Overview

"Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China's suppressed social strife simmers-or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in ""zombie citizenship,"" a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious-sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract."

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9780231212144

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Reviews

"Hillenbrand examines the precarity of life for the outcasts of Chinese capitalism, indispensable yet unwanted, living in a state that she calls “zombie citizenship.” Her analysis of a wide range of fractious, rebarbative cultural productions by China’s underclass reveals how links between precarity, labor, life, and art generate new spaces for understanding protest, class, exploitation, and control. -- Leigh K. Jenco, author of <i>Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West</i> Brilliant and perceptive, this book explores “precarity” as an affective and material human condition in China. Expressed through art forms and cultural practices, precarity unleashes unmanageable and undisciplined feelings that haunt the regime as much as society. This is one of the most original works on contemporary China I have ever read. -- Ching Kwan Lee, author of <i>The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View</i> Revealing vital connections between creativity and precarity, On the Edge features incisive and nuanced analyses of Chinese avant-garde art, migrant worker poetry and video, documentary cinema, and livestreaming performances. This inspiring book should be essential reading for all students of contemporary art, media, and society. -- Jie Li, author of <i>Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China</i> On the Edge engages with precarity as a critical issue of our time. Coupled with its theoretical sophistication, the scope of its subject matter, its analytical strength, and its eloquence, this makes it a key intervention. Combining social engagement and aesthetic sensitivity, this scholarship is as imaginative as it is rigorous. -- Maghiel van Crevel, author of <i>Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money</i> Hillenbrand is as searing and uncompromising in her critique of the power of the state and neoliberal market as she is sensitive and compassionate to rural migrant labourers. The book is definitely not “China for Dummies”, nor will it leave you with a feelgood aftertaste. But you’ll be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the moral complexity that is essential to understanding China. -- Wanning Sun * The Conversation's ""Best books of 2023"" *"

On the Edge engages with precarity as a critical issue of our time. Coupled with its theoretical sophistication, the scope of its subject matter, its analytical strength, and its eloquence, this makes it a key intervention. Combining social engagement and aesthetic sensitivity, this scholarship is as imaginative as it is rigorous. -- Maghiel van Crevel, author of <i>Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money</i>

"Hillenbrand examines the precarity of life for the outcasts of Chinese capitalism, indispensable yet unwanted, living in a state that she calls “zombie citizenship.” Her analysis of a wide range of fractious, rebarbative cultural productions by China’s underclass reveals how links between precarity, labor, life, and art generate new spaces for understanding protest, class, exploitation, and control. -- Leigh K. Jenco, author of <i>Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West</i> Brilliant and perceptive, this book explores “precarity” as an affective and material human condition in China. Expressed through art forms and cultural practices, precarity unleashes unmanageable and undisciplined feelings that haunt the regime as much as society. This is one of the most original works on contemporary China I have ever read. -- Ching Kwan Lee, author of <i>The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View</i> Revealing vital connections between creativity and precarity, On the Edge features incisive and nuanced analyses of Chinese avant-garde art, migrant worker poetry and video, documentary cinema, and livestreaming performances. This inspiring book should be essential reading for all students of contemporary art, media, and society. -- Jie Li, author of <i>Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China</i> On the Edge engages with precarity as a critical issue of our time. Coupled with its theoretical sophistication, the scope of its subject matter, its analytical strength, and its eloquence, this makes it a key intervention. Combining social engagement and aesthetic sensitivity, this scholarship is as imaginative as it is rigorous. -- Maghiel van Crevel, author of <i>Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money</i> Hillenbrand is as searing and uncompromising in her critique of the power of the state and neoliberal market as she is sensitive and compassionate to rural migrant labourers. The book is definitely not “China for Dummies”, nor will it leave you with a feelgood aftertaste. But you’ll be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the moral complexity that is essential to understanding China. -- Wanning Sun * The Conversation's ""Best books of 2023"" * Hillenbrand records the thrashing of the Chinese body politic in a way that makes this book necessary reading for anyone interested in the wages of drastic economic disparity, in China or beyond. * Critical Inquiry * [An]exceptionally sophisticated and rich book. * China Quarterly *"

Author Information

Margaret Hillenbrand is professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (2020).

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