Life and Death Underground: Miners’ Body, Working Space, and the National Subjectivity of China

• In Event: Rethinking the Body in Modern China: Nation, Modernity, and Transnational Knowledge

Abstract

Unlike the bodies of peasants or salt workers, the miners’ body was neglected in textual and visual cultures of China before the nineteenth century. Similarly neglected was the underground space where miners were working. Both, however, began to be realized in the late Qing dynasty when the technology of representation and the understanding of mining underwent a transition, one that gathered pace in the twentieth century. This paper, through a critical examination of the textual and visual representations of the miners’ body and working space from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, attempts to interpret this transition within the context of China’s awakening nationalism and ascending modernity. I will argue that the discovery of the miners’ body was inseparable from the underground space around it. The body and the space were not merely represented and gazed upon through the reproduction of texts and images, but also experienced and perceived through the sympathy between a suffering yet vital nation and miserable yet progressive miners. While the discovery of this space contributed to the building of a metaphorical boundary between the underground, dark world and the aboveground, bright world, which was widely appropriated for revolutionary and nationalist causes, the miners’ body obtained such significant subjectivity from the sympathy elicited from being bound to the deep mines. In this way the miner came to embody a growing Chinese nation.

Author

• Xi Ma, The University of Melbourne