The Postsocialist Posthuman: Gregor Samsa’s Chinese Futures in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis

Author(s)

Rossella Ferrari

Abstract

What happens when Gregor Samsa is recast as a Chinese delivery driver? How does Franz Kafka’s vision of modern alienation resonate with China’s postsocialist realities and future imagination? Li Jianjun’s stage adaptation of The Metamorphosis revisits Samsa’s fate in the context of twenty-first-century digital capitalism. Part of a Posthuman Trilogy produced in the aftermath of the pandemic, the original 2021 version was updated in 2023 with a revised finale, in which Samsa undergoes a double metamorphosis. Having transitioned from a degraded human to a “monstrous vermin,” the delivery driver turns into a cyborg creature and finds fame online as a technologically powered virtual idol. While documenting the objectification of a human underclass by the exploitative demands of China’s platform economy, The Metamorphosis probes the emancipatory potential of nonhuman alterities through the protagonist’s enactment of a posthuman hybrid identity. Similarly, while exposing the commodification of the human self through digital social media, the transgressive performance of the abject driver-turned-cyborg suggests that the nonhuman may offer transformative possibilities for (post)humanity to resist techno-dystopian futures where reality succumbs to the tyranny of intelligent algorithms and sophisticated simulacra. Thus, the adaptation engages with the posthuman as an ambivalent yet productive futural vision for postsocialist China.

Organisation(s)

Department of East Asian Studies

Journal

Theatre Survey

Volume

67

Pages

59

No. of pages

88

ISSN

0040-5574

Publication date

09-2025

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

604029 Theatre studies, 602045 Sinology

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/e124be58-5475-440d-a4f0-06d25d153660