The Modes of Representation of Social Suffering in Chinese Literature and Film

FAIN: FT-52858-04

Jian Xu
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI 53211-3153)

The project researches a representational practice emergent in China’s postsocialist literature and film that naturalizes and aestheticizes social suffering instead of historicizing it as a social problem needing solution. The project seeks to analyze it as a symptom of the nation’s cultural imaginary reacting to the ubiquitous reign of global capital. Rather than lamenting the total surrender of contemporary Chinese culture to the hegemony of the market, I undertake to show how a number of Chinese literary and cinematic works develop strategies both to negotiate their survival in the market and to subvert the global discourses of modernity and social progress in the service of capital.