Sensible interventions: Cultural resistance post-9/11

'Sensible interventions: Cultural resistance post-9/11' is anchored in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in America and their cultural legacies, most prominently in the forms of cultural resistance. By investigating a multimedia assemblage of creative objects - hip hop album, TV sit-com, best-selling novel and studio photographs - this dissertation traces the fault lines, gestures, ambitions and contradictions of popular dissent. This foregrounding of artistic endeavors and fastening them to politics also forces the inquiry to step into the quagmire that is the tumultuous relationship between politics and the arts. To consider this knotted relationship, the 9/11 and resistance nexus is further extended by a third component, that of the theoretical works by Jacques Rancière. In all, the dissertation points to a convergence of 9/11, cultural resistance and Rancière, where artistic practices counter 9/11’s effects through the multiple Rancièrean definitions and dimensions of the sensible.