Eric Florence
Université de Liège, Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies, Faculty Member
- Sociology, Politics, Identity (Culture), Identity politics, Language and Identity, Identity Politics (Political Science), and 10 moreSocial Representations, Anthropology of Borders, Social Movements, Postsocialism, Contemporary China, Illegality (Anthropology), Resistance (Social), Sociology of Music, Anthropology of Music, and Music and Politicsedit
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migrants. La conquête d’une citoyenneté (China and its migrants: the conquest of a citizenship),
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proche. Ethnographie des formes d’association en Chine contemporaine
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Peer reviewe
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... An essay by Casey Man Kong Lum examines several communities for whom karaoke is important: Hong Kong Cantonese living in New York's Chinatown, Taiwanese in surburban New Jersey, and Malaysian Chinese in ... Richmond, Surrey:... more
... An essay by Casey Man Kong Lum examines several communities for whom karaoke is important: Hong Kong Cantonese living in New York's Chinatown, Taiwanese in surburban New Jersey, and Malaysian Chinese in ... Richmond, Surrey: The Curzon Press, 1999-354 pp. ...
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Research Interests: Academia and Sociologie
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In this chapter, we document how the Shenzhen Migrant Workers Museum (SMWM) makes visible or invisible specific facets of political economy, power configurations and of migrant workers’ subject formation. Museums, through organizing... more
In this chapter, we document how the Shenzhen Migrant Workers Museum (SMWM) makes visible or invisible specific facets of political economy, power configurations and of migrant workers’ subject formation. Museums, through organizing specific arrangements of things, images and people, embody a specific capacity to “show and tell”, to incorporate people in state-making processes, and strengthen social orders (Bennett: 87) or on the contrary, as Beth Lord has argued, they can make visible the contingence and reversibility of social orders (Lord: 363). The Shenzhen Migrant Labour Museum rather belongs to the former kind of project. Our study shows that the representation of rural migrant workers has been closely articulated to the shaping of Shenzhen myth-making and to fostering a neoliberal ethos of the self-enterprising subject. Rural migrant workers as they are portrayed in the museum’s permanent exhibition exemplify values such as optimism in the face of adversity, diligence, risk-taking, autonomy and self-improvement combined with Mao-era values of making contributions and self-sacrifice. These values have been promoted with much intensity in the process of building an identity for the Zone from the late 1980s on, and even more so from the middle of the next decade on.
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Therefore, in this chapter, I endeavor to explore how a grassroots collective of rural workers engage in the constitution of mediation arrangements to produce “various spatial scales” of visibility of their actions, of their claims and of... more
Therefore, in this chapter, I endeavor to explore how a grassroots collective of rural workers engage in the constitution of mediation arrangements to produce “various spatial scales” of visibility of their actions, of their claims and of their identity” (Bleil, 2005). I will show how a collective of people struggle for visibility and recognition and for the alteration of social hierarchies or to what Butler has called the changes and struggles in “regimes of appearance” (Butler, 2015). These regimes may be seen as part of a struggles for the legitimate ways for people to appear in public space, to decide on whom can become “a subject of appearance”, Hence, following Arendt and Butler, one should attend to the struggles for the legitimate forms of appearance or attempts at altering the “regimes of appearance” (Butler, 2016), implying a differentiated or more or less inclusive politics of recognition and of citizenship. Therefore, the question I am interested in is not so much what spaces are invested by collectives of migrant youth, but rather to focus on a range of organizational practices and mediation processes through which collectives of workers shape spaces of interactions, of engagements, of shared emotions and collective performances, both physical and virtual . Following Martin, I conceive of cultural practices as embodied practices linked to social hierarchies and as fundamentally marked by ambivalence, polysemy and, most prominently as to this chapter, as carrying the potential to foster pleasure and connect people, as well as to embody emotions (Martin 2000). Hence, how do grassroots collectives of rural workers foster the constitution of communities of “interpretation and emotion” (Chartier 1989)? To tackle these questions, I rely on the concept of mediation as defined by Voirol for whom mediation always implies the issue of totality in that it re-inscribes social facts into the socio-historical conditions which engendered them. Voirol highlights that mediation processes are standing at the heart of symbolic and material struggles for representation and for definitions of social orders (Voirol 2005 : 20, 56-57). More precisely, I am interested in mediation or arrangements of mediation in that they enable to bridge meaning with organization and people (Beaud, 2005). The object of research in this chapter is more organizational than semantic. Instead of focusing on people’s consciousness or subjectivities, I draw from De Nora’s concept of “aesthetic agency” to look at how “the production of knowledge, talk, organizational regimes, and embodied practice is seen to emerge from within a matrix of social relations and things” and is closely related to embodiment and materiality (De Nora and Atkins)
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This paper offers a comparative investigation of two rural migrant workers museums, one state-run in Shenzhen and another grassroots project in the suburbs of Beijing. We take museums as institutions of the politics of recognition and... more
This paper offers a comparative investigation of two rural migrant
workers museums, one state-run in Shenzhen and another
grassroots project in the suburbs of Beijing. We take museums as
institutions of the politics of recognition and identity politics par
excellence, and as fields of forces through which the matrices of
political economy, state formation and popular culture are played
out. The theoretical problematiques that frame our analyses are
twofold. On the one hand, what are the ways in which the postMao political economy and socioeconomic changes are
represented in the symbolic rituals enacted in the museums? On
the other hand, how such representational schemes cast light on
issues of labour, technologies of the self, and the collective
identity of migrant workers? We argue that the Shenzhen
Museum, albeit providing idealising and heroizing portrays of
migrant workers, reifies a development- and market-centred view
of the city that is deliberately oblivious to the structural roots of
migrant marginality. In contrast, the Beijing Museum offers a
powerful counternarrative to the centrality of capital logic. By
prioritising migrants’ lived experiences of labouring and living, it
underscores claims for fair evaluation of migrant labour, welfare
protection, dignity of labouring bodies, and collective voice and
identity.
workers museums, one state-run in Shenzhen and another
grassroots project in the suburbs of Beijing. We take museums as
institutions of the politics of recognition and identity politics par
excellence, and as fields of forces through which the matrices of
political economy, state formation and popular culture are played
out. The theoretical problematiques that frame our analyses are
twofold. On the one hand, what are the ways in which the postMao political economy and socioeconomic changes are
represented in the symbolic rituals enacted in the museums? On
the other hand, how such representational schemes cast light on
issues of labour, technologies of the self, and the collective
identity of migrant workers? We argue that the Shenzhen
Museum, albeit providing idealising and heroizing portrays of
migrant workers, reifies a development- and market-centred view
of the city that is deliberately oblivious to the structural roots of
migrant marginality. In contrast, the Beijing Museum offers a
powerful counternarrative to the centrality of capital logic. By
prioritising migrants’ lived experiences of labouring and living, it
underscores claims for fair evaluation of migrant labour, welfare
protection, dignity of labouring bodies, and collective voice and
identity.
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The recent wave of evictions of tens of thousands of rural migrants in Beijing has served as a harsh reminder of the subaltern condition of many of these people in today's China. This essay examines how rural migrant workers have been... more
The recent wave of evictions of tens of thousands of rural migrants in Beijing has served as a harsh reminder of the subaltern condition of many of these people in today's China. This essay examines how rural migrant workers have been represented in Chinese independent documentary films. It points to the importance of conceptually linking the political economy, sociology, and cultural politics of labour in order to apprehend the subject-making processes of migrant workers in today's China.
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Ce chapitre, comme le précédent, s'intéresse au lien qui peut être établi entre média-tion et représentation, en analysant des productions culturelles particulières : des récits d'expérience de travailleurs migrants circulant aujourd'hui... more
Ce chapitre, comme le précédent, s'intéresse au lien qui peut être établi entre média-tion et représentation, en analysant des productions culturelles particulières : des récits d'expérience de travailleurs migrants circulant aujourd'hui en Chine. Il situe néanmoins ces objets dans un contexte théorique et empirique plus large, celui de la structuration de l'espace public, pour interroger le rapport entre les dispositifs de médiation et la visibilité. En réarticulant le niveau « macro » des contraintes institu-tionnelles (y compris médiatiques) et du discours hégémonique au niveau « micro » de l'expérience individuelle, la notion de médiation permet à l'auteur de décrire le type de subjectivité politique que les différentes mises en forme de ces expériences produisent. Considérer les dispositifs de médiation dans le cadre de la structuration de l'espace public dialectise la notion et en démontre les potentialités critiques, en particulier pour ce qui est de mettre au jour la manière dont le formatage des expériences ou des émotions relève d'une lutte politique. L'auteur démontre en quoi la notion de médiation, pour peu qu'on la considère dans ses différentes acceptions, et en particulier comme dispositif et comme processus, est apte à décrire le chevauchement de catégories personnelles et de catégories politiques, et en quoi elle est pertinente pour analyser la manière dont les objets culturels contribuent à structurer les collectifs qui se mani-festent dans l'espace public.