Abstract
Inspired by visit to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition “Disobedient Objects”, a few years ago, previous PhD work on the “discourse of Hong Kong’s future democratization”, and an interest in lexicography, I discuss the problems and potential methodologies of compiling a modern “dictionary of protest and dissent”. Political acts generate a diverse multimodal array of physical, spatial, and graphic inventions that often practically, succinctly, and emotionally reach out to participants and observers. Dissenting/protest objects can range from mundane items repurposed; they can be banners, found objects, and pamphlets. Like words, such objects/texts take on an additional sense to their more commonplace usages and will be long-remembered in the public consciousness. Such a dictionary could also contain neologisms and expressions that have arisen partly out of these objects/texts and the general political discourse of the time. Naturally such a dictionary would be digital/multimodal rather than paper-based, and include whether an object/text worked and how well as a protest object. Artifacts and texts from the Hong Kong “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (AKA “The Umbrella Movement”) of 2014 will serve as illustration. I will also briefly discuss whether the months-long protests of Hong Kong in 2019 could fit into this model.