Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture : Envisioning the Nation

Honourable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS Publication Awards 2022 Sheldon Lu's wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu’s analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists' representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.

Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Davis, USA. He has served as the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature, and Founding Co-Director of the Film Studies Program at UC Davis. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books in English and Chinese. These include Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (2007), China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (2001), and From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994).

Mark Gallagher is co-editor, with Yiman Wang, of Bloomsbury's Global East Asian Screen Cultures series and co-editor, with Chi-Yun Shin, of East Asian Film Noir (2015). He is the author of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (2018), Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (2013) and Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives (2006).

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). She is a NEH (National Endowment for
Humanities) awardee in 2019-20. She has guest edited a special issue for Feminist Media Histories on Asian feminist media (2019), and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on the topics of Chinese cinema studies, independent documentary, star studies, ecocinema, race gender and early cinema, film remakes and adaptation.