MLA’S Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies awarded to Margaret Hillenbrand
MLA’S Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies awarded to Margaret Hillenbrand for On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China
On 10 December 2024, the Modern Language Association of America announced that it was awarding its second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies to Margaret Hillenbrand, for her book On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, published by Columbia University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work in East Asian or East Asian diaspora literary or linguistic studies. The Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies is one of twenty-three publication awards that was presented on 10 January 2025, during the association’s annual convention, held in New Orleans.
The committee’s citation for Hillenbrand’s book reads: 'In On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, Margaret Hillenbrand offers penetrating portraits of cultural producers from the far margins of a booming China. Charting the terrain of precarity in the cultural and artistic worlds of the twenty-first century, Hillenbrand boldly takes on questions of great urgency and consequence that resonate with readers far from the creative Making deft use of the detritus of China’s creative industries and navigating a chaotic and anarchic media universe, in cluding recent performance art, poetry, protest movements, short videos, and livestreaming apps, the book is impressive in its analysis of these often-marginalized cultural expressions as well as the social relations in which they are physically staged. Hillenbrand’s brilliant study is compellingly argued, combining theoretical sophistication with penetrating clarity, and draws attention to China’s creative precariat with great sensitivity and sympathy.'
A conversation about the book, between Jiaxi Hou, a doctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo, and Margaret Hillenbrand, has been published in Asiascape: Digital Asia.
