Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics : Studies in Literature and Visual Culture

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. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: China and the Global Biopolitical Order Part 1. Literature and Biopolitics 1. Waking to Global Modernity: The Classical Tale in the Late Qing 2. When Mimosa Blossoms: Blockage of Male Desire in Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang 3. Body Writing: Beauty Writers at the Turn of the Twenty-fi rst Century Part 2. Art: From the National to the Diasporic 4. The Naked Body Politic in Postsocialist China and the Chinese Diaspora 5. “Beautiful Violence”: War, Peace, Globalization Part 3. Sinophone Cinema and Postsocialist Television 6. Hollywood, China, Hong Kong: Representing the Chinese Nation-State in Filmic Discourse 7. History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Film and Television Drama 8. Dialect and Modernity in Twenty-fi rst- Century Sinophone Cinema Part 4. Cityscape in Multimedia 9. Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Cinema, Photography, Video Historical Conclusion: Chinese Modernity and the Capitalist World-System Postscript: Answering the Question, What Is Chinese Postsocialism? Notes Chinese Glossary Bibliography Index About the Author

The houses far from home featured in this book are located in Vanuatu, a chain of islands between Fiji and Australia in the southwest Pacific. Once known as the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides, the islands were jointly administered by the British and French from 1906 to 1980. In this innovative and revealing study of a unique colonial project, Margaret Rodman tells the stories of these houses, exploring the profound differences of perspective, experience, and power that domestic spaces reveal and offering a novel look at the history of British colonialism in the Pacific.

Each chapter has at its heart a house where readers can explore dimensions of race, gender, and power that domestic spaces reveal. Moving across time, between different islands and actors, between oral memories and archival documents, Margaret Rodman provides a richly documented "multi-sited ethnography" of the social history of the New Hebrides.