Toward Dissent : Accessing Political Struggle Across the Americas

Global circuits and local pathways are shaped by the needs of our bodies – both as individuals and as societies – and reflect our access to resources, networks, ideas, and knowledge. Toward Dissent highlights the paths forged through resistance and defiance. It examines how differences travel across regions through small editions, sound bites, news clippings, and translations; how research on revolution transforms our methodologies, encouraging participatory and subjective approaches; and how access to resources, communities, and ideas shapes the ways we understand, write about, and document sociopolitical struggles across the Americas.

In this book, Matthew J. Edwards combines traditional essays with shorter, more experimental texts such as manifestos, personal vignettes, interviews, and chronicles. Together, these pieces explore the circulation of ideas, objects, and cultural artifacts across the Americas, showing that while movement is essential for resisting oppression and enacting political change, our access to archives, information, and social networks determines how we engage with communities, and experiences, and how we document and understand political struggles.

This volume situates critical inquiry alongside ideological affinity and activism, arguing that political movements not only initiate social change but impact and influence the observations and critical processes that work to communicate their outcomes.