In After the Post–Cold 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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction
- PART I. TRAUMA, EVACUATED MEMORIES, AND INVERTED HISTORIES
- 1. I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human
- 2. Hero and the Invisible Tianxia
- PART II. CLASS, STILL LIVES, AND MASCULINITY
- 3. Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of Still Life
- 4. The Piano in a Factory: Class, in the Name of the Father
- PART III. THE SPY GENRE
- 5. The Spy-Film Legacy: A Preliminary Cultural Analysis of the Spy Film
- 6. In Vogue: Politics and the Nation-State in Lust, Caution and the Lust, Caution Phenomenon in China
- Finale. History, Memory, and the Politics of Representation
- Interview with Dai Jinhua, July 2014
- Notes
- Selected Works of Dai Jinhua
- Bibliography
- Translators’ Biographies
- Index
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