Jiarui Sun, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“Heat and Sentiment: Affective alignments in Chinese NFT WeChat groups”

In Chinese legal cases and news outlets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are portrayed as financial schemes where an ill-minded few profit from a greedy, irrational crowd. This paper investigates why NFTs resonate among their mainland Chinese players (wanjia) in WeChat groups. As the crypto situation materialize in intersection with local assemblages of investment, gambling, and scams, “sentiment” (qingxu) and “heat” (redu) emerge as two main fetishizations. Players think prominent market players (dahu) can manipulate others’ sentiments and certain visual and haptic signs are indicative of a soon-to-be surging market. This paper argue these productive misrecognitions are part of the affectively charged interactive ritual that players (co)construct in WeChat groups. Through multimodal communication in WeChat, including metricalized texts, GIFs, and videos, the players enregister NFTs so as to (co)produce alignment toward a common participation framework, value regime, and temporality. In such process, signs like memes become affective through their circulation and citation. Weaving together cultural models of underground lottery gambling, stock trading, and Communist revolution, players contextualize NFT speculation as a war charge to break free from the contemporary Chinese working-class life of passivity and stagnation. Signs also contribute to the scaling work of current moment of collective action as retro-performative. Genred texts invoking feel-good net novels invite players to take the stance of a successful elite male looking back at his original moment of risk-taking, imagining certainty from the near future.

“A Haunting Epic: Entextualizing a State Archive and the ‘Strange’ Events in Ethnic China”

The One Hundred Chinese Epics Project is a multimedia archival initiative by the Chinese Ministry of Culture that aims to collect the country’s ethnic oral traditions recognized as part of the epic genre. In 2017, the Project assigned an ethnic Donyu film crew to compile the state archive for one of the one hundred Chinese epics, a Donyu narrative poem called Yinluge (yǐn lù gē) in Han or hai’ntsi [hai44ntsi11] in Donyu. Unlike most other sub-projects undertaken by scholars and professional filmmakers, the Yinluge Project was entrusted to the Donyu community filmmakers to “give voice to cultural bearers.” Despite their diligent efforts to complete this state archive, the Donyu crew encountered a series of unfortunate events that they described as “bizarre” (guǐyì) and “strange” (qíguài), leading them to feel that the project was impossible to finish. To complete the archive, they must confront the things that haunt the project. This chapter juxtaposes between the entextualization of the epic that ultimately became a state archive with the hauntings that did not. It examines the crew’s coping with the loss of culture and language as they attempt to preserve their Donyu world through the camera, Donyu-Han translation, and academic standards such as interlinear gloss. It describes the forces beyond such institutional practices and ethnographic analysis that nevertheless contributed to the creation of the archive.

“The Mirror and the Lens: Breast Cancer, Images, and Embodied Selfhood”

In the aftermath of breast cancer treatment, many people describe no longer recognizing themselves in the bodies they now inhabit. A common trope articulating this radical rupture in embodied selfhood focuses on the encounter with the mirror image. In accounts I have heard and gathered, people often describe looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger—or avoiding the mirror altogether because of a profound sense of alienation and misrecognition. Yet many people also recount that seeing their bodies in photographs taken by themselves or others facilitated a process by which they began to feel at home in their new bodies, and, more broadly to integrate a new sense of self as a person living with the durable effects and lasting threat of cancer. What is it about the appearance of the self as other in the camera image (as opposed to the mirror image) that makes it easier to reconcile and integrate one’s new appearance with one’s sense of self? This paper is part of a larger project examining how people with breast cancer are taking up cameras for projects of documentation, commemoration, communication, and advocacy during and after treatment. I ask how they are also using photography and visual imagery to contest and expand the field of vision around the disease, changing not only their own relations to their bodies but also the way society sees breast cancer. In this paper, drawing from both a Peircian processual understanding of the self as an emergent outcome of semiosis and from Schiller’s dynamic concept of the body image, I ask what the experiences of people with breast cancer might help us understand more generally about selfhood, embodiment, and the work of images.

“From the World to Singapore: The Singlish Quiz and (Foreigners’) Favorite Singlish Words”

At the scale of the nation-state and imagined national community, the Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore is constantly narrated through frames of lack, deficit, failure, and absence: histories, culture(s), and language(s) that have been irremediably lost or corrupted; individual and collective identities that are shallow, inauthentic, or derivative; group-based stereotypes and images that are embarrassing or utterly incomprehensible to the outside world. Against this backdrop, in this chapter, I mobilize a desire-based framework (Tuck and Yang 2012; also Kulick 2003, Stoler 2012, Stasch 2016) to examine a broadly enregistered cultural genre that I repeatedly encountered during my fieldwork: the Singlish quiz. At times formal and planned and at others casual and spontaneous, the Singlish quiz is an interactional routine wherein Singaporeans judge foreigners’ knowledge of Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English, a linguistic variety ambivalently positioned between national embarrassment and national pride, between “broken English” and the most—even the only—uniquely Singaporean phenomenon (Babcock 2022, 2023, forthcoming). I show how the Singlish quiz functions to invert the affective hierarchy of shame and pride by affording an opportunity for Singaporeans to evaluate foreigners’ knowledge and invite reflections on their “favorite Singlish words.” Yet as I show, despite this troubling, the hierarchy is often still reproduced in its inversion, and racially hegemonic, reflexively global listening subjects—whether individual, institutional, or aggregate (Rosa and Flores 2017; Pak 2023; also Inoue 2006)—continue to be reanimated even in absentia as the figure toward whom “the Singaporean’s” address must be oriented.