China and New Left Visions Political and Cultural Interventions

by Lu, Jie; Wang, Ban; Chen, Xiaomei; Vukovich, Daniel F.; Zhong, Xueping; Ferry, Megan; Rofel, Lisa; Mu, Aili; Gong, Haomin; Dirlik, Arif; Ren, Hai

• ISBN13: 9780739165164
• ISBN10: 073916516X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-20
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Against the dire consequences of China's market development, a new intellectual force of the New Left has come on the scene since the mid 1990s. New Left intellectuals debate the issues of social justice, distributive equality, markets, state intervention, the socialist legacy, and sustainable development. Against the neoliberal trends of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerism, New Left critics launched a critique in hopes of seeking an alternative to global capitalism. This volume takes a comprehensive look at China's New Left in intellectual, cultural, and literary manifestations. The writers place the New Left within a global anti-hegemonic movement and the legacy of the Cold War. They discover grassroots literature that portrays the plight and resilience of the downtrodden and disadvantaged. With historical visions the writers also shed light on the present by drawing on the socialist past.

Author Biography

Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese studies at Stanford University and the Yangtze River Chair Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is the author of Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern Cinema (2004), and editor of Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (2010). Jie Lu is professor of Chinese and film studies at the University of the Pacific. She is the author of Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (2005) and editor of China's Literature and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century (2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: China and New Left Critique	p. ix
Geopolitics and New Left Perspectives
Back to the Future: Contemporary China in the Perspective of Its Past, Circa 1980	p. 3
The Geopolitics of the New Left in China	p. 43
The Battle for Chinese Discourse and the Rise of the Chinese New Left: Toward a Postcolonial Politics of Knowledge	p. 61
What Is Political Theater?: A Critique of Performance Studies	p. 81
New Left Literature in China
Internationale as Specter: Na'er, "Subaltern Literature," and Contemporary China's "Left Bank"	p. 101
Constructing Agency: Challenges and Possibilities in Chinese New Left Literature	p. 121
Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the "Poetry of Migrant Workers" as Ecopoetry	p. 139
The Rise of the Short-short Genre	p. 159
Rethinking Socialism and Market Reform
The Road to Revival: A "Red" Classic or a "Black" Revisionist Epic in Praise of a Postsocialist China	p. 183
A New Narrative of Development in Chinese Television Media Representations of Africa	p. 205
Redistribution of the Sensible in Neoliberal China: Real Estate, Cinema, and Aesthetics	p. 225
Index	p. 247
List of Contributors	p. 253
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