Duke University Press After the Post–Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Sinotheory)

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. Review "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" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "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" (9/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “An avant-garde figure in cultural criticism since the late 1980s, Dai Jinhua constantly integrates various theories and methodologies—from feminism and ideological analysis to psychoanalysis and cultural studies—into her work on film studies, literary history and criticism, and third-world social movements. She is one of the few Chinese scholars who traverse the boundary between the academy and the mass media, both domestically and internationally, and she continues to be an important critical voice of China and the contemporary world.” Author: Wang Hui From the Author 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. About the Author 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.