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On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China
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.
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.
408 pages, Paperback
Published October 24, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 21, 2023
Posting my interview with Hillenbrand here when it goes live
March 1, 2026
The author writes with a huge vocabulary which may make you look up a word every minute. But if all her underlying assumptions about zombie citizenship in China are true, this is indeed a wonderful work of scholarship. One finds that the author is incredibly well-read and can draw from a massive body of work by other scholars, and brings her penetrative analysis into under-researched and obscure forms of art such as delegated performance (works of art where a performance artist hires migrant workers to do certain things).
One point which I find pertinent was raised by Wang Meiqin in her review of this book. She writes that Hillenbrand's "focus on extreme or sensational cultural practices may skew the reader’s perception of Chinese society as dominated by instability and chaos". From my personal experience, it brings a flicker of light into my heart when my Internet friends in China post meme photos of Xi Jinping despite the threat of prison time. These are "everyday acts of resistance and resilience" against a regime that perpetuates this precarity - resistence and resillience which the author did not talk about.
One point which I find pertinent was raised by Wang Meiqin in her review of this book. She writes that Hillenbrand's "focus on extreme or sensational cultural practices may skew the reader’s perception of Chinese society as dominated by instability and chaos". From my personal experience, it brings a flicker of light into my heart when my Internet friends in China post meme photos of Xi Jinping despite the threat of prison time. These are "everyday acts of resistance and resilience" against a regime that perpetuates this precarity - resistence and resillience which the author did not talk about.
November 6, 2023
wish there was some time taken out to talk a bit more deeply+focusedly+tangibly about the 'bad feelings' + negative affects that are so central to hillenbrand's thesis, but i get that this isn't duke university press...
my fav chapters were 'the ragpickers' and 'the cliffhangers.' once again blown away by the measured attention to prose in hillenbrand's work.
my fav chapters were 'the ragpickers' and 'the cliffhangers.' once again blown away by the measured attention to prose in hillenbrand's work.
August 16, 2025
Fascinating--and for me unexpected--stories from contemporary China.
December 18, 2024
Added priceless details to my understanding of the precarious side of life in twenty-first century China.... A fascinating and useful book!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews