Dog Days and Salted Fish: Malaise of Indolence among Young Migrant Café Workers in Shanghai
Rural-to-urban migrants have largely been portrayed as future-oriented, striving subjects, living ‘in suspension’ and enduring precarious conditions for the sake of desired futures. This talk works from the premise that such depictions tend to naturalize purposefulness as a constant mode of being requiring no efforts to be sustained against other temporal and affective (dis)orientations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018, the talk zeroes in on the lives of young migrant café workers in Shanghai who turned to the cosmopolitan service sector in pursuit of self-development and entrepreneurial futures. If aspirations configure self-narratives and trajectories, close-up observation reveals more ambivalent modes of subjectivity, oscillating between affective engagements with the future and expressions of indolence. At a time when discourses of the ‘Chinese dream’ coexist with vernacular celebrations of inactivity, what happens when young migrants encounter themselves as no longer inclined toward remaining aspiring, purposive, striving, if only temporarily?
Date:
18 November 2021, 17:00 (Thursday, 6th week, Michaelmas 2021)
Venue:
Venue to be announced
Speakers:
Speaker to be announced
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organisers:
Dr Yi Lu (University of Oxford),
Dr Coraline Jortay (University of Oxford),
Professor Denise van de Kamp (University of Oxford),
Dr Chigusa Yamaura (University of Oxford),
Dr Giulia Falato (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Dr Coraline Jortay (University of Oxford)
Part of:
China Studies Seminar series
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TVavEe9zSGONViJtYf-RTw
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
