Public spaces, Mediation, and Scales of Visibility : the case of the representation of rural workers in post-Mao China

Woven into complex social, political and cultural fields, migrants’ experiences and narrations of mobility
and of how they fare outside their hometown, of how they are more or less successful in their attempts
to negociate social hierarchies and the formation of their identities often closely articulate with major
social norms and values, as well as with processes of state formation. In this contribution, I argue that in
studying how migrants’ agency are at once enabling and shaped by structural forces there is a need to
focus on processes of “mediation” as these processes enable to think seriously the relationship between
institutions/organisations , people and meanings . Focusing on processes of mediation enables to deal
with how people’s subjectivities and agency are shaped in complex and never totalizing ways by the very
institutions (medias) through which they mediate their experiences. By documenting specifically how
migrant workers in post-Mao China mediate their experiences of social hierarchies and social mobility
via their engagement with a specific form of media (popular literature), I stress the relevance of
intertextuality, of the notion of “genre” (Bakhtin), of “publics” and draw from Roseberry’s use of
“hegemonic frameworks” for whom hegemony is helfpful to study “the ways in which the words,
images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and movements used by subordinate populations to
talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by
the process of domination itself”. For Roseberry, “What hegemony constructs, then is not a shared
ideology, but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting
upon social orders characterized by domination”. According to this approach, establishing such a
framework rests on “prescribed forms of procedures” or “prescribed forms for expressing both
acceptance and discontent”, as well as anger, disillusion, aspirations, desires, etc. (Roseberry, 1994, p. 360-361).