Moulding the Socialist Subject

Xiaoning Lu is Lecturer in Modern Chinese Culture and Language at SOAS, University of London and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2020).

• AcknowledgementsFiguresIntroduction1 The Socialist Subject for a New China (1949–1966)2 Cinema within a Socialist Society of Spectacle1 Terror and Mass Surveillance: the Counterespionage Film1 The Counterespionage Film and Political Campaigns against Counterrevolutionaries2 Cinematic Articulation of Mass Surveillance: The Might of the People2 The New Physical Culture and Volatile Attractions: the Sports Film1 The New Physical Culture2 Promoting Workers’ Sport and Heterogeneous Laughter: Trouble on the Basketball Court and Big Li, Young Li and Old Li3 Sports, Ethics, and Melodramatic Imagination: Woman Basketball Player No. 5 and Ice-Skating Sisters3 Ethnicity and Socialist Fraternity: the National Minority Film1 Reconfiguring the Ethnic Landscape: From Ethnicity to Nationality2 The National Minority Film3 Flames of War in a Border Village: Cross-Ethnic Performance and the Politics of Recognition4 Daji and Her Fathers from Page to Screen: Typifying Ethnic Fraternity in Socialist China4 Modeling the Model: Red Stardom1 Problematizing “the Star”2 Star Image3 The Stanislavski System and Modeling the Red Star5 The Cultural Politics of Affect: Villain Stardom1 Negative Characters, Performance Context, and Production of Affect2 Villain Performance as Negative Pedagogy6 Mobile Attraction: Itinerant Film Projectionists and Rural Cinema Exhibition1 Itinerant Film Projection: a New Attraction in Rural China2 Rural Film Exhibition: Problems and Challenges3 Film Projectionists and Their Machines4 Film Projectionists and Their Exhibition PracticesConclusionBibliographyFilmographyIndex

"Moulding the Socialist Subject by Xiaoning Lu is a concise yet insightful book. It addresses the instrumental role of cinema in textual form and as a state apparatus in ‘remoulding’ (改造, pp. 5 and 165) socialist subjectivity, as well as the intersection and interaction of cinema with other key discourses such as sport, ethnicity, theatre, melodrama, spectatorship/reception, and the urban/rural dichotomy. [...] Moulding the Socialist Subject is a welcome addition for students who love diverse movies, the general public eager to understand the ‘structure of feeling’ prevalent in a socialist regime, and scholars of China studies."-Lunpeng Ma, Communication University of Zhejiang, in China information, Vol 35 (2021), pp. 113-114"The book provides clearly written and engagingly illustrated pathways to understand the underlying histo-ries of contemporary conundrums"-Stephanie Donald, Monash University Malaysia, in The China Journal , No. 86, July 2021, pp. 208-210