Transdisciplinary approaches to activism across texts and genres

Abstract

With a long-standing tradition in the humanities, activism has constantly informed both cultural production and scholarly theoretical thinking. In the arts, it is also tightly related to the concept of performativity, i.e. language as social action with the power of affecting reality, since it is mostly through language and performance that artists carry out protests, oppose resistance, and create new narratives that question and challenge hegemonic discourse. The visibility, proliferation, and popularity of such forms of activism online increasingly influence the public debate on pressing contemporary issues that are more and more digitally interconnected and (trans)mediated. This special issue of Lingue e Linguaggi aims to explore how activism fosters cultural and social change through performance art, literary provocations, music experimentations, and translation in the works of writers, spoken word poets, intellectuals, publishers, musicians, and performance artists. Relying on hybrid modes of communication and exploiting the technological resources of the new media – especially social networks – to reach a wider audience, they also produce new kinds of textualities and genres that need a transdisciplinary approach to be fully interpreted and appreciated. Not only do the texts and the projects analysed in this issue question the past and challenge the present, but they also envisage and anticipate a better and more just future by creating a performative counter-discourse in which the combination of verbal, visual, gestural, and musical language is pivotal.