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

Autor(en)

Rossella Ferrari

Abstrakt

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(en)

Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Journal

Theatre Survey

Band

67

ISSN

0040-5574

Publikationsdatum

09-2025

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

604029 Theaterwissenschaft, 602045 Sinologie

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Link zum Portal

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