Rhetorics of Everyday Resistance: The Belgrade 1996/97 Student Protest
In this project, I explore and theorize how practices of resistance emerge and function within a nondemocratic political context. I identify the 1996/97 student protest as a pivotal event of nonviolent resistance in Serbia during the 1990s, focusing on the rhetorical tactics employed to subvert and undermine the authoritarian regime. Apart from examining day-to-day practices of the movement – its mechanisms and rhetorical devices – I interrogate the role of carnivalesque humor and the carnivalesque body present in political jokes and al fresco satirical, theatrical spectaculars. This project makes a number of contributions to the communication discipline. I suggest that the rhetoric of resistance per se has been used sporadically as a framework and that, while, that framework does encompass a wide range of theoretical precepts, social issues, and modes of enactment, it nevertheless has been historically molded to account for specific and narrow conceptual vocabularies that leave an array of discourses and practices of dissent unexamined. I demonstrate how everyday practices of dissent as latent forms of resistance came to full realization during the movement. In my dissertation, then, I provide insights into how the field of rhetoric might benefit from the analysis of everyday resistance in nondemocratic contexts. Specifically, I examine how carnival as a site and practice of resistance might be extended and revised.
Communication, Resistance, Protest, Social Influence and Political Communication, Speech and Rhetorical Studies
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