A revolution is when there is a radical shift in how people view the world they live in and decide to make or to accept change.
Unit 1 and 2 both had to do with revolutions of thinking. In Unit 1, the biggest revolution was that of how we choose to view others and how the notion of a single story affects so much. Professor Quillen was absolutely correct about how we have to move past the single-story and change how we think in order to better understand and coexist. Professor Rob’s Unit displayed how revolutions aren’t always physical and violent but have to do with paradigm shifts. On the flip side unit 3 was all about how revolutions can be violent and physical like how the Rwanda Genocide was. Unit 4 dealt with how revolutions can be societal such as the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. In Lapham there are many examples of revolution but the one that stuck out to me the most was the image of a suicide bomber. Part of a revolution is being willing to put everything on the line because you believe in it and that is what the photographed suicide bomber was willing to do.
However, I also believe that what a revolution is can vary greatly. While I would argue that Professor Rob’s primer is correct that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for revolution, so long as consent and will are present anything can be a revolution in the sense that this course has pushed me to be more inclusive of what I label and why I label things.
We’ve explored in the remaining units how revolution can take place through the body and most fascinating to me is the connection between performance and revolution seen in Unit 4. The ability to use dance to show parts of a story often ignored is amazing and the effect of watching other people use their body as their paintbrush or sword or pen can be revolutionary in itself. Through studying Bill T. Jone’s work, I’ve learned that counterfactuals, which express what “has not” happened, are very important and powerful in general. Counterfactuals are an example of a revolution of how history is accepted and thought through.
Unit 5 covered social revolutions and similar to unit 4 it displayed how a tool of revolution is the human body. I believe the actions associated with the Civil Rights Movement such as sit-ins and protest are part of the typical descriptive definition of revolution. The violence explored in Unit 8 is also often connected to revolution.
However, I feel that every day one lives and makes choices they are performing, and because of that revolution is all around us – at the micro-personal level and at a macro-global level. Both are just as important as each other and I ask of you to associate revolution with what matters most to you. If that’s doing everything you can to support and enforce a social movement, then so be it. If it’s an internal revolution in how you think or view the world then so be it.
