Trials of Multicultural Liberalism: A Visual Examination of Occupy Wall Street’s Resistance Art and Settler Colonial Expressions of Power
Humanities
FMST 194W: The Politics of Space, Matter, and Time
The goal of this visual study is to disrupt multiplicities of settler colonialism by attending to the ways it replicates itself through the modality of language. It is also to disrupt the naturalization of multicultural settler occupation and its continual investment in Indigenous dispossession. This paper confronts Occupy Wall Street (OWS) — one of the largest contemporary protest movements of its kind with a legacy in popular culture — and situates it through a multi-dimensional understanding of settler colonial power. My research’s main argument is that OWS’s liberal agenda catalyzes settler logics of domination and culturally re-produce conditions for naturalizing and extending settler society as a humanist democracy. My analysis pinpoints OWS’s protest art as a key site for engaging (visual) language as an apparatus in forming settler states. I investigate the ways contemporary politics co-opt colonial dynamics in its conception of freedom and justice, and hence foreclose possibilities for genuine revolution. The imperative to consider the consequences when liberal activism operates within a settler framework of power serves as my basis for placing OWS on trial. My visual cross-examination is framed around an interrogation of OWS’s rhetoric of (1) occupation as “democracy in action”, (2) economic redistribution for the nation’s 99%, and (3) rescuing the Indian figure through decolonizing Wall Street. Through this visual study, I examine to which degrees these prevailing rhetorics reconstitute the very structures from which settler colonialism maintains itself by extending its language of domination. I deconstruct how liberal activism and its cultural productions can inadvertently reinscribe colonial power relations in ways that ultimately undermine Indigenous spatial, temporal, and material sovereignty.
