Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China.
With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social
structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of
its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of
periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of
westernization as modernity, this volume's diverse group of
contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for
understanding postmodernism.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific
phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in
a postsocialist society. Some essays address China's complicity
in--as well as its resistance to--the culture of global capitalism.
Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture
in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in
everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of
political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market
and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of
nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the
historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to
understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of
postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China,
the volume also includes important observations on social and
cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has
so far been confined--in both Chinese and English-speaking
worlds--to their economic and consumer activities instead of their
political and cultural dynamism.
First published as a special issue of "boundary 2," "Postmodernism
and China" includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism
with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not
merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will
contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and
political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies.
"Contributors." Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang,
Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson,
Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon
Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen
Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang
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