Multiple "Border" Crossings: Nonfiction and China'S Rural Migrant Workers and Immigrants(3/3)

The project takes the comparative approach of interdisciplinary literary studies to read nonfiction narratives of contemporary “Chinese” migrant workers and immigrants both in Chinese and English. Through the lenses of comparative genre studies, affect studies, and critical border studies, the project investigates the multiple “border” crossings of nonfiction writers and their mediation, examines the structure of feeling and the cultural politics of emotions operated in literary journalism, and explores the linkage between nonfiction and making of new socialrelations. By taking such methodologies, the project attempts to reach deeper understanding of how nonfiction, as a genre, elicits and produces knowledge about specific subjects and its cultural politics of representation. At the sametime, the project endeavors to explore how nonfiction appropriates literary techniques to create and mobilize readers’ emotions and to further articulate the play between knowledge production and affects. With a focus on the multiple “border” crossings of nonfiction writers, particularly in terms of class, gender, culture, ethnicity, and race, the project unfolds the physical and emotional labor that both nonfiction writers and their writing subjects invest in the process of making “facts” and “truth” available to the reading public. The emotional labor that nonfiction writers perform, both in the narrative and in real life, not only shows the writers’ mediation and intervention, but also suggests the contradictions and conflicts between “objective” knowledge and “subjective” emotions in literaryjournalism. The project further complicates the play between “objective” and “subjective” information in nonfiction narratives of Chinese (im)migrants to explore how literary journalism mobilizes and creates a structure of feeling,enabling a new social relation between global readers and Chinese migrant workers. By examining the representation of Chinese migrant workers and its cultural politics of emotions, the project unfolds and articulates the making of “Chineseness” and “China as a concept” in the nonfiction genre.