Transitions as Performance

Abstract This chapter catalogues the ways in which political actors, especially Generation 2, characterized the twenty-first-century Great Recession as comparable to the transitions. Their use of the transitions’ ‘aesthetic’ risked modifying its meanings, often controversially. Generation 2 was a new cohort of artists and activists born in postauthoritarian years, with only distant memories of transition. Generation 2’s recourse to cultural memory allowed them to express disenchantment with the politics of the Great Recession, producing a certain spectral version of the past. Generation 2 holds a critical view of the transitions, but also re-enacts a 1970s aesthetic with its political codes in music and film, reperforming the transitions as memory.