research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. She received her PhD from University of Mississippi in English; an MA in American Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton.
Rodriguez Fielder applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, and reported the following:
The cultural workers of the civil rights movement improvised because they had to, but also because the techniques of improvisation opened space for people to relate to each other in a new way. On page ninety-nine of The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, I write concluding paragraphs to my chapter, “A New Lesson for Activism,” which traces the creativity of education reform across performance and literacy programs. I make the case that both the education reform and experiments in protest theater were operating in the “same method of fomenting intimacy” (99). The transformation that happens through improvisation moves education from how we teach to how we relate.Learn more about The Revolution Will Be Improvised at the University of Michigan Press website.
The Page 99 Test works beautifully for The Revolution Will Be Improvised. On this page, I argue that improvised performance maintains the right to complexity, in other words, that art made for protest could carry within it multivalent perspectives and ideas. Much of the protest performances I discuss in this chapter, such as the Free Southern Theater’s version of Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson and the actos of El Teatro Campesino, have been relegated to “early work,” suggesting unfinished or underdeveloped art. I write, “The performances of El Teatro Campesino and the Free Southern Theater define ‘fully human life’ as the right to complexity–of interpretations and emotional responses that may be in conflict with one another” (99). I ask us to acknowledge the complexity within the improvisation process and that much of what makes this work so powerful happened off-stage in the process of intimacy-making between activists and the local people they worked with. We are left to interpret the traces of this intimacy left behind in the works of art they created.
Some early readers of my book argued that my chapter on pedagogy/education reform didn’t fit well in a book about art activism. Page 99 proves otherwise and emphasizes a point I make elsewhere in the book about interpurpose art, that improvised social justice-oriented art intertwines multiple intentions together: gathering, relationality, propaganda, consciousness-raising, experimentation, etc. The performances they created to educate also did the work to define performance to how we recognize it today as explosive social commentary. And a chapter about education reform in the civil rights movement has a place within a book about experimental art.
--Marshal Zeringue
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