Abstract: The capacity of artistic works to speak directly to the emotions – to move us in one way or another – is a critical consideration in determining how an experience is to be represented and who should do the representation. When significant groups are left out of the national story, or when some groups dominate the storytelling, distortion is a likely result. But the distortion is not only of the past experience; it continues to influence the present and the future. It perpetuates harm. A powerful response to this harm comes from those who have been left out or whose experience has been distorted. Protest art serves to penetrate and challenge these distortions.

Chapter 1 introduces the motivating problem and the central contribution of the book. The chapter begins by observing that even though difference and disagreement can be valuable for liberal democracy, their expression can “overheat,” strain liberal democratic institutions, and leave the polity vulnerable to the growing influence of autocratic political forces. The chapter posits that the more citizens share in “role-based constitutional fellowship,” the more a liberal democracy can harness the benefits of difference and disagreement while sidestepping the potential perils of difference and disagreement. Under role-based constitutional fellowship, citizens share in a culture of trust where they feel united in the general effort to preserve liberal democracy. This culture of trust can emerge because citizens (perhaps unwittingly at first) observe a division of labour; they behave in different ways, according to which spheres of activity they find themselves in and according to what normative roles they find themselves occupying within those spheres. This chapter characterizes fellowship as a “negative idealistic” perspective that lies between “deliberative” and “realist” or “agonist” conceptions of democracy.

Chapter 2 concluded that liberal democracy must be supported by a sense of unity that is oriented toward the preservation of liberal democracy and that does not suppress difference and disagreement. Chapter 3 explores what this unity ought to look like by engaging with Aristotle’s notion of political friendship. For Aristotle, citizens who belong to different factions are political friends when they share a commitment to preserve the regime, provided that the regime is “correct” or not excessively “deviant.” The chapter determines that the unity we seek should assume the form of a culture of trust where citizens believe that their fellow citizens probably value the continuation of their civic relationship, where citizens share a commitment to liberal democracy, and where they can nonetheless debate the meaning of equality and justice. Such trust, however, faces an initiation problem by virtue of presupposing a broad commitment to liberal democracy. This chapter concludes that citizens must either first develop a preliminary sense of trust on top of something other than a commitment to liberal democracy or be able to contribute to liberal democratic trust without realizing it.

The epilogue proposes key ways in which decolonizing practices are alive today, and in which the past, present, and future are entangled in acts of freedom today.