History and Memory in the Marketplace Cultural Representations of Mid-20th Century China

“Gao’s volume opens afresh creative moments and studies of Modern China both at home and abroad with research into an era that is often muddled by intentional and unintentional confusion among the Third Front, the Rusticated Youth, and the Cultural Revolution. Fashioning a new critical idiom that organically connects romantic, sexual, and erotic strands of filmic, literary, and digital extensions and representations of the Cultural Revolution, she provides twentieth and twenty-first century historical analysis and urges further research into the dangerously seductive commodification of nostalgia and the myths it engenders.”—Bert Scruggs, Associate Professor of Chinese, University of California, Irvine
“This book examines the phenomenon of ‘rewriting the Cultural Revolution’ at the turn of the21st century. Focusing on eroticizing, romanticizing, nostalgic, and digitizing trends in recent representations, Gao sheds light on individuals’ attempts at self-fashioning and self-empowerment and their subtle resistance to political doctrine. Drawing on a plethora of cultural texts from novels and films to Cultural Revolution-themed restaurants and parks, this book makes an important contribution to modern Chinese studies and memory studies.”—Tze-lan D. Sang, Professor of Chinese Literature and Media Studies, Michigan State University