After the Post–Cold War: The Future of Chinese History
ISBN: 9781478002208
Platform/Publisher: e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection / Duke University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: unlimited; Download: chapter
Subjects: Asian Studies / East Asia; Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women’s Studies; Media Studies / Film;

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.

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Language at Peking University and the author of Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua , as well as numerous other books in Chinese.

Lisa Rofel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and coauthor of Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion , also published by Duke University Press.

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