Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967409
Hans Steinmüller
Abstract:The Wa State of Myanmar is often called "shanzhai China," that is, a lesser imitation of China. This essay unpacks the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation at the Chinese periphery, embodied in shanzhai 山寨 practices. Literally "mountain fortress," shanzhai refers to the provenience of cheap brand imitations, made by mountain dwellers who cannot afford the original. The term is commonly used to describe creative and ironic brand imitation in the People's Republic of China today. Until the 1950s, the inhabitants of the Wa hills did indeed live in mountain fortresses—both a pragmatic necessity as well as a miniature repetition of Chinese imperial rule. The pragmatic limitations and creative potential of imitating China are shown for the cases of Maoism, authoritarian capitalism, and contemporary nationhood. Rather than an essentialized feature of Chinese cultural practice, the practices of shanzhai reveal that material and symbolic recombination are essential to creative imitation.
{"title":"Shanzhai: Creative Imitation of China in Highland Myanmar","authors":"Hans Steinmüller","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967409","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Wa State of Myanmar is often called \"shanzhai China,\" that is, a lesser imitation of China. This essay unpacks the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation at the Chinese periphery, embodied in shanzhai 山寨 practices. Literally \"mountain fortress,\" shanzhai refers to the provenience of cheap brand imitations, made by mountain dwellers who cannot afford the original. The term is commonly used to describe creative and ironic brand imitation in the People's Republic of China today. Until the 1950s, the inhabitants of the Wa hills did indeed live in mountain fortresses—both a pragmatic necessity as well as a miniature repetition of Chinese imperial rule. The pragmatic limitations and creative potential of imitating China are shown for the cases of Maoism, authoritarian capitalism, and contemporary nationhood. Rather than an essentialized feature of Chinese cultural practice, the practices of shanzhai reveal that material and symbolic recombination are essential to creative imitation.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"895 - 921"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82864127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967305
Ferran de Vargas
Abstract:Although much has been written about the political theories of several thinkers associated with the Japanese New Left, to gain a better understanding of those theories a perspective that conceives them as a conversation within a unitary ideology is needed. Likewise, we know little about how media forms other than the written word contributed to this conversation. To address these gaps in our understanding, this article investigates how the practice of cinema, through the paradigmatic example of Ōshima Nagisa's film Kōshikei 絞死刑 (Death by Hanging) (1968), intervened in the Japanese New Left's conception of shutaisei 主体性 (subjectivity). This article first presents the theories of subjectivity of some of the most influential thinkers in the shaping of the Japanese New Left ideology (Umemoto Katsumi, Nakai Masakazu, Yoshimoto Takaaki, Tanigawa Gan, Tokoro Mitsuko) and then explores the contribution of Ōshima's Kōshikei to them, showing the limitations of some previous lines of interpretation of the film. Relating the different dimensions of an ideology, in this case the political theory and the practice of cinema of the Japanese New Left, will help us to gain a better understanding of both the ideology as a whole and the dimensions comprising it.
{"title":"Japanese New Left's Political Theories of Subjectivity and Ōshima Nagisa's Practice of Cinema","authors":"Ferran de Vargas","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967305","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although much has been written about the political theories of several thinkers associated with the Japanese New Left, to gain a better understanding of those theories a perspective that conceives them as a conversation within a unitary ideology is needed. Likewise, we know little about how media forms other than the written word contributed to this conversation. To address these gaps in our understanding, this article investigates how the practice of cinema, through the paradigmatic example of Ōshima Nagisa's film Kōshikei 絞死刑 (Death by Hanging) (1968), intervened in the Japanese New Left's conception of shutaisei 主体性 (subjectivity). This article first presents the theories of subjectivity of some of the most influential thinkers in the shaping of the Japanese New Left ideology (Umemoto Katsumi, Nakai Masakazu, Yoshimoto Takaaki, Tanigawa Gan, Tokoro Mitsuko) and then explores the contribution of Ōshima's Kōshikei to them, showing the limitations of some previous lines of interpretation of the film. Relating the different dimensions of an ideology, in this case the political theory and the practice of cinema of the Japanese New Left, will help us to gain a better understanding of both the ideology as a whole and the dimensions comprising it.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"61 1","pages":"679 - 703"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88768429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967331
Andrew Campana
Abstract:This article explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan's disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and "able-bodiedness" itself.
摘要:本文探讨了日本残疾人权利运动的领袖诗人横田浩的作品，以及他如何利用自己脑瘫的经历创造出一种新的残疾诗学。与世界上许多地方一样，日本在20世纪70年代也出现了残疾人运动，旨在挑战一个由非残疾人创造并为其服务的社会的不无障碍和残酷。横田参与了这类的两个关键团体——文学小圈子Shinonome和活动家团体Aoi Shiba no kai——几十年来，他出版了多本关于杀害残疾人的意识形态和残疾人社会和文化建设的书籍，以及几本诗集。在他的诗歌中，他不仅要揭示残疾人的压迫和非人化，而且要重新思考体现和“健全身体”本身的主流观念。
{"title":"You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi's Disability Poetics","authors":"Andrew Campana","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967331","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan's disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and \"able-bodiedness\" itself.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"176 1","pages":"735 - 762"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79820453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967383
Yi-Ting Chang
Abstract:In transpacific and Asian/American studies, islands often gain decolonial meaning via their explicit ties to US and Japanese military imperialisms. This article inquires how islands express the decolonial beyond US-centric anti-imperial critique, and how they complicate the fields' geopolitical imagination largely defined by the category of independent nation-states. To that end, the author turns to Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes and develops "archipelagic optics" as a transpacific interpretive framework—one that includes the decontinental in its decolonial thesis. Archipelagic optics takes liminal islands such as Taiwan and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as its epistemic grounds; it advances a multicentered epistemology in order to articulate inter- and intra-island contradictions; and it foregrounds "interdependence" rather than "independence" as an ontopolitical premise of archipelagic lives. Archipelagic optics indexes a form of decolonial sensing by refuting the impersonal, monocular eye of military cameras used by multiple empires to surveil Pacific islands. As this article will demonstrate, the decolonial goes beyond the deconstruction of military intercolonialism. It also means tracing noninnocent multiplicity, decontinental seeing, and immanent dependencies emerging from formerly "obscure" sites.
{"title":"Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes","authors":"Yi-Ting Chang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967383","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In transpacific and Asian/American studies, islands often gain decolonial meaning via their explicit ties to US and Japanese military imperialisms. This article inquires how islands express the decolonial beyond US-centric anti-imperial critique, and how they complicate the fields' geopolitical imagination largely defined by the category of independent nation-states. To that end, the author turns to Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes and develops \"archipelagic optics\" as a transpacific interpretive framework—one that includes the decontinental in its decolonial thesis. Archipelagic optics takes liminal islands such as Taiwan and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as its epistemic grounds; it advances a multicentered epistemology in order to articulate inter- and intra-island contradictions; and it foregrounds \"interdependence\" rather than \"independence\" as an ontopolitical premise of archipelagic lives. Archipelagic optics indexes a form of decolonial sensing by refuting the impersonal, monocular eye of military cameras used by multiple empires to surveil Pacific islands. As this article will demonstrate, the decolonial goes beyond the deconstruction of military intercolonialism. It also means tracing noninnocent multiplicity, decontinental seeing, and immanent dependencies emerging from formerly \"obscure\" sites.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"260 1","pages":"839 - 864"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79001896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967357
Chialan Sharon Wang
Abstract:This article focuses on Wu Ming-Yi's 2015 novel, The Stolen Bicycle, and examines the way individuals' storytelling is interwoven with scientific and historical facts to construct cultural memory and reinscribe the meaning of native soil. The novel unfolds with the narrator's search for vintage bicycles, which are at once commodities, war vehicles, objects of expertise and connoisseurship, and most important, fetishes that allow characters to articulate strained, alienated, colonial, and communal relationships. The bicycle as a legacy of coloniality and a memento of affection connects human and nature, embodying the symbiotic relationship among the people, animals, objects, and natural environment of Taiwan. In this sense, historical trauma is articulated in each character's memory about the generation before in relation to the bicycle. In scrutinizing the way the war generation's trauma is received by the generation after in the form of family tales, journals, recordings, strained parent-child relationships, invested sentiments in family bicycles, and even supernatural experiences, the article discusses the way the historical past is invoked as "affective archives." As the bicycle serves as an index of the past, "native soil" is delineated in The Stolen Bicycle as shared, adopted, and recast intergenerational and interspecies memories.
{"title":"Native Soil of Postmemory and Affective Archives in Wu Ming-Yi's The Stolen Bicycle","authors":"Chialan Sharon Wang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967357","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on Wu Ming-Yi's 2015 novel, The Stolen Bicycle, and examines the way individuals' storytelling is interwoven with scientific and historical facts to construct cultural memory and reinscribe the meaning of native soil. The novel unfolds with the narrator's search for vintage bicycles, which are at once commodities, war vehicles, objects of expertise and connoisseurship, and most important, fetishes that allow characters to articulate strained, alienated, colonial, and communal relationships. The bicycle as a legacy of coloniality and a memento of affection connects human and nature, embodying the symbiotic relationship among the people, animals, objects, and natural environment of Taiwan. In this sense, historical trauma is articulated in each character's memory about the generation before in relation to the bicycle. In scrutinizing the way the war generation's trauma is received by the generation after in the form of family tales, journals, recordings, strained parent-child relationships, invested sentiments in family bicycles, and even supernatural experiences, the article discusses the way the historical past is invoked as \"affective archives.\" As the bicycle serves as an index of the past, \"native soil\" is delineated in The Stolen Bicycle as shared, adopted, and recast intergenerational and interspecies memories.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"23 1","pages":"793 - 814"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80044940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967318
So-Rim Lee
Abstract:This essay looks at New York–based South Korean photographer Ji Yeo's two photographic series Beauty Recovery Room and It Will Hurt a Little. Tracing the social rhetoric on plastic surgery in South Korea after the 1997 IMF Crisis, it takes Yeo's photographs as counterexamples to the sensationalized depiction of plastic surgery as a symbol of upward mobility put forth by Seoul's private clinics. It argues that Yeo's images re-present surgery as a practice of bodily rupture necessitating an affective, material, and durational process of recovery, thereby demystifying the elusive narrative of cosmetic transformation promised by South Korea's plastic surgery industry. Exploring the performative affinities and disparities between the photographic representation and plastic surgery, it contends that Yeo's images ultimately humanize the individuals that experience the solitary process of healing.
{"title":"Between Plastic Surgery and the Photographic Representation: Ji Yeo Undoes the Elusive Narrative of Transformation","authors":"So-Rim Lee","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967318","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay looks at New York–based South Korean photographer Ji Yeo's two photographic series Beauty Recovery Room and It Will Hurt a Little. Tracing the social rhetoric on plastic surgery in South Korea after the 1997 IMF Crisis, it takes Yeo's photographs as counterexamples to the sensationalized depiction of plastic surgery as a symbol of upward mobility put forth by Seoul's private clinics. It argues that Yeo's images re-present surgery as a practice of bodily rupture necessitating an affective, material, and durational process of recovery, thereby demystifying the elusive narrative of cosmetic transformation promised by South Korea's plastic surgery industry. Exploring the performative affinities and disparities between the photographic representation and plastic surgery, it contends that Yeo's images ultimately humanize the individuals that experience the solitary process of healing.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"19 1","pages":"705 - 733"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90572769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9723698
Mengqi Wang
Abstract:This article examines how local governments calculate and allocate compensation to displaced peasants in demolition-relocation projects, known as chaiqian 拆迁 (demolition and relocation projects), at the urban edge of eastern Nanjing. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows that, contrary to popular imaginings, chaiqian in Nanjing do not exclude peasants from urban development but seek to exploit the uneven urban and rural property regimes and bring rural spaces, including people, real estate, and crops, into the urban system. The government-developer growth coalition, motivated by real estate – driven urban expansion, engineers this process with the aid of calculative technologies and protocols of commensuration. Moreover, technocrats such as chaiqian cadres and urban planners can never fully translate rural real estate into monetary value. They have to constantly update and negotiate protocols of calculation with property-owning villagers to solve emerging issues of commensuration. The villagers, on the other hand, engage with these technologies of valuation to raise claims to a larger share of wealth in chaiqian compensation. Demolition and relocation projects thus are not merely the execution of a developmental ideal but assemble urban accumulation as an ongoing process of value translation and transformation. They also show how urban accumulation at the edge of eastern Nanjing is a contested hegemonic process.
{"title":"Calculating Needs and Prescribing Properties: Chaiqian and the Commensuration of Value at Nanjing's Urban Edge","authors":"Mengqi Wang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9723698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9723698","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how local governments calculate and allocate compensation to displaced peasants in demolition-relocation projects, known as chaiqian 拆迁 (demolition and relocation projects), at the urban edge of eastern Nanjing. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows that, contrary to popular imaginings, chaiqian in Nanjing do not exclude peasants from urban development but seek to exploit the uneven urban and rural property regimes and bring rural spaces, including people, real estate, and crops, into the urban system. The government-developer growth coalition, motivated by real estate – driven urban expansion, engineers this process with the aid of calculative technologies and protocols of commensuration. Moreover, technocrats such as chaiqian cadres and urban planners can never fully translate rural real estate into monetary value. They have to constantly update and negotiate protocols of calculation with property-owning villagers to solve emerging issues of commensuration. The villagers, on the other hand, engage with these technologies of valuation to raise claims to a larger share of wealth in chaiqian compensation. Demolition and relocation projects thus are not merely the execution of a developmental ideal but assemble urban accumulation as an ongoing process of value translation and transformation. They also show how urban accumulation at the edge of eastern Nanjing is a contested hegemonic process.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"136 1","pages":"501 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86432785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9723685
Nellie Chu
Abstract:This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. E. P. Thompson's classic text, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the formation of class consciousness as historically embedded within cultural meanings, qualitative conditions of industrialization, and agency of the working people. The case of the tu er dai, however, lays bare how the historical unmaking of the Maoist peasant classes entails the emaciation of rural populations, as Yan Hairong has described, through the intensified extraction and exploitation of the migrant classes. The tu er dai is a place-based group of former peasants who have quickly elevated to the rentier class thanks to their collective possession of use rights to village land. By remaining suspended between the spatial and subjective designations of the rural and the urban, village members find themselves strategically stalling negotiations with the municipal government in the selling of their use rights via the corporate lineage. Meanwhile, they intensify the predatory extraction of rent and fees from migrant laborers so as to navigate the dilemmas associated with state-endorsed projects of displacement and development. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.
{"title":"Tu Er Dai Peasant Landlords and the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Guangzhou's Urban Villages","authors":"Nellie Chu","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9723685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9723685","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. E. P. Thompson's classic text, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the formation of class consciousness as historically embedded within cultural meanings, qualitative conditions of industrialization, and agency of the working people. The case of the tu er dai, however, lays bare how the historical unmaking of the Maoist peasant classes entails the emaciation of rural populations, as Yan Hairong has described, through the intensified extraction and exploitation of the migrant classes. The tu er dai is a place-based group of former peasants who have quickly elevated to the rentier class thanks to their collective possession of use rights to village land. By remaining suspended between the spatial and subjective designations of the rural and the urban, village members find themselves strategically stalling negotiations with the municipal government in the selling of their use rights via the corporate lineage. Meanwhile, they intensify the predatory extraction of rent and fees from migrant laborers so as to navigate the dilemmas associated with state-endorsed projects of displacement and development. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"479 - 499"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86866948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9723750
Yang Zhan
Abstract:For decades, Chinese rural migrants have been understood as engaging in dagong 打工 (working for a boss), or the selling of their waged labor, conditioned by the global production chain, dormitory regimes, and exploitive labor relations within and beyond factories. Meanwhile, chuangdang 闯荡 (venturing) as a life project that either opposes or extends dagong has been neglected in scholarly studies. Venturing refers to a spatiotemporal condition defined by the uniqueness of urban villages where rural migrants participate in the informal economy on the urban fringes and attach themselves to entrepreneurship and mobility. It is also a multifaceted presentism produced out of the following spatiotemporal conditions: (1) the sense of urgency to get ahead in spatial temporality; (2) an optimistic relationship with unpredictability; and (3) the technologies of mobility in the name of freedom. By highlighting the dilemmas that propel and hinder rural migrants, this article argues that the cultural politics of venturing are a condition that renders rural migrants economically aggressive, yet politically passive. Thereby, it not only prolongs rural migrants' mobile lives on the urban fringes, but also dampens political actions that claim space through resistance.
{"title":"\"When It's Dark in the East, It's Light in the West\": Lifelong Venturing and Accelerated Temporality in Beijing's Urban Villages","authors":"Yang Zhan","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9723750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9723750","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:For decades, Chinese rural migrants have been understood as engaging in dagong 打工 (working for a boss), or the selling of their waged labor, conditioned by the global production chain, dormitory regimes, and exploitive labor relations within and beyond factories. Meanwhile, chuangdang 闯荡 (venturing) as a life project that either opposes or extends dagong has been neglected in scholarly studies. Venturing refers to a spatiotemporal condition defined by the uniqueness of urban villages where rural migrants participate in the informal economy on the urban fringes and attach themselves to entrepreneurship and mobility. It is also a multifaceted presentism produced out of the following spatiotemporal conditions: (1) the sense of urgency to get ahead in spatial temporality; (2) an optimistic relationship with unpredictability; and (3) the technologies of mobility in the name of freedom. By highlighting the dilemmas that propel and hinder rural migrants, this article argues that the cultural politics of venturing are a condition that renders rural migrants economically aggressive, yet politically passive. Thereby, it not only prolongs rural migrants' mobile lives on the urban fringes, but also dampens political actions that claim space through resistance.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"88 1","pages":"595 - 617"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78325274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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