Resistance, activism and ordinary life: an editorial introduction

ABSTRACT

On the streets, over the internet, in the malls, across neighbourhoods, the Hong Kong resistance grows with the shaping of a consciousness of common identity under oppression. Inscribed in the ‘structure of feeling' of our time, such articulation of the ordinary as local messes up people's everyday trajectory in the unholy partnership between global capitalism and Chinese authoritarianism. This special volume offers a telling account of the embedded politics of affect involved. Challenged by the uncanny facelessness of the present, we examine the dire condition of the cityscape and the livelihood it traces. We analyse substantive tactics of critique ranging from eco-writing of Hong Kong as colony to habits of singing in an erotic Taiwanese teahouse. While local activism of a different sort assimilates unlikely cultural resources in Mainland China, taken together these struggles for identity situate subjects in their roles as consumer, entertainer, freelancer, digital gamer, cultural activist as well as intellectual. The locality of resistance moves from a translocal football stadium to a co-working space in Shanghai, from massive street demonstrations in the postcolony to switched-on enactments of cyber-‘activism'. Performing politics amid multiple relays of quotidian acts, individuals feed their ordinary imagination to alternative critiques. What transpires is a community evolving from fan solidarity to intimacy, erotic narrative to friendship, provincial sex-entertainment to urban self-entrepreneurship. Everyday contacts and lived fantasies link invisible writers to invisible readers, clients with hostesses, and drifting memes to drifting netizens. Despite tyranny, diffuse voices upset the status quo. As people enact their acts of identity, they reframe the given politics of affect by making the crushed ordinary life bearable of a fan, a creative labourer, a queer erotic addict, a teahouse hostess and her frustrated client, a frustrated, agitated intellectual, a desperate street activist, as well as millions of faceless online ‘subjects’.

KEYWORDS:

• Structure of feeling
• politics of identity
• the everyday-in-suspense
• tactics of resistance
• authoritarianism
• Hong Kong experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a contextualised discussion of the sociohistorical shaping of common identity as it reached an explosive phase in the summer of 2019, at the dramatic start of the people’s anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement, see Chan 2020a, 2020b.

2 See Chen and Szeto 2015.

3 For an in-depth analysis of this ‘progressive’ formation of radical localism, see Chen and Szeto 2015; for a succinct account of the general trend, see Kwong 2016.

4 In Chan 2020b, I share my informed analysis of the escalating ‘gaming’ politics articulating patterns in the ongoing, interlocking process relating to naam-chaau (literally ‘mutual destruction’) as strategies and tactics. Crucially, that analysis is a work of critique on what happens, itself independent of political or ideological orientation.

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Notes on contributors

Stephen C. K. Chan

Stephen C. K. Chan is Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is published internationally on Hong Kong culture, film, literature, education and cultural studies. He served as Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies from 2016 to 2020.