Trauma, Migrant Families, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Last Train Home

Yan-Jie Wang

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 42卷1期 (2016/03) Pp. 49-72

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.2016.42.1.03

並列摘要

This paper examines the traumatic experience of migrant workers through a reading of Lixin Fan’s award-winning documentary film Last Train Home (2009). I am not primarily concerned, like most trauma-studies-based research, with grand, clearly recognizable catastrophes. I also avoid generalizing about human suffering in the age of global capitalism. I focus rather on post-Socialist China’s more hidden social violence and its traumatizing effect on the quotidian life of migrant workers—a subaltern group on the periphery of society. I argue that the trauma of the marginalized population must be socially and politically contextualized. The first section of the essay investigates the traumatic sense of homelessness suffered by the film’s migrant family. I show how the family members’ loss of home is due to both the alienating capitalist mode of production and the cunning hukou system that turns migrant workers into a perpetually floating population. The second part concentrates on the painful intergenerational chasm. Here I argue that the father-daughter strife is a symptom, not just of the clash between modernity and tradition but of the falsehood maintained by neoliberal discourse. Neoliberal narratives of education and consumption construct fantasies such as that of mobility and freedom, subsuming migrant laborers within the nation’s capitalist economy and trapping them in a prison of unrealizable hopes. The film ultimately exposes and critiques the state-capital alliance that controls and deprives migrant workers through its economic, political and epistemic strategies.

並列關鍵字

Trauma ； violence ； migrant workers ； family ； homelessness ； neoliberal fantasies ； human value

參考文獻

All-China Women's Federation Research Group. “Woguo nongcun liushou ertong chengxiang liudong ertong zhuangkuang yanjiu baogao” 我國農村留守兒童、城鄉流動兒童狀況研究報告(“Report on the Status of the Rural Left-behind Children and the Floating Child Population in China”). 10 May 2013. 8 Dec. 2015. .

Fan, Lixin, dir. Last Train Home. Zeitgeist Films, 2009.

Fan, Lixin. “A Statement and Q & A with Lixin Fan.” Spirituality and Practice. Oct. 2009. 8 Dec. 2015..

People's Republic of China. Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Statistics. “2014 Sichuansheng jincheng wugong renyuan xianzhuang diaocha baogao (2)” 2014 年四川省進城務工人員現狀調查報告（二）(“2014 Survey on the Status of Migrant Workers in Sichuan Province 2”). 13 Aug. 2014. 7 Dec. 2015..

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