Cities Surround The Countryside

Visser Robin Visser

Description

Denounced as parasitical under Chairman Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics, the city now functions as a site of individual and collective identity in China. Cities envelop the countryside, not only geographically and demographically but also in terms of cultural impact. Robin Visser illuminates the cultural dynamics of three decades of radical urban development in China. Interpreting fiction, cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, she analyzes how the aesthetics of the urban environment have shaped the emotions and behavior of people and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city have produced urban aesthetics. By relating the built environment to culture, Visser situates postsocialist Chinese urban aesthetics within local and global economic and intellectual trends.In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China's urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government's inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China's neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Asia
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 12 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822392774
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cities

Surround

The

Countryside

Cities Surround The Countryside

RobinVisser

Duke

University

Press

Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China

Durham&London

2010

∫2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper!

Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

For Qingguo

Contents

Acknowledgments

IntroductionCities Surround the Countryside Part One Conceiving the Postsocialist City

1Designing the Postsocialist City Urban Planning and Its Discontents 2Theorizing the Postsocialist City The Cultural Politics of Urban Aesthetics Part Two The City as Subject

3Performing the Postsocialist City Beijing Identity in Art, Cinema, and Fiction 4Consuming the Postsocialist City Shanghai Identity in Art, Cinema, and Fiction Part Three The Subject in the City

5The Melancholic Urban Subject BlackSnow,PrivateLife,Breathing, andCandy 6Postsocialist Urban Ethics Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life

ConclusionSustainable Chinese Aesthetics

Notes Bibliography Index

ix

1

27

85

131

175

225

255

287

295 329 353

Acknowledgments

I depended on a great many people for the comple- tion of this book, but there are several to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude. David Der-wei Wang mo- tivated this project and so much more through his unstinting support and guidance throughout my edu- cation and career. Wang Xiaoming, who generously hosted two research leaves at the Shanghai University Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, inspired this book with his insightful direction and passion for social change. Direction provided by Chen Xiaoming of Peking University was instrumental in each stage of my research. Critical input from Judith Farquhar, William Olmsted, Sandra Visser, and Stephen Westin proved essential during the writing process. I am grateful for the support of an American Re- search in the Humanities in China Award provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, and par- ticularly thank Sandra Bradley and Zhu Shanjie for so capably facilitating visiting scholar logistics. My re- search was further supported by programs at the Uni- versity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, including a Grier/Woods Presbyterian China Initiative Fellowship in Chinese Studies administered by the Carolina Asia Center, and a Faculty Research and Study Leave pro- vided by the College of Arts and Sciences and the De- partment of Asian Studies. I received generous sum- mer research funds from Valparaiso University. A University of North Carolina Research Council Publica-