The Essential Resistance Reading List
The possibilities we can imagine for ourselves are determined by the possibilities shown to us.
I n the film The Lives of Others, which traces the intense surveillance of German citizens by the secret police, there is a scene where an East German artist plays a fictional “Sonata for a Good Man” to his wife while a Stasi police captain clandestinely listens in.
After finishing the piece, the artist wonders aloud, “could art have the power to make people good?” The implication is that listening to the sonata might not have only made the artist a better person, but in turn, the eavesdropping German spy. After watching The Lives of Others, I found myself entranced by this question — “could art make people good?” — but couldn’t help but wonder if art might have other powers as well. Could art make people kinder, stronger, braver, maybe even more resilient to trials and tribulations?
We are poised in a political moment where dissent—especially through language—is being actively threatened and thus has become exponentially more imperative to craft. But these waves of creative resistance are—hauntingly—cyclical; we return again and again to art to stem the tide of silence and oppression. Each generation conjures its spells against the darkness; their incantations vary, but…
