“Artistic resistance has seldom proven so socially useful, or as complicated. This intellectually engaging study targets the paradoxes, limitations, and media spectacle of organized cultural boycotts and state-sponsored censorship from South African apartheid in the 1980s, to present day Israel-Palestine, Cuba, the Gulf States, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., among other geopolitical zones of conflict.”
— Gregory Sholette, artist and author of  Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism

Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production Reception

The refusal to participate in an oppressive system has long been one of the most powerful tools in the organizer’s arsenal. Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production is the essential reader for today’s creative leaders and cultural practitioners, and includes original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. Far from representing withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a special condition for discourse, artmaking and political engagement.

As U.S. cultural and academic organizations are increasingly subjects of boycotts — in response to the ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries issued by the current U.S. administration — the question of boycott attains additional urgency. This May Day Book Launch features the three editors, Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, in a lively exchange with book contributors artist Mariam Ghani  and art historian Chelsea Haines, joined by Claire Potter, Professor of History, The New School, and investigates the potential of boycott as a tool for organizing and art making.

A festive reception with DJs ConVex and DJD (Salome Asega and Derek Schultz) follows, in celebration of the book and other May Day assemblies in the city. Co-sponsored by Interference Archive, on occasion of the archive’s April 23 Sowing Resistance, Propaganda Party No. 5.

Participants
Kareem Estefan: Brown University
Mariam Ghani: Gulf Labor
Chelsea Haines: Graduate Center, CUNY
Carin Kuoni: Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Claire Potter:Professor of History, The New School
Laura Raicovich: Queens Museum

as well as

DJs ConVex and DJD (Salome Asega and Derek Schultz)

Assuming Boycott features twelve newly commissioned essays and six contributions by Nasser Abourahme, Ariella Azoulay, Tania Bruguera, Noura Erakat, Kareem Estefan, Mariam Ghani with Haig Aivazian, Nathan Gray and Ahmet Öğüt, Chelsea Haines, Sean Jacobs, Yazan Khalili, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, Svetlana Mintcheva, Naeem Mohaiemen, Hlonipha Mokoena, John Peffer, Joshua Simon, Ann Laura Stoler, Radhika Subramaniam, Eyal Weizman and Kareem Estefan, and Frank B. Wilderson III.

It is published by OR Books, in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.