ABSTRACT
In the past decade, Hong Kong has witnessed the rise of new youth activism featuring a strong claim for Hong Kong identity. This chapter, an ethnographic study of young activists, explores how they define and imagine new temporalities for the city, which lie at the heart of their distinctive action styles and rhetoric. The evolutionary time frame, embodied by the ideas and notions centered around the concept of “democratization” and the deliberative process of political institutions, has become less appealing, if not having completely lost its validity, to the new generation. Instead, the young activists tend to imagine a “high time” of messianic sense, disrupting the mundane, homogeneous and empty time. With their unruly actions and advocacies, they engage in politics without recognition. This is a phenomenon, rather than simply specific to Hong Kong, is indicative of the cultural shift to dissolution of the temporal frame and awareness of the “near future” across the world.
