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The Art of Useless : Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China
Author
Title
The Art of Useless : Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China / Calvin Hui.
ISBN
9780231549837
Publication
New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2021]
Copyright Notice Date
©2021
Physical Description
1 online resource
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
In English.
Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021 9783110739077
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People's Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China's unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity.Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China's changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker's desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual's longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman's craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption-exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal-revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China's middle-class consumer culture.
Variant and related titles
De Gruyter University Press eBook pilot project 2021.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
December 09, 2021
Series
Global Chinese Culture
Contents
Frontmatter
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction. The Trouble with Naming: Middle- Class Culture, Petty- Bourgeois Sensibility, and Zhuang
Chapter One. Dirty Fashion: Ma Ke's Fashion Exhibit Useless (2007), Jia Zhangke's Documentary Film Useless (2007), and Cognitive Mapping
Chapter Two. The High- Quality Suit, Class Struggle, and Cultural Revolution: The Politics of Consumption in Xie Tieli's Film Never Forget (1964)
Chapter Three. "Mao's Children Are Wearing Fashion!": Romantic Love, Fashion Consumption, and Modernization Politics in Huang Zumo's Film Romance on Lu Mountain (1980)
Chapter Four. Imag(in)ing the Chinese Middle- Class Culture: White- Collar Work, Romantic Love, and Fashion Consumption
Chapter Five. Between Production and Consumption: Chinese Migrant Factory Workers in Documentary Films and Ethnographic Works
Chapter Six. The Psychic Life of Rubbish: On Wang Jiuliang's Documentary Film Beijing Besieged by Waste (2010)
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
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