The Defiant

In The Defiant Dawson Barrett offers a sweeping narrative of protest movements in the neoliberal-era United States. His general historical claim is that the past four to five decades of U.S. political life, which he calls “the post-liberal era,” have seen robust, creative, and inspiring displays of dissent by those pushed to the bottom of the social order (p. 17). His general theoretical claim, which draws on the scholarship of Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward and James C. Scott, is that the potency of protest derives from its capacity to capture strategic spaces and, in doing so, to disrupt the workings of power. Barrett establishes both claims with his first chapter, on the radical environmentalists of Earth First!. Founded in 1980, Earth First! has resourcefully experimented in the sort of direct-action, on-the-spot, disruptive protest that Barrett finds especially effective. He emphasizes the spatial logic at work in the group's direct-action methods, such as sitting in trees and blocking roads, and he argues that these practice forms influenced, or at least “paralleled,” the methods of other protesters, well beyond the environmentalist movement, in the decades following the founding of Earth First! (p. 53

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