本研究計畫旨在從比較文學觀點，來分析全球農民工書寫的再現政治和文化生產意義。主張農民工書寫作為中國崛起後變動中的社會階層關係的維穩與重塑媒介，透過文學敘事的生產與流通，一方面挪用現代化和全球化論述框架以再現中國勞動階層的生命困境，將農民工主體能動性和社會流動性的匱乏，定調為國家現代化進程和全球化的天然弱勢，使得資本對農民工勞動力的剝削和對此群體階級關係的分裂成為全球常態；但同時也問題化中國農民工在全球新自由主義中結構性的「非人」處境，進而重建中國勞動階層的另類未來。本研究計畫閱讀分析中、英文農民工書寫在文體形式和敘事策略上的差異，探討在不同的社會文化和知識生產脈絡下，文體形式和敘事策略，如何仲介農民工與國家發展和全球資本的關係，並討論中國農民工和移工敘事作為全球消費性文化商品，其所描繪和型塑的中國勞動階層（在全球分工秩序中實為全球勞動階層的代表）與消費此類敘事的全球公民間的關係，探究全球農民工敘事對社會關係重塑的想像以及其所帶有的社會運動意涵，開展中國農民工書寫研究聚焦於體現底層生活和社會現狀的侷限。 ;This project, “Rural Migrant Workers’ Narrative and its Discontent: the Making and Remaking of Chinese Working Class within Global Neoliberalism,” explores the linked relationship between rural migrant workers’ narrative and the global division of labor. The project claims that the production of rural migrant workers’ narrative within and without China helps normalize and reaffirm the loss of subjectivity and the impossibility of social mobility among this group in China’s economic modernity, facilitating state and global capital’s need to retain cheap labor and maintain social divisions. At the same time, migrant workers’ narrative, with a focus on the inhuman condition of Chinese migrant workers, problematizes the structural inequality embedded in the new global division of labor, challenges the existing social relations, and imagine alternative futurity for global readers. By comparing Chinese migrant workers’ narrative written in Chinese and English, the project examines how this body of work represents, mediates, and shapes workers’ relations with the Chinese nation-state and global capital. Borrowing from Jodi Melamed’s discussion on racial capitalism, the project studies how migrant workers’ narrative in English conceptualizes and produces Chinese workers as racialized subjects. Extending Neferti Tadiar’s research on migrant workers’ disposable life, the project explores the possibility of imagining alternative form of biopolitics as a means to resist the dehumanizing process of labor within global neoliberalism. I am particularly interested in how global Chinese migrant workers’ narrative, produced and consumed in different social and cultural contexts, frames workers’ inhuman condition and how such frameworks mediate global readers’ relations with workers and their understanding of existing economic systems.
