Doing politics nonpolitically: explaining how objects in cultural projects afford political resistance

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 9: Culture in Civic Life

Abstract

While the literature on repression, diaspora, and resistance substantially enriches our understanding of how individuals resist secretly and creatively under political pressure, it is still unclear how political resistance survives in nonpolitical organizations. This question is crucial to diasporic migrants from autocratic countries who cannot engage in formal mobilization and use nonpolitical organizations to preserve their collective solidarity. Empirically, this study draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two cultural organizations by diasporic Hongkongers in the United States. It argues that by comparing two forms of cultural preservation projects—one emphasizing cultural artifacts and another focusing on communal gatherings—collective resistance can exist in organizational life without being deliberately political. Contrary to the conventional logic, resistance in the Hong Kong case was neither disguised nor individualized but diffused in cultural activities. To accomplish this, people developed patterned ways to cue political speeches with the help of objects in the physical settings of cultural events. Relying on objects’ material affordances, organizers can regulate political speeches in activities, whereas participants can momentarily shift their speeches into political expressions. As such, organization members can consistently cue a sense of political resistance within their nonpolitical activities. I call this reliance on object-mediated interactions to articulate political concerns “afforded politicization.” The findings contribute to the scholarship by answering the question of when and how isolated, covert forms of everyday resistance can become politically meaningful in organizational life. By showing diasporic cultural practices are a form of everyday resistance, the study argues that repressed people can mediate politics using objects, and with enough object-mediated interactions, individual resistance can aggregate into collective resistance.

Author

• Nathan L.T. Tsang, University of Southern California