Publication date:
11 September 2014Length of book:
320 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442236776
Behind China’s growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country’s hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the country’s remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nation’s “subalterns.”
Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows that in the face of the harsh reality of injustice and discrimination, China’s rural migrants engage in media and cultural practices that are at once both mundane and profound—invariably imbued with hope and dignity, and motivated by the dream of a better life. Exploring the cultural politics of inequality in post-Mao China, this engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world.
Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows that in the face of the harsh reality of injustice and discrimination, China’s rural migrants engage in media and cultural practices that are at once both mundane and profound—invariably imbued with hope and dignity, and motivated by the dream of a better life. Exploring the cultural politics of inequality in post-Mao China, this engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world.
Wanning Sun's Subaltern China succeeds in making an original intervention in an already crowded field. The value of this study lies in its emphasis on cultural productions not only about but by rural migrant workers. . . .Sun offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of these cultural expressions of workers' voices. . . .I could not put this book down once I began to read it. Sun offers us a close-up view of workers' hopes and desires, pains and disappointments, and understandings of their exploited situations, putting these in the context of neoliberal economic growth. I look forward to teaching this book in my classes.