This chapter discusses the ways in which collective identity fuels mobilization in Chile’s urban margins. It looks at how activists’ cohesiveness and their differentiation from other social actors produce a mobilizing identity that advances contentious politics. The chapter draws on participant observations and interviews to outline the contents and dynamics of political consciousness production in Santiago’s urban margins. In their interactions, activists wield discourses of informality and marginality to strengthen a sense of pride in their neighborhood that is immune to hegemonic narratives of stigmatization. The thick boundaries that local activists use to promote mobilization depend on them dynamically differentiating between two realms of collective experience: the formal and the informal. On the one hand, the informal represents the protected sphere of confidence and close connections within neighborhood organizations. Activism works as a way of keeping the informal alive. The formal, on the other hand, is seen as a threat that motivates protective collective action. Finally, the chapter shows how activists’ reactive and defensive mobilization generates a sense of self-determination.

Between the years 1793 and 1796, a proliferation of small, creamware ale mugs and jugs, transfer-printed in enamel, were made by regional English ceramic factories. These relatively affordable wares depicted scaled-down images of the most infamous scenes of the French Revolution. Used in taverns and in the home, these printed ceramics formed part of what Jon Mee has called the “conversable world”; they raise significant questions about the complex nature of counter- and prorevolutionary sentiment in England. Encoded with a multiplicity of meanings, they had the capacity to act as historical and political agents. This chapter situates these pots within wider conversations around the sociocultural aesthetics of ceramics, and examines the processes involved in, and the material and historical consequences of, scaling down such monumental events onto handheld objects.

Native Hawaiian literature has always provided a foundation of knowledge suggesting a course of action, particularly in times of tremendous social, cultural, and political upheaval. In this way, such literature has always been intertwined with politics. Despite settler colonial attempts to appropriate or subvert the political power of Hawaiian literature, Native Hawaiians continue to evoke traditional orature and compose new literature to directly respond to conditions of settler colonialism, while celebrating the beauty, complexity and continuity of our people and our connection to our land and culture. This essay traces the origins and development of Hawaiian literature as a strategy of national political and cultural consciousness. Reclaiming Indigenous literature from the settler colonial imaginary is an integral part of Hawaiian identity, sovereignty, and nation building. In practice and performance, contemporary Hawaiian literature is an expression of kū mau mau, standing together with a cohesive political purpose to uplift the nation.