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This chapter discusses how the Umbrella Movement was an instance of prefigurative politics. Prefigurative politics refers to political actions or movements in which political ideals are experimentally realized in the “here and now,” in which activists attempt to construct aspects of the ideal society envisioned in the present, rather than waiting for them to be realized in a distant future. It means that political principles are embodied in current behavior, not put on hold until the time is deemed right for them to be deployed. Analyzing the everyday culture of the seventy-nine-day occupation through the lens of prefigurative politics, the chapter then shows two salient dynamics that propelled and fractured the movement. First, occupiers built an alternative urban commons that embraced equality, sharing, and solidarity in everyday life, envisioning a utopian socioeconomic order different from the existing one in Hong Kong. Second, throughout the movement, occupiers and leaders struggled with the idea and practice of leadership. The predicament of ambivalent, ambiguous, and fragmented leadership in what some protesters deemed a “leaderless” movement led to indecision at several critical junctures of the movement.

Andrew Miles offers an empirical study of the cultural practices of Manchester’s contemporary population. His essay is a contribution to continuing debates about the relationship between culture, class and identity in Britain. His particular interest is in the ‘non-users’ of the city’s more high-profile cultural institutions. He suggests the limited nature of debates among politicians and policy-makers about the nature of cultural participation, and, based on 102 in-depth qualitative interviews, shows that there are many kinds of cultural participation not usually captured by the survey evidence (or by dominant models). His findings serve as important counter to the official model of participation, whose assumptions, processes and technologies obscure – and neglect – the realm of everyday participation and its significance.

This essay summarizes the theoretical framework of the collection. The modes and policies of imperial systems make race intelligible through the representational logic of ‘differential inclusion’. This logic is basic to colonial projects that sought to establish race as a baseline, or naturalized state, that could be used to create and sustain a sense of imperial subject-hood. While such racialist politics may be mirrored in concrete developments such as shifts in state boundaries or policies on language and citizenship, it is equally important to stress just how much the criteria for deciding who was to be included as an imperial subject and who was to be excluded depended for their effectiveness upon the affective power of everyday representations of race. Affect may thus be used as an analytical category that brings together the protean constructability of race with its representational function in an imperial politics of inclusion/exclusion.

This chapter discusses Cixous' trips to America. It narrates her conversation with her taxi driver while on the way to a meeting of her theatre company, and discusses the logic of persecution that is evident in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. It studies the Americans' ignorance and indifference to ‘the rest’ of the world, the American viewpoint, and introduces the concepts of Saddamisation and ground zero. Finally, it describes everyday American culture as a ‘culture of fear’ and the Bushian spirit as a man hunter. The chapter also presents Cixous' reflections on America.