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Nellie Chu, PhD

Publications

Journal Articles

Chu, Nellie. (In progress). “From the Runway to the Platform: The Politics of In-Authenticity in the Era of Global Fast Fashion and China’s E-Vendor Economy,” article contribution in a special issue on Transnational Entrepreneurship in Latin America, Africa, and China to be submitted to the journal, Social Anthropology.
Chu, Nellie (co-author). 2022. Introduction to special issue volume co-written by Nellie Chu, Ralph Litzinger, Mengqi Wang, and Qian Zhu titled, “Villages Make the City: Displacement, Dispossession, and Class in China’s Urban Villages,” , Vol. 30(3): 411-427.

Chu, Nellie. 2022. “ Peasant Landlords and the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Guangzhou’s Urban Villages” article contribution to special issue volume titled, “Villages Make the City” Displacement, Dispossession, and Class in China’s Urban Villages, positions: east asia critique, Volume 30(3): 479-499.
Chu, Nellie. 2019. “Maternal Longing and Jiagongchang Household Workshops as Marginal Hubs of Subcontracted Labor in Guangzhou, China,” Modern Asian Studies, Volume 53: 800-821.
Chu, Nellie. 2018. “Paradoxes of Creativity in the Age of Fast Fashion in South China,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 59(1): 1-15.

Chu, Nellie. 2016. “The Emergence of “Craft” and Migrant Entrepreneurship along the Global Commodity Chain in Guangzhou” 9(2): 193-213.

Chapters in Edited Volumes

Chu, Nellie. 2023. “Prophetic Becoming: The Prosperity Doctrine in Guangzhou, China” Chapter in New World Orderings: China and the Global South edited by Carlos Rojas and Lisa Rofel.

Chu, Nellie. 2019. “The Spatial Imaginaries of Fast Fashion,” Chapter in edited by Sharon Heijin Lee, Christina Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, New York: NYU Press.

Field Reports and Invited Columns

“Urban Villages, Grid Management, and the Contradictions of Capital,” Made in China Journal, June 2023, accessible: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/06/13/urban-villages-grid-management-and-the-contradictions-of-capital/
“The Uncertain Rhythms of Life for China’s Migrant Bosses.” Noema Magazine, August 2022, accessible: https://www.noemamag.com/the-uncertain-rhythms-of-life-for-chinas-migrant-bosses/.
“Engendering Laoban: The Masculinization of Bosshood and Uncertainty in Transnational Guangzhou, China.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies: Perspectives, July 2022, accessible: https://ijaps.usm.my/?page_id=6659.
“Reconfiguring Supply Chains,” Chinoiresie/ Made in China Journal, October 2018, accessible: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2018/07/07/reconfiguring-supply-chains/
“Global Supply Chains of Risk and Desire: Migrant Youths and Fast Fashion Exchange in Guangzhou, China” Youth Circulations blog (in field of Cultural Anthropology), May 2019; accessible: http://www.youthcirculations.com/blog/2019/3/13/global-supply-chains-of-risk-and-desire-migrant-youths-and-the-fast-fashion-exchange-in-guangzhou-china
Uncertain Encounters: African Migrant Entrepreneurs and Chinese Manufacturers in Guangzhou, China,” Series: Internal Migration in China, University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute Blog, accessible: https://theasiadialogue.com/2015/10/07/uncertain-encounters-african-migrant-entrepreneurs-and-chinese-manufacturers-in-guangzhou-china/
“Rhythms of Displacement and Resilience,” University of Göttingen CETREN Center for Transregional Research Network’s blog, Field Impressions

Selected Articles

Villages Makes the City

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Urban In-Between

positions: east asia critique

Through ethnographic, archival, and visual analyses, we examine changing relations of land, labor, and governance in the context of rapid urbanization. As spaces of constant renewal and unprecedented accumulation, urban villages demonstrate how China's insertion into the global capitalist economy relies on the tenuous and contested relationships among land, labor, and capital, which are often overshadowed by narratives of rural-to-urban development in postsocialist contexts. More specifically, urban villages allow us to examine how the capitalist drive for profit and the continuing institutional legacy of the Maoist regime work as two “mutually imbricated” sets of protocols shaping China's postsocialist development (Rojas and Litzinger 2016).

https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article/30/3/411/316121/Guest-Editors-Introduction-The-Urban-In-Between

Tu Er Dai Peasant Landlords and the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Guangzhou’s Urban Villages

positions: east asia critique

This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-abstract/30/3/479/316120/Tu-Er-Dai-Peasant-Landlords-and-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Paradoxes of Creativity in the Age of Fast Fashion in South China

Culture, Theory, and Critique

Using the Xi Fang Hang market as a case study, I demonstrate how the quick turnover of fast fashion commodities compels different groups of market participants to claim contesting definitions and practices of creativity. While building managers and wealthy entrepreneurs mobilise techniques of rent extraction and claim originality as rightful sources of creativity, less established migrant entrepreneurs use design copying as a tool for market survival. With limited resources and formal education in fashion and merchandising, migrants claim success in delivering the right styles and trends at the right time and in keeping their businesses afloat. Together, these competing practices constitute what I call ‘paradoxes of creativity’, dynamics that highlight creativity as a fluid cultural category that is always subject to tensions and contestations.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14735784.2018.1443020

The Emergence of “Craft” and Migrant Entrepreneurship
along the Global Commodity Chain in Guangzhou

The Journal of Modern Craft

This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China. Using Guangzhou’s garment district as a case study, I analyze how intensification of transnational subcontracting practices across the Pacific Rim has facilitated a synergistic melding of craft and industrial production that is often described as a post-Fordist model of mass manufacture.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17496772.2016.1205278