Dialogue with Antonio Negri: A Few Thoughts on the Lecture “Metropolis as a Post-Industrial Factory”

Ngai Pun

doi:10.31269/triplec.v22i1.1510

Ngai Pun Lingnan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v22i1.1510

Keywords: Antonio Negri, multitude, class, empire, post-industrialism, immaterial labour, China's political economy, post-Fordist capitalism

Abstract

On November 27 and 29, 2014, Prof. WANG Hui, the Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Beijing, invited Prof. Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most leading Marxist philosophers and activists, to give a series of lectures. I was invited by Prof. WANG Hui to offer comments and reflections on one of Prof. Antonio Negri’s lectures, titled “The Metropolis as Post-Industrial Factory”. New Bloom published this article in Chinese based on the transcripts of the above lecture. It was translated into English by Ngai Pun.

Acknowledgement: I was invited by Christian Fuchs, the editor of tripleC, to publish this Dialogue as a memorial to Prof. Antonio Negri, who passed away on 16 December 2023 at the age of 90.

Author Biography

Ngai Pun, Lingnan University

Before joining Lingnan University as Chair Professor in 2021, Prof. PUN Ngai was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.
Pun Ngai received her Ph.D. from the University of London, SOAS, in 1998. She won the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her first book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China (Polity Press, 2016). She is also the editor of seven volumes of books in both English and Chinese. Two of her Chinese books were also awarded the Hong Kong Book Prize in 2007 and 2011 as the top ten popular books widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China. She was a Top 2 Scientist in the World ranked by Stanford University.

She has published extensively and cross-disciplinary in top-tier journals in Cultural Studies, China Studies, Labor Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology. Her articles appeared in Cultural Studies, Positions, Public Culture, Information, Communication and Society, New Media and Society, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Global Labor Studies, Work, Employment and Society, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and The China Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, Sociology, etc.