Contemporary Chinese Culture Lecture

Dr. Julie Chu (Assoc. Professor of Anthropology, Univ. of Chicago) will give the inaugural Contemporary Chines Culture Lecture on "Constancy & the Supply Chain of Human Feeling".

This talk takes up the figure of the supply chain to think about the problem of constancy-amid-flux in the circulation of people and things between China and the United States. Ethnographically, the talk focuses on a grey industry of transnational Chinese couriers whose work revolves around the transport of American-born infants and a steady supply of “quality” milk formula from their migrant parents in the U.S. to designated caregivers in rural Fuzhou in Fujian Province. For Chinese migrants hoping to ensure the safe movement and return of their “Little Americans,” supply chains not only emerge as explicit objects of concern; they also operate as a key chronotope—that is, in the Bakhtinian sense of the timespace configuring the narrative character and emplotment of migrant aspirations and moral careers. Specifically, at a time of great volatility in the valuation of the U.S. dollar against the Chinese yuan and in the escalation of Chinese and U.S. scandals over toxic milk formula, the talk explores how a constant and ostentatious flow of Little Americans and their supply of made-in-the-USA milk worked to stabilize and extend the “worth” of Fuzhounese migration amid multiple specters of “crisis.”

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  Heroic Imagination by Symphony by the Sea

  Sunday, May 05, 2024 3:00p

  The Cabot Theater
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  WBUR Earth Week Events

  Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 goes until 04/26

  WBUR CitySpace at The Lavine Broadcast Center

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