Life Integrating Art: Iconography in 21st-Century Street Protests
From Jakarta to Paris, young protestors are raising a new kind of flag — not a party banner, but the Jolly Roger from One Piece. Across Asia, Africa, and Europe — and recently in the United States — demonstrators are turning this iconic anime symbol into a rallying cry against corruption, inequality, and political failure. Much like the peace sign of the 1960s, the One Piece flag has become today’s emblem of freedom, rebellion, and global solidarity.
Join Japanese historian and anime scholar Andrea Horbinski and artist, writer, and activist Gregory Sholette for a lively conversation about how pop culture reshapes protest — from streaming and fandom to revolutionary iconography and the shared languages of resistance.
Andrea Horbinski
Andrea Horbinski holds a PhD in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in new media from the University of California, Berkeley. She has discussed anime, manga, fandom, and Japanese history at conventions and conferences on five continents, and her articles have appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Convergence, Internet Histories, and Mechademia. Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (2025, University of California Press) is her first book.
Gregory Sholette
Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and professor who co-founded the socially-engaged art collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His books include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Delirium and Resistance, Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass), The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, and forthcoming from MIT Press, The Radical Unpresent, Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World. Sholette is Affiliated Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center and co-director of Social Practice Queens.