Shayan Momin

SHAYAN MOMIN, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Lumpen Utopias: Livestreaming Labor in Chinese Media Worlds,” supervised by Dr. Angela Zito. At Hengdian World Studios, China’s largest film production base, marginalized migrant workers perform in historical dramas while navigating their own stigmatization — a centuries-old pattern in Chinese cultural representation. Through historical research and digital ethnographic work conducted from July 2023 to May 2024, the grantee examined how political-economic transformations produced “lumpen” groups who became represented in the narrative world of the jianghu (“rivers and lakes”). These representations consistently mediate class anxieties: figures like beggars and bandits are simultaneously romanticized as righteous outsiders and stigmatized as social threats. This research reveals how this pattern persisted through China’s socialist period and capitalist transformation, culminating at Hengdian, where migrant workers animate historical settings in response to the state’s ideological turn to history. The findings demonstrate how cultural representation and social marginality have co-evolved, with displaced groups continuously navigating between romantic valorization and social stigma across historical dramas, digital media, and contemporary cultural production.