Diaspora, displacement, (dé)tour: Jia Zhangke and his dialogic attempts in Chinese Urban Cinema

Abstract

In China, as well as other parts of the world, the link between urbanization, displacement and independent cinema reflects a growing trend to tell the inconvenient truth outside the mainstream. Independent cinema becomes increasingly an effective medium in airing concerns regarding reckless development or the displacement of the masses against the backdrop of marketization and globalization in China. The leading Chinese director, Jia Zhangke, who has received international acclaim for his critical remarks on social ills, reflects constantly in his works a growing awareness of the combined social and economic consequences of China’s postsocialist experience. His films portray, on the one hand, the ruining of China’s manufacturing centers and nature because of development and reconstruction; and the withering of home and everyday life under the unknown forces of global modernity on the other. The contemporary Chinese diasporic experience involves not only physical displacement (the migrant workers) but also intellectual alienation. This paper shows how the migrant workers re-conceptualize their understanding of home, culture and the self within the terms set by post-socialism and urbanization. Their awareness fuels a desire to interpret “home” as both a geographical location and an imaginary. This chapter focuses on the one hand, the way Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) and 24 City (2008) illuminate the effects of the confrontation between the migrant workers’ personal sensitivities and hopelessness; and the filmmaker’s new awareness of global power structures and international relations (via the circulation of his films in film festivals) that leads to a shift in his conception of his intellectual self, his home and what it means to be “Chinese” filmmaker on the other. This discussion explores the notions of home and diaspora, which inform the construction of place and locality and exemplifies the role urbanization plays in the dismantling of the everyday in today’s China, and film’s capacity to translate the diasporic experience into social and cultural critique. It sheds light on the ways in which both geographical (migrant workers) and intellectual (the filmmaker) displacement served as a critical device to reflect on the notions of identity and home, urbanization and globalization. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism would be employed in analyzing the self-reflexivity of Jia, his performative cinema and its interaction with the notion of home.