, Clary-Lemon, J. 61, 253, 257
290 Clayton Powell, Adam Jr. 136
Carawan, Guy 126 Clemmons, N. 108
Careful Now 44, 89 CNN Türk 84, 88
Carter, Bob 133 Coates, K. 146–148
Cason, Allen 121 coinage 69, 88, 94, 274
casting 59, 82, 249, 250, 271, 274 Cold War 99, 113, 143, 145, 149,
Catholic-Republican-Nationalist 155, 158–160, 173, 270, 273,
(CRN) 244, 259 289
Cavanaugh, M. 97, 105, 111 collective memory(ies) 14, 15, 36, 49,
Çavdar, Ayse 93 55, 68, 89, 91, 98, 105, 112,
Ceausescu, Nicolae 25, 150, 171, 122, 139, 150, 189, 208, 244,
172, 174–178, 180, 183, 184, 265, 279, 280
188, 189, 212, 278, 279, 289 Collective Singular 255–256
Charlie Hebdo 15 Collins, J. 159
Chavez, Cesar 97, 100–108, 114 collocation 181, 182, 271
Chew-Bose, Durga 5 Commission Against Impunity in
Childers, J. 17 Guatemala (CICIG) 221, 230
Children’s Crusade 23, 139, 160, Communia 290, 301
170–173, 178–180, 186–188, communicative competence 7, 85,
269, 271 186, 189
Chilton, P. 18, 26 Community of practice 8, 9, 21,
Chomsky, N. 22, 43, 46, 47, 49 61–63, 68–70, 79, 87, 89, 91,
Chrisafis, A. 282 92, 94–96, 98, 103, 104, 106,
Christmas Truce of 1914 195 109–111, 122, 126, 127, 129,
Chuj 20, 21, 56, 186 134, 137, 138, 140, 153, 155,
civil disobedience 18, 19, 55, 56, 67, 156, 173, 186–188, 209, 236,
233 237, 239, 241, 248, 254, 265,
civil rights 16, 22, 114, 123–126, 267–269, 273–275, 277, 281,
128, 129, 132, 136, 137, 139, 292
306    
Index
Comunidad Lingüística Maya
K’iche’/Comunidades
Lingüística Maya K’iche’ 220,
227, 228, 231, 232, 235–237,
241, 252, 273, 279
Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) 125
Congress of Racial Equality 121, 124,
135
constative utterance 42, 177
context 2, 23, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 61,
66, 67, 71, 85, 86, 94, 98, 127,
129, 140, 149, 153, 162, 173,
174, 213, 228, 243, 246, 251,
253, 276, 277, 287, 292, 298
convocative effect 274, 275
convocative identity 62, 94, 139, 265
convocative split 92, 93, 102, 108,
110, 112, 137, 138, 141, 156,
186, 207, 209, 237, 238, 254,
268, 274, 275
convocativity 11, 22, 55, 62, 63, 67,
69, 86, 92, 108, 137, 155, 156,
186, 187, 207, 237, 254, 266,
273–276, 298
Coogan, T.P. 248, 251, 252
Cook, S.A. 84
Cooperative Principle 3, 7, 9, 12–14,
16, 21, 40, 59, 61, 87, 93, 97,
103, 173, 183, 265
Cotrell, C. 42, 54
Crawford Seeger, R. 130, 131, 300
Crimea 64
Criminalization 226, 236, 246, 247,
249, 251
critical awareness 58, 62, 66, 87, 88,
103, 104, 111, 128, 130, 139,
152, 153, 181, 201, 233, 249,
270, 272, 273, 289
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 2,
22, 37, 39, 49–53, 62, 63, 69,
70, 239
Cruciada Copiilor/Children’s Crusade
23, 139, 160, 171–173, 178–
180, 186–188, 212, 269, 271
Cuatro Caminos/Cuatros Caminos 42,
219, 228, 239, 259, 268, 269,
271, 277–279, 283
Culture 19, 21, 50, 55, 81, 82, 87,
99, 105, 147–149, 155, 157,
158, 164, 175, 204, 231, 247,
258, 282, 283
Cummings, B. 8
D
Davenport, Inez 133
Davis et al v. the County School Board
of Prince Edward County, VA,
et al. 133
The Day After 147
De Bellaigue, C. 81
Decadents 196, 197, 207
De Cillia, R. 72, 256, 257
“Declaration of a State of War” 56
Declaration of Independence 48, 123
Decree 153/1970 188
Decree 770 171, 172, 174, 177, 181,
184, 189, 267
Decretteii 172, 175, 182, 299
dedublare 177, 178, 180, 184, 186,
189, 269
deep structure 46, 48, 49, 69, 81, 98,
122, 123, 145, 173, 193, 220,
228, 243
Deetz, S. 66
deixis 129
Delderfield, R.F. 195
 Index    
307

Delgado, Francisco 112 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 152

de Man, P. 258 EJOLT 82
Demson, M. 196 Electronic Frontiers Foundation 290
Denisoff, R. Serge 122, 155, 161, Eliaçik, Ihsan 84, 90, 91
300 Energuate 230, 231, 233
Derrida, Jacque 37, 38, 54, 57, 58, Erdogan, Recep 79–84, 86–90, 92,
61, 63, 64 96, 110, 269, 270
The Diary of Bobby Sands 242, 243, Erlanger, S. 208
247, 255, 268, 269, 274 Espinoza, Francisco “Pancho” 97
Diebner, H. 39 Etulain, R. 101, 107
Dierkes-Thrun, P. 198, 213 Euromaidan 64
differance 61, 63 European Nuclear Disarmament 146
DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation 102, explicit performative 25, 38, 44, 45,
109 48, 49, 69
digital commons 24, 286, 291, 301 Eyerman, R. 132, 138
dirty protest 247
Dolan, D. 14
Donnelly, J. 244 F
Don’t Attack Iraq! 41, 57 Facebook 2, 8, 20, 67, 85, 86, 148,
Don’t Attack Iraq/Not in My Name 227, 232, 235, 237, 238, 254,
campaign 282 267, 268, 272, 274, 281–284,
Doomsday Clock 24, 27, 145, 290
158–161 Fageeh, Hisham 3
Dost, B. 84 Fahrenkrog-Peterson, Uwe 154
Duffy, Carol Ann 208, 278 Fairclough, N. 50, 51
Dulce et Decorum Est 23, 161, 171, Farley, E. 280, 288
190, 192, 193, 199, 200, 205, Farley, Wendy 1, 69, 292
207, 210, 212, 213, 266, 267, felicity conditions 2, 22, 23, 41–43,
269, 275, 288 52, 54, 55, 62, 65, 69, 86, 87,
Duras, Marguerite 5 94, 102, 110, 112, 126, 138,
140, 149, 150, 156, 159, 177,
180, 187, 189, 200, 209, 210,
E 212, 231, 232, 238, 241, 247,
Eagleton, T. 18 249, 255, 266, 273, 276–279,
Edelman, M. 17 286, 287, 298
Egremont, M. 194, 195 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)
Egypt 82 135
Einstein, Albert 145 Felman, S. 38, 69
308    
Index

Ferguson, Missouri 59, 142 Gergen, K. 288

Fickling, D. 282 Germany 10, 54, 146, 149, 153, 157,
Fischer-Lichte, E. 39 159, 160, 174, 193–195, 198,
Fish, S. 53, 277 273
Fiske, J. 19 Gezi Park 42, 79–82, 84, 86, 87, 90,
Fisk University 134 95, 96, 113, 266, 273, 275,
Five Demands-POW Status 249 283
Flister, L. 172, 174 Gezi spirit 91, 94
Flores, L. 96, 100, 103 Glazer, Joe 125
Foucault, M. 16, 26, 37, 50, 68, 257, Glen, J.M. 162
280, 289 Goffman, E. 43
Foundation for P2P (Netherlands) Goktas, Zeynep 92, 275
290 Gölebatmaz, Mehmet 84
Four steps of nonviolent resistance 16 Good Friday Agreement 245
Fowler 49 Good Neighbor Policy 99
Fox, D.R. 72 Gorman, D. 48
Frandzen, N. 178, 179, 185, 188, Gotta Kick It Up 112
189, 212 Gramsci, A. 17, 58, 59, 62, 184, 248
Frankfurt School 49 Graves, Robert 206
Fraser, N. 142, 162 Great Peace March 146
Freedom Rider(s) 121, 124, 134, Great War 161, 190, 193, 196, 207,
140, 161, 277, 278 209, 212, 272
Freedom Singers 127, 283 Greenberg, C.L. 127
Frith, S. 154, 283 Grice, H.P. 7
Frow, J. 21 Griswold del Castillo, R. 106
Fr. Ted 44, 89 Gross, P. 175
Fukushima nuclear disaster 158 The Guardian 83, 84, 113
Füle, Stefan 85 Guatemala 20, 46, 54, 212, 219–227,
229–232, 234, 236, 237, 239,
240, 259, 266, 267, 273, 276,
G 279, 282
Gaddafi, Muammar 57, 82 Guatemala Human Rights
Gandhi, M. 18, 55, 61, 107, 299 Commission (GHRC) 220–
Garratt, J. 149 222, 230–232, 234, 236–239,
Gassert, P. 147 241, 267, 269, 271, 273, 274,
Gates, H.L. 135 279, 283
Geertz, C. 19 Guerin. W. 3
Geneva Protocol 208, 209, 275 Gul, Abdullah 93
Georgians 196–198, 207 Gullace, N.F. 201
 Index    
309

Gunduz, Erdem 83, 113 Horton, Zilphia 125, 126

Gurel, Kiraz Deniz 89 House of Cards 64, 65
Guzder, D. 134 Huerta, Dolores 97, 101, 102, 107
Guzman-Concha, C. 281 Human Rights Campaign 13, 44,
209
Hungary 13, 14, 193, 194
H hunger strike 242, 244, 245, 247–
Hacaoglu, S. 82 249, 252, 254, 255, 274, 278
Halbwachs, M. 15 Hutcheon, L. 180
Hall, K. 8, 9, 253 hybridity 3, 65, 237, 238, 281
Hamilton, Frank 126 The Hydra 207, 210
Hammerback, J. 102, 105, 109, 111, Hymes, D. 8
112
Hands up! Don’t Shoot 57
Harding, L. 80, 89 I
Harris, H. 209 identity/identityies 3, 8, 9, 21–23,
Hashtag activism 289 25, 45, 56, 60–63, 68, 69, 90,
Haughton, B. 135 91, 95, 96, 98–100, 104, 106,
Hauser, G. 137 107, 109, 111, 125, 127, 132,
Hayden, T. 56 135, 137, 138, 140, 156, 162,
hegemonic center 63, 98, 109, 132, 183, 184, 186–189, 195, 200,
137, 156, 238, 248, 280 204, 207, 209, 237, 238, 242,
hegemonic hail 62, 64, 100, 204, 246, 247, 250, 253, 257, 267,
252, 253, 273, 291 269, 273, 274, 277, 283, 284,
hegemony 17, 58, 60, 126, 141, 163, 287, 288, 291, 301
193, 236, 248, 253, 254 If your beliefs fit on a sign, think
Henderson, T. 99 harder! 47
Henley, J. 282 I have a dream 68
Herman, D. 38 I’ll Be All Right 124
Herzogenrath, B. 187 I’ll Be Like Him Someday 124
heteroglossia 53, 64, 288 illocutionary act 40, 41, 48, 70, 243
Hibberd, D. 193, 196–201, 204– I’ll Overcome Someday 124
207, 210, 211, 213, 214 imagined community 10, 258
Highlander Folk School 125 impersonal pronoun 103, 104, 106
Hill, M.L.G. 40 indefinite nouns 181, 271
Hodge, R. 11, 37, 47, 68, 70, 71 India 18, 50, 51, 61, 135
honor killings 10 insurrectionary speech 7, 45, 265,
Hooper, J. 282 287
310    
Index

intention 40, 44, 66, 110, 112, 130, K

157, 187, 208, 239, 246, 255,
259, 275
International Center for Studies on
Communism and the Sighet
Museum 189, 279
interpellation 59, 61, 62, 64, 89, 90,
106, 132, 154, 155, 183, 184,
186, 204–206, 235, 252, 272,
273
Iranian Green Revolution/Persian
Awakening 11
Irish Republican Army (IRA) 242,
245, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253,
257, 259, 275
irony 3, 12, 38, 59, 69, 88, 177–179,
186, 190, 193, 197, 199, 213,
269–271
Istanbul 22, 79, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90,
94–96, 150
J Künstler für den Frieden/Artists for
Jackson, Jimmie Lee 140
Jamison, A. 138
Japan 6, 194, 195
Jenkins, B. 7
Jensen, R.J. 102, 105, 109, 111
Je suis Charlie 15, 127, 285
Jim Crow 123, 129, 130, 132, 161,
253
Johns, Barbara Rose 132, 133, 163
Johnson, Lyndon Baines 141
Johnson Reagon, Bernice 127, 131,
271
Jones, Jamila 138, 139
Kampflied 154
Karges, Carlo 143, 153, 154, 158,
268
Kasem, C. 155, 157
Keats, John 196
Kennedy, Robert F. 285
Kent, B. 159, 160
K’iche’ 23, 219, 220, 223, 224, 228,
231, 232, 234–238, 241, 242,
252, 254, 267, 268, 272–274,
279, 283
Kilimani Mums 8, 50
King, M.L. 15, 68, 100, 122, 125,
161, 233
Klayman v. Obama 290
Kligman, G. 25, 171, 174–178, 183,
184, 188, 212
Klimke, M. 146
Koplow, M. 84
Kress, G. 11, 37, 47, 68, 70, 71
Kronenwetter, Michael 5
Peace 147
L
LaFayette, Bernard Jr. 121
language rights 20, 220, 238, 279
Law, J. 39
Lee, Bernard 279
Lefort, C. 187
legitimacy 8, 9, 21–23, 25, 53, 54,
61–63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 85, 91,
92, 96, 100, 106, 111, 112,
159, 162, 184, 189, 205, 212,
233, 237, 238, 240, 241, 257,
265, 273–276, 283, 284, 288

legitimation 25, 177, 247, 274
legitimization 9
Letsch, C. 82, 83, 88, 92, 93
Letter from a Birmingham Jail 15
Lewis, John 134, 140, 277, 278
Library of Congress 122
Libya 57, 82
Liedermacher 153
Lincoln 45, 136, 137
Gettysburg Address 45
locutionary act 40, 172
Long Kesh/Maze prison 242, 253,
257
Long, T. 143
Lord Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing 124
Love is a Human Right 44
Luckmann, T. 37
lynching 13, 123
Lynskey 147, 148
Lyotard, J.F. 39, 280
M Menchú, Rigoberta 220
Madres de Plaza de Mayo 13
Maidan Nezalezhnosti 67, 72
Malinowski, B. 17
sociological strain 17
Mandarin 20
Mandela, N. 56, 60, 61
Mannheim, B. 8, 253
manufactured consent 17, 18, 26, 54
Marasligil, C. 80
March to the sea for salt 18, 35
Martinez, M.B. 85
Marx, K. 25, 48, 243, 258, 265
Märzrevolution/March Revolution of
1848 149
Index    
311
Mason, P. 280, 283
Matthews, G. 100, 109, 110
Mautner, G. 58, 62, 181
May, E.T. 99
McAlea, Kevin 143, 268
McCollum, Salynn 134
McConnell-Ginet, S. 37, 162
McCracken, H. 284, 285
McDonnell, Father Donald 107
McEnaney, L. 145
McGreal, C. 282
McLuhan, M. 24, 281, 282, 285, 287
McSmith, A. 206
The medium is the message 24, 281,
282, 285
Memorial of the Victims of
Communism and of the
Resistance 189, 279
Memorial to the victims of the
German invasion 13
Memphis Sanitation Workers strike
15
meta-narrative of citizenship 280
metaphor 2, 6, 22, 43, 47, 49, 69,
145, 182, 189, 269, 272
metonym 203
Metress, S. 244, 245
Meyer, D.S. 18
Miller, J.H. 38, 39, 57, 61, 64, 243,
259, 291
Mitchell, W.J.T. 292
Modernism 197
Modernists 196, 197
Molina, Otto Perez 219, 221, 233,
238, 240
Moncrieff, C.K. Scott 198
312    
Index
Monestier, Martin 6
Montgomery 121, 125, 134, 135,
140
Morris, M. 21
Mountbatten, Lord Louis 160
Mubarak, Hosni 82
Mulholland, M. 246
multiphrenia 288
Munro-Nelson, J. 208
Murphy, T. 128, 131, 138, 141, 142,
162
Musicians United for Safe Energy
(MUSE) 147
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)
146, 156
My Dress My Choice 8, 25, 50
N 270, 271, 273
Nairobi 8
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) 13
Nebbia, G. 112
negative prefix particles 182
Nena 142, 143, 145, 147, 148,
152–155, 158–160, 265, 266,
268, 270, 273, 279
neurosthania 191
nominalization 47
No More Auction Block 124
Northern Ireland 46, 54, 122, 242,
243, 248, 258, 259, 267,
275–277
no-wash protest 247, 251
No Woman, No Drive 3
NPR 140
nuclear power plants 6, 7, 82, 153
O
Öcalan, Abdullah 91
Occupy 11, 24, 45, 56, 100, 230,
266, 281, 284, 287, 292, 298
Occupy Movement 5, 156, 280
Ochs, P. 50, 163
omogenizare/homogenization 176,
180, 183, 184, 204, 273, 276
Önder, Sirri Süreyya 90
O’Neil, Tip 61
Open Rights Group (UK) 143, 290
Ordinary Decent Criminal (ODC)
status 246, 273
O Sanctissima or the Italian Mariners
Hymn 124
Owens, D. 121
Owen, W. 23, 161, 190, 192–195,
204, 207, 212–214, 267, 268,
Ozerkan, F. 82
P
Paley, D. 228, 231
Paluch, Jan 6, 242
Pandey, Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) 50,
51
Parks, Rosa 125
passive voice 47, 106
Patterson, William 123
Paz y Paz, Claudia 239, 278
Peacock, Willie 139
Peker, E. 90
performative 1, 22, 36–39, 41, 42,
44, 45, 48, 49, 51–54, 56, 58,
59, 61–69, 95, 96, 98, 110,
122, 137, 150, 156, 157, 172,
209, 235, 239, 243, 247, 255,
257, 258, 270, 280, 286, 291
 Index    
313

performative speech act 39, 44, 49, predicate nominative 15, 280, 285,
52, 56, 58, 59, 69, 96, 159 287
performative texts 48 presuppositional conditions 42, 96,
performative turn 38 126, 259
performative utterance 1, 36, 37, 39, Presuppositional Felicity Conditions
41, 44, 48, 243 86, 87, 102, 110, 126, 138,
performative verb(s) 25, 37, 40, 44 150, 180, 187, 200, 209, 210,
performativity 24, 25, 37–39, 52, 54, 231, 232, 247, 255, 266, 273,
55, 58, 98, 110, 291, 301 276
periperformative(s) 22, 44–46, 49 presuppositions 42, 54, 55, 149, 266,
perlocutionary act 40–42 298
perlocutionary effect(s) 41, 42, 48, promissory speech act 69
57, 59, 63, 64, 67, 128, 208, pronouns 127, 129, 162, 270, 271,
243, 253, 265, 274, 275 284
perlocutionary force 61 Protestant-Unionists-Loyalists (PULs)
Petrov, Stanislav 142, 160 254, 275
Philippines 61 Pussy Riot 5, 65, 67
Pilgrim, D. 123 Putnam, R. 14
Pirate Parties International 290, 301
Pirtle, Sarah 137
Pitty, D. 48 R
Plessy v. Ferguson 123 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
point of view 69, 172, 189, 270, 272 47
politica demografica/political demog- Reagon, Cordell 127
raphy 174 Realsabry 86
political efficacy 3, 5–7, 15, 60, 68, Reddy, Helen 15
69, 91, 93, 95, 103, 110, 134, Red Hand Day 13, 26
137, 139, 177, 186, 188, 189, Red Scare 99, 113, 125
253, 254, 265, 278, 283, 287 Reiser, B. 122, 136
Port Huron Statement 56 Reisigl, M. 256, 257
pragmatic 9, 22, 37, 38, 48, 49, repetition 7, 8, 57, 64, 68, 128, 130,
52–54, 62, 69, 72, 89, 96, 112, 180–182, 222, 269–271
159, 189, 212, 241, 265, 273 Reporters Without Borders 83
pragmatic legitimacy 9, 22, 53, 54, Reuters 57, 113
62, 69, 96, 112, 159, 189, 212, Reyes, A. 9, 247
241, 265, 273 Robb, D. 153, 154, 283
Prague 6, 35, 242 Robeson, Paul 123
Pratt, M.L. 38, 48 Rollman, Hans 83
314    
Index

Romania 13, 25, 46, 54, 59, 150, Searle, J. 36, 38, 42, 48, 70
160, 171, 173, 174, 177, 184, Sedgwick, E.K. 1, 22, 24, 25, 37,
212, 266, 276 44–46, 51, 58
Romantics 196, 197, 207 periperformative 22, 45, 46
Rose, M.E. 102, 107 Seeger, Pete 122, 125, 126, 136, 162,
Rosenberg, Isaac 192 300
Ross, Fred 107 Sellnow, D. 131
Rossington, M. 14 Selma 35, 138, 140, 141, 273, 299
Rudrum, D. 21, 38 semantic shift 87
Ruiz-Goiriena, R. 240 semantics of opposition 59, 64, 88,
Rusan, Romulus 188 89, 104, 129–131, 153, 154,
Russell, Bertrand 145 181, 201, 203, 204, 233, 249,
Russell-Einstein Manifesto 145, 150 268, 270, 271, 274, 291
Russia 64, 67, 193, 194 Sener, Mesut 95, 278
Rustin, Bayard 132, 136, 137, 299 Sheets, C.A. 22, 80, 266
Shelley, Percy B. 191, 196, 200, 203,
204
S Silverstein, M. 38
Sabral, J. 80, 83, 85, 86, 88 Simmons, Lucille 126
Said, E. 17, 54 sincerity condition 66, 69, 277
Saigon 6, 242 Singer, M. 39
Salinas 96, 97, 273 Singleton, V. 39
Sal, Juan Chiroy 221, 230, 240 Sí Se Puede 22, 70, 96–98, 102–106,
Samizdat 187, 188 108–112, 266–271, 275, 278,
Sands, Robert "Bobby" 242, 243, 288
247, 248, 252, 253, 255, 258, slut shaming 8
259, 266, 270, 272, 273, 275, Smith, M.K. 14
278, 279, 283, 290 Smithsonian Institution 127
Sassoon, Siegfried 198, 200, 206, 278 social capital 3, 14, 49, 68, 91, 103,
satyagraha 55 109, 111, 134, 137, 138, 183,
Saudi Arabia 10 186, 188, 254, 265, 284, 287,
Saussure, F. 68 300
Sayer, D. 9 Social Contract 12–14, 16, 19, 83,
Schama, S. 60 111, 140, 181, 183, 209, 229,
Schell, Jonathon 147 231, 248, 265, 267, 275, 290
Schenley Industries 101, 109 social media 3, 22, 24, 62, 64, 80,
Schermer, M. 146 85, 88, 96, 235, 237, 238, 274,
Schmitt, B.E. 194 276, 280–284, 302
 Index    
315

social memory 15 T
solidarity 13, 20, 41, 79, 87, 90, 91, Tacam, Maria del Carmen 236, 240
106, 109, 111, 127, 137, 139, Tahrir Square 11
155, 162, 173, 180, 221, 236, Taksim Solidarity 79, 87, 90, 91, 265
238, 248, 254, 265, 268, 269, Taksim Square 22, 79, 80, 86, 96
272, 274, 275, 277, 281, 283, Tannen, D. 72
284 Tarrow, Sidney 292
Somme 42, 201, 277 Taussig, M. 288
sonnet 193, 200–203, 271 Taylor, R. 101, 108, 135
Sorea, D. 171–173, 175, 179, 180, Tayyibinden 86
183, 212 Tedlock, D. 8, 253
South African apartheid 16 Terminello v. Chicago 21
Southern Christian Leadership Thích Quảng Đức 6, 242
Conference 124 Third Space 3
South Vietnamese 6 Thoreau 18, 19, 21, 56, 265
Soviet Union 99, 142, 145, 146, On the Duty of Civil
157–159, 174, 275 Disobedience 18, 56
Soweto Uprising of 1976 11 Tiananmen Square 13, 67
space of appearance 287 Tibet 20, 122
Special Category Status 246 Tindley, Charles Albert 124
Speech Act Theory 1, 2, 9, 22, 36, Today’s Zaman 83–85
54, 70, 287 Todorov, T. 48
Stallworthy, J. 196, 213, 300 Tolokonnikova, N. 65
Starr, S. 95, 96 Tosun, Cagri 91
Stewart, Jon 113 Totonicapán Government
Stotts, S. 125, 126, 128, 131, 137, Condemnation 223, 225
139, 140 Totonicapán Massacre 23, 219, 220,
Student Nonviolent Coordinating 227, 228, 235, 238, 239, 254,
Committee 124 286, 291
Students for a Democratic Society 56 Transformational Generative
Students for a Free Tibet 20 Grammar 46
Subramanian, C. 82 Translate for Justice 90, 302
surface structure 81, 98, 122, 145, Tremblay, P. 82
172, 193, 243 Tremlett, G. 282
Swinburne, A.C. 212 The Troubles 245, 249, 254
synecdoche 94, 183, 188, 249, 255, Tunisia 6, 15, 82
256, 258, 272 Turkey 46, 54, 81–83, 85, 87, 88,
113, 114, 266, 276–278, 282
316    
Index
Turner, V. 39
Tuysuz, G. 82
Twigg, K. 82, 85, 91, 93, 94
Twitter 2, 64, 67, 80, 81, 83, 85, 96,
281, 283, 285
U Voting Rights Act of 1965 141
Ukraine 64, 138
Umbrella Revolution 58
Umkhonto we Sizwe 56
United Farm Workers of America 97,
102
United Nations Declaration of
Human Rights 21, 113
United Nations Truth Commission
240
United States 12, 22, 46, 54, 56, 98,
102, 112, 113, 123, 124, 135,
139–142, 145–147, 152, 159,
160, 164, 173, 174, 194, 229,
239, 240, 254, 259, 273, 275,
276, 279, 285
uptake 48, 53, 61, 72, 87, 94
US Civil Rights Act of 1964 16
Uvas No/No grapes 104
V Woman in the blue bra 11
Vanderveken, D. 36
Van Dijk, T. 49, 50, 52, 62, 63, 72
Van Tets, F. 3
Vasquez, Tony 97
Vedeler, H.C. 194
Vela, J. 84
Vietnam War 11, 50, 282
Viva La Causa 98, 101, 300
vocative 55–57, 62, 64, 87, 89, 92,
102–104, 112, 126, 128, 139,
150, 151, 157, 180, 186, 200,
201, 203, 231–233, 247, 248,
266, 268, 269, 272–274, 291
volta 202, 203, 208
Vormärz 149, 158
W
Wallace, I. 149, 157
Warsaw Pact 147, 174
Watson, I. 82
Weather Underground/The
Weathermen 56
Wenger, E. 8
We Shall Overcome 22, 23, 36, 113,
121–132, 134, 136–142, 162,
163, 209, 214, 267–272, 275,
277, 288
West German Green Party 149
Wetherell, Margaret 26
We Will Overcome 124, 125
Wheels 197
White, J. 112
Williams, N. 92, 93, 278
Wodak, R. 72, 256, 257
World Pride 44
Y
Yaman, A. 80, 81, 83–85, 91
Yapıcı, Mücella 90
Yeats, W.B. 238, 245, 247, 259
Yes, we can 22, 98, 112, 267, 288
 Index    
317

You’re Mad as Hell and I’m Not Z

Going to Take it Anymore 47 Zappavigna, M. 284, 285
Youtube 2, 57, 80, 84, 85, 96, 283, Zuccotti Park 24, 284, 287
285, 299 Zwerg, James 132, 133