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- Creators: Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business
- Creators: Kirsch, Sharon
Throughout every liberation movement in America’s history, poetry has been an undeniably powerful act of resistance. Even today, protest poetry is instrumental to countless resistance movements because it captures attention, evokes emotion, and demands social progress. My project is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of five journals. These journals are informal written responses that conversate with different texts and analyze specific images within specific passages. My exploration of protest poetry focuses on five prominent poets of the last century: Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gloria Anzaldúa, Camille T. Dungy, and Claudia Rankine. The second part of this project is my contribution to protest poetry. For my collection, I crafted ten poems in which I resist a range of issues that have to do with class, gender, and ethnicity. My protest poetry is also an examination of what it means to be human, particularly in modern day America.
Interviews were analyzed using content analysis in order to complement the literature and provide for new explanations. These interviews were collected through online news and firsthand reports of actual protesters and academics reflecting on the protests. Interviews from Chileans provide a window into the perspective of protesters in their own words. After coding the transcriptions of the first-hand reports, the primary findings of these sources show anger about human rights violations during the protests, frustration with the neoliberal economic structure, and current disconnection between the government and the people. This study found that Pinochet’s economic legacies implemented through his authoritarian dictatorship can help explain the 2019 civil uprising.