Genres, dialectics of visibility, and agency: the cultural politics of labor from migrant literature to digital media platforms

This chapter provides a critical overview of the major shifts in the cultural politics of migrant labor in post-Mao China. Juxtaposing interdisciplinary scholarship on subaltern cultural politics with long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that struggles over the (self-)representation of migrant labour have constituted a key terrain for negotiating the meanings of labor and class across successive phases of reform, with profound implications for the actual reform process. The chapter focuses on three interconnected genres: state and commercial media, migrant literature, and grassroots mediation. While state and commercial media have shown much plasticity in constructing changing forms of representation and recognition of migrant labour to legitimate reform while euphemizing class conflicts and tensions, migrant literature, labour NGOs and processes of digitalization have opened avenues for workers to reclaim the meaning of dagong and hence their subjectivities. These processes of the (dis-)articulation of class, as demonstrated, are fraught with complex processes of institutional mediation and intertextuality. The chapter concludes by identifying key questions for future research on platform-mediated cultural politics, calling for attention to the political economy of digital infrastructures and their implications for migrant workers' voice-making in contemporary China.