After the PostCold War

In After the PostCold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the countrys socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialisms past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between Chinas embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of Chinas transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.