INTRODUCTION Lived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Lived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life LANA DEE POVITZ AND STEVEN HIGH∗ ONE OF THE TRUISMS of social movement history is that change never just happens. It has to be diligently, painstakingly fought for, with each victory lifted up and each defeat honestly faced for future wisdom. As historians of social movements, we are always edging as close as we can to the warm-blooded specifics of how change gets made; we see it as our project to illuminate the complex of material, endlessly contingent forces that have shaped the worlds we now inhabit. Across the distance of space and time, activists—loosely defined for our purposes as those who have taken coordinated action to bring about systemic political change—have devoted significant portions their lives to these pursuits. In this special issue of Histoire sociale / Social History, we ask the following questions: What do we learn when we view social struggle through the lens of a life, or lives, rather than an issue, a place, or a period of time? What comes into focus if we strip a struggle down to its most essential elements: human beings? And if we think of people’s lives as the medium for their political work—their canvas, their blank notebook, their chunk of wet clay—what larger insights do we glean about activism? Given the vast historiography on social movements, our desire in creating this special issue was to throw the spotlight onto matters that have all too often been relegated to footnotes, left to other disciplines, or left out altogether.1 We wanted to better ∗ Lana Dee Povitz is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College. Steven High is Professor of History at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. 1 For example, some sociological equivalents of this special issue can be seen in Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Jeff Goodwin and James understand the impact of interpersonal relationships on activism, as well as the more diffuse roles that affect and emotion play in social movements.2 We sought greater clarity about how people have come to self-identify as activists and the importance of reflexivity and intersubjectivity to that process.3 By calling for fine-grained historical studies that seek to understand these questions better, we hoped to see how different forms of activism have been connected, how apparently discrete movements have been related to one another, and how activism has been sustained over the course of a lifetime.4 We also wondered how fleshing out Jasper, eds., Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); and James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Catherine Leclercq and Julie Pagis, “Les incidences biographiques de l’engagement: Socialisations militantes et mobilité sociale,” Sociétés contemporaines, vol. 84, no. 4 (2011), pp. 5–23. Affect theorists have addressed social movements as well. Important examples include Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2 The recent growth of “history of emotion” as a subfield is a hopeful step in a new direction. Beautiful recent work that brings together histories of emotion and histories of activism includes Alfonso Salgado, “Making Friends and Making Out: The Social and Romantic Lives of Young Communists in Chile (1958–1973),” The Americas, vol. 76, no. 2 (April 2019), pp. 229–326; and Barbara Keys on the role of telephones in sustaining activist commitments and community life in “The Telephone and Its Uses in 1980s U.S. Activism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 48, no. 4 (Spring 2019), pp. 485–509. More foundational, general, earlier writing on the history of emotion includes Peter Gay’s five-volume collection The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–1998...