Is There a Crisis of Narration? Narrative Imagination on Chinese Social Media

Amidst the rising concern about a crisis of narration in global digital culture, this talk reclaims the work of narrative imagination, with a focus on civic storytelling on Chinese social media. In today’s platform society, social media platforms often obstruct the telling and sharing of some stories while promoting others. In response, social media users mobilize their work of narrative imagination—the capacity to tell stories using creative and artistic forms. This talk analyses forms of narrative imagination on Chinese social media in recent years to show the possibilities of grassroots world-making under conditions of commercial and state-sponsored platformization. By remixing fact and fiction in iterative processes of networked participation, social media users turn information scraps and narrative fragments into intensified and prolonged social and artistic experiences, leading to new perception and action.

This lecture has been co-organized with Dr. Renren Yang from Asian Studies.