From Columbia College Press:
Charismatic artists recruit determined migrants for site-specific efficiency artwork items, typically with out compensation. Building staff threaten on digicam to leap from the highest of a high-rise constructing if their again wages usually are not paid. Customers of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by consuming excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and lots of different latest cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over.
On the Edge probes precarity in modern China by the lens of the darkish and indignant cultural types that continual uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues {that a} huge underclass of Chinese language staff exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the regulation and its safeguards. Many others additionally really feel precarious—sensing that they reside on a precipice, with the fixed worry of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Inspecting the risky aesthetic types that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiousness over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how folks use tradition to vent taboo emotions of rage, resentment, mistrust, and disdain in situations rife with cross-class antagonism.
On the Edge is extremely interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, artwork historical past, literary criticism, and efficiency research with citizenship, protest, and labor research. It makes each the distinctive Chinese language expertise and the important function of tradition central to international understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.
