Suchergebnisse

This essay addresses the symbolic or socio-ideological significance of what is called guoxue re in China today. In the author's view, as a concept with a fixed morphological form, guoxue has been traversing history with a changing content, and for different people or social groups it means different things and serves different interests. The catachrestically used term guoxue acquires an imploding ambiguity when it is manipulated to accommodate different needs and desires in the contemporary Chinese culture and commodity market. The kaleidoscopic vertiginous guoxue landscape in China, the essay argues, ultimately points to an unmistakable collusion among the state government, the academic elite, and the commodity market. As such, the imploding ambiguity of the concept and discourse of guoxue bears a continuity with the ambiguity of Chinese modernity, which at present is a conglomerate of capitalism, Marxism, Confucianism, economism or developmentalism, and harmonious society. Moreover, the contemporary guoxue re betrays an innermost desire in the Chinese national unconscious for a different genuinely existing social order, and for other ways of being human than those defined by capitalist modernity while China is being dominated by the rule of capital. (China Perspect/GIGA)

"Unconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min'an's work centres on the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang's discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic life--its founding moral, aesthetic, political values--is tremendously useful and enlightening. In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work is not a "China book," but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang experiments with the applicability of "theory" to what might be thought of as a transcultural common life embedded in mundane technologies. The book is particularly concerned with rescuing everyday materiality and bodily life from the numb obscurity to which things have been relegated by modern consumerism and bourgeois hygiene. This book is not an oddity from the mysterious East; it is a playful experiment in writing from a unique scholar, a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities in China, and will be of interest to scholars and students of East Asian, particularly Chinese, political and domestic studies."--Provided by publisher