China, Transnational Visuality, Global PostmodernityThis ambitious work offers a comprehensive mapping of the cultural landscape of China in the late twentieth century. By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the book dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era post-cold war, postsocialist, and postmodern in China s history. The author defines the emergent logic of Chinese postmodernity within a dominant system of global capitalism and points to the central role of the transnational flow of visual culture in the establishment of local and national identity. The Chinese case demonstrates that the old conceptual scheme of Euro-American postmodernism versus Third World national culture is no longer feasible. This wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary work demarcates the cultural terrain by examining diverse media: film, television, avant-garde art, and literature, as well as critical theory and intellectual history. Part I reviews the raging critical debates about the public sphere, the academy, intellectual identity, cultural politics, and economic globalization, in the process examining the Chinese appropriation of discourses of modernity, postmodernity, and postcoloniality. Part II investigates the impact of globalization and diaspora on the formation of citizenship and nationality as articulated in mainland Chinese and Hong Kong films. Part III probes issues of post-orientalism, postmodernism, and strategies of representation in contemporary Chinese art. Part IV studies pop music, soap opera, and literary bestsellers, pinpointing the dialectic and mediating function of popular culture amid the forces of official socialist ideology, capitalist commodification, mass entertainment, and transnational images in contemporary China. Overall, the book is an insightful analysis of the ironies of the cultural logic of Chinese socialism in a period that has seen accelerated economic integration into the capitalist world system, but without major political change. |
Contents
Postmodernity Visuality and China | 1 |
The Academy the Public | 31 |
The Discourses of Chinese | 48 |
Economic Globalization | 71 |
Televisuality Capital and the Global Village | 89 |
Illustrations | 95 |
Hong Kong and 1997 | 104 |
Schizophrenic Hong Maggie Cheung at the end | 119 |
Zhang Peili Divided Space Xiangdui de kongjian | 164 |
Xu Bing A Case Study of Transference a k a Cultural | 170 |
Beyond Orientalism | 173 |
Qin Yufen Lotus in Wind Feng he Installation 1994 | 176 |
Wang Ziwei Mao and Mickey Acrylic on canvas 1994 | 184 |
Gu Dexin 10301999 Installation 1999 | 191 |
Toward a Historical | 195 |
Intellectuals in the Ruined Metropolis at | 239 |
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actress allegory American audience avant-garde avant-garde art Beijing capitalist century character Chen Chinese art Chinese artists Chinese avant-garde Chinese Cinemas Chinese culture Chinese intellectuals Chinese postmodernism chubanshe Confucian contemporary China critical critique Cultural Revolution Deng discourse East economic Ermo Ermo's exhibition fiction foreign gender genre global capitalism Heroic Trio Hollywood Hong Kong action Hong Kong film humanistic identity ideology images installation Irma Vep Jameson Jia Pingwa Jiang Jin ping mei Li Qiao literary literature Maggie Cheung mainland masculinity mass Michelle Yeoh modern Chinese narrative nation-state novel official political pop popular culture post-New postcolonial Public Culture revolutionary Ruined Capital serial sexual Shanghai soap opera social socialist songs story studies Taiwan television third world Tiananmen Square tion Tomorrow Never Dies traditional Chinese University Press viewers visual Wang Shuo wenhua West Western woman Xu Bing York Zhang Zhongguo Zhou