Touching the Elephant: Global Imaginations in Jia Zhangke’s The World

This article argues that the sensation of touch in Jia Zhangke’s 2004 film The World (Shijie) offers a lens for imagining globality beyond the reductive terms of capitalist globalization. The entrapped lives of the protagonists in Beijing World Park, a space filled with replica landmarks from across the globe, embody the tension between the imagined mobility of a cosmopolitan middle class and the involuntary (im)mobility of national and transnational migrant labor. Using hapticity as an analytical framework, I show that the film manifests alternate global space-times from the bottom up, through material and sensual experiences that resonate among the characters. Their haptic encounters, including those enacted virtually through media, transform interactions with fake architecture into real sentiments of globality. The sensation of touch rechannels their inability to see the outside world into anticipation of other transnational connections. Their shared experiences of captivity reject capitalist models of smooth cultural exchange and facilitate alternate modes of globality that emerge from embodied exchanges.