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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
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Poell
Robin Celikates Department of Media Studies
Department of Philosophy University of Amsterdam
University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
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
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maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Photo of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement by Jeroen de Kloet

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 5

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 7

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 9

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.
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 11

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 13

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL CULTURES OF CONTESTATION 15

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
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to await the dawn to fly home, for owls fly in the early twilight, and
hawks come later, and I wished to have a safe path through the air.
Now I am at home—I am hungry and thirsty."
The first thing I did with my new pigeons was to give them food and
fresh water. I never let them drink the water they bathed in. Since
Gay-Neck's wing smelled of fish, I gave him separate quarters from
the other pigeons. It took three days longer and three good baths
before Gay-Neck was fit for decent society. In passing, let me remark
that my father made me return the money to the man who had
bought Gay-Neck with such deplorable results. To tell you the truth, I
did not wish to then. But now I feel I did right in obeying my parent.
After a fortnight and before unbinding the wings of my newly
acquired pigeons, I bribed them to love me. Every morning I would
put some millet seed and peanuts in ghee (clarified butter). After
they had been soaked in butter all day, I gave a dozen each to every
one of my pets. They were so fond of those delicacies that in two
days' time they had formed the habit of coming to me before five in
the afternoon, begging for buttered seeds. In three more days I freed
their wings, in a subtle way, undoing them about fifteen minutes
before five. They all flew off the moment they felt their liberty. But lo,
after the first exhilaration of finding their freedom had passed, they
flew down to the roof again for their meal of buttered peanuts and
millet seeds! It is a pity that we have to win our pigeons' confidence
by feeding their stomachs, but alas! I have noticed that there are
many men and women who resemble pigeons in this respect!
CHAPTER II
 WAR TRAINING (Continued)
he new pigeons gradually learnt to fly further and
further away from the house as day followed day.
At the end of a month they were taken a distance
of fifty miles and more and uncaged, and with the
exception of two who apparently fled home to their
previous owner, all returned to me under Gay-
Neck's leadership.
The question of an undisputed leadership was not an easy one to
settle. In fact a serious battle had to be fought out between Gay-
Neck and two new males, Hira and Jahore. The last named was a
pure black tumbler. His feathers shone like panther's fur. He was
gentle and not fierce, yet he refused to submit to Gay-Neck's
leadership of the entire flock. You know how quarrelsome and full of
display carriers generally are. On my roof all the carrier males used
to strut, coo and talk as if each one of them was the monarch of all
he surveyed. If Gay-Neck thought himself Napoleon, Hira (Diamond),
the white carrier,—(as white "as the core of sunlight," to express it
poetically)—considered himself Alexander the Great, while Jahore
(Black Diamond), though not a carrier, let it be known that he was
Julius Cæsar and Marshal Foch rolled in one. Besides those three,
there were other conceited males, but they had already been beaten
in battle by one or the other of the above three. Now it was
necessary to fight out the question of absolute leadership of the
entire flock.
One day Hira was seen preening his wings and talking nonsense in
the presence of Mrs. Jahore, a beautiful jet black creature with eyes
red as bloodstone. Matters had hardly gone any distance when from
nowhere came Jahore and fell up on Hira. The latter was so
infuriated that he fought like a fiend. Beak against beak, feet against
feet, and wings pitted against wings. All the other pigeons fled from
the ring where the two males were engaged in trouncing each other.
Gay-Neck stood over them, calm as an umpire over a tennis match.
At last, after half a dozen set-tos, Hira won. Puffing himself to the
uttermost limits of his conceit, he went over to Mrs. Jahore as much
as to say: "Madame, your husband is a coward. Behold what a fine
fellow I am, Buk, bukoom, kumkum." She gave him one crushing
look of contempt, and flapping her wings withdrew to her husband in
their home. Hira looked crestfallen and sulky in turn, then in a
sudden paroxysm of anger he fell upon Gay-Neck tooth and nail.
The latter, taken unaware, was very nearly knocked out at the first
fury of the attack. Hira pecked and slapped him till he felt too dizzy to
stand up, so Gay-Neck ran away pursued by the mad fellow. They
ran in a circle, spinning like two tops, I could hardly see which was
pursuer, and which pursued. They went at such high speed that I
could not see when they stopped and started to peck and slap each
other. The explosive sound of wing hitting wing filled the air with an
ominous clamour. Now feathers began to fly in every direction.
Suddenly, beak to beak and claw in claw they wrestled and spun on
the floor—two birds become one single incarnation of fury. Seeing
that they could not reach any decision that way, Gay-Neck extricated
himself from his rival's grip and flew up in the air. Hira followed
flapping his wings tremendously fast. About three feet above the
ground Gay-Neck put his claws like talons around Hira's windpipe,
and set to squeezing it more and more tightly, and at the same time
kept up a terrific cannonade of wing-beats, that like flails of steel
threshed out a shower of snowy feathers from his opponent's body.
Now, hid in that falling blizzard of feathers, the two rolled on the
ground, pecking one another with the virulence of two maddened
serpents. At last Hira let go and wilted like a torn white flower on the
floor. One of his legs had been dislocated. As for Gay-Neck his
throat and neck had hardly any feathers left. But he was glad that the
struggle had been settled one way or another. And he knew full well
that had Hira not first expended half his strength fighting Jahore he,
Gay-Neck, might not have won the battle. However, all is well that
ends well. I bandaged and did all that was necessary to Hira's leg. In
another thirty minutes all the pigeons were eating their last meal of
the day utterly oblivious of what had happened so recently. No
sulking and bearing of grudges in their blood—no doubt they all
came from a fine set of ancestors! Good breeding prevailed even
amongst the smallest of them, and needless to add Hira took his
defeat like a gentleman.
By now January had come, with cool weather and clear skies and
the competition for pigeon prizes began. Each man's flock was
tested on three points: namely, team-work, long distance flight, and
flight under danger. We won the first prize on the first point, but I am
sorry to say that owing to a sad mishap which you shall learn of in its
proper place, my pigeons could not compete for the other two.
This is the nature of the team-work competition. The various flocks of
pigeons fly away up from their respective homes. Once they are
beyond the reach of whistling and other sounds that indicate their
master's voice, the diverse flocks coalesce. Then spontaneously
they agree to fly under the leadership of a pigeon whom they
consider fit. All that happens up in the air where pigeon-wit and
pigeon instinct prevail, and the bird who flies forward and is allowed
to lead, does so without ever realizing the nature and the reason of
the honour that has been bestowed on him.
The temperature dropped to forty-five. It was a fine cold morning for
our part of India, in fact the coldest day of the year. The sky above,
as usual in the winter, was cloudless and remote, a sapphire
intangibility. The city houses—rose, blue, white, and yellow—looked
like an army of giants rising from the many-coloured abyss of dawn.
Far off the horizons burnt in a haze of dun and purple. Men and
women in robes of amber and amethyst, after having said their
morning prayers to God, were raising their arms from the house-tops
in gestures of benediction to the rising sun. City noises and odours
were unleashed from their kennels of the night. Kites and crows
were filling the air with their cries. Over the din and clamour one
could yet hear the song of the flute players. At that moment the
signal whistle blew that the contest had begun, and each pigeon
fancier waved from his roof a white flag. Instantly from nowhere
innumerable flocks of pigeons rose into the sky. Flock upon flock,
colour upon colour, their fluttering wings bore them above the city.
Crows and kites—the latter of two species, red and brown—fled from
the sky before the thundering onrush of tens of thousands of carriers
and tumblers. Soon all the flocks—each flying in the shape of a fan
—circled in the sky like so many clouds caught in large whirlpools of
air. Though each moment they ascended higher, for a long time each
owner of a flock knew his own from the others, and even when at
last the separate flocks merged into one single unit and flew like a
solid wall of wings, I could pick out by the way they flew, Gay-Neck,
Hira, Jahore and half a dozen others. Each bird had personal
characteristics that marked him as he flew. When any owner wished
to call the attention of any one of his pigeons, he blew a shrill whistle
with certain stops as a signal. That attracted the bird's attention
provided he was within reach of the sound.
At last the whole flock reached such a height that not even the blast
of a trumpet from any pigeon fancier could reach it. Now they
stopped circling in the air and began to move horizontally. The
competition for leadership had begun. As they manoeuvred from one
direction of the heavens to another we, the owners below, had to
look up intently in order to make sure of the characteristics of the
one whom the pigeons had trusted to lead their flight. For a moment
it looked as if my Jahore would lead. But hardly had he gone to the
head of the flock when they all turned to the right. That brought
about a confusion in the ranks, and, like horses on a race course, all
kinds of unknown pigeons pushed forward. But in time each one of
them was pushed back by the rest of the flock. This happened so
often that we began to lose interest in the contest. It looked as
though some nondescript pigeon would win the coveted leadership
prize.
Now suddenly rose the cry from many house-tops: "Gay-Neck, Gay-
Neck, Gay-Neck!" Yes, many of the pigeon fanciers were shouting
that name. Now I could see—without the slightest shadow of error—
my own bird at the head of that vast flock—a leader amongst leaders
—directing their manoeuvres. Oh! what a glorious moment. He led
them from horizon to horizon, each time rising a few feet higher till by
eight in the morning not a pigeon could be seen in any corner of the
sky. Now we furled our flags and went downstairs to study our
lessons. At midday, when again we went above, each man could see
the entire wall of pigeons descending. Lo! Gay-Neck was still
leading. Again rose the shout "Gay-Neck, Gay-Neck!" Yes, he had
won the palm, for he had remained in leadership for more than four
hours, and was coming down as he had gone up—a master!
Now came the most dangerous part of the flight. The Commander of
the vast concourse gave the order to disband, and flock after flock
split from the main body, each separate flock flying away to its home.
But not too quickly. Some must guard the sky above them while the
others flew homeward. Gay-Neck held my little flock in a kind of
umbrella formation to protect the rear of the receding pigeons
belonging to other contestants. Such is the price of leadership—the
other name of self-sacrifice.
But now began a horrible climax. In India during the winter the
buzzards called Baz, come south. They do not eat carrion; like the
eagle and the hawk the Baz generally eats what he kills with his own
talons. They are mean and cunning—I think they are a class of low-
born eagles—but they resemble kites, although their wings are not
frayed at the ends. They fly in pairs slightly above a flock of kites and
are hidden by them from their prey, which however they can see in
this way without ever being seen themselves.
On that particular day just when Gay-Neck had won the leader's
laurels, I perceived a pair of Baz flying with a flock of kites. Instantly I
put my fingers in my mouth and blew a shrill whistle. Gay-Neck
understood my signal. He redistributed his followers, he himself
leading the centre, while Jahore and Hira he ordered to cover the
two ends of the crescent, in which shape the flock was flying. The
entire group held together as though it were one vast bird. They then
began to dip down faster and faster. By now the task for which they
tarried in the heavens was done. All the other flocks that they had
played with in the morning had gone home.
Seeing them dip down so fast, a Baz fell in front of them like a stone
dropping from a Himalayan cliff. Just when he had descended to the
level of my birds, he opened his wings and faced them. This was no
new tactic, for it has been used in the past by every Baz in order to
strike terror into a flock of pigeons. That it succeeds in ten cases out
of eleven is undeniable for when it happens the terror-struck pigeons
lose their sense of solidarity and fly pell mell in every direction. No
doubt that was what the Baz hoped for now, but our wily Gay-Neck
beating his wings flew without a tremor under the enemy about five
feet, drawing the whole flock after him. He did it, knowing that the
enemy never pounces upon a solidly unified group. But hardly had
he gone a hundred yards forward when the second, probably Mrs.
Baz, fell in front of the pigeons and opened her wings as her
husband had done. But Gay-Neck paid no attention. He led the
whole flock straight toward her. It was inconceivable. No pigeon had
dared do that before, and she fled from their attack. Hardly had her
back been turned when Gay-Neck and the rest of the pigeons dipped
and swooped as fast as they could go. By now they were hardly six
hundred feet from our roof, and then as fate would have it, Mr. Baz,
like a shell full of high explosives, fell again, this time right in the
middle of the crescent and opened his wings and beak like forks of
fire, crying and shrieking with fury. That produced its effect. Instead
of one solid wall of pigeons, the flock was cut in two, of which one
half followed Gay-Neck, while the other, smitten with abject fear, flew
none knew whither. Gay-Neck did what a true leader does in great
crises. He followed that panic-stricken flock until his section overtook
it, and in no time, lo, they had merged into a single group once more.
Hardly had that taken place when Mrs. Baz in her turn descended
like a thunderbolt between him and the other pigeons. She almost
fell on his tail, and cut him off from the rest, who now, deprived of
their mentor, sought safety in flight, paying no heed to anything. That
isolated Gay-Neck completely, and exposed him to attacks from
every side. Still undaunted he tried to fly down to his retreating
followers. Ere he had descended a dozen feet, down before him
swooped Mr. Baz. Now that Gay-Neck saw the enemy so near, he
grew more audacious and tumbled. It was a fortunate action. Had he
not done so, Mrs. Baz, who had shot out her talons from behind,
would have captured him then and there.
In the meantime the rest of my pigeons were beating on and had
almost reached home. They were falling on the roof as ripe fruits fall
from a tree. But one among them was not a coward. On the contrary
he was of the very essence of bravery. It was Jahore, the black
diamond. As the whole crowd settled down on our roof, he tumbled
and flew higher. There was no mistake about his intentions. He was
going to stand by Gay-Neck. Seeing him tumble again, Mr. Baz
changed his mind. He gave up pursuing Gay-Neck and swooped
down after Jahore. Well, you know Gay-Neck—he dipped to the
rescue of Jahore—circling and curving swiftly as a coil of lightning,
leading Mrs. Baz panting after him. She could not make as many
curves as Gay-Neck, no, not nearly so many. But Mr. Baz, who was
a veteran, had flown up and up to take aim; this put Jahore in
danger. One more wrong turn and Mr. Baz would have him. Alas!
poor bird; he did the thing he should not have done. He flew in a
straight line below Mr. Baz who at once shut his wings and fell like a
thunderclap of Silence. No noise could be heard, not even "the
shadow of a sound." Down, down, down, he fell, the very image of
death. Then the most terrible thing happened. Between him and
Jahore slipped, none knew how, Gay-Neck, in order to save the
latter and frustrate the enemy. Alas! instead of giving up the attack,
the Baz shot out his talons, catching a somewhat insecure hold of
the intruder. A shower of feathers covered the air. One could almost
see Gay-Neck's body writhing in the enemy's grip. As if a hot iron
had gone through me I shrieked with pain for my bird! But nothing
availed. Round and round, higher and higher that Baz carried him
trying to get a more secure hold with his talons. I must admit
something most humiliating here. I had been so intent on saving
Gay-Neck that I did not notice when Mrs. Baz fell and captured
Jahore. It must have happened very swiftly right after Gay-Neck was
caught. Now the air was filled with Jahore's feathers. The enemy
held him fast in her talons, and he made no movement to free
himself. But not so Gay-Neck; he was still writhing in the grip of Mr.
Baz. As if to help her husband to grasp his prey more securely, Mrs.
Baz flew very close to her lord. Just then Jahore struggled to get
free. That swung her so near that her wing collided with her
husband's. The fellow lost his balance. As he was almost over-
turned in the air with another shower of feathers Gay-Neck wrenched
himself free from his grip. Now he dropped down, down, down.... In
another thirty seconds a panting, bleeding bird lay on our roof. I lifted
him up in order to examine his wound. His two sides were torn, but
not grievously. At once I took him to the pigeon doctor who dressed
his wounds. It took about half an hour, and when I returned home
and put Gay-Neck in his nest, I could not find Jahore anywhere. His
nest, alas, was empty. And when I went up to the roof there I found
Jahore's wife sitting on the parapet scanning every direction of the
sky for a sign of her husband. Not only did she spend that day, but
two or three more in the same manner. I wonder if she found any
consolation in the fact that her husband sacrificed himself for the
sake of a brave comrade.
CHAPTER III
 MATING OF GAY-NECK
ay-Neck's wounds healed very slowly. Until
about the middle of February he could not be made
to fly more than ten yards above the roof. The
duration of his flight too was very short. No matter
how frequently I chased him off the roof, I could not
keep him in the air more than a quarter of an hour.
At first I thought that it was his lungs that were out
of order. When, after investigation, they proved sound, I ascribed his
disinclination to fly to his heart that might have been injured by his
latest mishap. That assumption also proved erroneous after a
second investigation.
So, utterly exasperated by Gay-Neck's behaviour, I wrote a long
letter to Ghond describing everything that had happened. It turned
out that he had gone on a hunting trip with some Englishmen.
Receiving no help from that quarter, I decided to examine my pigeon
most closely. Day after day I put him on our house-top and watched,
but no clue was vouchsafed me as to the nature of his trouble. So I
gave up all hope of seeing Gay-Neck fly again.
About the end of February I received a cryptic note from Ghond from
the deeps of the jungle. It read: "Your pigeon is frightened. Cure him
of his fear. Make him fly." But he did not say how. Nor could I devise
anything that would make Gay-Neck wing his way into the higher
spaces. It was no use chasing him off the roof, for if I chased him off
one corner, he flew across to another and perched there. And what
was most disconcerting was that if the shadow of a cloud or a flock
of birds flying in the sky fell on him on our roof, he would tremble
with terror. Doubtless every shadow that fell filled his mind with the
feeling that it was a Baz or a falcon swooping down on him. That
gave me an idea of how badly shaken Gay-Neck was. How to cure
him of his disease of fear proved most baffling. Had we been in the
Himalayas I would have taken him to the holy man who once healed
him of a similar ailment, but here in the city there was no Lama. I
was forced to wait.
March had ushered in Spring and Gay-Neck, who had gone through
an unusual moulting, looked like the very heart of a deep and large
aquamarine. He was beautiful beyond description. One day, I know
not how, I found him talking to Jahore's widow. She looked very
bright with the advent of Spring. In the sunlight her black opal
complexion glowed like a tropical night shot with stars. Of course I
knew that marriage between her and Gay-Neck, though not the best
thing for their offspring, might win him from his fear and her from the
morose temper which had grown upon her ever since Jahore died.
In order to encourage their friendship, I took the two together in a
cage to my friend Radja who lived on the edge of the jungle about
two hundred miles away. The name of his village was Ghatsila. It
stood on the bank of a river across which lay high hills densely
forested and full of all kinds of animals. Radja, being the priest of the
village, which office his ancestors had held for ten centuries, and his
parents, were housed in a large building of concrete. The village
temple, also of concrete, was adjacent to the house. In the courtyard
of the temple surrounded by high walls Radja every night performed
the duty of reading the Scriptures and explaining them to the
peasantry that assembled there. While he would read aloud inside,
outside would come from far off the yell of a tiger or the trumpeting of
wild elephants across the narrow river. It was a beautiful and sinister
place. Nothing dangerous happened in the village of Ghatsila, but
you did not have to go very far to encounter any beast of prey that
you cared to seek.
The train that brought me there reached Ghatsila at night. Radja and
two servants of his house greeted me at the station. One of the
servants took my bundle on his shoulder and the other carried the
cage with the two pigeons. Each of us had to carry a hurricane-proof
lantern, an extra one having been brought for me. In single file, one
servant leading and another in the rear, we walked for an hour. My
suspicions were aroused and I asked, "Why do we go round-about?"
Radja said: "In the spring wild animals pass through here going
north. We can't take short cuts through the woods."
"Nonsense!" I exclaimed. "I have done it many times before. When
do we reach home?"
"In half an hour——"
Then, as if the very ground had opened at our feet and belched out a
volcano with a terrific noise, arose the cry "Hoa—ho—ho—ho—hoa!"
The pigeons fluttered their wings in panic in their cage. I gripped
Radja's shoulder with my disengaged hand, but instead of sharing
my feelings he laughed out loud. And like master like servant—the
two servants laughed too.
After their mirth had subsided Radja explained: "You have done this
many times, have you? Then why did the cry of monkeys frightened
by lanterns scare you?"
"Monkeys?" I questioned.
"Yes, lots of them," my friend reminded me, "go north this time of the
year. We frightened a whole flock in the trees overhead. That's all. In
the future don't take every monkey yell for the roar of a tiger."
Fortunately we reached home shortly without any other incident to
upset my complacency.
The next morning Radja went to his duties at his ancestral temple
while I sought the roof and uncaged my birds. At first they were
bewildered, but seeing me near them with my hands full of buttered
seeds, they settled down to breakfast without any ado. Pretty nearly
all of that day we spent on the roof. I dared not leave them by
themselves very long lest the strangeness of their surroundings
upset them.
In the course of the week that followed the two birds made
themselves at home in Ghatsila, and moreover became extremely
intimate with each other. There was no doubt now that I had acted
wisely in isolating them from the rest of the flock. About the eighth
day of our stay, Radja and I were surprised to see Gay-Neck fly in
pursuit of his mate. She flew on, but at a low altitude. He followed.
Seeing him catch up to her, she rose and turned back. He too did the
same and followed after. Again she rose. But this time he balked and
began to circle the air beneath her. However, I felt that he was
regaining his confidence. At last Gay-Neck, the paragon of pigeons,
was healing himself of his fear and of his horror of the heavens; he
was once more at home in the sky.
The next morning the birds flew higher and played with each other.
Gay-Neck again refused to go all the way and he began to come
down hastily instead of circling in the air below her. That puzzled me,
but Radja, who was a keen person, explained. "A cloud, large as a
fan, has come over the sun. Its shadow fell so suddenly that Gay-
Neck thought it was his enemy. Wait until the cloud passes and then
——"
Radja was right. In a few more seconds the sun came out and its
light dripped from Gay-Neck's wings once more. At once he stopped
coming downwards and began to make circles in the air. His mate
too, who had been coming down to keep him company, waited for
him a hundred feet or so above. Now Gay-Neck rose, beating his
wings like an eagle freed from his cage. The sunlight made pools of
colour about him as he swerved and swung up and up. Soon instead
of following, he led his mate. Thus they ascended the sky—he
healed of fear completely, and she ravished by his agility and power.
The next morning both of them made an early start. They flew far
and very long. For a while they were lost beyond the mountains as if
they slid over their peaks and down the other side. They were gone
at least an hour.
At last they returned about eleven o'clock bearing each in his beak a
large straw. They were going to build a nest for the laying of eggs. I
thought I would take them home, but Radja insisted that we should
stay at least a week longer.
During that week every day we spent some hours in the more
dangerous jungle across the river, taking the two pigeons with us in
order to release them in the dense forest hardly five miles from
Radja's house. Gay-Neck forgot everything save testing his sense of
direction and making higher flights. In other words, love for his mate
and the change of place and climate healed him of fear, that most fell
disease.
Here let it be inscribed in no equivocal language that almost all our
troubles come from fear, worry, and hate. If any man catches one of
the three, the other two are added unto it. No beast of prey can kill
his victim without frightening him first. In fact no animal perishes until
its destroyer strikes terror into its heart. To put it succinctly, an
animal's fear kills it before its enemy gives it the final blow.
CHAPTER IV
 WAR CALLS GAY-NECK
y the first week of August, just after the children
were born, Hira and Gay-Neck had gone from
Calcutta to Bombay, setting sail with Ghond to
serve in the world-war. I sent that bachelor bird Hira
with Gay-Neck because the army had need of both.
I was very glad that Gay-Neck had some knowledge
of his little ones before he sailed for the battle-field
of Flanders and France. The chief reason of this happiness was
because I knew that a pigeon whose wife and new-born children are
waiting at home rarely fails to return. That bond of love between Gay-
Neck and his family assured me that he would do his work of carrying
messages very well. No sound of gun-fire, nor bullets, as long as he
lived, could keep him from returning home at the end.
But here one may raise the question that home was in Calcutta and
the war was thousands of miles away. That is true. But all the same,
because he had left his wife and children at home, he would do his
utmost to fly back to his temporary nest with Ghond.
It is said that Gay-Neck carried several important messages between
the front and general headquarters where the Commander-in-chief
and Ghond waited for him. Of course Gay-Neck was attached to
Ghond first. But in the course of the following months he became very
fond of the Chief.
Ghond and not I went to the front with the two pigeons for I was under
age and ineligible for any kind of service, so the old fellow had to take
them. During the voyage out from India to Marseilles, Hira and Gay-
Neck and the old hunter became fast friends. I have yet to see any
strange animal resist Ghond's friendship long, and since my pigeons
had known him before, it was easy for them to respond to him.
During the stay of the Indian Army in Flanders from September 1914
till the following spring, Ghond remained near General Headquarters
with his cage, while Hira or Gay-Neck was taken by different units to
the front. There from time to time messages were written on thin
paper weighing no more than an ounce and were tied to his feet; then
he was released. He, Gay-Neck, invariably flew to Ghond at the
general headquarters of the Army. There the message was
deciphered and answered by the Commander-in-Chief himself. It is
rumoured that the latter personage loved Gay-Neck and valued his
services highly.
But it is better to listen to Gay-Neck's own story. As the experiences
of a dream cannot be told except by the dreamer, so some of the
adventures of Gay-Neck he should recount in person.
"After we crossed the black water—the Indian ocean and the
Mediterranean—we travelled by rail through a very strange country.
Though it was September, yet that country—France—was cold as
Southern India in the winter. I expected to see snow-capped
mountains and giant trees, for I thought I was nearing the Himalayas.
But no hills higher than our tallest bamboo trees could I perceive on
the horizon. I do not see why a land has to be cold when it is not high.
"At last we reached the battle front. It turned out to be the rear end of
it, but even there you could hear the boom, boom, boom of the fire-
spitters. And, as a normal pigeon, I hate all fire-spitters no matter of
what size and shape. Those metal dogs barking and belching out
death were not to my liking. After I had been there a couple of days
our trial flight began. There were only four pigeons of our own city
besides Hira and myself. You know how rash Hira could be. No
sooner had we flown up above the houses of a large village than Hira
flew towards the direction of the boom, boom, boom. He wanted to
investigate. Well, in an hour's time we were there. Oh, what a noise!
Big balls of fire, spat out like thunderbolts by the metal dogs hidden
under trees, hissed and exploded below us. I was frightened, so I
rose higher and higher. But no peace there in the highest heavens
could I find. From nowhere came vast eagles roaring and growling
like trumpeting elephants. At such a terrific sight, we flew towards
where Ghond was waiting for us. But the eagles, two of them
followed! We went faster and faster. Fortunately they could not
overtake us. Just as we had expected, those eagles came down
where we lived. I felt death was at hand. Those eagles were going to
devour us in our cages like weasels. But no! They stopped trumpeting
soon and lay down on the field—dead. Two men each jumped out of
the stomachs of those two birds and walked away. I wondered how
eagles could devour human beings. And how could the fellows come
out alive?

No beast of prey can kill his victim without frightening him first.