Event details

Special guest lecturer Prof. Zheng Lin presents "Villages-in-the-City of the Pearl River Delta: An Unfinished Modernity" Lecture conducted in Chinese

Village-in-the-city (chengzhongcun) is a special phenomenon of urbanization in China due to the rural-urban dual system. It seems contradictory to the ideal of a modernized and civilized metropolis and thus should be moved out of the city. Is that true? This talk presents a case study of a Cantonese rock band, “wutiaoren,” whose folk music performance demonstrates the aesthetics of chengzhongcun of the Pearl River Delta and blurs the boundaries of dichotomies between rural and urban, lowbrow and highbrow, ugly and pretty, premodern and modern, local and global. Chengzhongcun embodies both the uncertainty and the possibility of the city. It is marginal, chaotic, unregulated, and sometimes even underground, but also wild and dynamic and implies strength from the bottom up.

About the presenter:

Dr. Zheng Lin is an Associate Professor of Chinese literature, Associate Dean of The Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) at Sun Yat-sen University, China, and a Visiting Scholar at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. She is the author of Beijing Park: Cultural Production and Literary Imagination, 1860-1937 (Peking University Press, 2022). Dr. Lin received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Peking University, China.

Prof. Lin’s Faculty Profile at Sun Yat-sen University: https://chinese.sysu.edu.cn/teacher/1386 Prof. Lin’s Profile at Harvard Fairbank Center: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/person/zheng-lin/ Prof. Lin’s recent public-facing talk at Yixi: https://www.yixi.tv/h5/speech/1072/