Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture - Couverture souple

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-Peng

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0824831772 ISBN 13 : 9780824831776

Editeur : University of Hawai'i Press, 2007

Synopsis

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level.

Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China's belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Sheldon H. Lu is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Davis.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Hawai'i Press
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0824831772
• ISBN 13: 9780824831776
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 264
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible