This talk proposes a reading of noir as a symptomatic genre that has linked together the post-2010 Chinese media ecology to capture a dystopian societal mood of seeing no way out. Drawing theoretical insights from film noir, Dr Lin discusses how expressions of noir have grown prominent across cinema, science fiction, hip hop music, web series and social media in PR China. This collective turn towards noir, she argues, enabled Chinese media cultures to carry forward social criticism in a time of growing state control, but this was made possible only because this genre is morally and politically ambiguous enough to side with the shifting social climates. The talk examines a few paradigmatic shifts within this wave of Chinese noir through cultural products such as the crime film A Touch of Sin (2013), the hip hop song ‘Kill the Ninja’ (2016) and COVID-era social media livestreaming. The intertwinement of criticality and complicity inhabited by these media cultures gives rise to what Dr Lin terms as ‘parasitic media’ ‒ a form of media that strategically changes shape and generates ambiguous meanings, just like parasites within a host, in order to survive and subvert from within a hegemonic system. As such, she considers noir as a genre that marks structural conditions of impasse in our global time of crisis.

Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Chinese and global film and media studies, media theory, political theory and critical theory.