Columbia University Press The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China (Global Chinese Culture)

Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption―exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal―revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible. A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture. Review A cutting-edge work of cultural studies, this book shines a penetrating light on the rise of a middle class in China. Examining the powers of mass media, film, and fashion industry, Calvin Hui offers us fascinating scenarios and critical insights into how consumerist fantasies raise the pretensions of a status-seeking "bourgeoisie" while opening up dream spaces for alienated labor.--Ban Wang, author of Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China A superbly original study of the media construction of the middle-class sensibility in post-1949 China, Calvin Hui's The Art of Useless demonstrates the indisputable value of Western Marxism and cultural studies in Chinese-language film studies. The ingenious tripartite structure moving from consumption to its underside affords an irresistible riveting read.--Yiman Wang, author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood By closely examining a broad selection of documentaries, feature films, and other artistic works and cultural products, Hui illuminates not only the works themselves but also the sociocultural environments that have nurtured these works and in turn been shaped by them. A useful and enlightening perspective on Chinese middle-class consumer culture.--Tze-lan D. Sang, author of Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries From Never Forget, a 1964 socialist film intent on educating a factory worker who longs for a fancy suit, to the forty dazzling costume changes in 1980's Romance on Lu Mountain, to the white-collar fashion presentations in 2010's Go! Lala Go!, the politics of how one dresses has been a crucial coordinate for navigating cultural identity in contemporary China. In The Art of Useless, Calvin Hui takes us on a fascinating cultural tour that remaps our understanding of the relationship among fashion, politics, and visual culture during an era of unprecedented social transformation.--Michael Berry, author of Speaking in Images and A History of Pain About the Author Calvin Hui is Class of 1952 Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of W