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Winner, 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies, Modern Language Association
Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over.
On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.
On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.
A fierce and urgent book.
On the Edge presents a new way of understanding and talking about precarity and the subaltern experience in contemporary China, and its approach to social inequality is sophisticated as well as innovative.
On the Edge is an exemplary piece of comparatist cultural studies...Tightly argued, nuanced in its analysis, and eruditely referenced, the book is both illuminating and sobering. It is a must-read for researchers of contemporary China as well as those in the highly interdisciplinary and protean field of precarity studies.
Hillenbrand is as searing and uncompromising in her critique of the power of the state and neoliberal market as she is sensitive and compassionate to rural migrant labourers. The book is definitely not “China for Dummies”, nor will it leave you with a feelgood aftertaste. But you’ll be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the moral complexity that is essential to understanding China.
— Wanning Sun
[An]exceptionally sophisticated and rich book.
A seminal work that offers a multifaceted understanding of precarity in contemporary China. Hillenbrand’s interdisciplinary approach and her ability to connect disparate cultural forms provide a fresh perspective on how insecurity and instability shape both individual and collective experiences in China.
Hillenbrand’s book has the potential to spark discussion not only within the specific field of Chinese studies but
also across the disciplines, as she conceptualizes precarity in a way that sharpens our understanding of the current phase of late capitalism.
This new work by a literary and visual studies scholar at Oxford is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Urgently addresses the struggles of Chinese workers in an unstable labor market, the disillusion of the Chinese Dream, and the consequences of China’s economic downturn.
Hillenbrand examines the precarity of life for the outcasts of Chinese capitalism, indispensable yet unwanted, living in a state that she calls “zombie citizenship.” Her analysis of a wide range of fractious, rebarbative cultural productions by China’s underclass reveals how links between precarity, labor, life, and art generate new spaces for understanding protest, class, exploitation, and control.
— Leigh K. Jenco, author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West
Brilliant and perceptive, this book explores “precarity” as an affective and material human condition in China. Expressed through art forms and cultural practices, precarity unleashes unmanageable and undisciplined feelings that haunt the regime as much as society. This is one of the most original works on contemporary China I have ever read.
— Ching Kwan Lee, author of The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View
Revealing vital connections between creativity and precarity, On the Edge features incisive and nuanced analyses of Chinese avant-garde art, migrant worker poetry and video, documentary cinema, and livestreaming performances. This inspiring book should be essential reading for all students of contemporary art, media, and society.
— Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China
On the Edge engages with precarity as a critical issue of our time. Coupled with its theoretical sophistication, the scope of its subject matter, its analytical strength, and its eloquence, this makes it a key intervention. Combining social engagement and aesthetic sensitivity, this scholarship is as imaginative as it is rigorous.
— Maghiel van Crevel, author of Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money
A compelling and refreshing examination of what it means to exist on the margins in a society undergoing radical transformation.
Preface: Trial by Fire
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Grasping the Precarious
1. The Delegators
2. The Ragpickers
3. The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists
4. The Cliffhangers
5. The Microcelebrities
Conclusion: Viral Precarity
Notes
References
Index