JINGYU MAO: Doing Ethnicity in Contemporary China [Research Talk]

This talk draws on my book to illustrate the multi-layered ethnic scripts in contemporary China. Ethnic performers are people who perform ethnic songs and dances in restaurants and tourist sites, most of whom are rural–urban migrants from ethnic minority backgrounds. Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork, this book demonstrates how rural/urban, ethnic, and gendered inequalities structure certain kinds of service work and migration trajectories, and how they are experienced through the intimate and emotional experiences of workers themselves.

This talk elucidates how the daily encounters of ethnicity shape performers’ reflexivity regarding ethnicity, and the politics of ethnicity it reveals. Ethnic performers ’ambivalences regarding whether they are ‘authentic minorities’ points to the inadequacy of understanding ethnicity in an essentialised way. Understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, the concept of ‘ethnic scripts’ is proposed as a conceptual tool to illuminate the cultural and social repertoires which deeply shape people’s understanding of and ways of doing ethnicity. By exploring the multi-layered meaning of ethnic scripts in contemporary China, this talk highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related to migrant performers’ emotions and sense of self, and addresses the fact that ethnic scripts are inherently gendered.

is a Lecturer in Sociology at Edinburgh University. Her research focuses on emotion, work and migration, ethnicity and gender, rural-urban division, intimacy, and personal life. Her work has been published in journals such as Emotions and Society, The China Quarterly, China Perspectives, Families, Relationships, and Societies, and Global Social Policy. She is the author of Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration (Bristol University Press).

promotes multidisciplinary research, teaching and programming with impact beyond academia, seeking to remedy class, racial, gender, and other inequalities, and to improve mutual understanding in UK-China relations. The MCI is based at the University of Manchester.

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Host or Publisher The Manchester China Institute