Subjectivity, modernity, and the politics of difference in a periurban village in China: Towards a progressive sense of place?

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the cultural imageries of place and their relation to the politics of difference within China's emerging space of modernity. Using a case study of the place politics in Xiaozhou Village, Guangzhou, we consider how particular subject positions in relation to the ideologies of modernity and rurality shape particular imaginative structures of place and cognitive mappings of social relations. We argue that Massey's theory of a global sense of place needs to include a dimension concerning how concrete subject positions can be negotiated and challenged in the imagination of place. We also contend for a face-to-face politics of difference to analyze the anxieties and tensions between particularized subject positions. In concluding this paper we also suggest that the political potential of this model of place politics lies in its recognition that, while conflicts which are grounded in place-based social relations will not vanish, place should not to be mobilized as a citadel within which an enclosed subjectivity is protected from the interference of otherness. Thus the Other is also ascribed with the political potential to reproduce the cognitive mapping of the lifeworld of mine. © 2012 Pion and its Licensors.