'In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China’s entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China’s uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity.' - from back cover.
The authors presents an analysis of Chinese contemporary culture and its cultural politics in a global setting through a series of theoretical expositions and close readings of literary and filmic works from a psychoanalytic and Deleuzean perspective.
Includes a bibliography and an index.
Onsite
English
2008
346
9780822342304
2
monograph
The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism
Part I: Intellectual Discourse: National and Global Determinations
The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post- Tiananmen Intellectual field
Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s
Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the 'New Era'
Part II: Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism
Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegort in Wang Anyi's Literary Production in the 1990s
Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, 'Minor Literature,' and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology
'Demonic Realism' and the 'Socialist Market Economy': Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine
Part III: Cinematic Discourse: Universality, Singularity, and the Everyday World
National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite
Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju
Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century
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