Small-Store Utopianism

Abstract

This article examines a utopian impulse in popular culture and activism through a reading of cultural objects disseminated from East Asia. It terms this impulse ‘small-store utopianism’, seeing it as a cultural imagination that anchors hope in small-scale retail spaces, and explores its emergence, characteristics, and potentiality. The article argues that: (1) this impulse emerges in response to various contexts shaped by intersecting forms of power and precarity that are entangled with forces such as neoliberalism and neostatism; (2) such a utopianism mythologizes small stores as having a capacity to deviate from their capitalist ‘storeness’ to shelter vulnerable bodies, memories, and experiments; and (3) such deviated storeness is enabled by storekeeping and storytelling – cultural practices which may foster infrastructures of hope in everyday life, grounding and disseminating other utopian visions such as convivialism and commoning.

Keywords

commons conviviality hope public small stores utopia

After Hong Kong’s Mount Zero Books announced its closure, a customer spoke to the media:

‘Mount Zero has given me strength since the social movement’, said Judy, whose son left the city due to what she described as a ‘depressive era’. ‘From where I live, I could see the lights of Mount Zero in the distance, and that had given me hope . . . I know I wasn’t alone’, she continued. ‘From now on I would keep the lights on in my heart’ (Tse, 2024).

Mount Zero’s closure was a blow to people like Judy, as the 10-square-metre bookstore was an active community hub and public sphere in the city, both during and after the peak of a social movement triggered by an extradition bill.¹ Judy’s feeling – that Mount Zero could give strength and hope – has to be understood as part of a broader public affect, in which certain small-scale stores (ranging from bookstores and cafés to bistros and grocery stores) strove to maintain autonomy and criticality under the dual pressures of government regulation and capitalist dispossession, receiving much support from those who participated in or sympathized with the movement.

This phenomenon is both old and new. On the one hand, there is a long history in which small retail spaces have served as sites of autonomy, agency, and resistance. While such spaces are often critiqued for manufacturing a false diversity that serves late capitalism (Evans, 2023; Simon, 2009) and hierarchical community (Maifianti et al., 2025), we should also acknowledge the extensive scholarship detailing the cultural and political vitality of small stores: from London’s coffeehouses (Habermas, 1991: 32–43), Paris’s cafés (Haine, 1996), Moroccan markets (Kapchan, 1996), the streets of Cuzco (Seligmann, 2004), and Tehran’s bazaar (Keshavarzian, 2007), to Tokugawa Japan’s bookshops (Ikegami, 2005: 302–18), Chengdu’s teahouses (Wang, 2008, 2018), Mumbai’s one-foot shops (Gupte and Shetty, 2022: 554), and independent female small businesses in Istanbul (Özsan, 2024), among others.²

On the other hand, in recent years, small stores have more frequently been imagined as a form of utopia that gives hope. For instance, in Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, Cooper (2014: 100–128) sees a Toronto feminist bathhouse providing unconventional care as an ‘everyday utopia’ – a network and space that enacts daily life in a radically different fashion, serving as a site of judgement where a conceptual life for transformation is possible. Similarly, in The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements, Kinder (2021: 7–8) proposes seeing activist bookstores in the United States as akin to ‘concrete utopias’ – imperfect and unfinished, yet generative of ‘open-ended dreaming and scheming’.³ In Hong Kong, well before the anti-extradition bill movement, Lok (2014) observed that the local press often framed small stores as ‘anti-capitalist heterotopias’ that preserved authentic human affect within a hyper-capitalist society, thereby extending the cultural analysis of small stores from the realm of everyday life and activism to their representation in mass media.

This article is motivated by the observation that this utopian imagination is found not only in the above intellectual writings but also in popular culture and activist culture, making it worthy of closer examination to understand how it emerged and how it might develop.

For example, in bestselling comics and literary works shared within and beyond East Asia, small stores are depicted as miraculous spaces capable of healing and empowering people. Prominent examples include Japanese titles such as Midnight Diner (Abe, 2006) and The Miracles of the Namiya General Store (Higashino, 2012), as well as the Korean novels Uncanny Convenience Store (Kim, 2021) and Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookstore (Hwang, 2022), all of which have gained immense popularity across the region and beyond through translations and adaptations.⁴ In the Sinophone mediascape, cultural documentaries and reality shows produced for different linguistic groups – such as A Store of Hope (Yunshang de xiaodian, in Putonghua and Hunanese, 2021), Tales of Small Giants (Keihjik siudim, in Hong Kong Cantonese, 2023), and A Store of Dreams Under the Cocoa Tree (Kho-kho su hak et ki-huan sio-tiam, in Taiwanese Hakka and Mandarin, 2023) – share a tendency to associate small stores with ‘miracles’, ‘hopes’, and ‘dreams’. Furthermore, activists in East Asia have generated discussions on how to build small stores in different communities, even publishing guidebooks sharing their experiences.

Together, the above cultural objects produced in and disseminated from East Asia provide rich resources for rethinking utopia and the circulation of hopes – themes that have gained renewed urgency amidst global uncertainties, as shown in recent scholarship covering the West (Han, 2024; Levitas, 2013; Thompson and Žižek, 2014), Africa (Sarr, 2019), China (Wang et al., 2020), and Colombia (Lizarazo, 2024).

The central concern of this article is what I call ‘small-store utopianism’ – a cultural imagination in which small stores are seen as sites where the seeds of change and hope are felt and planted. It is both impulsive and structural. It is, first of all, a ‘utopian impulse’ that, in contrast to systematic utopian programs executed through grand blueprints, represents a utopia now detectable in daily life – one that ‘finds its way to the surface in a variety of covert expressions and practices’ (Jameson, 2007: 5). These covert expressions and practices can be interpreted as what Williams (1977: 132–3) would see as affective elements of consciousness and relationships. When read carefully in relation to one another, these affective elements might derive a cultural hypothesis – a ‘structure of feeling’ – which, not as formal as concepts of ‘worldview’ or ‘ideology’ and always needing to be returned to a range of cultural evidence interactively, can help us understand some ‘social experiences in solution’. This article is the result of collecting and reading numerous expressions and practices concerning utopianized small stores (such as books, films, TV dramas, and digital objects that romanticize small stores) from 2021 to 2024 while living and travelling in Hong Kong and across broader East Asia and beyond.

As I will demonstrate, small-store utopianism has two major characteristics. First, the small store is imagined as having the capacity to deviate from its capitalist ‘storeness’ in order to house vulnerable or repressed culture. This deviated storeness recurs across a wide range of cultural objects in response to various contexts shaped by intersecting forms of power and precarity interwoven with forces such as neoliberalism and neostatism. Second, if such a deviation of ‘storeness’ is given a closer examination, one can see the importance of storekeeping and storytelling in utopianizing small stores. If a café can become a concrete utopia, the energy sustaining it derives not only from capital and customers. For example, in Habermas’s (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Button’s Coffee House is cited as an exemplar of London’s public sphere, notably for the lion’s head mailbox on its west side connected to The Spectator (Habermas, 1991: 42). A public sphere is formed not only through the intellectual discussions of customers inside the space but also through two forms of cultural practices, namely storekeeping (that manages the mailbox) and writing (the letters). As I will show, the power of storekeeping and storytelling are often overlooked, but they may foster infrastructures of hope in ordinary life, grounding and disseminating other utopian visions.

The above characteristics of small-store utopianism will be elaborated through three forms of deviated or utopian storeness below. But before doing so, I will first discuss the historical and conceptual ground upon which small-store utopianism can be understood.

Emergence: Small Stores as Mythical

The historical emergence of small-store utopianism is difficult to trace, because hopeful small stores seem to be both everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, throughout human history, there have always been different kinds of stores – such as cooperative stores, activist stores, independent retailers, and corner shops – that carry cultural values and hopes. To name several examples in East Asian cities: in Hong Kong, Tak Cheong Lane Vegetarian Cooperative has become a case study where the art of commoning is practised (Zeng and Choi, 2024); in Beijing, One-Way Street Bookstore was renowned as a hub for China’s intellectuals; in Taipei, Fembooks is a seminal gender-focused bookstore; in Seoul, Hakrim Dabang is a café widely recognized for fostering intellectual discussions about Korea’s democracy; and in Tokyo, the curry house Shinjuku Nakamuraya Manna connected Indian and Russian activists in the early 20th century. On the other hand, these stores – some bygone and some still in operation – are also nowhere; they are rarely documented in global and national cultural histories, often leaving few traces and fading into obscurity as their customers pass on.

But we may begin with concepts: small-store utopianism as a phenomenon appears when certain small stores start to be mythologized. Tuan (1977: 99–100) suggested that mythical space is an ‘intellectual construct’ as well as ‘a response of feeling and imagination to fundamental human needs’, in which ‘the small mirrors the large’: ‘its messages, being confined to a small area, are readily perceived and understood’ as ‘the small is accessible to all human senses’. In literary and cinematic works, the small store can appear as a romantic site where genuine encounters or love can be established between urban strangers, as seen in The Shop Around the Corner (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) and 84, Charing Cross Road (Hanff, 1970). The small store can also function as a ‘national allegory’ (Jameson, 1986), telling stories of entrepreneurs and families striving under imperialism and modernization, such as the Chinese classical novel The Shop of the Lin Family (Mao, 2004) and the Hong Kong film Chicken and Duck Talk (dir. Clifton Ko, 1988), which depicts a traditional Cantonese roasted duck shop responding to a modern American fried chicken franchise. In West Indian fiction, the Chinese shop is a ‘national theatre’ where the ‘nation’ is performed (Loy, 2007). Small stores are not only grounded in physical form but are also projected in texts, screens, and stories they carry.

Small-store utopianism should be understood as the extensive mythologization of small stores as having the capacity to give hope. This utopianism, as I will demonstrate through analyzing different cultural objects in the remainder of this article, appears when a store’s capitalist storeness gives way to other humanistic values, such as the protection of vulnerable people, memories, and imaginations of the future in the face of multiple forms of power, especially, though not limited to, the neoliberal capitalization and neostatist governance that have dominated in East Asia for decades (see Huang, 2004; Pang, 2024; Ong, 2006; Veg, 2019).

But we should not see small-store utopianism as exclusive to East Asia despite the fact that such a utopian impulse has produced abundant cultural evidence for analysis. Neoliberalism, neostatism, and many other ideologies and affective forces are globally practised in different societies in different forms and degrees. There are other similar ways of mythologization in different contexts, and they might also inspire how we see small-store utopianism. For instance, Scott (2012: 55) once pointed out that amidst the dominance of ‘large public and private bureaucracies’, the petite bourgeoisie, including shopkeepers and smallholding peasants, and their ‘small property’ signify a ‘precious zone of autonomy and freedom.’ For Scott (2012: 90), ‘property meant the ability to celebrate marriages, funerals, and, in a small Malay village, the feast at the end of Ramadan, in a way that affirmed the social worth and standing of the community’. ⁵ Through Scott’s ‘intellectual constructs’, we may see the small store as a form of ‘small property’ between the two large bureaucracies, the neoliberal corporate sector and the neostatist government, in which a sense of autonomy, freedom, and communal agency could be felt.

Still, different contexts can give rise to different mythical spaces – involving different intellectual constructs, feelings, needs, and the smallness that projects the large world. As Gonzaga (2024: 4) reminds us, while consumer spaces are designed for profit, they are also entangled with many different discourses, narratives, and images. Below, I will discuss three forms of mythologized or utopianized storeness, each showing a capacity to deviate from capitalist storeness through the power of storekeeping and storytelling.

The Store of Respite

In much East Asian popular fiction, the small store is frequently imagined as a site of respite, possessing the capacity to accommodate and care for vulnerable individuals.⁶ One example is the previously mentioned Midnight Diner (Abe, 2006), which portrays a tough yet compassionate storekeeper who provides care to diverse customers facing societal adversities. There are many other similar comforting stories in which individuals grappling with challenges in atomized societies can find a foothold in small stores, being healed and empowered by storekeepers and customers who form ties akin to a quasi-family, where members care for one another. Such quasi-familial storeness might appear conservative, perhaps mythologizing a potentially capitalist and violent space. Yet, as Chow (2007: 18–19) reminds us, domesticity might serve as a refuge from an otherwise oppressive world. Moreover, the families in many of these ‘store-fictions’ resemble what Azuma (2023: 159) calls the ‘contingent family’, characterized by ‘expandability’ that accommodates strangers and offers hopeful conviviality or solidarity for isolated individuals.

This caring storeness is more than a story produced by the literary industry, as it can also be found in actual stores. Let us consider the following excerpt from an interview with the storekeeper of Chojiya Book Store in Soma, Fukushima, who vividly described the affective power of storekeeping after a devastating tsunami in 2011:

Many people came in asking to buy calendars because their stay in the shelter had begun to confuse them. Consequently, I decided to resume service as early as we could. If all the stores were closed, this place would resemble a ghost town, and the entire town would lose its vitality. I believe we need to at least turn the light on. It’s not just about selling products; we feel joy when people say, ‘The bookstore is open!’ In the evening, the light from the store attracts city hall workers. During the day, these individuals manage various issues in the coastal area following the tsunami, including addressing nuclear reactor pollution, and become exhausted after a day’s work. Many of them step inside and exclaim, ‘The store is open!’ The pressure is released. (Inaizumi, 2014: 78–80, originally in Japanese; my translation from its Chinese translation to English)

We must thank Inaizumi (2014) for documenting these details in his Bookstores of Rebirth, so that we can clearly see how a small store produced care for a post-disaster town, deviating from its conventional role as a bookstore – a space for displaying and selling the products of creative labour and invention (Nancy, 2009: 34). Beginning with the simple act of turning on a light bulb after a disaster, the storekeeper alleviated the pressure on workers and nearby residents by operating the store as a communal respite even amid energy and material shortages and without much support from institutions.

Unlike Fukushima, where people were thrust into a world with limited infrastructure and institutional support, Hong Kong presents a contrasting case: a highly urban setting confronted by overwhelming state power and its security institutions (Chan and Wang, 2023). In this securitized context, some small stores also serve as social respites in activism. During the political unrest in 2019, stores located near protest sites sheltered protesters evading the state security apparatus. As the unrest evolved, the storekeepers’ subjects of care shifted – from protesters hiding inside the stores to the larger public outside. Some storekeepers came to be seen as political representatives of the protesters, engaging in what the government viewed as ‘soft resistance’.

After the high tide of the protests, many stores’ subjects of care shifted again to the cultural community. Independent bookstores proliferated locally and internationally, preserving and fostering a reading public amid the prevailing securitist rhetoric. Discussions of Hong Kong culture are often framed in terms of the tensions between a (neo)liberal city and a (post)socialist nation. However, some citizens have chosen to run a store as a small respite for their culture and identity amidst uncertainty.⁷

The Store of Heritage

The second type of utopian storeness is the heritage store: small stores are imagined as custodians of cultural traditions or heritage. This romantic representation of certain old small stores points to a utopian desire for an alternative world to the present reality, akin to a ‘retrotopian’ vision. Here, happiness is attached to a backward-looking vision, seeking an alternative way of living ‘located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past’, as Bauman (2017: 4–5) points out.

This retrotopian way of seeing small stores can serve structures of power such as neoliberalism, which seeks to commodify cultural memories for nostalgic consumption. Today, in numerous marketing campaigns, many old stores’ stories are centred around shop owners’ entrepreneurial achievements in the past. State power, too, extends its cultural governance and soft power by reinventing traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 2012) and heritagizing certain small stores. For example, the Seoul Metropolitan Government has been running a ‘Future Heritage Programme’ for a decade, selecting old stores such as bakeries and barbershops as heritage that resonates with younger generations (Yonhap News, 2023). Similarly, Tainan City’s Cultural Bureau launched a project to document old stores, viewing them as valuable local cultural resources (Liu, 2019). Various government-funded museums – in Hong Kong (Corkill, 2014), Seoul (Lee, 2024), and Osaka (Wikimedia Commons, 2025) – have also exhibited different small stores as their installations.

But besides serving profit-making and cultural control, some heritagized or mythologized stores also house vulnerable memories and histories. Online petitions and public mourning over the loss of historic shops – valorized as symbols resisting cultural homogenization – are ubiquitous in the digital sphere. There are also artworks and cultural research telling stories about storefronts, signboards, and the material interiority of stores in Asian cities, such as Tokyo-based Polish painter Mateusz Urbanowicz’s (2018) Tokyo Storefront, Korean artist Lee Me Kyeoung’s paintings of old convenience stores (Fox, 2024), and independent book projects such as Hong Kong Historical Shops (2024) and Our Encounters with Small Stores (V-Artivist and Coreda, 2022), all of which can be seen as ‘affective heritage practices’ (Wetherell et al., 2018), documenting and paying tribute to small stores’ visual and material elements that are disappearing or have already disappeared.

What heritagized stores can preserve and regenerate is not only visual and material culture but also the cultural spirit and memory of storekeepers. One interesting case is a social media page called ‘REstore: Small Store Culture Conservation’, which can be seen as a meta-store dedicated to preserving the techniques and artefacts left behind by other storekeepers from small stores in Hong Kong. REstore is not only a digital website but also a physical concrete store, regularly inviting old storekeepers, whom they call ‘masters’, to educate the public through workshops and to redesign store artefacts, such as brassware and embroidery.

I met one of REstore’s core storekeepers, Man-ching, at a community workshop. I told her about my study of small stores as heritage, and she kindly agreed to share with me one of the important moments that influenced her: she and other core REstore storekeepers, originally social workers in a grassroot community in Tai Kok Tsui, were deeply affected by the closure of Honest Company (lou sat gung si, 1926–2010), a small store selling imitation gold jewellery and wedding accessories to those who could not afford real gold. When Honest Company closed, many people mourned its loss, lining up to purchase the store’s items, including its signboard. The store owner organized a farewell meal with old customers, creating a heartwarming gathering that moved the community’s social workers to start their own social enterprise to continue the dying grassroots craftsmanship in another form. A memory left by a small store is capable of not only housing the past, but also generating future practices.

The Store of Experimentation

Finally, small-store utopianism also exists in certain stores serving as sites of experimentation. The power of this utopian impulse lies not only in care for the present and memory of the past but also in the testing of new ways of living and organizing.

Experimental storeness might appear in the form of neoliberal start-ups as experiments in individual lives; it might also stem from government initiatives designated to stimulate rural economies. For example, the aforementioned Hunan reality TV show A Store of Hope (2021) was part of a state rural revitalization project, depicting how celebrities managed a convenience store in China’s Liuyang.

But this experimental storeness is also found in activist community projects and circulated through guidebooks teaching people how to transform communities through managing small stores (e.g. Horibe, 2015; Saitou, 2021). For example, Matsumoto’s (2016) Guidebook to the World’s Dumb Rebellion: How to Create Silly Places shares the experiment of Shiroto no Ran No. 5 in Tokyo’s Koenji district. Matsumoto opened various stores, including a second-hand clothing store and a bar, and initiated street rallies, festivals, and other creative actions (Egami, 2018). His book critiques government regulations and consumer society, urging readers to reclaim spaces and open ‘nonsensical small stores’ as a means of building community. It concludes with an extensive list of similar stores across Japan and other East Asian cities, akin to a travel guide for like-minded activists in East Asia. Matsumoto could be described as an ‘activist-entrepreneur’ (Kinder, 2021: 8).

In contrast, frontline storekeepers face various work pressures, managing multiple tasks like an ‘omnipotent worker’, as seen in Taipei’s convenience stores (Chang, 2021), serving the top-down operations of value extraction and capital accumulation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019). But what if the role of storekeeper is not merely one of oppression but also one that is strategically embraced for experimentalism? Such experimentalist or activist storekeeping subjects are rarely given close examination.

An interesting case is Wai-yi Lee, a community cultural worker who has been critiquing neoliberal capitalism for decades. She described her 100-square-foot store, Half-Cup Hut, as an ‘artwork’ – a personal and open-ended utopian investment that contrasts sharply with the storekeeper’s typical role in serving capitalist or state purposes. I attended Half-Cup Hut’s poem tour and workshop in Sham Shui Po, where the store is located.⁸ There, Wai-yi taught participants to experience the streets and write poems. After learning about my project, she kindly agreed to share her life and labour as a storekeeper with me.

Wai-yi’s storekeeping can be understood as an experimental process of exploring alternative ways of living. Her motivation stemmed not from a clearly defined economic purpose but rather from a sense of vacancy left behind by a beloved Vietnamese coffee stall, combined with affordable rent after the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted her to become the new tenant. Initially unsure of what to do with the space, she deliberately avoided opening a second-hand store to prevent competing with neighbouring grassroots businesses. Instead, she chose to run a general store offering a variety of products, from snacks and used books to tea bags and other meaningful items.⁹ For Wai-yi, experimentalism involves deciding not only what to do but also what not to do.

Half-Cup Hut is a tiny space that hosts music lessons, reading groups, local film screenings, and more. Wai-yi’s labour can be described as what Kinder (2021: 6) calls ‘overlays’ – the use of one space for multiple purposes, such as retail venue, community space, storage room, promotional tool, and logistical hub. These overlays ‘transform vanilla-box storefronts into progressive counter-spaces where people live and promote alternative lifestyles’. Yet, the autonomy and rhythm of such overlays are not unchallenged by the community they attempt to serve. Running a street-level store exposes one to unpredictable flows of diverse elements, from friendly passers-by and streetwise mice to thieves – prompting Wai-yi to reluctantly install CCTV cameras for security. Managing such a parochial space requires ‘being open, but sometimes closed’ (Wessendorf, 2014), striking a balance between reaching out and protecting oneself. Wai-yi’s store is both experimental and practical, an ordinary place imbued with extraordinary meaning.

When I asked Wai-yi about one of her most memorable moments, she recalled placing a long bench outside the shop, which facilitated interactions between two groups near Half-Cup Hut: mothers dropping off their children at the kindergarten on the left-hand side of the store, and Indonesian and Pakistani residents doing their laundry on the right-hand side. She encouraged the mothers to help improve the laundromat environment by translating washing machine instructions from Chinese and English into Bahasa and Urdu. This bench allowed different cultural groups to encounter one another and can be seen as what Lefebvre (2014: 16) describes as ‘near-order’ – an architectural practice that appropriates space close to the human body, generating enjoyment, in contrast to the ‘distant order’ imposed by abstract utopias (promised by capitalism, the state, and urban planning).¹⁰ It is through this ‘architecture of enjoyment’ at Half-Cup Hut that we see how small-store utopianism is grounded in everyday activism, rather than merely circulating in popular culture.

Potentiality: Small Stores as an Infrastructure of Hope

Small-store utopianism emerged in historical conjunctures interwoven with different forms of power and precarity entangled with neoliberalism and neostatism, with its various forms of hopeful storeness – as respites, heritage, and experiments – potentially pointing to alternative ways of experiencing the present, the past, and the future. This deviation of storeness, on many occasions, hinges upon storekeeping and storytelling – which steer certain capitalist shops, which typically amass and display commodities for shopping, toward cultural storages that house the vulnerable, thereby engendering a sense of hope.

The contemporary world confronts radical uncertainties amidst a multipolarity of power and ‘polycrisis’ (Morin, 2018) – encompassing wars and violence, environmental problems and rapid technological changes, and various political, economic, and social precarities under belligerent leaders. However, even in such an unpredictable world, understanding a utopian impulse does not necessarily blind us to real problems. While small stores would also intermingle with the power of capital, the state, and other forces that may ‘privatize’ hope (Thompson and Žižek, 2014), they should also be taken seriously as potential cultural and hopeful infrastructures that might provide care, conviviality, and dissent as a real-possible (Bloch, 1995: 17). As Sarr (2019: xiv) writes in Afrotopia, founding a utopia ‘is a matter of thinking spaces of the real to bring them into existence by way of both thought and action; it’s about recognising the signs and seeds of the present in order to better nourish them’. Similarly, small-store utopianism can also be a practical utopianism in recognizing small stores as signs and seeds relating to different utopian visions.

One such utopian vision is convivialism. Over the past two decades, discussions on conviviality – interpreted by Gilroy (2004: xi) as ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculturalism an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere’ – have enriched reflections on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. This intellectual discussion on conviviality has gradually attracted more scholarly attention and has developed into global principles, culminating in two Convivialist Manifestos (Caillé et al., 2014; Convivialist International, 2020), garnering support from over three hundred scholars. These manifestos outline general principles – including common naturality, common sociality, common humanity, legitimate individuation, creative opposition, and the imperative to control hubris – to respond to a world in which no single ideology – be it capitalism, liberalism, socialism, or communism – adequately addresses the myriad global challenges. Nevertheless, conviviality also requires infrastructure. Small stores like Half-Cup Hut, which foster conviviality in the neighbourhood through various events, can serve as infrastructure for conviviality or as ‘convivial nuclei’ (Kohr, 1974), grounding global principles in everyday life. Without a concrete idea and physical ‘near-order’, convivial culture risks remaining an abstract exercise in cultural and social theories.

Another utopian vision small-store utopianism may contribute to is commoning. Whether the ‘common’ is understood as the self-governing of local resources (Ostrom, 2015 [1990]), a global communicative network (Hardt and Negri, 2009), or a method to bridge cultural studies and political economy (Erni and Pun, 2025), small stores, I suggest, can provide a more tangible and sensible form of commons, which could also contribute to the development of different forms of commons. While many small stores remain private property rather than common good, they, whether in concrete form or textual form, can still demonstrate community capacities that contribute to assembling a commons or shared resource derived from them. Convivialism and commoning involve different networks, intellectual traditions, and political stances, and they may not always interact. However, both are forms of intellectual activism to reimagine alternative worlds, and both of them share a common need: an ordinary infrastructure to ground these visions in everyday life.

The need for ordinary infrastructures of hope becomes particularly obvious in the limitations of spectacular publics, which arise during extraordinary events such as mass protests – events that are both a sign of solidarity and ephemerality. Many small stores, as ordinary sites adjacent to streets and plazas, serve as spaces where utopian impulses can be shared and sustained among the ordinary public, potentially generating culture and hope. Small stores thus function as vital resources of hope.

In Resources of Hope, Williams (1989) wrote about a Cambridge teashop he disliked:

Now there are two senses of culture . . . that I know about but refuse to learn. The first I discovered at Cambridge, in a teashop. I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the older and more respectable departments, was a different matter. Here was culture, not in a sense I knew, but in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people . . . they were not . . . particularly learned; they practised few arts; but they had it, and they showed you they had it. . . . It is simply that if that is culture, we don’t want it; we have seen other people living.

. . . The other sense . . . that I refuse to learn, is very different. . . . I hear a lot, lately, about culture vultures . . . of do-gooders and highbrows and superior prigs. Now I don’t like the teashop, but I don’t like this drinking-hole either . . . we can simply refuse to learn it. Culture is ordinary. Any interest in learning or the arts is simple, pleasant and natural . . . so far I have tried only to clear away the detritus which makes it difficult for us to think seriously about it at all. When I got to Cambridge, I encountered two serious influences which have left a very deep impression on my mind. The first was Marxism, the second the teaching of Leavis. (Williams, 1989: 5–7)

For Williams, the teashop and the ‘drinking-hole’ represent two negative senses of culture – one derived from the pretentious behaviour of the teashop customers and the other from the cynical language of the metaphorical ‘drinking-hole’. What was truly hopeful was the third sense of culture, showing a simple, pleasant, and natural interest in learning or the arts. This ordinary culture is not so much the antithesis of high culture, but rather one struggling with pretentiousness and cynicism simultaneously.

It was unfortunate that Williams did not encounter a store demonstrating this hopeful ordinariness in his time, yet he was fortunate to find Marxism and Leavis as resources for serious thinking. Today, many ordinary small stores in and beyond East Asia are disseminating their energies, and discussions of utopia have expanded far beyond a few classical texts to embrace diverse local and regional myths, traditions, economies, and ideas deeply anchored in different overlapping lifeworlds. Small-store utopianism and its small stores are one resource of hope that deserves further examination.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Joseph (Cho-kiu) Li

Notes

Joseph (Cho-kiu) Li is a Research Assistant Professor of Public Humanities in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A regular contributor to the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, he has published in the Journal of Local Discourse, Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and other venues. His research interests focus on public humanities, cultural studies, tourism, and inter-city placemaking across multiple lifeworlds, ranging from Hong Kong, Guangdong, and China to Inter-Asia, the Global East, and beyond.

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