EVENTS

This talk examines Shamate (杀马特) as a subcultural practice of aesthetic survival through a close reading of Li Yifan’s participatory documentary Shamate, Wo Ai Ni (《杀马特，我爱你》, We Were Smart) (2019). Emerging in the early 2000s, Shamate was characterised by flamboyant hairstyles and bold fashion adopted primarily by second-generation rural migrant youth employed in low-paid factory work in rapidly urbanising cities. Shamate has been dismissed by the mainstream as vulgar or misread as a sign of rebellion. The members of the subculture operated through QQ groups, which served as safe virtual spaces that provided them with a sense of belonging, identity and visibility in a real world marked by marginalisation, ridicule, and alienation. By including the voices of those who lived this experience, We Were Smart restores dignity to a group long caricatured by the mainstream. In this talk, the speaker argues that Shamate was not a coherent political resistance or labour movement but an aesthetic strategy of self-preservation developed by left-behind, undereducated, rural migrant youth to cope with factory discipline, social humiliation, and structural exclusion in post-reform China. By tracing Shamate’s rise, ridicule, and disappearance, this Wednesday Seminar highlights the limits of cultural expression under conditions of unequal urbanisation and warns against mistaking visibility, viral circulation, or individual success for structural empowerment. Hence, it may be more instructive to comprehend Shamate as a symptom of exclusion, rather than a politics of resistance.

Speaker

Snigdha Konar is Research Associate and Assistant Director at the Institute of Chinese Studies. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Chinese and South East Asian Studies at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship 2015-2016 (MHRD, Govt. of India) and completed a Certificate Course in Chinese Studies Research and a Certificate Course in Advanced Chinese from the Beijing Language and Culture University. Her research interests include Chinese language and literature, gender and social issues. She has presented at several national and international conferences and has published in Assonance, The Wire and Economic and Political Weekly.

Chair

Patricia Uberoi is an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies , New Delhi. She has held teaching and research positions at the Australian National University (Canberra), the University of Hong Kong, the Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla), the University of Delhi, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), and the Institute of Economic Growth (Delhi), where she also for many years edited the journal, Contributions to Indian Sociology. She was the Director, and later, also Chairperson of the ICS (2015-21). Her research interests centre on aspects of family, kinship, gender, popular culture, and social policy, with regard to both India and China. At the ICS, she was closely associated with the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Forum for Regional Cooperation, a Track II dialogue focusing on development issues in the region stretching from Northeast India to Southwest China, and had co-authored, with K.S. Rana, The BCIM Forum and Regional Integration (Institute of Chinese Studies, 2012). Along with Professor Emiko Ochiai (Kyoto), she is currently engaged in preparing a revised and expanded edition of the 2021 multi-volume translation series, Asian Families and Intimacies.

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