Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

by Zhang, Xudong

• ISBN13: 9780822342304
• ISBN10: 0822342308
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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, reflecting the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting what is unique to China as well as what its recent experiences imply for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity. Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political shifts in 1990s China. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the socialist realism of the 1990s through readings of Mo Yan's fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. In his discussion of film, Zhang contrasts styles and politics of the Fifth and Sixth Generation directors. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang offers the same keen insight into China's long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.

Author Biography

Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Postsocialism	p. 1
Intellectual Discourse: National and Global Determinations
The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field	p. 25
Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s	p. 102
Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the "New Era"	p. 136
Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism
Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory in Wang Anyi's Literary Production in the 1990s	p. 181
Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, "Minor Literature," and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology	p. 212
"Demonic Realism" and the "Socialist Market Economy": Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine	p. 240
Cinematic Discourse: Universality, Singularity, and the Everyday World
National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite	p. 269
Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju	p. 289
Notes	p. 311
Bibliography	p. 331
Index	p. 341
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