Re-politicizing South China: Cartography of Political Expressions, Aquatic/Amphibious Aesthetics in Guangzhou

Keywords: South China, Guangzhou, Aesthetics, Sovereignty, Social movements
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Reflecting on a homogenous conceptualization of "China", this paper considers geographical and geopolitical differences between Northern and Southern parts of China, specifically the Guangdong Province and Cantonese politics located in the Pearl River Delta. Nationalistic narratives have depoliticized the region as a space only for economic development and cheap labor, dismissing its political significance and cultural abundance. Focusing on Guangzhou, a city built along the Pearl River and the “capital of South China,” I engage with the political cartography of China’s North-South divide to articulate South China as a space that enables political expressions, subjectivities, and forms of resistance that are alternative to party and state-centered politics symbolized by Beijing, Northern China. Building on previous literary and ethnographic scholarships on South China, I pay particular attention to the city’s proximity to and intimacy with waterscapes. Specifically, I consider how people’s relationships with the physical and metaphorical spaces in Guangzhou nourish a more fluid, transnational, and diasporic politics in everyday life, facilitate a sense of identity as “Southerners” and provide an alternative notion of sovereignty. I draw from local social movements, contemporary artist groups such as the Southern Artists Salon, and emerging Cantonese literature such as Lin Zhao’s Chaoxi Tu, to theorize what I call an “aquatic/amphibious aesthetics” that resists land-locked politics. I situate Guangzhou as a generative site that reflects both neoliberal and authoritarian oppressions, where Southerners reject both national and imperial impositions, realigning South China with the Global South as well as postcolonial and Indigenous politics and struggles.