Abstract

This dissertation positions art production as a form of social activism by investigating how participation within artistic collaborations constructs "mattering maps" where individual transformation and political change are linked by collective processes of making meaning. The three sites examined--Oujé-Bougoumou, The Bread and Puppet Theater, and Le Centre Artisanal des Femmes--all facilitate creative production as an apparatus for political action. In analyzing each, the dissertation highlights the affect of art making as a way of theorizing the becoming of subjectivity necessary for social activists. Invoking a locational feminism, this project contends that a situational conception of identity subverts modernist appeals to an essential humanistic subject, while maintaining the possibility of individual agency. The creative processes enacted at each site necessitate the construction of a new model for art history that narrates collaborative production. Therefore, rather than describing the examples in terms of art objects, finite events, or hypothesizing their effects upon viewers, this dissertation creates particular meaning by shaping the discourse around the production of communities; the performance of collaboration; the transformative pedagogy of "organic intellectuals;" and the creation of cultural democracy. In doing so the specificity of each of the activist interventions can be documented, while attendantly theorizing the impact of participation within creative production as a process of making art matter as social activism.