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Global Cultures
of Contestation
Mobility, Sustainability,
Aesthetics & Connectivity
Edited by ESTHER PEEREN,

ROBIN CELIKATES,
JEROEN DE KLOET
& THOMAS POELL
PALGRAVE STUDIES
IN GLOBALIZATION,
CULTURE & SOCIETY
Palgrave Studies in Globalization,
Culture and Society
Series Editors
Jeroen de Kloet
Centre for Globalisation Studies
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Esther Peeren
Centre for Globalisation Studies
University of Amsterdam
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the
boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically
explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization
processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through
and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding
how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks
what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken
to be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, political and
cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete.
A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the
imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and
critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization,
Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across
cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary,

theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed
case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite
junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited
volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors
for more information: b.j.dekloet@uva.nl / e.peeren@uva.nl.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15109
Esther Peeren · Robin Celikates
Jeroen de Kloet · Thomas Poell
Editors
Global Cultures
of Contestation
Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity
Editors
Esther Peeren Jeroen de Kloet
Department of Literary and Cultural Department of Media Studies
Analysis University of Amsterdam
University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Poell
Robin Celikates Department of Media Studies
Department of Philosophy University of Amsterdam
University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

ISBN 978-3-319-63981-9 ISBN 978-3-319-63982-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63982-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949215
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Photo of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement by Jeroen de Kloet
Printed on acid-free paper
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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction: Global Cultures of Contestation 1

Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet
and Thomas Poell
2 The Square and Beyond: Trajectories and Implications

of the Square Occupations 27
Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian
3 Weak Resistance in Semi-Peripheries: The Emergence

of Non-Heroic Counterpublics 49
Ewa Majewska
4 Challenging the Nation-State’s Territorial Integrity

through Contestation: Secessionist Rallies
in Catalonia 69
Jaume Castan Pinos
5 A Radical Reframing of Civil Disobedience:

“Illegal” Migration and Whistleblowing 93
Natasha Basu and Bernardo Caycedo
v
vi Contents
6 Biopolitical and Phenomenological Underpinnings

of Embodied Contestation: Further Reflections
on Creative Insurgency 113
Marwan M. Kraidy
7 Whose Space Is It Anyway? Practices of Protest

and Strategies of Authority in Egypt 129
Walid El Houri
8 Umbrellas and Revolutions: The Aesthetics

of the Hong Kong Protests 151
Jeroen de Kloet
9 The Internet as a Global/Local Site of Contestation:

The Case of Iran 171
Mahsa Alimardani and Stefania Milan
10 Tactical Connecting and (Im-)Mobilizing

in the French Boycott School Day Campaign
and Anti-Gender Theory Movement 193
Jayson Harsin
11 Disruption or Transformation? Australian Policymaking

in the Face of Indigenous Contestation 215
Tanja Dreher, Lisa Waller and Kerry McCallum
12 Erehwon: A Digital Platform for Empowering

Sociopolitical Interventions in Public Space 241
Beatriz Cantinho and Mariza Dima
Index 263
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis

at the University of Amsterdam. She is Vice-Director of the Amsterdam
School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Amsterdam Centre for
Globalisation Studies (ACGS). Recent publications include The Spectral
Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014)
and the edited volumes The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in
Contemporary Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013, with María del Pilar
Blanco), and Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Space, Mobility,
Aesthetics (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg).
Robin Celikates is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy
at the University of Amsterdam, where he also directs the NWO-funded
research project Transformations of Civil Disobedience. He is a mem-
ber of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) and
an Associate Member of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt
am Main. His publications include Critique as Social Practice (Campus
2009/Rowman & Littlefield 2018, with a foreword by Axel Honneth)
and Politische Philosophie (Reclam 2013, with Stefan Gosepath). Most
recently he has co-edited Transformations of Democracy: Crisis, Protest,
and Legitimation and The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary
Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning (both Rowman & Littlefield
2015). Website: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/r.celikates/.
vii
viii Editors and Contributors
Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Director of the

Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) at the University of
Amsterdam. His work focuses on cultural globalization, in particular in
the context of China. He is the principal investigator of a project funded
by the European Grant Council (ERC) on creative cultures in China. In
2010 he published China with a Cut—Globalisation, Urban Youth and
Popular Music (Amsterdam UP). He wrote, together with Yiu Fai Chow,
Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound
and Image (Intellect, 2013) and edited, together with Lena Scheen,
Spectacle and the City—Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture
(Amsterdam UP, 2013). With Anthony Fung he published Youth Cultures
in China (Polity 2017). See also www.jeroendekloet.nl.
Thomas Poell is Assistant Professor of New Media & Digital Culture
and Program Director of the Research Master Media Studies at the
University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on social media and
popular protest, as well as on the role of these media in the develop-
ment of new forms of journalism. Together with Jean Burgess and Alice
Marwick he has edited the Sage Handbook of Social Media (2017). His
next book, co-authored with José van Dijck and Martijn de Waal, is
titled The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Website:
http://www.uva.nl/profiel/p/o/t.poell/t.poell.html.
Contributors
Mahsa Alimardani is an internet researcher focused on the intersection

of technology, human rights, and social movements in Iran. She has been
working in the field of digital rights in Iran for the past six years and is
currently leading projects related to digital rights in Iran with the non-
governmental organization Article 19. She has an honors Bachelor of
Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto and com-
pleted a Master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on
online contestation in Iran, while working with the DATACTIVE pro-
ject (data-activism.net).
Natasha Basu is a Ph.D. Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, cur-
rently working within the project Transformations of Civil Disobedience:
Democratization, Globalization, Digitalization. She is a member of the
Editors and Contributors ix
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Dutch Research

School of Philosophy (OZSW), and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation
Studies (ACGS). The focus of Natasha’s research is on the globalization of
civil disobedience. In her approach, she seeks to conceptualize transnational
forms of resistance as civil disobedience by developing a theoretical lens that
combines gender, critical race, postcolonialism, and migration studies. She
has presented papers on conceptualizing “illegal” migration and citizen
smuggling as types of transnational civil disobedience, and is currently work-
ing on gender and civil disobedience.
Beatriz Cantinho is a Postdoctorate Fellow at CIAC—Algarve
University, Portugal. As a choreographer and researcher, she mostly
develops her work in collaboration with other artists and research-
ers (C. Spencer Yeah, Ricardo Jacinto, Vangelis Lympouridis, Herwig
Turk, Mariza Dima), exploring interdisciplinary composition within per-
formance, visual arts, sound, and digital arts. Beatriz was a Postdoc at
ARTEA program Castilla-La-Mancha University/Reina Sophia Museum,
Spain (2016–2017). She holds a Ph.D. in Dance and Aesthetics from
ECA, University of Edinburgh, UK and was a visiting scholar at N.Y.U./
TISCH (2010–2011), performance and cinema departments. Her work
has been presented in Portugal (CCB, MNAC, Gulbenkian Foundation),
the UK (SARC, DanceBase, Blue Elephant Theatre, Surrey, Chelsea and
Cambridge Universities), Germany (Festival Transmedial 07, TESLA,
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation), Austria (MAK, UNIKUM), Turkey
(Bilgi University), and Spain (Matadero).
Jaume Castan Pinos works as an Associate Professor at the Department
of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern
Denmark. He holds a Ph.D. in International Politics (Queen’s University
Belfast, 2011). He was the organizer of the summer school “Debating
secessionism in Europe” (2013 and 2014) and is currently the Director
of the European Studies bachelor programme at the University of
Southern Denmark. His academic interests are framed by ethno-territo-
rial conflicts, sovereignty, and political violence. He has conducted exten-
sive research in Catalonia, North Africa, and the former Yugoslavia. He is
currently working on a book scrutinizing the territorial consequences of
humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.
x Editors and Contributors
Bernardo Caycedo is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Department of

Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. His research explores
new forms of political engagement related to the internet (in particu-
lar, whistleblowing, hacktivism, and radical open access initiatives).
Bernardo is part of the project Transformations of Civil Disobedience:
Democratization, Globalization, Digitalization. He is a member of the
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Dutch Research
School of Philosophy (OZSW), and the Amsterdam Centre for
Globalisation Studies (ACGS). Bernardo obtained his MA in Philosophy
from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia and his BA in
Philosophy from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia.
Mariza Dima is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) designer and
design strategist. She specializes in the design and development of inter-
actions, using tangible, mobile, Augmented Reality (AR), and haptic
interfaces in sociocultural contexts, prominently in performance art, cul-
tural heritage, and social innovation. Working in between industry and
academia, she has run projects with theaters, museums, cultural organi-
zations, and start-ups in the UK, and has consulted for international
projects on design strategies for engaging interactions. She combines
engineering and design approaches in the design process, and informs
this with theoretical contexts of narrative, dramaturgy, and audience/
player engagement. She has published and exhibited widely in the field of
HCI. She is currently a Lecturer in Games Design at Brunel University,
London.
Tanja Dreher is an Australia Council Future Fellow and a Scientia
Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at
the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on the poli-
tics of listening in the context of media and multiculturalism, indig-
enous sovereignties, feminisms, and anti-racism. Her future fellowship
project analyzes the political listening practices necessary to support
the potential for voice in a changing media environment characterized
by the proliferation of community and alternative media in the digital
age. She is a Co-Vice Chair of the Community Communication and
Alternative Media Section of the International Association for Media and
Communication Research (IAMCR).
Editors and Contributors xi
Walid El Houri is a researcher, journalist, and filmmaker living between

Berlin and Beirut. He is the lead editor of the North Africa, West Asia
section at openDemocracy.net, and an affiliated fellow at the Institute
for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow
since 2014. He completed his Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University
of Amsterdam in 2012, exploring the transformation of Hezbollah’s
media strategies and the articulation of the notion of “resistance” as a
political identity in Lebanon. His current research deals with protest
movements, politics of failure, and the new geographies of war and pro-
test in the Middle East.
Marlies Glasius is a Professor in International Relations at the
Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. Her research inter-
ests include activism, authoritarianism, and international criminal jus-
tice. Glasius holds a Ph.D. cum laude from the Netherlands School of
Human Rights Research. She previously worked at the London School
of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she was one of the
founding editors of the Global Civil Society Yearbook. She is currently
principal investigator in the ERC-funded project Authoritarianism in a
Global Age, which investigates changes in the nature and sustainability of
authoritarianism induced by globalization.
Jayson Harsin is Associate Professor of Global Communications at The
American University of Paris, where he teaches across digital media stud-
ies, social/political/cultural theory, and political communication. His
current research focuses on widely discussed public problems around
‘post-truth,’ attention economy, fake news, trust, emotion, and democ-
racy, and especially the strategic role of rumor in contemporary political
practices. An author of over thirty articles and book chapters, he is cur-
rently finishing a book manuscript on post-truth politics and the atten-
tion economy entitled The Rumor Bomb: Vertiginous Politics and Regimes
of Post-truth.
Armine Ishkanian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social
Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Her research examines the relationship between civil society, democracy,
development, and social transformation. She has examined how civil
society organizations and social movements engage in policy processes
xii Editors and Contributors
and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia,

Greece, Russia, and the UK. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from
the University of California, San Diego.
Marwan M. Kraidy is the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media,
Politics, and Culture, and Director of the Center for Advanced Research
in Global Communication at the Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for
ongoing work on war machines in the age of global communication.
The recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, Woodrow Wilson and
NIAS fellowships, Kraidy has published 120 essays and 10 books, nota-
bly Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple UP, 2005),
Reality Television and Arab Politics (Cambridge UP, 2010), which won
three major prizes, and The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency
in the Arab World (Harvard UP, 2016). He tweets at @MKraidy.
Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher of culture. She was a visiting
fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (BBRG) and a stipendiary
fellow at the University of Orebro (Sweden), IWM (Vienna), and ICI
Berlin. She is the author of two monographs, co-editor of four volumes
on neoliberalism, politics, and feminist education, and has published
some 50 articles and essays in Signs, e-flux, Nowa Krytyka, Przegląd
Filozoficzny, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Kultura Współczesna, Le Monde
Diplomatique (PL), and other journals, catalogues, and collected vol-
umes. She has worked at three Polish universities, teaching cultural the-
ory, philosophy, and gender studies, and is currently affiliated with the
ICI Berlin and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Artes Liberales at
the University of Warsaw, Poland.
Kerry McCallum is Associate Professor of Communication and Media
Studies, and Senior Research Fellow in the News and Media Research
Centre at the University of Canberra. She researches in political com-
munication, specializing in the relationships between changing media
and Australian social policy, particularly in indigenous affairs. She is a
former President of the Australian and New Zealand Communication
Association and Member of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
Editors and Contributors xiii
Stefania Milan (stefaniamilan.net) is Assistant Professor of New Media

and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Associate
Professor (II) of Media Innovation at the University of Oslo. She is the
Principal Investigator of the DATACTIVE project (data-activism.net),
funded with a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. Her
research explores technology and participation, cybersecurity, and inter-
net governance, and emerging data epistemologies. She holds a Ph.D. in
political and social sciences of the European University Institute. Prior
to joining the University of Amsterdam, she worked at the University
of Lucerne, Central European University, Citizen Lab (University
of Toronto), and Tilburg University. Stefania is the author of Social
Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013) and co-author of Media/Society (Sage, 2011). She
is currently working on a new manuscript on ‘cloud protesting,’ inves-
tigating how the algorithmically mediated environment of social media
changes organized collective action.
Lisa Waller is an Associate Professor of Communication in the School
of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia.
Her research is concerned with how the news media shapes society,
from Indigenous Affairs policy to its roles in local communities and the
administration of justice. She is a member of the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Australian and
New Zealand Communication Association. Lisa has recently co-authored
two books: Local Journalism in a Digital World (with K. Hess, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017) and The Dynamics of News Media and Indigenous
Policy in Australia (with K. McCallum, Intellect, 2017).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Global Cultures

of Contestation
Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet

and Thomas Poell
From the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in early
2011, via the Spanish indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the Gezi
Park protests in Turkey and the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong,
in recent years different parts of the world have seen major instances of
popular contestation. These were not isolated events; they influenced,
shaped, and in some cases triggered each other. Together, they arguably
form a new, global protest “cycle” (Della Porta 2016), “revolutionary
wave” (Weyland 2012) or “regime-change cascade” (Hale 2013).
It is worth considering how the various terms used—cycle, wave,
cascade—highlight different elements at play when protests spread
beyond national borders. The image of the cascade foregrounds the
way in which individual contestations follow upon each other in stages,
with each subsequent stage taking from and building on the previ-
ous one, accumulating force in the process. The metaphor of the cycle
E. Peeren (*) · R. Celikates · J. de Kloet · T. Poell

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: E.Peeren@uva.nl
© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Peeren et al. (eds.), Global Cultures of Contestation,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63982-6_1
2 E. Peeren et al.
usefully indicates how unexpected transnational proliferations of protest

are not unique, but reoccur over time and therefore inevitably involve
“remobilization” alongside “innovation” with regard to their “organiza-
tional structures” and “styles of activism” (Della Porta 2016, 1–2). The
idea of recurrence is also accommodated by the figure of the wave, but
with greater emphasis on its unpredictability (waves are not regularly
spread) and its association with difference (waves can be of different mag-
nitudes and durations). In addition, the wave evokes not just an intensi-
fying force (as it builds toward the shore), like the cascade, but also the
subsequent discharge and fading (as it breaks) that characterizes each pro-
test surge and, conceivably, each specific protest within it. This indicates
a momentum quite different from a cyclical return to the beginning, one
that is vulnerable to counter-measures (wave breakers or breakwaters) and
subject to highly variable outcomes; the wave may fizzle out, but it may
also overwhelm and alter the landscape or cause profound damage, as in
the case of a tsunami, to which the Arab Spring has been repeatedly lik-
ened, mostly by those framing it as a failure (Freudenstein 2011; Bradley
2012; Gartenstein-Ross and Vassefi 2012; Haseeb 2012). Finally, the
wave, through its capacity to travel across vast distances, connotes geo-
graphical expansion more readily than the cycle (associated with circum-
scription) or the cascade (invoking the vertical movement of a waterfall).1
Conceiving the global swell in popular contestations of the 2010s as a
far from unitary wave—which, in addition to taking inspiration from ear-
lier protests, accommodates distinct “sub-waves” (Gerbaudo 2013) and
produces, to the present day, ripple effects as it continues to inspire new
and ongoing contestations in various, sometimes surprising ways—allows
us to consider it in terms of sameness and difference, continuity and dis-
continuity, action and counter-action, build-up and fall-off, concentra-
tion and diffusion. Thus, on the one hand, we see the protests making up
this wave and those influenced by it as different from each other in many
respects—unfolding in specific national and local contexts, and contest-
ing a variety of issues from divergent political perspectives. On the other
hand, we consider how certain elements of the mobilized “collective
action frames and identities” (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005) were actively
passed on from one protest to the next, most notably a framing of the
protests as expressing a desire for bottom-up, direct, or participatory
democracy on the part of those feeling oppressed or ignored by autocratic
regimes, or disenfranchised in parliamentary democracies, and as defining
themselves against an indifferent, self-serving elite (Gerbaudo 2013, 90).
1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 3
The protests also borrowed from each other in terms of their

“organizational structure” and “repertoires of action” (Della Porta
and Tarrow 2005). Regarding their organizational structure, what has
been particularly striking is that these protests were, for the most part,
not initiated or directed by traditional social movement organizations
(although these sometimes became involved or took over in later stages),
but appeared to be spontaneous political movements “from below.”
Their repertoires of action, moreover, showed a shared reliance on:
(1) the sustained or repeated occupation of public space (Butler 2015;
Göle 2013; Feigenbaum et al. 2013; Treré and Mattoni 2016); (2) the
establishment of alternative forms of sociality and civility in these spaces
(Celikates 2015; Yaka and Karakayali 2017); (3) the extensive use of
social media (Castells 2012; Juris 2012; Poell and van Dijck 2015); and
(4) creative branding through the use of colors (as in the so-called Color
Revolutions), catchy slogans (such as the Egypt Revolution’s “Erhal”
[Leave], Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” or the French anti-gay
marriage movement’s “Manif Pour Tous” [Protest for Everyone]), and
quirky symbols (from umbrellas in Hong Kong to penguins in Turkey’s
Gezi Park protests) (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Beraldo 2017; Poell
et al. 2016).
While we agree that there is reason to celebrate progressive contem-
porary movements for their spectacular occupations of squares, streets,
and buildings, their creative online tactics, and the new prefigurative
political imaginaries they introduced, we also acknowledge that these
movements’ long-term efficacy and sustainability have been called into
question, with several (most insistently the protests in Egypt, Libya, and
Syria) labeled as eventual failures (Bayat 2013; White 2016; Dean 2015;
Elbadawi and Makdisi 2016).
With this volume, coming out of the 2015 Global Cultures of
Contestation conference organized by the Amsterdam Centre for
Globalisation Studies (ACGS), we seek to move beyond positions that
generalize across the different popular contestations making up and
influenced by the protest wave to present a singularly celebratory or dis-
missive account. We do so by presenting detailed analyses of particular
contestations from a durational perspective that allows us to consider not
only obvious and immediate outcomes, but also more subtle, deferred,
or displaced effects. These analyses, moreover, focus on delineating the
specific “culture of collective action” (Maurer 2011; quoted in Della
Porta et al. 2015, 16) or “culture of contestation”—in the sense of the
4 E. Peeren et al.
forms of material and symbolic production (Williams 1988) through

which the non-dominant “adduce opposing testimony” to the dominant
(Lombardi-Satriani 1974, 104)—into which common elements were
assimilated in each specific protest. Thus, each protest is approached in
terms of both its specificity and its tendency, in a context of advanced
globalization and digitization, to connect to, learn from, or influence
other protests elsewhere.
The eleven contributions that make up the volume come from schol-
ars across the humanities and the social sciences who analyze particular
contestations in terms of how they unfolded, what inspired them, and
how their afterlives have taken shape in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, the UK,
Spain, Greece, Poland, Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as on
a transnational scale, as with the NSA-leaks and illegal border-crossings
by migrants around the world. Combining perspectives from the social
sciences and the humanities enables this volume to take into account the
political and social causes and consequences (direct and indirect, imme-
diate and delayed) of the various protests making up the global wave or
following in its wake, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of protest com-
munication and mobilization, online and offline.
It is important to note that this volume is concerned neither with
“transnational collective action,” defined as “coordinated interna-
tional campaigns on the part of networks of activists against interna-
tional actors, other states, or international institutions” (Della Porta and
Tarrow 2005, 2–3), nor with global movements that “identif[y] both a
common identity—the ‘us’—and the target of the protest—the other—at
the transnational level” (Della Porta 2016, 7). Rather, in tackling “global
cultures of contestation,” it focuses on relations of influence, on a global
scale, between movements that mostly define the mobilized “us” and the
contested “other” at the national level (Gerbaudo 2013), even if, as with
the Occupy movement, some also have a transnational dimension. What
we seek to underline is that even if the target or addressee of a protest
is local or national, advanced globalization and digitization have made
it possible and practicable for such a protest to forge strategic links with
other protests or movements, including transnational ones (the global
justice movement, the global environmental movement, the global anti-
capitalism movement), and to gain visibility on the global media stage,
which may not only garner more support but may also give authori-
ties pause when considering violent means of suppression. Such “going
global” does not need to be an active move, as connections can be made
by global media independently of those involved in a particular contes-

tation (as happened with the so-called Color Revolutions) and protest
repertoires can circulate thanks to social media uptake by others inde-
pendently of actors’ intentions.
Instead of considering the global protest wave of the 2010s as having
ended, this volume highlights its ongoing effects on how popular pro-
tests around the world, such as the Gezi Park protests, but also, more
unexpectedly, Catalan secessionism and the French anti-gender the-
ory movement, unfold. Continuity can be observed in the use of social
media, in how these protests configure public space and “the people,”
and in how they are conceptualized: as civil disobedience, as mobiliza-
tions of non-heroic counterpublics, as creative insurgencies, and so on.
As the subtitle of this volume indicates, we focus specifically on issues
of mobility, sustainability, aesthetics, and connectivity, leading to the fol-
lowing central questions: (1) How do the protests use forms of mobil-
ity and immobility (occupations, strikes, boycotts) as part of their action
repertoires? What forms of mobility are implied in the global spread of
the protest wave? (2) How are issues of sustainability—and its counter-
part, precarity—addressed in the various protests? To what extent are
the protests themselves sustainable as effective forms of contestation?
(3) What are the aesthetics of contemporary protest movements? What
new imaginaries and repertoires of protest (linguistic, visual, and acous-
tic) are emerging and how do they challenge and/or reproduce domi-
nant cultural regimes? (4) What are the connective platforms that
facilitate and structure today’s protest communication and mobilization?
How do these platforms not only enable contestation, but also shape
its focus and dynamics? As the contributions in this volume underline,
in practice these issues cannot be separated but have to be addressed in
their intertwinement.
Mobility
The strategic use of mobility and immobility in the recent global pro-
test wave—from marching through the streets to refusing to leave pub-
lic space—is addressed in various contributions. In the opening chapter,
Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian focus on the 2011–2012 “wave”
of square occupations. On the basis of interviews, they explore how
activists in Cairo, Athens, London, and Moscow experienced the social
and political momentum created by gathering in and laying claim to a
6 E. Peeren et al.
central square, and what happened to this momentum after the occupa-
tions ended. Insisting that “the square occupations have been neither as
transformative as their supporters had hoped, nor as evanescent as subse-
quent commentators would have us believe,” they trace how, in all four
locations, despite increased government repression designed to prevent
further mass mobilization, meaningful after-effects have emerged in the
form of local initiatives that continue the prefigurative practices devel-
oped on the square.
Ewa Majewska similarly stresses the political force of occupying public
space by using the erection of a “White Town” of tents by striking nurses
in central Warsaw in 2007 as the starting point for her discussion of how
this and later protests mark the emergence of a new politics of resistance
based on the formation of “non-heroic counterpublics” engaged in an
everyday resistance of the weak. An early example of the long-term occu-
pation of central public spaces that became a key strategy in the protests
of the 2010s, Majewska shows how the “White Town” resonated in the
Occupy movements, the Arab Revolutions, the Majdan Square gather-
ings in Kiev, Ukraine, and the women’s protests of 2016, particularly in
the way it combined a stubborn refusal to leave with a determination to
facilitate the continuation of the movements of everyday life within the
occupied site.
Jaume Castan Pinos’ contribution moves away from protests involving
continuous occupation to explore the use of annual mass marches by the
Catalan secession movement in Spain. In conjunction with other forms
of activism, including online, the marches establish “semi-permanent
mobilizations” producing “established patterns of interaction that have
created the conditions for their reification and reproduction.” As proac-
tive contestations initiated and led by civil society groups, these mobili-
zations have pushed the issue of Catalan secessionism to the top of the
political agenda, with established secessionist parties becoming involved
reactively. Hence, the Catalan secessionist movement should not be
taken as driven by political elites, but as showing how grassroots mobi-
lizations, when sustained over time, can lead to political movement, and
how institutionalization (as with the emergence of Podemos out of the
indignados) may strengthen a protest movement rather than signaling its
appropriation and demise.
Castan Pinos also explores the importance of acts of civil disobedience
for the Catalan secessionist movement, with leaders facing jail provid-
ing another impetus for regular mass mobilization. The question of what
constitutes civil disobedience in today’s globalized world is taken up by

Natasha Basu and Bernardo Caycedo, who introduce mobility into the
concept itself. Exploring illegal border-crossings by migrants and Edward
Snowden’s disclosure of state surveillance practices, both tied to trans-
national mobility and mobilization, they argue that acts by non-citizens
and fundamental challenges to (state) institutions should also be consid-
ered as civil disobedience, making it more prevalent and more revolu-
tionary as a form of political contestation.
Issues of mobility and immobility are at stake, too, in Jeroen de
Kloet’s discussion of the 2014 occupation and immobilization of cen-
tral parts of Hong Kong as a “semi-post-identarian movement” that was
constantly reinventing itself during the struggle, and in Walid El Houri’s
exploration of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt as a moment in
which “the bodies of protesters … produce disruptions that go beyond
the institutional assessment of success and failure.” Invoking Jacques
Rancière’s notion of politics as redistribution through dissensus, both
emphasize that disruptions, even when harshly repressed, produce a
sense of hope and possibility, especially in young people, that persists and
feeds into new contestations.
Taken together, these divergent case studies of protests involving
mobility (crossing borders, marching, leaking), immobility (occupation,
refusal), or their complex interplay reveal a spreading awareness of the
political force of the—mobile or immobile—public assembly of bod-
ies. As Judith Butler argues in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of
Assembly, “when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other
forms of public space (including virtual ones) they are exercising a plural
and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body
in the midst of the political field” (2015, 11). Crucially, this force can
be mobilized not only by those normally excluded from making politi-
cal claims (the marginalized and oppressed), but also by state authorities
(as when the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called upon his
supporters to go out on the streets to counter an attempted coup in July
2016) or by those seeking to deny the rights or demands of minorities
(Pegida, Manif Pour Tous). Publicly assembled bodies, then, can contest
established power relations or solidify them. What form their mobiliza-
tion takes—whether the gathered bodies remain in one place to occupy
a central square or area with high symbolic value, like Zuccotti Park in
New York or Tahrir Square in Cairo, or whether they come together for
regular marches in an increasing number of locations, like the Spanish
8 E. Peeren et al.
anti-austerity 15-M Movement or Pegida—depends on the specific con-

text and circumstances, including the expected and actual response by
authorities or counter-movements such as Legida.
While Butler focuses on the political force of the insistent, embodied
presence of the many in public space and in the media—“the cameras
never stopped; bodies were there and here; they never stopped speaking,
not even in sleep, and so could not be silenced, sequestered, or denied”
(2015, 98)—Jayson Harsin’s contribution to this volume on the strate-
gic use of rumor bombs by the French Boycott School Day campaign
(aligned with the wider anti-gay marriage Manif Pour Tous movement),
which encouraged parents to keep their children at home to protest the
introduction of “Gender Theory” in schools, makes clear that it is also
possible to articulate “a bodily demand” (Butler 2015, 11) through the
withdrawal of bodies from public space, as long as these are bodies nor-
mally able (or, in the case of schoolchildren, compelled) to appear there.
Removing these bodies and drawing attention to this removal through
social and news media creates perceptible absences that are politically
articulate. In addition, Marwan M. Kraidy, whose contribution focuses
on the centrality of biopolitics and phenomenology to embodied con-
testation in the modes of the “Burning Man” and the “Laughing Cow,”
highlights how, in some circumstances, such contestation only requires
a single body to manifest itself in an extraordinary manner in physical
or virtual public space—such as the burning body of Mohamed Bouazizi
he discusses in this volume or the blog post featuring a naked Aliaa al-
Mahdy analyzed in his book The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative
Insurgency in the Arab World (2016).
Mobility is at stake not just within particular protests, but also in the
question of how a global protest wave gains momentum, with contesta-
tions triggering and taking inspiration from each other in terms of the
frames, styles, and strategies used. Yet this process is far from straight-
forward. As Glasius and Ishkanian show, while the square occupations
of 2011–2012 were, in part, inspired by and resembled each other in
how they took shape, they did not form “a single, networked move-
ment.” The question of how protests seen to constitute a global “wave”
are linked has been approached primarily through the notions of “dif-
fusion,” “brokerage,” and, most controversially, “contagion.” Diffusion,
considered as a “causal process” capable of being traced and mapped
(Strang and Soule 1998, 266), occurs when “challengers in one coun-
try or region adopt or adapt the organizational forms, collective action
frames, or targets of those in other countries or regions,” and is seen to

have become more common and straightforward with advanced globali-
zation and digitalization (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005, 3).2 However,
the limits of diffusion as a very broad concept that covers “direct and
indirect mechanisms that link an event with an increased probability of a
similar event happening elsewhere” or again in the same place (Saideman
2012, 714), as well as deliberate and spontaneous dissemination (Strang
and Soule 1998), and that is associated with diffuseness (Della Porta
and Tarrow 2005) have also been noted. This has led to the develop-
ment of several categories of diffusion, from “relational diffusion,” based
on direct contact, and “non-relational diffusion,” involving indirect
influence often through mass media, to “mediated diffusion,” involv-
ing brokerage (Vasi 2011, 12). Brokerage refers to deliberate connec-
tions between protest movements forged by identifiable intermediaries
(Tarrow and McAdam 2005), which are too narrow to account for the
emergence of a protest wave comprising multiple, sometimes simultane-
ous contestations in dispersed locations. Contagion, finally, “conjures up
the imagery of some behavioral, emotional, or ideational phenomenon
spreading rapidly, uncritically, and uniformly,” which glosses over the
role of disarray, disagreement, and contingency within and between the
popular protests of the 2010s (Snow 2013, 1), and downplays the active
role of movements in appropriating and reinterpreting symbolic protest
repertoires.
In social movement theory, diffusion has mostly replaced contagion
to account for the way in which protests put each other in motion across
geographical distances (Snow 2013), although contagion does reappear
in some recent work related to the global protest waves of the 2010s.
Paolo Gerbaudo (2016), for example, takes up the notion of “emotional
contagion” (Hatfield et al. 1993; Barsade 2002) to explain how support
for the 2011 protests in Egypt and the indignados movement in Spain
was generated through Facebook pages. His use of emotional contagion
as illuminating how a movement attracts supporters could be extended
to explain how one protest inspires another as part of a global protest
wave. Contagion has also gained new prominence through its affin-
ity with virality as a central mode of circulation within networks, with
the meme as the new virus. In response to the latter development, Tony
Sampson has developed a theory of contagion inspired by the work of
Gabriel Tarde that allows it to be invested with a degree of agency with-
out rendering it fully controllable by “locat[ing] the human condition
10 E. Peeren et al.
somewhere in between deliberate volition, biologically motivated

mechanical habits and the self-spreading of desires and social invention”
(Sampson 2011, 2012).
Agency, then, is not irreconcilable with either contagion (as shown
by Sampson and by Gerbaudo’s linking of emotional contagion to the
use of particular rhetorical artifices by Facebook administrators) or dif-
fusion (which Della Porta and Tarrow see as involving not just adopting
but also adapting). Yet contagion remains dominantly associated with a
relatively indiscriminate spread of infection producing similar outcomes
everywhere, which does not fit the particular routes along which the
contestations of the 2010s evolved, or their disparate results. Diffusion,
although capable of referring to both a deliberate action and a sponta-
neous process (in its scientific meaning), evokes a strict, chronological
separation between source and adopter (Strang and Soule 1998), keep-
ing it from accounting for mutual feedback loops between simultane-
ous protests. In addition, diffusion suggests a spreading with weakening
effects that cannot capture the (at least initially) accumulating force of
the global protest wave of the 2010s.
An alternative term for how different contestations within a protest
wave influence each other is “resonance,” which has the advantages of
accommodating differences more readily than contagion (resonance is
not a transfer of the same), being associated with amplification rather
than weakening, and being able to refer to both deliberate action—it is
possible to make something resonate, although only within certain envi-
ronments—and action bypassing human intention. Resonance has been
used in social movement theory to convey the “effectiveness or mobiliz-
ing potency” of collective action frames, seen to depend on the “cred-
ibility of the proffered frame and its relative salience” (Benford and Snow
2000, 619; see also Snow and Benford 1988). Significantly, in his analy-
sis of the global protest wave of the early 2010s, Gerbaudo (2013, 87,
90) combines diffusion and resonance to account for the wave’s “rather
slow and convoluted progress,” arguing that
collective action frames and protest repertoires are not transmitted auto-
matically even in the presence of certain diffusion channels; their success-
ful reception depends on their ability to achieve cultural resonance in new
geographical areas … this is true for all forms of diffusion, given that an
important factor in the diffusion of innovations is compatibility with pre-
existing values and customs.
Combining diffusion with resonance allows an accounting for both

the fact that, in today’s globalized, media-saturated world, the pres-
ence of diffusion channels is almost guaranteed, and the fact that dif-
fusion in itself does not guarantee uptake of the same or similar action
frames, action repertoires, and, we would add, organizational structures.
Moreover, since there is never complete compatibility of values and cus-
toms, “a complex process of translation and local ‘domestication’ of
action frames and repertoires” is necessary (Gerbaudo 2013, 90).
In addition to diffusion and resonance, then, a third term is needed to
convey the process of translation and domestication essential to keeping
a global protest wave in motion. Because translation primarily refers to
a finite process involving a single preexisting source and a single target
that should resemble the source as closely as possible, Gerbaudo has to
specify that it involves domestication. To capture this in one term, and to
convey the various degrees to which the individual protests in the global
protest wave of the 2010s resembled each other, as well as the feedback
loops that existed between coinciding protests, we propose the concept
of “versioning.”
Versioning is used in literary studies, computer science, and market-
ing to denote the generating of different versions of a text, document, or
commodity (for various reasons, including the desire to maximize profit
across different markets). It refers to a pragmatic process of transforma-
tion that can involve multiple actors and is not necessarily predicated on
the idea of a single original or a notion of fidelity. The process of ver-
sioning itself is, moreover, “limited neither in number nor in its ability
to supplement” (Peeren 2008, 209); it is a potentially infinite project of
proliferation, with each new version capable of giving rise to more, that
works in multiple directions and can be pursued with various degrees of
domestication. As such, together with diffusion (allowing the identifica-
tion of direct or indirect diffusion channels that form the precondition
for resonance and versioning) and cultural resonance (drawing attention
to the conditions determining whether the diffusion of protests will lead
to their actual spreading3), versioning enables us to account for the man-
ifold, complex ways in which the different protests making up the global
protest wave of the 2010s moved and (trans)formed each other, with the
relation being neither one of identical replication nor one of absolute
difference, and some, such as those of the Arab Spring or the different
Occupy protests, located in the same “global cultural region” (Gerbaudo
2013, 91), more closely resembling each other than others.
12 E. Peeren et al.
As Glasius and Ishkanian, de Kloet, and El Houri emphasize in their

contributions, although the global protest wave of the 2010s is widely
considered to have fizzled out, many of the protests that formed part
of it continue to have residual effects and perceptual afterlives. To their
examples we may add the recent spate of university protests in, among
others, the UK, the Netherlands, the US, and South Africa (Ratcliffe
2015; van Reekum 2015; Johnston 2015; Luckett and Mzobe 2016),
which could be seen as a continuation—or, rather, versioning—of the
same wave, as could the mass assemblies (the post-inauguration Women’s
March) and semi-occupations (the airport protests against the “Muslim
travel ban”) contesting the Trump presidency in the US, or the 2016
Women’s Strike in Poland, discussed by Majewska, which successfully
challenged a planned abortion ban. As Butler (2015, 20) posits, the tran-
sience of particular assemblies, which can never last forever, is rendered
productive when such assemblies are serialized, producing an enduring
sense of “anticipation of what may be coming: ‘they could happen at any
time!’” In other words, while a single wave may fizzle out on the shore,
the sea never stops moving.
Sustainability
Many of the protests making up the protest wave of the 2010s or com-
ing in its wake centered on tensions between sustainability (of longstand-
ing political and economic structures, as well as, in Western countries,
social security systems) and precarity (as socially induced individualized
and responsibilized vulnerability). Autocratic rules of seemingly endless
sustainability produced increasingly widespread precarity among the poor
and, especially, the young in Northern Africa and the Middle East, while
in Europe and the United States there emerged, after the imposition
of budget deficit reduction measures and full-fledged austerity regimes
designed to sustain political structures and economic systems seen as dis-
serving the majority of the people, a need and demand for “an ethos of
solidarity that would affirm mutual dependency, dependency on work-
able infrastructures and social networks, and open the way to a form of
improvisation in the course of devising collective and institutional ways
of addressing induced precarity” (Butler 2015, 21–22).4 The forceful,
embodied articulation of this demand was central to the Occupy protests
and the 2007 Polish nurses’ strike discussed by Majewska as fostering the
emergence of a counterpublic. In Majewska’s analysis, what started as a
demand for higher wages in a particular profession broadened, as a result

of the sustained presence of the “White Town” erected by the nurses,
into a general discussion about immaterial labor, precarization, gender,
and neoliberalism, as well as prefiguring an ethos of solidarity through
the nurses’ provision of healthcare and the support given to the nurses
by Warsaw residents and the wider Polish public.
The protests discussed in this volume rely on the sustainability of
contestation—on enhancing the revolutionary force of “opposing testi-
mony” to the dominant (Lombardi-Satriani 1974, 104) through sheer
duration, whether through the prolonged mass occupation of a central
(semi-)public space, from Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park to Gezi Park
and Hong Kong’s financial district; or through the regular repetition of a
particular claim, as in the Catalan secession movement’s annual marches
or the French Boycott School Day campaign. Such sustained action ech-
oes and thereby highlights the unrelenting condition of precarity, which
has been seen to produce a sense of “impasse” (Berlant 2011, 4) and
to enforce a regime of “waiting” (Das and Randeria 2015, S12). At the
same time, in its very duration and obstinacy, sustained protest chal-
lenges the lack of security and stability that precarity entails, as well as
the lack of mattering it ascribes to the precaritized (Butler 2015; Butler
et al. 2016).
But there is a limit to the sustainability of these protests—of which,
as Glasius and Ishkanian show, those involved tend to be keenly aware.
Firstly, in temporal terms: an occupation of a (semi-)public space cannot
last indefinitely, especially when the protesters are the precaritized and
when the movement’s aims either lack concreteness or are unlikely to be
fulfilled. The powers being contested may, as with Occupy Wall Street,
choose to wait out the protest until media attention lessens, the number
of protesters dwindles, and internal conflicts start to come to the surface.
Alternatively, as with the protests in Gezi Park, state violence may be
used to end the contestation, at the risk, as the cases of Libya and Syria
show, of escalating it into enduring instability or civil war. Secondly, in
formal terms: it is difficult for protest movements that lack a hierarchical
structure and that bring together actors from different social strata, ideo-
logical persuasions, and protest traditions to sustain a coherent identity
in a way that keeps all protesters invested and the outside world, includ-
ing the authorities and the media, engaged. Moreover, movements
united in a single occupied space, once dissipated, tend to split into
factions articulating very different goals.
14 E. Peeren et al.
Claiming that the temporal and formal unsustainability of the protests

of the 2010s has resulted in total failure—leaving those who contested
power either in the same or a worse position—is ultimately as empiri-
cally and theoretically unconvincing as claiming that the simple fact that
these protests have occurred already proves their success (de Zeeuw
2014). None of the protests have dissipated completely—they are all
having more or less insistent after-effects, producing flickers of light even
in the dark aftermaths of the (attempted) removal of dictators in Tunisia,
Egypt, Libya, and Syria (see, for example, El Houri in this volume; or
Bayat (2015) on the unionization and slum-upgrading movements that
arose in the wake of the Egyptian revolution), and continuing demands
for more direct forms of democracy in the US (where Bernie Sanders’
primary campaign echoed the preoccupations of Occupy), in Hong
Kong (where the call for independence from China is gaining strength),
and in Spain, where Podemos has taken the indignados movement into
the Spanish parliament as the third largest party. It seems imperative,
therefore, to gauge the “success” or “failure” of a protest not so much
from its immediate achievements or, in the case of occupations, their
unavoidable end, than from what it yields in the long term, also through
processes of diffusion, resonance, and versioning.
Aesthetics
As Kraidy argues in this volume, the contestations making up the global
protest wave of the 2010s cannot be understood without looking at their
aesthetic dimension. For him, it is precisely the “peculiar aesthetics of
creative insurgency” that enables it to disperse “the fog” of propaganda
common to oppressive regimes and traditional revolutionary move-
ments. But what are the “peculiar” aesthetics of contemporary protest
movements? What new imaginaries and repertoires of protest (linguis-
tic, visual and acoustic) are emerging and how do they challenge and/or
reproduce dominant cultural regimes? As de Kloet shows in this volume,
the yellow umbrella became the key image during the protests in Hong
Kong in the fall of 2014, not only serving as an aesthetic ideological glue
for the movement itself, but also helping to give the movement visibil-
ity. It was thus a sign rather than a leader that promoted the movement
both locally and globally. The connotations of protection, innocence,
and cheerfulness evoked by the yellow umbrella made it into an ideal
logo for the movement. In his contribution, Harsin shows that aesthetic
strategies were also part and parcel of the rhetoric of the diverse French
conservative activist groups behind La Manif Pour Tous. Facebook con-
stituted a platform to post provocative images, for example of a woman
with a wide-open screaming mouth, her neck wrapped in a barbed wire
tattoo that reads “liberty, fraternity, equality,” while the logos of major
French news channels appeared on her blindfold. Here, the power of
the image—the post became highly popular—is turned against gender
equality.5 Conversely, El Houri shows how an iconic image of Egyptian
soldiers assaulting a woman, beating and stripping her to expose her blue
bra, became a symbol of defiance for protesters during the protests in
Egypt. In Spain, as discussed by Castan Pinos, the Catalan secessionist
movement’s yearly macro protest marches have been complemented by
more aesthetic forms of protests such as performances and flash mobs.
These examples attest to the power of images, sounds, and words
that are mobilized as playful and ironic tactics for political contestation
on all sides. They inject politics with a sense of the quotidian, articu-
lating a non-heroic resistance of the weak, as Majewska shows. Thus,
when analyzing political contestation it is pivotal to include its aesthet-
ics. According to Walter Benjamin, the aesthetic and the political were
aligned for the first time during the rise of the Nazi regime. In his words,
“the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politi-
cal life” (Benjamin 1968, 241). But was this really the first time? Here
we agree with Rancière, who claims that aesthetics and politics are, and
have always been, already entangled (2004). Dominant powers, or in his
words, the police order, are implicated in the distribution of the sensible,
defined as
the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously dis-

closes the existence of something in common and the deliminations that
define the respective parts and positions within it. … Politics revolves
around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the
ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and
the possibilities of times. (12–13)
It is through the distribution of the sensible that the everyday ordering

of society is safeguarded; it is between what is rendered visible, audible,
and tactile, and what is not, that boundaries are drawn. But this distribu-
tion of the sensible at the same time provides the tools for its subversion:
images, sounds, and words can be twisted, turned around, and tweaked
16 E. Peeren et al.
in order to redistribute the sensible and allow for different meanings and
affects to proliferate. An image that was not supposed to be seen can
undermine the legitimatization of a regime, as illustrated by the global
scandal following the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures in 2004. The
distribution of the sensible can also be challenged through a Debordian
tactic of détournement, in which the language and imageries of the ruling
powers are turned against it (Debord and Wolman 1956). During the
protests at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2015, for exam-
ple, protesters appropriated the official slogan of the university, which
referred to “Competent Rebels,” by adding: “Dear University Board, are
we rebellious enough now?” In the same vein, in Hong Kong, protest-
ers used the communist visual language of the Cultural Revolution on a
propaganda poster to make fun of chief executive Leung Chun-ying.
Such tactics of détournement are closely tied to representation itself;
they tweak meanings to produce yet another message. These tactics are
intentional. But often, images start to lead their own life, to have their
own agency, and they may want to do something else than what was
imagined (cf. Mitchell 2005). Take, for example, the image of the tank
man, carrying bags in both hands as if just returned from some daily
shopping, who stopped a tank during the student protests on Tiananmen
Square on June 4, 1989. That image has since traveled the world and its
meanings have multiplied; it has, among others, come to stand for the
power of the individual, for democracy as such, and for the cruelty of
oppression. The image has gained a life of its own, often disconnected
from the events in Beijing on that bloody night. It is an image that has
become part of a global consciousness. As Susan Buck-Morss notes,
images, no longer viewed as copies of a privately owned original, move

into public space as their own reality, where their assembly is an act of the
production of meaning. Collectively perceived, collectively exchanged,
they are the building blocks of culture. (2004, 21)
It is often the visual that is given the limelight when analyzing the aes-
thetics of protest. In an era of ocularcentrism (Jay 1992), the visual is the
sensory mode that seems the easiest to reproduce and the most effective
in grabbing attention in newspapers, on television, and on websites. The
audible, the gustatorial, the olfactory, and the tactile, in particular the
latter three, are more difficult to mediate. Yet sound is also an impor-
tant sensory regime of contestation. Protest songs, for example, have
a long history with the authorities, alerted to and worried by sound’s

affective implications, its power to create shared utopian moments dur-
ing concerts, protest marches and rave parties, and its ability to produce,
literally and metaphorically, noise, often banning these songs or jailing
their performers (Street 2012). The challenge for future research into
contestation remains how to move beyond the visual and the auditory,
how to theorize the redistribution of all the senses and their political
implications.
This challenge also points to the importance of mediation. Protesters,
as well as the authorities against which they protest, are by now deeply
aware of the omnipresence of media in our media-saturated lives.
Contestation thrives on mediation, and the more spectacular its aes-
thetics, the stronger its chances of achieving global mediation. This has
amplified with the rise of new media over the past decades. New technol-
ogies are now mobilized to increase the impact of a protest beyond the
actual protest site. Aesthetics, mediation, and a culture of connectivity
(van Dijck 2013) conflate in today’s politics of contestation. New media
not only turns all protesters into broadcasters, but also allows for a rapid
global spread of images, words, and sounds, resulting in the global pro-
duction of millions of images. As Mitchell writes, “the rapidity and vast
archival capacities of digital media render this material hyperaccessible
to searching and retrieval, while at the same time it threatens to drown
the researcher under a tsunami of material” (2012, 14). This quantita-
tive shift, facilitated by a plethora of connective platforms, has profound
qualitative implications for global cultures of contestation and its aes-
thetic dimensions.
Connectivity
Exploring the qualitative implications of the rise of connective plat-
forms, the contributions to this collection show that platformed activ-
ism is deeply entangled with and shaped by the specific political, cultural,
and socio-economic relations involved in particular episodes of conten-
tion. In the popular press and in some scholarly literature there has been
a strong focus on a small number of large connective platforms, which
are considered central to the mobilization and communication of con-
temporary protest. As Segerberg and Bennett (2011, 200) note, how-
ever, the challenge is not to gauge the impact of specific platforms on
popular contention, but to examine these platforms as part of “complex
18 E. Peeren et al.
communication processes involving many actors and technologies.” This

challenge is taken up in this volume in several ways.
The chapter by Masha Alimardani and Stefania Milan shows that poli-
cymakers tend to reproduce the popular and scholarly fixation on large
platforms. Examining Iranian online contention, the authors discuss how
US “internet freedom” projects have contributed to hyping Twitter as a
crucial platform for Iranian citizens. Yet, as their research suggests, this
does not correspond with the actual experience of users in Iran itself.
Alimardani and Milan found that Iranians tend to turn to Telegram for
contentious communication rather than to Twitter or any of the other
large platforms. For this reason, they label Telegram “a new indigenous
form of emancipatory technology.” In other words, the construction of
particular technologies as political technologies should be understood
within a specific sociopolitical configuration. In this regard, not just par-
ticular modes of protest are subject to versioning, as discussed above, but
so are connective platforms. This is not to say that platforms are sim-
ply localized, but that technologies and local practices mutually articu-
late each other. As Daniel Miller (2013, 153) notes in his research on
the use of Facebook in Trinidad, where the platform is appropriated or
rather “invented” as Fasbook: “Fasbook is invented by Trinidadians at the
same time as Trinidadians are dialectically changed through their use of
Fasbook.” Alimardani and Milan show that this process of dialectic appro-
priation also prominently involves institutional actors. In the case of
Iran, the authoritarian state provided, in the words of the authors, “the
very conditions to make Telegram such a particular phenomenon within
the country,” while US efforts to promote internet freedom especially
enhanced Twitter’s international reputation.
How sociopolitical strategies shape connective platforms is also illus-
trated by Harsin’s chapter on the conservative French activist movement
and campaign Journée de Retrait de l’École (Boycott School Day; BSD).
Harsin traces how this movement employed rumor bombs to attack the
teaching of gender theory in French schools. Here we can see how con-
nective platforms are integrated into a larger political campaign and used
to micro-target rumor messages at specific audiences. In this configura-
tion social media are primarily mobilized as one-way channels of com-
munication rather than as interactive platforms: users were encouraged
to share and act, but not to debate and comment on the movement’s
messages.
These observations are especially interesting as scholars working on

the online circulation of activist content have theorized such circulation
practices through the notion of the “viral” and the “meme,” which sug-
gests spontaneous user-driven processes of digital contagion (Bennett
and Segerberg 2013; Castells 2012; Juris 2012). Harsin’s analysis reveals
the intricate strategies behind such phenomena, helping us to appreciate
how leadership, political strategies, and brokerage continue to play a vital
role in what, from a distance, appear as distributed forms of online activ-
ism. As such, it contributes to the growing body of research demonstrat-
ing that activist leadership and brokerage continue to be important in
popular contention centrally involving connective platforms (Della Ratta
and Valeriani 2012; Gerbaudo 2016; Nunes 2015; Poell et al. 2016).
In trying to understand how connective platforms are shaped as politi-
cal technologies, it is also important to consider how these platforms
are positioned in the larger media landscape. The chapter by Dreher,
Waller, and McCallum on indigenous contestation in Australia is espe-
cially interesting in this regard. They note that, for decades, legacy media
have ignored the voices of First Nations on policy and funding questions,
while indigenous community media have not been able to have a signifi-
cant impact on public discourse and political decision-making. Analyzing
the state-sponsored Recognise campaign for reform of the Australian
Constitution to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peo-
ple, Dreher, Waller, and McCallum show that disruptive activity through
social media can have an impact. Indigenous voices were able to contest
through Facebook and Twitter the terms on which the policy debate was
held, highlight claims for self-determination, and affect the mainstream
political agenda. Yet, as the authors emphasize, mediated popular contes-
tation should not just be evaluated in terms of the ability of marginalized
groups to express their point of view, but also in terms of “listening” on
the part of political elites. From this perspective, the impact of contesta-
tion through platforms is much more ambiguous, and political inequali-
ties and colonial structures still deeply entrenched.
The difficulty of intervening in public space in the face of oppos-
ing state powers and indifferent legacy media is also the starting point
of the chapter by Dima and Cantinho, who adopt a more critical per-
spective on connective platforms. They consider how activist interven-
tions can be preserved and sustained, as many of these interventions
often go unnoticed by the general public and tend to quickly disappear
20 E. Peeren et al.
in the constantly evolving platform ecosystem. In response, the authors

are developing, through a series of workshops, a digital commons space
called Erehwon, which aims to preserve activist attempts to intervene in
public space. Moreover, it aims to contribute to community-building
by bringing together activists, technologists, and scientists. Online, it
focuses on linking activist projects in an interactive visualization that dis-
plays the details of each project and the connections between them. The
authors stress the importance of focusing on connections between pro-
jects instead of between users to “overcome the exhausted logic of social
networking and promotion,” which does not appear to sustain more
durable relations. This assessment echoes concerns voiced by Oliver
Leistert (2013), who argues that today connective platforms increasingly
decide “what fits, not an organized group where each member is com-
mitted to responsibility.” In his mind, “this has many dramatic effects on
duration, sustainability, identity production and … on how robust the
political trajectory can become.”
In combination, the chapters offer a variety of perspectives; each
reflecting on how connective platforms are positioned in larger sociopo-
litical environments. They show that platform connectivity attains a dif-
ferent meaning in each contentious episode, depending on context and
objectives. In this regard, they move beyond the technological determin-
ism and historical presentism observed by Kraidy in many of the available
studies on contemporary protest. In his contribution to this collection,
he argues that much contemporary research tends to ascribe “agency to
machines rather than to humans.” He proposes that public contention is
instead best understood as “sustained by permutations of words, sounds,
and images circulating between a variety of interlocked media platforms”
that create a “hypermedia space.”
While Kraidy warns against ascribing agency to machines rather than
to humans, his observations point in the direction of an actor-network
theory approach, focusing attention on the heterogeneous connections
between words, sounds, images, and technologies. Rather than trying
to understand how either technologies or humans shape public conten-
tion, we need to gain insight into how technologies and humans become
inextricably entangled in contemporary activism. Moving away from the
idea that we are analyzing homogenous sets of relations, this means,
in the words of Bruno Latour (2005, 5), tracing the “trail of associa-
tions between heterogeneous elements.” Following this approach, we
can observe, when studying public contestation, how a wide variety of
practices and technologies shape each other. As demonstrated by the

contributions to this collection, such heterogeneous configurations
are never self-evident or stable, but need to be traced each time anew.
Political strategies, institutional responses, activist tactics, and main-
stream reporting practices shape the role connective platforms play in
particular contentious episodes.
Besides exploring the intricacies of specific sociopolitical configura-
tions, it is simultaneously important to critically and carefully trace how
connective platforms become actors in such configurations. A lot of
research on contemporary social movements still appears to understand
these platforms as activist instruments. Yet, as political economic research
shows, they are primarily commercial enterprises revolving around tar-
geted advertising and data services (Couldry 2015; Fuchs 2013; Turow
2012). These commercial objectives, in turn, inform the development
of platform architectures, which greatly shape how users can express
themselves and connect with each other (Bucher and Helmond pre-
print; Gillespie 2014; van Dijck 2013). Furthermore, platform technolo-
gies and business models are constantly evolving, which means that the
role of connectivity in public contention is always subject to change.
Although connective platforms clearly enable activists to expand the
reach of protest communication and to develop new modes of mobili-
zation, at the same time they appear to complicate the construction of
sustainable communities, as well as efforts to generate sustained public
attention for larger political issues (Langlois et al. 2009; Leistert 2013;
Milan 2015; Poell and van Dijck 2015). In the end, what role connective
platforms play in particular contentious episodes cannot be determined
beforehand, but needs to be carefully explored in relation to the sociopo-
litical practices, activists, institutions, and other actors involved in public
contention. The challenge is to trace how connective platforms become
deeply entangled with these actors, while simultaneously recognizing
that they operate on the basis of very different objectives and concerns.
Notes
1.
Using naturalistic metaphors to discuss social and political phenom-
ena should never be done uncritically and can have severe drawbacks, as
becomes clear, for example, in the current, highly problematic use of the
image of the wave or tsunami in relation to migration.
22 E. Peeren et al.
2. Against this, Gerbaudo (2013, 94) points out that the global protest
wave of the 2010s was slower to spread than the waves of 1848, 1968,
and 1989. However, these earlier waves were arguably more restricted
geographically (to, respectively, Europe, the US and Europe, and Eastern
Europe).
3. In terms of the mobility of protest, it is necessary to consider not only how
protests may inspire each other, but also how cultural dissonance or the
disappointing outcome of particular protests may dissuade others, causing
a protest wave to lose momentum.
4. Significantly, the demand for such an ethos of solidarity has more recently
been overshadowed by a populist nationalist or nativist demand, arguably
in response to the same spreading socially induced precarity, for a restricted
solidarity with only those seen to properly belong to the nation, at the
expense of everyone else.
5. The alliance between aesthetics and the extreme right is of course not
new, as Nazi Germany, too, can be considered a profoundly aestheticized
project (Koepnick 1999).
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CHAPTER 2
The Square and Beyond: Trajectories

and Implications of the Square Occupations
Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian
Introduction
In 2011–2012, the world witnessed a wave of “square occupations”:
from the anti-austerity protests in Southern Europe, to the Arab upris-
ings, to the global Occupy movement. On the face of it, the protests
that emerged in the West against austerity, inequality, and financial mis-
management had a totally different set of preoccupations, aims, and
ideas than the democracy movements in the Arab world and in Russia.
But on closer consideration, it turns out that Occupy Wall Street was
in part inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square, and in turn insti-
gated protests not just in the West but also in Moscow, Yerevan, and,
more recently, Hong Kong. Based on interviews with core activists
in Athens, Cairo, London, and Moscow, we discuss what the square
experience meant to the activists, how the movements have developed
M. Glasius (*)
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: M.E.Glasius@uva.nl
A. Ishkanian
London School of Economics, London, UK
e-mail: a.ishkanian@lse.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 27

E. Peeren et al. (eds.), Global Cultures of Contestation,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63982-6_2
28 M. Glasius and A. Ishkanian
and transformed beyond the squares, and to what extent the square
occupations of 2011–2012 should be considered as a single, networked
movement.
Our research shows that the experience of mobilizing or camping
in squares inspired people to become more active in their own neigh-
borhoods and communities in subsequent months and years. They
introduced new ideas and brought about a significant change in pub-
lic debates on the economy, systems of governance, democracy, as well
as the role of the state and citizens. However, since the square occupa-
tions, the state has become much more repressive, especially in Cairo and
Moscow, and disaffection with representative democracy and neoliberal
economic policies has fed into nativist populism, especially in Athens and
London.
Our Research
Some political scientists have largely ignored the square occupations, or
considered them as inconsequential “symptoms of morbidity” (Schmitter
2015), engaging in self-indulgent and naïve practices (Bauman and
Bordoni 2014), and unable to achieve structural or policy level changes
(Fukuyama 2015). Meanwhile, a literature fueled by “scholar activists”
in anthropology and sociology sets great store by the “prefigurative”
nature of the movements (Maeckelbergh 2011; Pleyers 2011; Graeber
2013; Yates 2015). They examine the cultures of protest and processes
of communication (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012), as well as what hap-
pens after the movements have left the squares (White 2016). A third
set of scholars, from social movement studies, sociology, and philosophy
asserts that activist self-understandings do matter, but approaches them
and their effects more critically. These scholars examine the intersection-
ality of recent movements and how these subjectivities shape demands
(Athanasiou 2014; Ishkanian and Glasius 2016), and they consider
how movement actors negotiate the framing of issues as they mobilize
around interconnected political and economic demands (Calhoun 2013;
Della Porta 2015). Within this third group, in which we locate our own
research, are also scholars who, writing about earlier movements, recog-
nized the significance of “outbreaks of democracy” (Blaug 2000, 148)
or “restorative moments” (Wolin 1994, 23) in shaping state-citizen
relations, but noted that such outbreaks tended to crack when bump-
ing up against repressive state-market complexes. These scholars foresaw
2 THE SQUARE AND BEYOND 29
a future of frequent crises between bankrupt political systems and

insurgent citizens (Holston 2008; Bayat 2013).
We draw inspiration from the scholars in the second and especially the
third category, but they also demonstrate the methodological challenges
in studying this global wave of protests. They either generalize from a
single movement or country they know very well, or travel the world try-
ing to collect as many activist vignettes as possible for a global compari-
son, in a way that is necessarily somewhat methodologically haphazard.
We have approached this challenge by aiming for a meso-level investiga-
tion. We carried out a qualitative comparative study of four capital city
contexts, aiming for the most different cities as well as for within-case
diversity in selecting our activist respondents, but asking the same open
questions of all respondents in all cases.
The four settings for our interviews had one important commonality:
they all witnessed extensive and sustained mobilization, including street
demonstrations and an encampment, in 2011 or early 2012. Beyond
that, we chose them for their differences. Since we aimed to understand
the extent to which activists had similar views and experiences, and were
connected across different settings, we chose cities that are very differ-
ent from each other, and not obviously connected, as London might
be to New York, Cairo to Tunis, or Moscow to Yerevan. We selected a
financial center in a stable Western democracy (London), a peripheral
European democracy with an economy in the midst of instability and cri-
sis (Athens), a stable authoritarian context with a post-communist natu-
ral resource economy (Moscow), and a developing state in the midst of
political instability with an open aid-dependent economy (Cairo). Our
focus on cities avoids the fallacy of making generalizations about a coun-
try based on just capital city observations.
We conducted field research in Athens together, developing a defini-
tive interview guide that we used in the other three cities.1 In each city,
we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15–20 respondents, most
of whom were core activists in square occupations or other forms of
direct action, while some were journalists or representatives of NGOs,
trade unions, or political parties. We selected the people we interviewed
via a snowball sample, but selecting for the greatest possible variety in
political views, age, gender, and class to reflect the much-noted diversity
in the street protests themselves. In Cairo, for instance, we made sure
to interview various shades of liberals, leftists, and Islamists, young and
old, male and female, English speakers and Arabic-only speakers. We did,
30 M. Glasius and A. Ishkanian
Table 2.1 Named respondents
City Pseudonym Age, gender Type of activism
Athens Aiketerine 20s, F anti-police violence; pro-democracy; anti-racism;

anti-austerity & solidarity
Athanasios 30s, M squatting; prisoners’ rights; anti-austerity
Vasilis 30s, M anarchist; pro-democracy; anti-austerity &
solidarity
Cairo Mahmoud 20s, M Palestine solidarity; anti-police violence; pro-
democracy; human rights
Malak 40s, M anti-globalization; social justice; pro-democracy
Salma 40s, F anti-police violence; pro-democracy; anti-GM
foods; feminist
London Alice 30s, F Occupy; anti-austerity & solidarity
Jake 20s, M student; anti-austerity
Thomas 60s, M squatting; coops; Occupy
Moscow Nastya 20s, F Occupy; environmentalist
Pavel 30s, M human rights; election observation; Occupy
Sergey 40s, M anarchism; anti-Chechen war; environmentalist;
Indymedia; anti-globalization
however, focus on those deeply involved, for whom activism, however

they defined it themselves, was an important time commitment and part
of their identity, rather than on occasional demonstrators.
While our analysis draws on our broader base of interviews, for the
purposes of this chapter, in order to provide greater depth and illus-
trate the identity and diversity of the activists, we will focus on and
take quotes from only three respondents in each city, each of whom
was deeply involved in street activism and direct action in 2011–2012
(see Table 2.1). In describing them, we draw on information from the
time of our interviews, in mid-2013. Thus, we provide a window to the
micro-level of their individual reflections, rather than have them speak
as disembodied voices (some of the activists quoted here also feature in
Glasius and Ishkanian 2015). At the same time, we demonstrate that
their views and considerations are also more broadly shared, by regularly
referring to our broader base of interviews. Because some interviewees
were, or subsequently became, at risk we use first-name pseudonyms for
all respondents.
For Athens, we will draw on the interviews with Aiketerine,
Athanasios, and Vasilis. Aiketerine, late 20s, is a humanitarian NGO
worker who has been involved in many forms of street activism in
2 THE SQUARE AND BEYOND 31
Syntagma Square, in the traditional anarchist Exarcheia neighborhood,

and in various other locations. Athanasios, in his late 30s, has worked
with a (squatted) social center for fifteen years, and advocates for prison-
er’s rights. Vasilis, also late 30s, interrupted his academic career in order
to immerse himself in the Athenian Syntagma occupation and went on to
run an organization connecting and supporting solidarity initiatives.
For Cairo, we will focus on Mahmoud, Malak, and Salma. Mahmoud,
early 20s, is a law graduate working for an NGO from a “political fam-
ily,” and he has been involved in street demonstrations since his early
teens. Malak, mid-40s, is a veteran activist with a Marxist and anti-
globalization background, and a known connector between leftist and
Islamist activists. He has a corporate day job. On the other hand, Salma,
an academic in her late forties, did not engage in street activism until she
became part of the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook group in 2010.
All were in Tahrir Square throughout the “18 days” in 2011 that led to
the overthrow of Mubarak.
In London, we will focus on Alice, Jake, and Thomas. Alice, in her
30s, is an architect who camped at St. Paul’s for five months and con-
tinued to engage in direct action afterward. Jake, in his 20s, is a student
activist who was deeply involved in the campaign against cuts in higher
education. Thomas, in his 60s, is a veteran activist who has been involved
in squats, coops, and artist activism all his life.
In Moscow, we will discuss the views and experiences of Nastya, Pavel,
and Sergey. Nastya, a language teacher in her 20s, was a core organ-
izer of the Moscow square occupation Occupy Abai. Pavel, in his 30s,
is a lawyer who works for a human rights NGO and gave lectures about
human rights at Occupy Abai. He was also involved in election observa-
tion and in providing legal aid to activists. Sergey, in his late 40s, has
been involved in various forms of activism since the 1980s. He considers
himself a non-dogmatic anarchist and is also involved with a radical envi-
ronmental organization.
In the sections below, we present the reflections of the activists on the
roots of the square occupations, the square experience itself, its after-
math, and the extent to which the different occupations were part of a
worldwide movement. As we conducted the field research in 2013, the
findings presented here primarily focus on the period from 2011–2013.
We have since conducted follow-up research in two of the four cities
(Athens and London); these findings inform our analysis but they are not
the focus of this chapter. In our discussions of the implications of our
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Europe and
elsewhere
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: Europe and elsewhere
Author: Mark Twain
Author of introduction, etc.: Albert Bigelow Paine
Contributor: Brander Matthews
Release date: July 24, 2022 [eBook #68604]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Harper & Brothers,

Publishers, 1923
Credits: KD Weeks, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUROPE

AND ELSEWHERE ***
Transcriber’s Note:
The few footnotes have been collected at the end of
each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference.
Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been
corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of
this text for details regarding the handling of any textual
issues encountered during its preparation.
The title and author, as well as the publication date,
have been added to the image of the front cover.
Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will
navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the
corrections table in the note at the end of the text.
EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE
AND I ROSE TO RECEIVE MY GUEST, AND BRACED
MYSELF FOR THE
THUNDERCRASH AND THE BRIMSTONE STENCH
WHICH
SHOULD ANNOUNCE HIS ARRIVAL
(See p. 326)
EUROPE
AND ELSEWHERE
By
MARK TWAIN
WITH AN APPRECIATION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
AND AN INTRODUCTION BY
ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE
Copyright, 1923
By The Mark Twain Company
Printed in the U.S.A.
First Edition
E-X
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
An Appreciation vii
Introduction xxxi
I. A Memorable Midnight Experience 1
II. Two Mark Twain Editorials 14
III. The Temperance Crusade and Woman’s 24
Rights
IV. O’Shah 31
V. A Wonderful Pair of Slippers 87
VI. Aix, the Paradise of the Rheumatics 94
VII. Marienbad--A Health Factory 113
VIII. Down the Rhône 129
IX. The Lost Napoleon 169
X. Some National Stupidities 175
XI. The Cholera Epidemic in Hamburg 186
XII. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee 193
XIII. Letters to Satan 211
XIV. A Word of Encouragement for Our Blushing 221
Exiles
XV. Dueling 225
XVI. Skeleton Plan of a Proposed Casting Vote 233
Party
XVII. The United States of Lyncherdom 239
XVIII. To the Person Sitting in Darkness 250
XIX. To My Missionary Critics 273
XX. Thomas Brackett Reed 297
XXI. The Finished Book 299
XXII. As Regards Patriotism 301
XXIII. Dr. Loeb’s Incredible Discovery 304
XXIV. The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger 310
XXV. Instructions in Art 315
XXVI. Sold to Satan 326
XXVII. That Day in Eden 339
XXVIII. Eve Speaks 347
XXIX. Samuel Erasmus Moffett 351
XXX. The New Planet 355
XXXI. Marjorie Fleming, the Wonder Child 358
XXXII. Adam’s Soliloquy 377
XXXIII. Bible Teaching and Religious Practice 387
XXXIV. The War Prayer 394
XXXV. Corn-pone Opinions 399
AN APPRECIATION
(This “Biographical Criticism” was prepared by Prof. Brander

Matthews, as an introduction to the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain’s
Works, published in 1899).
It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary

literature that there is such an entity as the “reading public,”
possessed of a certain uniformity of taste. There is not one public;
there are many publics--as many, in fact, as there are different kinds
of taste; and the extent of an author’s popularity is in proportion to
the number of these separate publics he may chance to please.
Scott, for example, appealed not only to those who relished romance
and enjoyed excitement, but also to those who appreciated his
honest portrayal of sturdy characters. Thackeray is preferred by
ambitious youth who are insidiously flattered by his tacit compliments
to their knowledge of the world, by the disenchanted who cannot
help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and by the less
sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in
sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those
who liked broad caricature (and were therefore pleased with Stiggins
and Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and
were therefore delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul
Dombey and Little Nell) and also of those who asked for unexpected
adventure (and were therefore glad to disentangle the melodramatic
intrigues of Ralph Nickleby).
In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself
Mark Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the
qualities he possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so
widely varied publics--first of all, no doubt, to the public that revels in
hearty and robust fun, but also to the public which is glad to be
swept along by the full current of adventure, which is sincerely
touched by manly pathos, which is satisfied by vigorous and exact
portrayal of character, and which respects shrewdness and wisdom
and sanity and a healthy hatred of pretense and affectation and
sham. Perhaps no one book of Mark Twain’s--with the possible
exception of Huckleberry Finn--is equally a favorite with all his
readers; and perhaps some of his best characteristics are absent
from his earlier books or but doubtfully latent in them. Mark Twain is
many sided; and he has ripened in knowledge and in power since he
first attracted attention as a wild Western funny man. As he has
grown older he has reflected more; he has both broadened and
deepened. The writer of “comic copy” for a mining-camp newspaper
has developed into a liberal humorist, handling life seriously and
making his readers think as he makes them laugh, until to-day Mark
Twain has perhaps the largest audience of any author now using the
English language. To trace the stages of this evolution and to count
the steps whereby the sagebrush reporter has risen to the rank of a
writer of world-wide celebrity, is as interesting as it is instructive.
I
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, at
Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from
Tennessee and who removed soon after his son’s birth to Hannibal,
a little town on the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what
were the circumstances of Mr. Clemen’s boyhood we can see for
ourselves in the convincing pages of Tom Sawyer. Mr. Howells has
called Hannibal “a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-
holding Mississippi town”; and Mr. Clemens, who silently abhorred
slavery, was of a slave-owning family.
When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son
had to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got
little and of book learning still less, but life itself is not a bad teacher
for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his
chances. He spent six years in the printing office of the little local
paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that
stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began
his connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer
the lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as
New York.
When he was nineteen he went back to the home of his boyhood
and presently resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he
learned the river he has told us in Life on the Mississippi, wherein his
adventures, his experiences, and his impressions while he was a
cub pilot are recorded with a combination of precise veracity and
abundant humor which makes the earlier chapters of that marvelous
book a most masterly fragment of autobiography. The life of a pilot
was full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young
Clemens saw and heard and divined during the years when he was
going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of
Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. But toward the end of the
’fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a
carrier; and in the beginning of the ’sixties the Civil War broke out
and the Mississippi no longer went unvexed to the sea. The skill,
slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless,
and at twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling.
As a border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of
the Union and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man
stood doubting, not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has
given us the record of his very brief and inglorious service as a
soldier of the South. When this escapade was swiftly ended, he went
to the Northwest with his brother, who had been appointed Territorial
Secretary of Nevada. Thus the man who had been born on the
borderland of North and South, who had gone East as a jour-printer,
who had been again and again up and down the Mississippi, now
went West while he was still plastic and impressionable; and he had
thus another chance to increase that intimate knowledge of
American life and American character which is one of the most
precious of his possessions.
While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two which
found their way into print. In Nevada he went to the mines and lived
the life he has described in Roughing It, but when he failed to “strike
it rich,” he naturally drifted into journalism and back into a newspaper
office again. The Virginia City Enterprise was not overmanned, and
the newcomer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to
write a sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his
signature. He now began to sign himself Mark Twain, taking the
name from a call of the man who heaves the lead on a Mississippi
River steamboat, and who cries, “By the mark, three,” “Mark Twain,”
and so on. The name of Mark Twain soon began to be known to
those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he was
drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found
casual employment on the Morning Call, and where he joined
himself to a little group of aspiring literators which included Mr. Bret
Harte, Mr. Noah Brooks, Mr. Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles
Warren Stoddard.
It was in 1867 that Mr. Webb published Mark Twain’s first book,
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras; and it was in 1867 that
the proprietors of the Alta California supplied him with the funds
necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the
steamer Quaker City, which had been chartered to take a select
party on what is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly
letters, in which he set forth what befell him on this journey, were
printed in the Alta Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by
the other Californian papers. These letters served as the foundation
of a book published in 1869 and called The Innocents Abroad, a
book which instantly brought to the author celebrity and cash.
Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next
step, his appearance on the lecture platform. Mr. Noah Brooks, who
was present at his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain’s
“method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow,
deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage,
the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, the
surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with
delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word
painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.” In
the thirty years since that first appearance the method has not
changed, although it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one of the
most effective of platform speakers and one of the most artistic, with
an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in spite
of its seeming simplicity.
Although he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and although he
was the author of the most widely circulated book of the decade,
Mark Twain still thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he
gave up the West for the East he became an editor of the Buffalo
Express, in which he had bought an interest. In 1870 he married;
and it is perhaps not indiscreet to remark that his was another of
those happy unions of which there have been so many in the annals
of American authorship. In 1871 he removed to Hartford, where his
home has been ever since; and at the same time he gave up
newspaper work.
In 1872 he wrote Roughing It, and in the following year came his
first sustained attempt at fiction, The Gilded Age, written in
collaboration with Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. The character of
“Colonel Mulberry Sellers” Mark Twain soon took out of this book to
make it the central figure of a play which the late John T. Raymond
acted hundreds of times throughout the United States, the playgoing
public pardoning the inexpertness of the dramatist in favor of the
delicious humor and the compelling veracity with which the chief
character was presented. So universal was this type and so broadly
recognizable its traits that there were few towns wherein the play
was presented in which some one did not accost the actor who
impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer to declare: “I’m the original
of Sellers! Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the Colonel from
me!”
Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at
fiction, Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote Tom
Sawyer, published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered
here and there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the
’seventies he went to Europe again with his family; and the result of
this journey is recorded in A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880.
Another volume of sketches, The Stolen White Elephant, was put
forth in 1882; and in the same year Mark Twain first came forward as
a historical novelist--if The Prince and the Pauper can fairly be called
a historical novel. The year after, he sent forth the volume describing
his Life on the Mississippi; and in 1884 he followed this with the story
in which that life has been crystallized forever, Huckleberry Finn, the
finest of his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its
appeal.
This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by a new firm, in
which the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had
been an associate of Ballantyne and Constable. There was at first a
period of prosperity in which the house issued the Personal Memoirs
of Grant, giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 1886, and in which
Mark Twain himself published A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s
Court, a volume of Merry Tales, and a story called The American
Claimant, wherein “Colonel Sellers” reappears. Then there came a
succession of hard years; and at last the publishing house in which
Mark Twain was a partner failed, as the publishing house in which
Walter Scott was a partner had formerly failed. The author of
Huckleberry Finn at sixty found himself suddenly saddled with a load
of debt, just as the author of Waverley had been burdened full
threescore years earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it,
as Scott had done before him. More fortunate than the Scotchman,
the American has lived to pay the debt in full.
Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a
third Mississippi River tale, Pudd’nhead Wilson, issued in 1894; and
a third historical novel Joan of Arc, a reverent and sympathetic study
of the bravest figure in all French history, printed anonymously in
Harper’s Magazine and then in a volume acknowledged by the
author in 1896. As one of the results of a lecturing tour around the
world he prepared another volume of travels, Following the Equator,
published toward the end of 1897. Mention must also be made of a
fantastic tale called Tom Sawyer Abroad, sent forth in 1894, of a
volume of sketches, The Million Pound Bank-Note, assembled in
1893, and also of a collection of literary essays, How to Tell a Story,
published in 1897.
This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain’s life--such a brief
summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the
conditions under which the author has developed and the stages of
his growth. It will serve, however, to show how various have been his
forms of activity--printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer,
novelist, publisher--and to suggest the width of his experience of life.
II
A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps this
is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity breeds
contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason) we
tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those
who make us weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing
tears quite as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the
reason, the fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the
penalty of his humor; he must run the risk of being tolerated as a
mere fun maker, not to be taken seriously, and unworthy of critical
consideration. This penalty has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of
the discussions of American literature he is dismissed as though he
were only a competitor of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John
Phœnix, instead of being, what he is really, a writer who is to be
classed--at whatever interval only time may decide--rather with
Cervantes and Molière.
Like the heroines of the problem plays of the modern theater, Mark
Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little
promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works.
Mr. Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised, if he wished to
“see genuine specimens of American humor, frolicsome,
extravagant, and audacious,” to look up the sketches which the then
almost unknown Mark Twain was printing in a Nevada newspaper.
The humor of Mark Twain is still American, still frolicsome,
extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper now and richer, and it has
taken unto itself other qualities existing only in germ in these
firstlings of his muse. The sketches in The Jumping Frog and the
letters which made up The Innocents Abroad are “comic copy,” as
the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not altogether unlike
what John Phœnix had written and Artemus Ward, better indeed
than the work of these newspaper humorists (for Mark Twain had it
in him to develop as they did not), but not essentially dissimilar.
And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark
Twain is only the author of these genuine specimens of American
humor. For when the public has once made up its mind about any
man’s work, it does not relish any attempt to force it to unmake this
opinion and to remake it. Like other juries, it does not like to be
ordered to reconsider its verdict as contrary to the facts of the case.
It is always sluggish in beginning the necessary readjustment, and
not only sluggish, but somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help
seeing the later works of a popular writer from the point of view it had
to take to enjoy his earlier writings. And thus the author of
Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc is forced to pay a high price for the
early and abundant popularity of The Innocents Abroad.
No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their
elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of
earlier funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his
predecessors. No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and
highly colored, and may even be called forced, not to say violent. No
doubt, also, they did not suggest the seriousness and the
melancholy which always must underlie the deepest humor, as we
find it in Cervantes and Molière, in Swift and in Lowell. But even a
careless reader, skipping through the book in idle amusement, ought
to have been able to see in The Innocents Abroad that the writer of
that liveliest of books of travel was no mere merry-andrew, grinning
through a horse collar to make sport for the groundlings; but a
sincere observer of life, seeing through his own eyes and setting
down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also with
profound respect for the eternal verities.
George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty
themes “debasers of the moral currency.” Mark Twain is always an
advocate of the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm
an affectation with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence
for the things that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old
Masters that he scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip service
to things which they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a
painting or a legend that does not seem to him to deserve the
appreciation in which it is held he refuses to affect an admiration he
does not feel; he cannot help being honest--he was born so. For

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Global Cultures of Contestation:

Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics &

A Theory of Global Governance : Authority, Legitimacy,

A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy,

Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability Robert

Women Across Cultures: A Global Perspective 3rd

The Virtues of Sustainability 1st Edition Jason Kawall

The Contestation of Expertise in the European Union 1st

Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco

Edited by ESTHER PEEREN,

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949215

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Global Cultures of Contestation 1

2 The Square and Beyond: Trajectories and Implications

3 Weak Resistance in Semi-Peripheries: The Emergence

4 Challenging the Nation-State’s Territorial Integrity

5 A Radical Reframing of Civil Disobedience:

6 Biopolitical and Phenomenological Underpinnings

7 Whose Space Is It Anyway? Practices of Protest

8 Umbrellas and Revolutions: The Aesthetics

9 The Internet as a Global/Local Site of Contestation:

10 Tactical Connecting and (Im-)Mobilizing

11 Disruption or Transformation? Australian Policymaking

12 Erehwon: A Digital Platform for Empowering

About the Editors

Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis

Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Director of the

Mahsa Alimardani is an internet researcher focused on the intersection

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Dutch Research

Bernardo Caycedo is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Department of

Walid El Houri is a researcher, journalist, and filmmaker living between

and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia,

Stefania Milan (stefaniamilan.net) is Assistant Professor of New Media

Introduction: Global Cultures

Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet

E. Peeren (*) · R. Celikates · J. de Kloet · T. Poell

© The Author(s) 2018 1

usefully indicates how unexpected transnational proliferations of protest

The protests also borrowed from each other in terms of their

forms of material and symbolic production (Williams 1988) through

by global media independently of those involved in a particular contes-

constitutes civil disobedience in today’s globalized world is taken up by

anti-austerity 15-M Movement or Pegida—depends on the specific con-

frames, or targets of those in other countries or regions,” and is seen to

somewhere in between deliberate volition, biologically motivated

Combining diffusion with resonance allows an accounting for both

As Glasius and Ishkanian, de Kloet, and El Houri emphasize in their

demand for higher wages in a particular profession broadened, as a result

Claiming that the temporal and formal unsustainability of the protests

the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously dis-

It is through the distribution of the sensible that the everyday ordering

images, no longer viewed as copies of a privately owned original, move

a long history with the authorities, alerted to and worried by sound’s

communication processes involving many actors and technologies.” This