China and New Left Visions

Political and Cultural Interventions

Contributions by Xiaomei Chen, Daniel F. Vukovich, Xueping Zhong, Megan Ferry, Lisa Rofel, Aili Mu, Haomin Gong, Arif Dirlik, Hai Ren Edited by Jie Lu, Ban Wang

Not available to order

Publication date:

20 July 2012

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739165188

Against the dire consequences of China’s market development, a new intellectual force of the New Left has come on the scene since the mid 1990s. New Left intellectuals debate the issues of social justice, distributive equality, markets, state intervention, the socialist legacy, and sustainable development. Against the neoliberal trends of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerism, New Left critics launched a critique in hopes of seeking an alternative to global capitalism. This volume takes a comprehensive look at China’s New Left in intellectual, cultural, and literary manifestations. The writers place the New Left within a global anti-hegemonic movement and the legacy of the Cold War. They discover grassroots literature that portrays the plight and resilience of the downtrodden and disadvantaged. With historical visions the writers also shed light on the present by drawing on the socialist past.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: China and New Left Critique by Ban Wang and Jie Lu

Part I: Geopolitics and New Left Perspectives
1. Back to the Future: Contemporary China in the Perspective of Its Past, Circa 1980 by Arif Dirlik
2. The Geopolitics of the New Left in China by Lisa Rofel
3. The Battle for Chinese Discourse and the Rise of the Chinese New Left: Toward a Postcolonial Politics of Knowledge by Daniel Vukovich
4. What Is Political Theater?: A Critique of Performance Studies by Ban Wang

Part II: New Left Literature in China
5. Internationale as Specter: Na’er, “Subaltern Literature,” and Contemporary China’s “Left Bank” by Xueping Zhong
6. Constructing Agency: Challenges and Possibilities in Chinese New Left Literature by Jie Lu
7. Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the “Poetry of Migrant Workers” as Ecopoetry by Haomin Gong
8. The Rise of the Short-short Genre by Aili Mu

Part III: Rethinking Socialism and Market Reform
9. The Road to Revival: A “Red” Classic or a “Black” Revisionist Epic in Praise of a Postsocialist China by Xiaomei Chen
10. A New Narrative of Development in Chinese Television Media Representations of Africa
11. Redistribution of the Sensible in Neoliberal China: Real Estate, Cinema, and Aesthetics by Hai Ren

This book provides a broad-ranging discussion of China’s New Left’s intellectual discourse and debates since the 1990s. . . .These essays provide vivid, multi-faceted description and analyses of China’s New Left and its wide-ranging discourse.