Lecture: The Spaces Between: Corporatizing Lineage Belonging and the Making of Fast Fashion in Southern China
Thursday, July 2, 2015 
6 pm, KWZ Room 0.609
Dr. Nellie Chu (University of Göttingen)

My presentation introduces my research on the global commodity chains for fast fashion in Guangzhou, which I began during the period of 2010-2012. In particular, I describe how these global commodity chains within the Pearl River Delta region of southern China entails post-socialist transformations of property and kin relations among members of long-standing lineages who currently claim use-rights to the land. 

Using the Zhongda garment district in southeastern Guangzhou as a case study, I argue that the formation of global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China entails the re-definition of lineage belonging as socialist collectives are converted to profit-driven corporations by long-standing villagers. Specifically, I outline the historic transformation of this site from a collection of former agricultural villages known as Nanjing village during the Maoist period to a massive industrial hub, which currently stands as a conglomerate of several neighboring urban villages which are administratively suspended between rural and urban designations.

I begin by narrating the re-division of the land from individualized plots loosely organized around various lineages into massive agricultural collectives during the early years of the Communist Revolution, and the subsequent re-distribution of the land from agricultural collectives to privatized household plots during the Reform period when Deng Xiaoping promoted citizens to experiment with entrepreneurship and other capitalist practices. In particular, I emphasize how in light of these large-scale changes, long-standing members of Nanjing village redefine the affective and profit-driven contours of lineage belonging in face of large-scale urbanization projects. Their kin-based capitalist activities as corporate lineages in turn shape the ways in which members of these local village collectives assert their claims against the state as share-holders of the land.

Image: Theen Moy , Liminal Space, https://flic.kr/p/oMZJdP, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0