Political Urgency Research Articles

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Pp. 317.

<i>Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons</i>. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Pp. 317.

Transnational Fashion Sustainability: Between and Across the Gulf and the UK

In this moment of ecological crisis, the consequences of crisis are unevenly distributed, with those with the least power impacted the most. The fashion industry’s growth, spurred in the past decades by fast fashion and a reliance on growth of petroleum-based fibers, is a contributor to this uneven distribution of ecological consequences. This paper explores fashion and ecology as interconnected transnational systems. It does this with reference to two contexts: the UK and the Gulf state of Bahrain. By exploring positions on environmentalism in the UK and Bahrain, questions around fibers, clothing care and waste, this paper underscores the political urgency and the relational effects of change that span nation states within the fashion sector. Decarbonizing the fashion system requires both localized action and methodologies in addition to political will to work between and across such themes. Transnational perspectives are central to cumulative whole-systems effects.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Red Washburn and Brianne Waychoff bell hooks states, "Love is an action, never simply a feeling." This issue, Black Love, arrives during a critical moment in the ongoing struggle for racial justice. With the political urgency of the Movement for Black Lives, prison abolition, cops out of Pride, decolonize the curriculum, and bell hooks joining the ancestors, we remember love is a verb. We use this vision to help us imagine a better life in which love transcends rigid concepts of romantic coupledom under capitalism, and instead, expands the thought and practice of love as a community project of mutual aid, trust, care, kindness, compassion, respect, and solidarity across the spectrum of difference. The politics of love holds much promise for honoring self-care, educating for critical consciousness, and promoting social change. Love allows us to hold space for Black people to heal under white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism, as well as move toward a collective social responsibility to build a better world where we all are free. The guest editors, writers, and artists who contributed to this issue explore the knowledge/power of Black love from different angles of vision that enrich this interdisciplinary area of study in exciting ways. We are indebted to the guest editors Mary Frances Phillips, Rashida L. Harrison, and Nicole M. Jackson for convening this issue. We are delighted to feature work on Black love, nationally and transnationally, ranging from the United States to Nigeria, as well as Trinidad and Tobago. We commend the stellar academic essays on social movements, self-care, and cultural productions, especially centering the writings of Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. We celebrate the stunning creative writing and visual art by Arisa White, Roya Marsh, and Mel Michelle Lewis, among other notable contributors. We are grateful for this scholarship and activism. We want to thank WSQ, including the editorial board; poetry, prose, and [End Page 10] art editors; and editorial assistants. In particular, we want to extend a tremendous thank-you, thank-you, thank-you to the editorial assistants, Amy Iafrate, Alex Johnson, Joe Goodale, Ivy Bryan, Googie Karrass, and Kayla Reece, all of whom worked tirelessly on communicating with the scholars, writers, and artists to make this issue happen. In addition, we want to extend a very generous thank-you to Dána-Ain Davis, Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and administrative staff Eileen Liang and Jennifer Bae for providing WSQ with internships in feminist publishing for graduate students in women's and gender studies at the City University of New York. Our partnership has significantly enriched the quality of the journal for our feminist communities across CUNY and beyond. We are greatly indebted to the Feminist Press for all its help with scheduling, copyediting, and distributing our issues, especially to Interim Executive Director Lauren Rosemary Hook and Assistant Editor Nick Whitney. We cannot thank you enough for your help and support. We also wish to thank Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities Kendra Sullivan, as well as Jordan Lord and Sampson Starkweather for collaborating with us and building a new vision for the journal, including aiding with publicity and administrative matters. We acknowledge the support we have received from President Kaye Wise Whitehead and Former Interim Executive Director Jen Ash of the National Women's Studies Association, as well as the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Lastly, we want to thank each other as general editors of WSQ for continuing this work during a global pandemic with much loss and grief. We are looking forward to celebrating fifty years of WSQ and the future of this important feminist journal. Red Washburn Kingsborough Community College Director of Women's and Gender Studies Associate Professor of English City University of New York Brianne Waychoff Borough of Manhattan Community College Associate Professor of Speech Communications and Theatre Arts, Gender and Women's Studies Program City University of New York Works Cited hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Murrow. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Red Washburn and Brianne Waychoff

The impact of climate change awareness on behavioral changes in Germany: changing minds or changing behavior?

BackgroundThe increasing frequency of extreme weather events across the globe, the intensifying international debates about the political urgency to mitigate climate change, as well as the respective more action demanding social movements have caused a significant increase in climate change awareness among the population. Little research, however, has systematically analyzed the behavioral impact of this development. Using Germany as a case study, we therefore scrutinize whether the recent increase in climate change awareness triggered mainly changes in public perceptions concerning environmental and sustainability issues or whether it has led to sustainable behavioral shifts. Based on previous research, we considered two routes through which an increase in climate change awareness can instigate changes: (a) directly by leading to behavioral changes towards more sustainable consumption decisions, or (b) indirectly by exerting pressure on the political process.ResultsThe analyzed data in the three consumption sectors of mobility, food consumption and housing confirm the continuing prevalence of an attitude–behavior gap: although there is a broad, strongly positive attitude towards climate protection and increasingly high problem awareness of climate change, so far this attitude does not immediately translate into notable behavioral changes. With regard to effects on political agenda setting, however, the effects are much more immediate. The results confirm strong pressure on the political process mainly through shifts in voter behavior.ConclusionsThe results show that the increase in climate change awareness has spurred dynamics in the debate around climate change both among the population and in the political realm. Fueled by the intense media coverage of the Fridays For Future movement and related activities, a snowball effect has been set off, opening a window of opportunity for significant shifts towards more effective and rigorous climate policies. Politicians and decision-makers now have the opportunity to implement sustainability measures with strong support of the population, even if these imply higher costs. Whether there will be further shifts in the current lifestyle towards a more sustainable one, lifestyle changes should be carefully monitored in the coming years, as relevant data are only now becoming available.

China’s Minority Fiction

China’s Minority Fiction Sabina Knight (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves study both for its political urgency and for its lyricism and philosophical power. Multiethnic fiction speaks volumes about Chinese attitudes toward minorities, as well as these peoples’ historical understandings, their search for roots, and longings for cultural survival. [End Page 48] What Holds China Together? How has literature enabled China’s evolving empire? Rather than a continuous polity, “China” names a culture. It may be this culture’s seemingly infinite resilience that confers political legitimacy. What has made Chinese culture so resilient? For three thousand years a powerful literary tradition has held together diverse and sometimes competing civilizations. The written language has been the glue that connects Chinese people to a shared cultural past. Throughout the region’s history, what counts as “Chinese” has been shifting. Yet even as Chinese characters, literally “Han words” (漢字), have evolved over time, expert sinologists can still read the inscriptions on tortoise shells and sheep scapulae from the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 bce). Identification as a people has hinged on this written language. Written Chinese has also enabled communication across disparate spoken dialects, including those of ethnic minorities. For ethnic groups with their own languages, from the Mongols and Manchus that once conquered and ruled the realm to contemporary Tibetans and Uyghurs, writing in Chinese has brought status and acceptance. The cost has been Sinification, a homogenizing trade-off. Literary writing has also been fundamental to governance, likely more so in China than anywhere else. To enter the civil service, scholars had to master the core philosophical canon and poetic composition. Thanks to a long tradition of scholar-officials who remonstrated with rulers, such texts also served as voices of conscience. The Chinese Communist Party continues to recognize the political power of writing, and literature in particular, through the PRC’s official organ for writers, the Chinese Writers Association (CWA). Who Counts as Chinese? During the Civil War of 1946 to 1949, the Chinese Communist government adopted the Soviet paradigm using the term “nationalities” (民族) to refer to ethnic groups within the empire. Ethnic Han Chinese had earlier conceived of themselves in terms of a center-periphery model. This new notion of “nationalities” made the empire’s internal nations, cultures, and ethnicities distinct categories of official discourse. These distinctions paved the way for the establishment of the “autonomous regions” of Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi (1958), Ningxia (1958), and Tibet (1965). China’s label of “autonomous” for these areas should not be taken at face value. They are always subject to Beijing’s dominion; their powers of self-rule are even less than the modest rights begrudged to Indigenous peoples on US reservations or among Canada’s First Nations. In China, these cultures’ distinctiveness has meant that their inclusion within the PRC has entailed battles over independence and identity that some have called civil wars. China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” (少数民族) make up less than 9 percent of the PRC. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their sparsely populated homelands account for over 45 percent of the country’s area. On the Chinese Writers’ Association roster of 12,000-plus members, more than 1,500 are self-identified ethnic minorities. Many of these non-Han writers represent their group’s first generation of published authors. Since 1976, Chinese presses have issued hundreds of novels by minority writers on ethnic themes. In addition, at least eighty literary magazines (about half in ethnic languages) publish poems, stories, and essays by minority writers. These ethnic groups all have long oral traditions, and their cultures are distinct enough to make China a multinational polity, more analogous to the European Union than to a single country. Fiction and Survival Dynamic and defiant, fiction by China’s ethnic minorities offers clarion voices amid the din of Chinese nationalism and party discourse. Often lyrical and nostalgic, this fiction documents the pluralism of cultures within China’s historically shifting borders. In so doing...

The Urgency of Legal Politics in the Draft Law on Religious Harmony

The constitution guarantees the rights and obligations of the Indonesian people, one of which is religious harmony, the conflicts that have occurred to the present day encourage the Government to create higher and binding regulations and have permanent legal force. The purpose of this paper is to find out about legal politics, efforts to create an orderly and harmonious relationship between religious communities and legal politics contained in the Draft Law on Religious Harmony. In this study the researcher used a normative juridical research method, which in this study the researcher took a literature study. Legal politics is a state policy (policy) through state agencies authorized to set the desired regulations. Efforts to create orderly and harmonious relations between religious communities need to pay attention to socio-cultural factors and legal factors. Then, politics in the draft Law on Religious Harmony, namely the purpose of organizing in Religious Harmony, it is necessary to have the rights and obligations of each individual in religion, then to maintain the harmony of religious life it is necessary to have rules that regulate activities that support religious harmony. The activities in question are; Commemoration of holidays, Spreading religion, Funeral of corpses, and Establishment of synagogues.

For political geographies of fertilities

Debates ranging from parental leave within universities to abortion rights, ‘anchor babies,’ racialized maternal mortality, and the continued disproportionate role of indigenous children within foster care systems demonstrate the wide range of politics informed by fertility. In this paper, I aim to prompt further academic research and personal reflection about the politics that underpin questions about fertility and the life course. There is an analytic potential and political urgency to understand these debates under the conceptual umbrella of ‘political geographies of fertility,’ as matters of fertility cross disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and are – literally – matters of life and death. In this paper, I argue for framing fertility as a continued state of being, an anticipatory weight, that influences lives, behaviors, and politics at a variety of scales, from the border and the nation-state to academic workplaces and the body. By considering the range of spaces and scales where the politics of fertility take shape, I hope to encourage future researchers to devote attention to what gets made political through fertility – including but not limited to the biological events of reproduction.

“In the Name of Love”

This essay explores Black queer feminist readings of the sexual politics of James Baldwin’s Another Country. Recent work at the intersection of queer of color critique and Black feminism allows us to newly appreciate Baldwin’s prescient theorization of the workings of racialized and gendered power within the erotic. Previous interpretations of Another Country have focused on what is perceived as a liberal idealization of white gay male intimacy. I argue that this approach requires a selective reading of the novel that occludes its more complex portrayal of a web of racially fraught, power-stricken, and often violent sexual relationships. When we de-prioritize white gay male eroticism and pursue analyses of a broader range of erotic scenes, a different vision of Baldwin’s sexual imaginary emerges. I argue that far from idealizing, Another Country presents sex within a racist, homophobic, and sexist world to be a messy terrain of pleasure, pain, and political urgency. An unsettling vision, to be sure, but one that, if we as readers are to seek more equitable erotic imaginaries, must be reckoned with.

Review of the Political Direction of National Legal Development Law

The political direction of the law in Indonesia in the development of national law simplifies legislation. The scope of national legal development is not only through legislation. There is the functionalization of the law that lives in society. The purpose of the research describes the political urgency of law in the development of national law and reviews the political direction of national law development law. This research uses a philosophical approach, namely to examine the law from the ideal side in the form of an idea of the direction of national law politics in the future. The results of this study show that the politics of law is necessary to provide direction in the development of national law. Each country has a legal political direction whose role as the basic policy of state organizers to determine the direction, shape, and content of the law to be established. Legal politics as a strategy of the formation process, as well as the implementation of laws based on the national legal system to achieve the goals and ideals of the state. The political direction of the law in Indonesia in the development of national law simplifies legislation.Keywords: The Political Direction of Law; The Development of National Law; The Living Law Tinjauan Arah Politik Undang-Undang Pembangunan Hukum Nasional AbstrakArah politik hukum di Indonesia dalam pembangunan hukum nasional menyederhanakan pada legislasi. Cakupan pembangunan hukum nasional sebenarnya tidak hanya melalui legislasi. Ada fungsionalisasi hukum yang hidup di masyarakat. Tujuan penelitian mendeskripsikan urgensi politik hukum dalam pembangunan hukum nasional, dan mereview arah politik hukum hukum pembangunan hukum nasional. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan filosofis, yaitu mengkaji hukum dari sisi ideal berupa gagasan arah politk hukum nasional ke depan. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa politik hukum sangat diperlukan guna memberikan arah dalam pembangunan hukum nasional. Setiap negara memiliki arah politik hukum yang perannya sebagai kebijakan dasar penyelenggara negara untuk menentukan arah, bentuk maupun isi hukum yang akan dibentuk. Politik hukum sebagai strategi proses pembentukan, serta pelaksanaan hukum yang berpijak pada sistem hukum nasional untuk mencapai tujuan dan cita-cita negara. Arah politik hukum di Indonesia dalam pembangunan hukum nasional menyederhanakan pada legislasi.Kata Kunci: Arah Politik Hukum; Pembangunan Hukum Nasional; The Living Law Обзор политической направленности национального закона о правовом развитии Аннотация:Направление правовой политики Индонезии в развитии национального права упрощено до законодательного. На самом деле, развитие национального права осуществляется не только через законодательство. Существует действующий закон, который живет в обществе. Цель исследования - описать актуальность правовой политики в развитии национального права и рассмотреть направление правовой политики в развитии национального права. В данном исследовании используется философский подход, который рассматривает право с идеальной стороны в виде идей политического направления национального права в будущем. Результаты этого исследования показывают, что правовая политика необходима для определения направления развития национального права. В каждой стране существует правовое политическое направление, роль которого заключается в том, чтобы руководствоваться государственной администрацией в качестве основной политики по определению направления, формы и содержания закона, который должен быть сформирован. Правовая политика как стратегия процесса формирования и реализации закона основана на национальной правовой системе для достижения целей и идеалов государства. Направление правовой политики Индонезии в развитии национального права упрощено до законодательного.Ключевые Слова: Направление Правовой Политики; Развитие Национального Права; Живое Право

Archival critique and activism: memory, preservation, and digital visual cultures in post-revolutionary Egyptian heterotopias

Many might argue that the prospects of a progressive politics and democratic governance that the 2011 Egyptian revolution sought to realize have completely vanished. Those revolutionary aspirations for social change, political justice, economic opportunity, or civic equality have disintegrated, for some, into disillusioned desperations. In turn, recent cultural discourse about Egypt’s post-revolutionary malaise has often been couched in terms of “dystopia.” However, this paper posits that Egyptian artists are testing the limits of their creative expression, experimenting to give rise to alternative heterotopias. Specifically, this paper examines how two contemporary artists, Lara Baladi and Ganzeer, wrestle with the archives and memories of the 2011 Egyptian revolution to visually, digitally theorize and reconstitute its political resonance, salience and urgency. Through digital and graphic media, Cairo-based and diasporic Egyptian artists alike continue to ruminate on the country’s present stagnation all while keeping a pulse on the potential for a future revolutionary resurgence.

White Slave Fiction, So-Called

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

Rethinking Ethics in the Shadow of Displacement and Statelessness: A Critically Engaged Account of Democratic Agency

ABSTRACT Statelessness and displacement represent nothing short of a loss of place, the violation of rights and international norms, threat to safety and belonging, and severely limits access to law and citizenship. Social work must leverage and sustain an ethical standpoint as a critical counterpoint to the increasing moral and political urgency of statelessness. However, traditional and normative social work ethics operate at a level of abstraction that do not engage sufficiently with the realpolitik of statelessness. This paper critically engages with moral questions concerning displacement and statelessness by engaging the philosophy of James Tully and Christine Korsgaard. This engagement enables connections between agency and notions of democratic constitutionalism where people have the right to call into and contest relations of governance that oppress them, through various means such as advocacy and activism. We present a reconsideration of established ethical understandings by arguing for the place of public philosophy and the constitution of the self as key to social work theory and practice in response to statelessness and displacement. Korsgaard’s work on normativity and agency, and Tully’s notion of democratic constitutionalism provide a rich and original contribution to social work ethics that will be articulated for social work theory and practice.

Hématotropique : Ethnographie, violence et expérience

Depuis les trois dernières décennies, les thèmes de la violence et de l’urgence politique ont commencé à se cristalliser comme champ d’intérêt à part entière en anthropologie. Une tendance qui coïncide avec un tournant réflexif qui fait parfois une plus grande place à l’expérience et aux « textures » du vécu par rapport à la systématisation des savoirs. À partir d’une réflexion sur mes propres expériences de terrain au Pakistan et de lectures critiques autour de terrains de la violence, j’explore comment cette approche anthropologique renoue, en lien avec la question de la vérité, les fils de l’épistémologie et de l’éthique-politique. Comment, par son caractère plus engagé, elle pointe vers la possibilité d’un potentiel transformateur de l’anthropologie.

Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era

Abstract Women of color have long used the transformative power of writing and theorizing through their bodies to speak back to the pervasive racist and sexist hierarchies in hegemonic cultures. I extend this argument in the specific context of Muslim feminism that is theorized outside orientalist and patriarchal frames of reference. In this article, I turn to a performative autoethnographic approach to look at the Moroccan era, ‘Now and Then,’ through my grandmother’s lens, that of a Moroccan woman erased from the written history of Morocco. Drawing on ‘theories of the flesh,’ I privilege my grandmother’s voice and her embodied experience that transmits her story of resistance and survival under French colonization. Through ‘fleshing,’ my Moroccan grandmother reclaims her lived experiences and deconstructs the hegemonic universalist knowledge of feminism and struggle. It is important to foreground the political urgency of surveying the theoretical frameworks of Arab and Muslim scholars in order to create new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial/neocolonial settings.

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

<i>Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel</i>. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

The Political Imperative of World Cinema

Abstract This paper argues for the political urgency of the project of World Cinema, and an understanding of World Cinema as a dynamic totality. Totality here is not a generic, macroscopic lens, but a system that accounts for the co-existence of all cinemas as well as the uneven power relationships that determine the relative visibility or invisibility of cinemas in the global system. This structural inequity, a condition that underlies the differentiated cinematic flows, is also a methodological ruse in that it can only point to unequal relationships in discourses that define the current conceptions of World Cinema. An awareness of totality, we argue, makes it possible to return to films themselves as nodal points from which to begin the mapping of World Cinema through its complex networks of financing, distribution, and its circuits of legitimation (film festivals, academic discourses) which shape world cinema as a body of knowledge.

Moments of Possibility: Holocaust Postmemory, Subjunctivity and Futurity in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017)

Abstract This article examines subjunctive approaches to history and memory as a novel aesthetic and ethical mode of Holocaust (post-)memory in two prominent examples of contemporary German-Jewish fiction. I argue that Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) develop subjunctive modes of Holocaust (post-)memory as a response to a crisis of witnessing in the post-survivor era. Faced with the dying out of the survivor generation and the increasing institutionalization and hypermediation of Holocaust memories, these two authors invoke the subjunctive to self-reflexively account for their historical positionality and critique monolithic memory discourses (Petrowskaja), while also aiming to (re-)invest a stagnant culture of Holocaust memory with political urgency and futurity (Menasse). Subjunctivity thus emerges as a central yet underexamined mode of contemporary German-Jewish writing which has the potential to transform wider cultures of Holocaust (post-)memory, by moving ‘beyond the traumatic’ (Rigney 2018) in the direction of futurity.

A Local Heritage and Climate Nexus: The Past in Planning for Climate Change on the Dutch island of Goeree‐overflakkee

AbstractClimate change poses worldwide challenges, perhaps most in coastal areas. Governments on different scales respond with planning and policy measures, many with drastic impact. In this paper we assess the role of cultural heritage in planning for climate change on the former island Goeree‐Overflakkee in the Netherlands. We do so by exploring the theoretical discourse on the nexus of climate change and heritage discourses and relating these to an analysis of mitigation and adaptation measures on the island of Goeree‐Overflakkee in the Dutch river delta. It appears that the scale and political urgency of climate change induces involvement of many different governments, resulting in an inconsistent integration of cultural heritage in these plans and policies. These outcomes demonstrate that in order to integrate heritage in climate adaptation and mitigation planning, governments cannot rely on established planning traditions for other spatial challenges.

Equity as both a means and an end: Lessons for resilient food systems from COVID-19.

Food systems are important sites of economic stress, political response and adaptation. Access to food is also an important marker of how well a society distributes its wealth, reflecting the state of political accountability, economic redistribution, and the society's level of commitment to uphold the right to food. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the interconnected weaknesses of our food, social and economic systems and offers lessons for building more just and resilient food systems. We focus on three lessons learned anew in the pandemic: (1) food insecurity both reflects and reinforces inequity, (2) food workers are essential yet treated as sacrificial, and (3) racialized migrant food workers face unique forms of inequity. These lessons - chosen for their ethical salience, global relevance, and political urgency - show how interconnected inequities revealed by the pandemic are undermining resilience. We conclude with specific policy recommendations for redress, both within and beyond food systems. This will not be the final global pandemic, nor is it the only shock that regions are currently experiencing. COVID-19 is an opening to think about how societies might center justice and equity in efforts to build back better. Governments should take this opportunity to invest in structural changes to reduce persistent inequities in food access due to poverty, health outcomes, decent work and overall wellbeing, especially for racialized communities and migrants.

Solidarity Stalled: When Chinese Activists Meet Social Movements in Democracies

This study analyzes a largely unexamined phenomenon in the studies of transnational activism: immigrant activists’ engagement in progressive social movements in their residence countries. Through participatory observation and interviews with the Chinese activist communities, this study explores how diaspora activists assess social movements in established liberal democracies in light of their experiences with organizing in a more repressive setting back home. Despite active involvement in social movements in their residence societies, these Chinese diaspora activists find the dominant models of activism in democracies to be overly institutionalized, lacking a sense of political urgency to push for real social change. The deeper and more intersectional understandings of social movements in democracies trigger positive reflections that help create new political subjectivities, but at the same time, they produce skepticism and disenchantment, lowering activists’ expectations about the power of international solidarity. By delving into activists’ transnational social movement experiences, this study critically interrogates the theoretical framework of diaspora politics and social movement learning and brings attention to the unintended consequences of transnational political engagement.