Chapter 3, “Inner versus Outer – The Politics of Political Space,” reviews the spatial dynamics of the Song court that are reflected in the conceptual and spatial dichotomy between inner and outer (nei/wai 內/外) and posits the inner and outer courts as competing and separate political and administrative centers of imperial technocratic versus Confucian institutionalist governance. Most critical was the intermediate, overlapping space where the emperor served as the sanctioned conduit between these two administrative spheres of Song governance. This chapter counters the contention that “the Song had no inner court,” which is itself merely a modern extension of the rhetorical claim that the Song monarchs succeeded in curtailing the political reach of the affinal kinsmen, female bureaucrats, and eunuchs who administered the mechanics and politics of the inner court. On the contrary, this chapter concludes that over the course of the dynasty court administration shifted progressively away from outer towards the imperial palace’s inner space and thus accorded more control over vital governmental functions to the non-literati operatives of the inner court.

This chapter plots the rebellion(s) of the “long 1960s” across three “zones” of Europe in order to understand how Europe’s 1968 manifested under different political regimes. Exploring how border-crossing connections functioned around 1968, it emphasizes the importance of transnational exchanges alongside acts of the globalizing imagination in which activists joined metaphorical hands across borders, blocs, and continents. Emphasizing the eclecticism of 1960s radicalism, the chapter traces efforts to identify the revolutionary subject—the “who?” of the revolution—and the search for radical source material to answer the question of “how?” Highlighting the importance of key principles such as anti-authoritarianism and self-organization, it emphasizes the “total” vision of 1960s radicals. Motivated by the belief that all spheres of social existence could or should be political, they attempted to put that principle into practice, leading to the “proliferation of the political” that gave 1968 its all-embracing character.

Chapter 2, Art and Justice in Times of Transition, sets out the theoretical framework for the book. By undertaking a close visual analysis and narrative investigation of one artwork – REwind by Gerhard Marx, Maja Marx and Philip Miller – that addresses the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I unpack four ideas which make art exigent and meaningful to transitional justice, and vice versa. These ideas are about the circulation of political sentiment, the mediation of political agency, the invitation of political encounters, and the invention of political space.I argue that an account of transitional justice without aesthetic dimensions – especially art – is insufficient. Art plays an important role in animating and activating the narratives of individuals so that they take on collective importance. In so doing, the past can be shared so that a new political future can be imagined. Artistic production becomes a radical form of political participation in times of political transition. The chapter concludes with an afterword on power, ethics, and modes of display.