Yiming Ma
Yiming MaSpecialization: Modern Chinese Literature, Transnational East Asia, Labor History, Working-Class Culture, Infrastructure Studies, Material Culture
Email:yimingma@ucsb.edu
ABOUT
I am a Ph.D. candidate researching modern Chinese and East Asian labor culture. My doctoral project examines literary and media representations of the working-class identity, employment relations, labor process, labor movements, unwaged labor, and kinship/family from the late 19th century to the early People’s Republic of China. My dissertation is a literary, cultural, and political-economic analysis of industrial labor in modern China. Each zooming in a specific region informed by labor geography, my dissertation chapters move from “invented traditions” among silk workers in industrializing Canton, ideals about work among student-workers in Shenyang, wartime co-op workers’ critique of capitalism (Baoji, Shaanxi), the migrant workers arriving in Chongqing from coastal cities, and, finally, the miners and film workers reckoning with war and colonial legacies in post-WWII Manchuria.
There are two central threads to my inquiries: first, “How do farmers become workers?” This is a century-old question initially posed by the renowned Chinese sociologist Fei Hsiao-tung. It is the question of how social formations and cultures change along with shifting modes of production. For example, “Self-combing” was a practice of celibacy among women silk workers that became unprecedentedly widespread due to the economic boom and new family-factory relations in the historical Nanpanshun (南番顺) area.
The other thread is how to understand the margins of typical industrial modernity. In modern China, industrial production and consumption were not among the dominant organizational, social, and cultural logics, and any “accumulation” was disrupted by frequent wars, regime changes, and colonialism. Instead of big factories, Chinese industrial modernity happens in families, co-ops, and sometimes on the road.
AREAS OF INTEREST
Modern Chinese Literature, Transnational East Asia, Labor History, Working-Class Culture, Infrastructure Studies, Material Culture
ACADEMIC ADVISORS
ACADEMIC HISTORY
M.A., Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University, 2017-2019
M.A., English, Wuhan University, 2014-2017
B.A., Business English, Jianghan University, 2009-2013