Name: The Cliffhangers: Suicide Shows and the Aesthetics of Protest in China
Start: 2025-01-16T17:30:00+08:00
End: 2025-01-16T19:00:00+08:00
Location: City Book Room

The Cliffhangers: Suicide Shows and the Aesthetics of Protest in China

Join Margaret Hillenbrand, a professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Oxford at Singapore on 16th Jan!
About this Event

Over the last two decades, workers in China’s vast and poorly regulated construction industry have increasingly turned to suicidal performance as a radical means of securing unpaid wages. These so-called “suicide shows” have drawn attention as expressions of escalating labor unrest in China; as such, they are usually interpreted through a political science prism. But these displays, precisely because they are so dramatic, also open themselves up to cultural analysis: they tie together mixed threads, from the Chinese tradition of suicide as righteous remonstrance to forms of creatively embodied protest in the era of Occupy. At the same time, though, these workers have also created an aesthetic intervention which is all their own. This talk draws on two dozen suicide shows posted on video-sharing sites to argue that these performances force a visual rupture in the Chinese cityscape, as the nation’s new poor, so often invisible to their social others on the street, climb to the highest urban summits and command extreme attention. They turn the rooftop into a site of performance which acts out the excruciating distinction between those who belong within the city and the dispossessed: those who are cast out from the circle of humanity and thus excluded from all avenues to legal and economic redress when they are wronged.

About the speaker

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focusses on literary and visual studies in contemporary China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, especially cultures of secrecy and protest. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023). She is now working on a book about the cultural politics of the face in Chinese visual culture during the era of biometric surveillance, cosmetic surgery, and masked protest.