par Jeroen De Kloet, Université d'Amsterdam, Professeur invité MSH

Abstract China’s ambition to become a creative and innovative nation, at the forefront of global digital cultures, is rapidly producing a creative class. This class, like their peers elsewhere, meets in hip café’s to work with their Apple laptops on yet the newest startup and they gather in factories that are turned into creative districts to curate an exhibition (cf. Keane). While being based in China, their lifestyle resonates clearly with the creative class elsewhere in the world. In current debates, this class is often considered the new precariat, the young people that suffer from intense neoliberalization, with freedom and self-expression being the new opium that estranges them from issues like labor rights and income security (cf McRobbie, Standing). In a place where neoliberalism is merely an exception rather than the rule (cf. Ong), how does this new precariat navigate everyday life, what are their creative aspirations? How do they talk back towards notions of being young, of being precarious, of being creative, and of being Chinese? In my talk I will show how in the context of China precarity also entails an ethics of possibility (cf. Appadurai), offering lines of flight out of hegemonic notions of creativity, notions that value individual talent and unique inspiration. I will focus in particular on contemporary Chinese urban youth, drawing on fieldwork in Beijing over the past years. Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) at the University of Amsterdam and PI of the project ChinaCreative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). His work focuses on cultural globalisation, in particular in the context of East Asia. In 2010 he published China with a Cut - Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music (Amsterdam UP). He wrote, together with Yiu Fai Chow, Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image (Intellect, 2013), he edited together with Lena Scheen Spectacle and the City – Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture (Amsterdam UP, 2013) and with Robin Celikates, Esther Peeren and Thomas Poell Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave, 2018). He wrote, together with Anthony Fung, Youth Cultures in China (Polity, 2017). See also www.jeroendekloet.nl and www.chinacreative.humanities.uva.nl Jeudi 5 octobre de 12h à 15

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