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The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China
Ort / Verlag
New York: Columbia University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
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.