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.
Rossella Ferrari (Thu,) studied this question.