After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History

By Jinhua Dai

Book Overview

In After the Post-Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country's socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism's past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China's embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China's transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478000511
• ISBN13: 9781478000518
• Release Date: November 2018
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary