From the stadium to the screen: bullfights and their mediated afterlife in Southwest China

AbstractAlongside a construction boom in bullfight stadiums, there is a thriving world of bullfight video production in ethnic minority regions of Southwest China. Drawing on fieldwork with Miao videographers, shopkeepers, and fans in Guizhou, as well as conversations with Sani Yi bull owners and visits to stadiums and video shops in Yunnan, this essay traces the bullfight from the stadium to the screen. Animals, videos, and videographers move within and across the periphery of the Chinese nation. In so doing, the production and circulation of bullfights and their videos assert a minority past-time and peripheral network as central to the lived experience of ethnic minority modernity. They enable the strategic employment of local expressive forms, the recognition of common interests, and the emergence of a minority, transperipheral public comprised of the people involved and invested in this ethnic practice and its popular representation.