Historian Zoe Trodd declared blogs the modern equivalent of 1960s protest literature last night as she promoted her new anthology of protest writing, drawing a small crowd despite a last-minute cancellation by speaker Howard Zinn.
Trodd, the editor for American Protest Literature, said the anthology examines the genre of protest literature to show how different movements and works build off one another. In the book, she illustrates the historical legacy of various movements, including the Vietnam-era antiwar movements and their influence on current opposition to the war in Iraq.
“[Protest writers] salvaged pieces of old reform movements and made music with what was left,” she said.
Despite the subdued appearance of public protest today, Trodd said there is still a presence in society of the type of progressive protest highlighted in the anthology.
“A lot of people ask now, ‘Where is our protest?’ I think it’s in Internet blogs,” she said. “[There can be] 100,000 people participating in virtual protests online. Our protest is comedic; it’s satire.”
Trodd referenced comedian Stephen Colbert, South Park and satirical newspaper The Onion as mainstream forms of satirical protest.
Although Trodd said the Internet is a new conduit for protest literature, Harvard professor of English and American language John Stauffer, who contributed the foreword, had doubts about its usefulness as a democratic medium.
“How many impoverished people are actually using the Internet?” Stauffer said.
Stauffer said he hopes the anthology will inspire renewed activism. He said protest literature “taps into that vein of dissent; it announces to people that they are not alone.”
Jennifer Snodgrass, the book’s publisher and Harvard University Press editor for reference and special projects, said the anthology is unique because it traces the lineage of social protests.
According to Snodgrass, protest today is more decentralized, but it is still as influential as in the past. She characterized the recent gubernatorial election as a form of protest against the administration in power and wondered whether Patrick would have been elected without protesters.
“These movements don’t go away,” she said. “People are developing their positions more clearly. [There is] less of a public assembly type of protest.”
According to Barnes ‘ Nobles Events Manager Jeanne Haight, an illness kept Zinn from attending the event, which drew about 20 people, mostly elderly, to Barnes ‘ Noble at Boston University. Zinn canceled just hours before the event, she said.
“He’s a very popular figure,” Haight said, suggesting Zinn would have drawn a younger audience. “[Zinn] certainly captures the college ideal of being involved . . . aware and active in the world.”
Zinn, who wrote the afterword to the book, has been an influential figure on campus, drawing a capacity crowd to a lecture last month, Haight said.
Some said they were disappointed by Zinn’s short-notice absence, including director of health reform at BU’s School of Public Health, Debbie Socolar.
“Howard Zinn is not only an astute critic of contemporary policy,” she said, “but someone who has brought the history of social change alive.”
Socolar said although she attended the event in hopes of hearing Zinn speak, the book itself was a major attraction for her as well. Socolar described Trodd’s effort to compile some of the most influential protest writings in the country’s history, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “inspirational.”
Trodd’s efforts could motivate “people [today] who feel intimidated, sometimes with reason, because of the ways in which civil liberties have been cut back lately,” Socolar said.