Images by Angela Melitopoulos

Borders are no longer only geographical lines or filters between states. Rather than existing solely at territory's edge, they have emerged as mobile control technologies strung across the world's infrastructures, circuits, cities and bodies. In China one of the most important borders is that between the urban and the rural. The movement of people between these spaces is deeply shaping Chinese society and its interactions with the state. Events such as the Shanghai Expo 2010 offer a hypermodern and green vision of the city. The migrant villages that have sprung up on the fringes of China's metropolises present a very different image: bleak, polluted and poor. These villages are sites of multiple borders, where the subjectivity of migrants is produced at the interface with governmental, nongovernmental and commercial actors.

Paper delivered at Flying University of the Transnational Humanities, Reseach Centre for Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, June 2010.

What's Wrong with the Alternative Modernities Thesis

Critical accounts of regionalism always seem to end up as debates about modernity. Defined sometimes in terms of time and at others in terms of social or political form, modernity is perhaps too general a concept. Without doubt it has enabling effects which move the discussion of regionalism beyond the polarising bind of universalism and particularism. Yet it can also inhibit discussion by swinging the debate away from historical detail and toward schematic simplifications of interactions between civilizations or cultures. It is by now widely recognised that modernity is a global phenomenon and not merely the result of the upheavals, industrialisation, revolutions and enlightenments that began to occur in Europe over five centuries ago. At the very least there is acceptance that modernity must reckon with the history of European colonialism and that the two way traffic between metropolis and colony was central to its emergence. More forcefully than this, the thesis of alternative or multiple modernities posits a plurality of modernities throughout the world. Each arises under different circumstances and interacts with the others, but nonetheless displays its own internal contradictions.  It is to this thesis that I wish to turn my attention today.

On 23 June 2010 Transit-Labour participants Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson participated in a round table discussion with academics from Shanghai Unversity in the Venice Pavillion at the Shanghai World Expo. The theme of the event was: Mega-Cities Images at ExpoL Urban Planning, Environmental Protection, Migration. Below is the announcement for the meeting plus some images of the occasion.

Thanks to Giulia dal Maso for her organising efforts.

This multimedia project - photographed, with audio and video, by Sharron Lovell, and produced by David Campbell - tells the story of three families of Chinese migrant labourers in Shanghai, and the struggles they face as undocumented internal migrants.