Small-Store Utopianism

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.