Remaindered Commons: Notes Toward Post-socialist Futures in China vis-à-vis the Black Outdoors

Abstract

This chapter proposes the term remaindered commons to theorize the collective space-making of people whose life is relegated to the margins of systems of capture. I present two stories, the first being about the intimacies and affective relations among women tin miners and how they challenge the Orientalist Cold War research narratives that discuss the rural communes and working units of socialist China in terms of trauma and injury. The second draws on my work as a labor activist in Shenzhen. As part of that work, I documented the location and content of workers’ graffiti on factory bathroom cubicle doors for three years. Building Black Outdoors’ emphasis on space-making and freedom, I argue that the remaindered commons speaks to a livingness beyond the logic of damage, disposability, and loss. The two case studies are remaindered commons that provide an analytical entry point into how the political and socio-spatial relations structuring these women’s experiences of community and resistance make other relationalities possible.