China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity

“This ambitious work provides a sweeping analysis of Chinese popular culture from 1977 to the turn of the millennium. Lu discusses everything from intellectual debates on the concepts of modernity and postmodernity to cinematic, artistic, and literary representations of China’s social changes in the era of economic reform.”—The China Review

By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the author dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era. This wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary work demarcates the cultural terrain by examining diverse media: film, television, avant-garde art, and literature, as well as critical theory and intellectual history.

Booknews

Intending to provide a "comprehensive inventory of the constitutive aesthetic characterization of emergent Chinese postmodernism," Lu (Chinese, film studies, and cultural studies, U. of Pittsburgh) traces Chinese intellectual history and looks at Chinese culture as demonstrated through productions of film, television, literature, and avant-garde art. Paying special attention to the way that visual media portrays images from and of the world outside of China, she argues that the rapid ascendance of commercialized popular culture and the diminished role of the intellectual mark a new phase of culture in Chinese cultural history. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sheldon H. Lu is Associate Professor of Chinese, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, 1994) and editor of Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender.