Rethinking the Good Life

A Crip Critique of Hon Lai-chu’s Surrealist Short Stories

On July 1, 2022, President Xi inaugurated Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive, John Lee, marking the 25th anniversary of the territory’s return to Chinese rule. The handover was supposed to guarantee autonomy and civil liberties for 50 years, but critics argue these freedoms have diminished since Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 following mass protests. In recent years, the city’s education curriculum has grown increasingly pro-China, and election laws were altered to exclude opposition lawmakers. ‘Development’ and ‘overcoming/restoration’ were the key themes of the day. In his keynote address, Xi spoke in detail about the social unrest of the preceding few years. “There is extensive consensus that no time should be lost in Hong Kong’s development and that all interference should be removed so that Hong Kong can stay focused on development,” Xi added. In remarks preceding Xi’s, Hong Kong’s chief executive John Lee named three significant protests between 2014 and 2019, and said that “the full support of central authorities” contributed to Hong Kong’s ability to overcome challenges. Lee added that the implementation of the National Security Law and electoral system changes were part of Hong Kong restoring […]

Disruptive Subjects

Operaismo and Radical Feminism in Italy and the United States

On 24 May 1968, a 100,000-strong crowd of French students and workers, chanting “your struggle is ours,” began their march to Place de la Bastille. This conjoining of university and factory uprisings, no less through a symbolic reenactment of the events of 14 July 1789, sent chills down the spine of De Gaulle’s government. The French state, faced with the terrifying prospect of workers and students uniting to form a new revolutionary subject, sprang to action, creating a wall of police to drive the demonstrators back to the Latin Quarter. In the days that followed, the careful and tactical policing of the streets was matched by an even more calculated media operation to segregate the masses of revolting French into their constituent parts.

Whose Heritage–Whose Narrative?

Disrupting Place-Based Narratives to Re(claim) Heritage Sites in Political Agendas

Whose heritage? No question could be more central when dealing with cultural heritage. For Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall, it provided a point of departure to discuss how to unsettle “the heritage” as a national tale that proved increasingly incompatible with the diversity of (post)modern society. It is a question that has shaped the critical discourse on heritage for decades, becoming a—if not the—major denominator when it comes to (cultural) heritage and the representation of the past in the present. It demands considering not only who…

Disruptive Paradox

Deconstructive Architecture and its Subversive Power

Since the 1980s, deconstructivist architecture has attracted attention with its radical de-parture from orthogonal structures and its aesthetic boldness. As a provocative counter-model to traditional building regulations, it has sparked a lasting discourse on form and meaning in architectural theory. But precisely because of their exceptional forms and broken angles, the architects were quickly dismissed by many critics as attention-seeking and purely provocative. Even as the term ‘deconstructivist’ was emerging in in the field of architecture, the prevailing opinion was that architects had nothing to do with the philosophy of deconstruction…

Framed Slowness and the Ecological Value of Multiperspectivity

Adopting a cognitive and econarratological perspective, this article explores the use of framing strategies for slowness as a way in which multiperspective narratives may foreground the complex entanglement of human and more-than-human temporalities. By introducing the concept of ‘framed slowness,’ I aim to describe a slow way of experiencing narrative elicited by the use of segmentivity and other framing devices…