This talk covers the rise of nonfiction writing as a form of participatory documentation in post-2008 China. As a specific cultural wave oriented towards ordinary existence, Chinese nonfiction writing grew prominent in a time in which writers, media professionals, and amateurs from different social classes came together to capture the drastic social and urban changes around them through engaged storytelling. In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, this collective practice—Shiqi Lin argues—allowed a narrative of crisis and intervention to surface against an entrenched discourse of high economic developmentalism in contemporary China. Lin considers how the nonfiction writing movement itself was a response to structural crises in literature, journalism, and society. With the rise of WeChat as a dominant digital platform that facilitated the spread of this movement, she also examines the role of digital infrastructure in refashioning literature as a form of new media for building commons and negotiating social fragmentation.

Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Chinese new media cultures, critical theory, political theory, and comparative media theory. Her current book project examines how Chinese film, literature, podcast, and digital media have been interrelated to document the structural crises of neoliberal globalization since 2008. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as China Perspectives, Foundry, positions politics, Symplokē, and the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media.

Sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese Department and co-sponsored by the Political Science Department, Asian Studies Program, International Studies Program, Media Studies Program, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.  

This event is free and open to the public.