| On an April weekend in 2001, a colourful parade of medieval knights, ethereal fairies, stilt walkers, bongo drummers, frenetic dancers, Radical Cheerleaders, and Raging Grannies flooded the streets of Quebec City in a saturnalian exhibition of camaraderie and resistance. This thesis explores the visual culture generated for and during these demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an agreement that will extend free trade to the entire Western hemisphere. Applying an interdisciplinary theoretical approach to the contemporary cultural phenomenon of creative dissent, I explore the various oppositional art practices employed in Quebec City as both strategies and manifestations of a collective objective to physically and symbolically contest the conventional exclusions of politics and public space. I also consider the extent to which the carnivalesque nature of contemporary protest can be theorized as a strategy for the construction of spaces of resistance. I conclude that the enactment of creative performances of dissent functions as a vehicle for bearing witness to social injustice, constructing collective identity, and reclaiming the public sphere as a site of oppositional politics. |
