Carrying on Memories of Dignified Labor: Reading Na’er, Heroes Everywhere, and The Piano in a Factory

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In the context of a global subcontracting system that pushes workers toward a race to the bottom, the present article explores assertions for dignified labor in the Foxconn workers’ actions and in the literary texts Na’er (2004) and Heroes Everywhere (2005), as well as in the film The Piano in a Factory (2011). By tracing the dialectical relationship between memories of dignified labor during the high socialist era, and critical expressions of present day degradation, the article finds a shift from the critique of global capital to proactive nostalgia for the previous era. Proactive nostalgia goes beyond the perception of China’s high socialist era as traumatic. What is absent in the Foxconn labor experience, but still alive in workers’ unconscious, is a world of dignified labor. By documenting how labor was once imbued with dignity in the recent past, these texts function as prosthetic memories for the next generation of workers, and a cultural resource for overcoming the current trauma of dehumanizing working conditions.