Joyful singing in parks

Abstract

This article draws on Bayat’s discussions of the “quiet encroachment” and “social nonmovement” to explore the intertwined relationships between mundane lives, public culture, and spatial orders. It takes the collective singing practices in public parks in the city of Guangzhou in South China as a case study, and at the center of analysis are senior urban residents who have experienced double marginalization under the new political economy and the new spatial order in public spaces. I show that collective singing in parks, which is a cultivated practice acting upon a body’s habitus shaped by the political culture, has contributed to rebuild the social life of the senior citizens after layoffs. While such an embodied practice has been re-appropriated by the government and officials to capitalize on the authority of political culture to further their ends, such re-appropriation also empowers the choral participants to pursue happiness in their familiar ways and legitimize their claims on public spaces that are increasingly coded with a middle-class civility. I argue that the analytical lens offered by “social nonmovement” helps shift attention from agency to action. By focusing on how effects of state-orchestrated governing strategies have been made complicated by ordinary people’s “quiet encroachment”, this article shows that the exercise and effects of power shall be analyzed as a dynamic process with a spatial and temporal dimension. The exploration of the layers of social, political and visceral experiences between individual citizens and the social-political space can effectively help us diagnose how power works and morphs.