Protest as a Source of Demands

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 7, Protest as a Source of Demands: Polyphony and the Radical Imagination of Liberation Movements, elucidates what counts as giving proper uptake to the demands of a protest and the kinds of communicative obstacles and injustices that prescriptive protest acts issuing those demands can encounter. The general thesis of this chapter is that, as part of our general obligation to listen and give proper uptake to legitimate protests, publics and institutions have a prima facie obligation to maintain a live dialogue with the plural voices of grassroots protest movements so as to avoid the silencing or communicative downgrading of their heterogeneous (and not always consistent) demands and the communicative neglect of the voices (or factions of the group) that do not raise to the top or do not become centered. Through an analysis of some of the demands of Black Lives Matter in its policy platform “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice,” the chapter elucidates the difficult communicative engagements that the radical demands of a protest movement require and often fail to secure, arguing for obligations that audiences and institutions have to make special communicative efforts to listen to and communicatively engage with the radical political imagination of protest movements.