Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

by Zhang, Xudong

• ISBN13: 9780822342120
• ISBN10: 082234212X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"Xudong Zhang has produced a brilliant and compelling study of the various forces struggling with one another in China during the pivotal decade that followed the failure of the 1989 social movement. Through a deft explication of the complicated factors at play--summed up wonderfully in a clear exposition of the collision between postmodernism and postsocialism--Zhang is able to provide a uniquely nuanced picture of the China that has emerged as such a formidable force in our globalized age."--Theodore Huters, author of "Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China"

Author Biography

Xudong Zhang is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at New York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Socialism

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"

Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism

Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory 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

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

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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