Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the fake and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China.
Trade Review“Through a meticulous and multivalent study of the many discourses and practices around the fake, Joshua Neves provides us a kaleidoscopic and fascinating view of the sociality and media culture of contemporary Beijing, China, Asia, and the world. This truly interdisciplinary work draws resources from many fields and many cultures, and it demonstrates vividly how the logic of development densely infiltrates our mentality and ways of living.” -- Laikwan Pang, author of * Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offense *
“Joshua Neves treats the transformations of Beijing's cityscape as an experienced physical reality, an imagined construct in popular culture and art, and representative of what is happening in China. By disclosing what is distinctive and elusive about China's seemingly triumphant developmental nation-building project, Neves makes a provocative intervention at the nexus of several interdisciplinary subfields, from urban media studies and Asian developmental studies to postsocialism studies and global subaltern studies.” -- Dilip P. Gaonkar, Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern University
"Neves has written a meticulously sourced analysis of the cultural transformation of societies, focusing on the appearance of fakes and forgeries in China. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and faculty researchers." -- S. C. Hart * Choice *
"The experience of reading Joshua Neves's
Underglobalization is a bit like watching an experimental film.… Bringing an innovative approach to media that focuses on forms, technologies, practices, and infrastructures, Neves has produced a captivating account that challenges the methodological complacencies of much scholarship at the intersection of China, media, and globalization." -- Fan Yang * Film Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction. After Legitimacy 1
1. Rendering the City: Between Ruins and Blueprints 33
2. Digital Urbanism: Piratical Citizenship and the Infrastructure of Dissensus 61
3. Bricks and Media: Cinema's Technologized Spatiality 94
4. Beijing en Abyme: Television and the Unhomely Social 120
5. Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection 150
6. People as Media Infrastructure: Illicit Culture and the Pornographics of Globalization 169
Notes 169
Bibliography 227
Index 245
