Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011

What anarchists demand from art is what they demand from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means.

While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a vividly textured "resistance culture" to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it.

Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these artistic anarchist creations across the history of the movement. Discussing famous artists like John Cage and Diane DiPrima as well as unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Jesse Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and, ultimately, most useful.