Description
Book SynopsisIn After the PostCold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country's socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism's past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China's embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China's transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.
Trade Review"This volume is one of the best publications of its kind, not only because of the brilliance of the original essays, but also because of the excellent translation and editing that come across as judicious as one reads it." -- Jessica Yeung * China Perspectives *
"This is a challenging book by an author at the top of her game. Insightful and cosmpolitan in its range, the book shows that public intellectuals in China are managing to find a voice. The editors have done the author and readers a fine service." -- Paul Clark * China Journal *
Table of ContentsSeries Editor's Preface / Carlos Rojas vii
Acknowledgments xi
Editor's Introduction / Lisa Rofel xiii
Introduction / Translated by Jie Li 1
Part I. Trauma, Evacuated Memories, and Inverted Histories
1. I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human / Translated by Shuang Shen 25
2.
Hero and the Invisible
Tianxia / Translated by Yajun Mo 47
Part II. Class, Still Lives, and Masculinity
3. Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of
Still Life / Translated by Lennet Daigle 67
4.
The Piano in a Factory: Class, in the Name of the Father / Translated by Jie Li 91
Part III. The Spy Genre
5. The Spy-Film Legacy: A Preliminary Cultural Analysis of the Spy Film / Translated by Christopher Connery 109
6. In Vogue: Politics and the Nation-State in
Lust,
Caution, and the
Lust, Caution Phenomenon in China / Translated by Erebus Wong and Lisa Rofel 127
Finale. History, Memory, and the Politics of Representation / Translated by Rebecca E. Karl 141
Interview with Dai Jinhau, July 2014 / Lisa Rofel 160
Notes 167
Selected Works of Dai Jinhua 181
Bibliography 183
Translators' Biographies 189
Index 191
