The India China Institute (ICI) at The New School is pleased to announce another event as part of our ongoing Colloquium on the Economies and Societies of India and China (CESIC).

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform

Professor Julie Chu, University of Chicago

Friday, Nov 2, 2018 (4:00-6:00 pm) | Orozco Room (#712), 66 W. 12th St.

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About the Talk

This talk considers the ways in which legal reform unfolds as a palpable, if vague, “change in the air” in new zones of urban revitalization and port development in contemporary China. Drawing from various examples of air’s tactile circulation through the rezoned areas of coastal Fuzhou (e.g., the free trade port area, the touristic city center), I show how redevelopment as filtered through “the rule of law” still politically and literally stinks for those caught up in its environs. But against instrumental readings of the dysfunctions and failures of China’s recent legal reforms, my aim is to explore how “the law” actually works through its very malfunctions and spread of bad airs to shape a distinctive atmospherics of protest in citizen-state encounters; this includes gathering unlikely allies together under a shared cloud of political disaffection and procedural noise to ponder the revolutionary and everyday possibilities of social change beyond the governing logics of “reform.”

About the Speaker

Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States. A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing a new ethnographic focus on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”).

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Selected Publications

n.d.
The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge (book manuscript in progress).

n.d.
Leaving Longyan, ethnographic film in production.

n.d.
Debt, Theft and the Calculus of Fortune (in preparation for publication).

n.d.
Schlock Value: Or, How Some Chinese Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Politics of Fiasco (in preparation for journal submission).

2017
Risk, Fate, Fortune: The Lives and Times of Customs Inspectors in Southern China. Cambridge University Press.

2016
Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Dis/comforts of Moving Strangers. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society.

2014
When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in China. American Ethnologist 14 (2): 351-367.

2011
The Noise of Data: Comments on Ewald’s “After Risk.” Carceral Notebooks 7 (2011): 109-118.

2010
Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press.

2010
The Attraction of Numbers: Accounting for Ritual Expenditures in Fuzhou, China. Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): 132-142.

2009
Departing China: Identification Papers and the Pursuit of Burial Rights in Fuzhou. In Sabine Berking and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Between Life and Death; Governing Populations in the Era of Human Rights. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

2007
Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in Foreign Exchange. In A. Truitt & S. Senders, eds., Money: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

2006
To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 13(3): 395-425.

2001
When Alan Turning Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies. Connect: art.politics.theory.practice 1(2).

2000
Meet Halo Halo, a 28-minute video documentary produced and directed.