Welcome to a seminar where Jingyu Mao, University of Edinburgh, will present and discuss his research.
This talk draws on my book Intimacy as a Lens to talk about the emotional politics of being an ethnic performer in Yunnan province, and how performers’ emotions reveal the broader politics of inequality in contemporary China. Ethnic performers are rural-urban migrants who perform ethnic songs and dances at venues such as restaurants and tourist sites, most of whom come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Based on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork, including 60 in-depth interviews with performers, this talk focuses on the emotions of ethnic performers, including their ambivalence over their ethnic identity, their ‘happiness duty’, and the ways they use their emotional reflexivity to navigate an opaque migration regime. Through situating these micro-level emotional experiences in the broader emotional regime, this talk reveals the ways in which the emotions of ethnic performers offer valuable lenses for us to understand the broader politics of inequality in relation to ethnicity, rural-urban divide, and gender in contemporary China.