Acquiring,positioning and connecting: the materiality of television and the politics of mobility in a Chinese rural migrant community

Abstract

There has long been a dichotomy in television studies: research into the social meanings and practices of television as an object and infrastructure is confined to sedentarism, while the significance of television in migrancy is almost exclusively approached through migrants’ consumption of texts and programmes. As an attempt to break this material/immaterial division, this article uses an ethnographic study in a Chinese rural migrant community to explore the politics of mobility performed through the materiality of television. It reconceptualizes the conjunction between electronic mediation and the migratory subject as a body/material hybrid rather than a mind/text hybrid, examining Chinese rural migrants’ daily practices with television in their urban settlement from three perspectives: TV set acquisition, positioning and cable connection. Rural migrants’ resourceful engagements with the materiality of television were captured in the second-handedness of their TV acquisition, the diversified positioning of television sets at home, and the self-help cable infrastructure system in the neighbourhood. This materialist approach reveals the juxtaposition between mobility and immobility and their dialectical interconnections in the television consumption in migration. It illuminates a new arena of the politics of mobility, wherein the materiality of television represents a special resource, which affords the migrant user more competences and choices for both movement and settlement under the governance of migration.