Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Socialism  1

Part I. Intellectual Discourse: National and Global Determinations  

1. The Return of the Political: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field  25

2. Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in the 1990s  102

3. Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society: Cultural Politics after the "New Era"  136

Part II. Literary Discourse: Narrative Possibilities of Postsocialism  

4. Shanghai Nostalgia: Mourning and Allegory in Wang Anyi's Literary Production in the 1990s  181

5. Toward a Critical Iconography: Shanghai, "Minor Literature," and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology  212

6. "Demonic Realism" and the "Socialist Market Economy": Language Game, Natural History, and Social Allegory in Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine  240

Part III. Cinematic Discourse: Universality, Singularity, and the Everyday World  

7. National Trauma, Global Allegory: Construction of Collective Memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite  269

8. Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju  289

Notes  311

Bibliography  331

Index  341

With this new book, Zhang has provided an indispensible critical lens through which to discern the dizzying speed of social change and dazzling complexity that characterize the contemporary Chinese condition as symptomatic of ‘the Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping Revolution.’”—David Leiwei Li, Comparative Literature

“Postsocialism and Cultural Politics is, among many things, both well organised and easy to navigate. . . . [Zhang’s] application of postsocialism to literature and film is deft and nuanced, and proffers arresting insights into the works themselves as well as the socio-political situation they exist in. Zhang's subtle understanding of Deleuze, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida underpins his analysis of Chinese literature and film. His examples drawn from the works of Baudelaire, Dickens, nineteenth-century German oil painting, Balzac, and Kafka lends Zhang's work a cosmopolitan quality, and draws parallels beyond the parameters of his subject. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics is a thorough and compelling examination of the socio-political situation in 1990s China.”—Joshua Hoey, M/C Reviews

With this new book, Zhang has provided an indispensible critical lens through which to discern the dizzying speed of social change and dazzling complexity that characterize the contemporary Chinese condition as symptomatic of ‘the Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping Revolution.’”—David Leiwei Li, Comparative Literature

“Postsocialism and Cultural Politics is, among many things, both well organised and easy to navigate. . . . [Zhang’s] application of postsocialism to literature and film is deft and nuanced, and proffers arresting insights into the works themselves as well as the socio-political situation they exist in. Zhang's subtle understanding of Deleuze, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida underpins his analysis of Chinese literature and film. His examples drawn from the works of Baudelaire, Dickens, nineteenth-century German oil painting, Balzac, and Kafka lends Zhang's work a cosmopolitan quality, and draws parallels beyond the parameters of his subject. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics is a thorough and compelling examination of the socio-political situation in 1990s China.”—Joshua Hoey, M/C Reviews

“An extraordinarily rich panorama of the cultural and socio-political debates in China today. Xudong Zhang’s analyses are not only models of theoretical interpretation, the whole book can stand as a triumphant demonstration of the way in which readings of novels, films, social and political texts, and the polemics around them can be positioned to illuminate each other.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke University

“Xudong Zhang has produced a brilliant and compelling study of the various forces struggling with one another in China during the pivotal decade that followed the failure of the 1989 social movement. Through a deft explication of the complicated factors at play—summed up wonderfully in a clear exposition of the collision between postmodernism and postsocialism—Zhang is able to provide a uniquely nuanced picture of the China that has emerged as such a formidable force in our globalized age.”—Theodore Huters, author of Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China

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