The Notion of Agency

As this is our last blog, I have been thinking about the critical dilemmas we explored this semester. For me it all comes down to agency, especially with the idea of representation from this last unit. Agency is complicated by every other dilemma (for example: representation, identification, agent, etc). I want to use these concepts to really understand how agency was affected by representation and diaspora in Up the Yangtze. It is time for me to really attempt being a rhetorical theorist.


How you are represented in the world will affect your level of agency. Unfortunately representation has more to do with how people see and categorize you, than how you see and categorize yourself. This is how agency is relate. You can not possibly garner the agency you want or deserve, if you cannot even be represented in the way that matches 'who you are'. Does this make the fight for representation null? pointless? Judith Butler saw this issue when it came to feminism; how can we fight the system when it produces us (3-4). If we are a product, a symptom, of the system that deems how we are to be represented, then can we ever gain the level of agency that is congruent with how we identify ourselves?

In Up the Yangtze, we see a people physically and culturally live in diaspora. They are watching their world disappear in a wave of consumerism. There is so much to unpack here. This film is an example and a metaphor for the interplay relationships between: agency, representation, identification, and diaspora. These factors all affect agency. First, we see a people who are physically living in diaspora. Their homes will soon be flooded or forever changed, their rural life gone. This is part of their identification, this is a part of who they are, their lifestyle, and soon it will be gone.

Metaphorically, this shows the complication and discrepancy between how we identify ourselves and how the 'system' sees us. These people identify worth and therefore agency  from the rural, hard-working life they led. However their society identified their home with capitalistic goals. Here is the first discrepancy. Society doesn't value their lifestyle in the way they do. Secondly, society is actually taking a piece of their identification away from them, making them a product of society (as society sees fit). How can these people have the level of agency they want/deserve when they have their identification stripped away from them, and are forced to be misrepresented.

We see this with 'Cindy'. She can't afford school and must work on a tourist ship. Again this metaphorically shows how Cindy is becoming a product of her society's identifiers and is now representing that as opposed to truly representing herself. She is living in diaspora, losing her identification, representing something other that herself,and therefore losing agency.

I hope my attempt at being a rhetorician wasn't too painful!