ABSTRACT
What is literary dissent? And how do we know it when we see it? Instances of political dissent seem easier to locate. We might think of iconic images like ‘Tank Man’ in Tiananmen Square, civil rights marchers with arms linked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a hundred thousand anti-Mubarak demonstrators in Tahrir Square, or Edward Crawford throwing a tear gas canister in Ferguson, Missouri. These images document bodily resistance. The unidentified subject of Jeff Widener’s ‘Tank Man’, for example, wields power not through the mechanisms of participatory government or political speech but, rather, by positioning his body against the wordless technologies of military suppression.
