Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185984264X ISBN 13: 9781859842645

Publisher: Verso Books, 2002

Synopsis

Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film, and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In these pages she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, lays bare Euro-American fantasies about the Sixth Generation of Chinese cinema auteurs, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese Diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyzes the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s' urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intricately intertwined.

About this title

Review:

"In these luminously powerful essays on Chinese cinema, women's literature, and contemporary popular culture, Dai Jinhua achieves a new historiography. She shows us how to rethink the great themes of nationalism, colonialism, consumerist capitalism, and modernity itself. Moving, inspiring, and absorbing from beginning to end, Cinema and Desire is a landmark work by a major cultural critic"--Meaghan Morris, Lingen University, Hong Kong

"The most lucid, complex and brilliant analysis of Fifth Generation film (indeed of the entire 'generations' phenomenon in the People's Republic of China) that I have ever seen. Dai Jinhua manages at the same time to connect with international currents in psychoanalytic feminist film criticism and to forward a grounded, 'new Marxist' Chinese school of thinking."--Ella Shohat, City University of New York

About the Author:

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Peking University. She teaches women's studies, cultural studies, and film. She is the author of Breaking Out of the City of Mirrors and Film Theory and Handbook of Criticism. Jing Wang is S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology. She is the author of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng's China. Tani Barlow is a historian of modern China and teaches in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, and is senior editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 185984264X
• ISBN 13: 9781859842645
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292
• Editor: Wang Jing, Barlow Tani E.