Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its Cold War past to show how the recent erasure of the country's socialist history signifies socialism's failure and forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism.
From her early film studies to her most recent critiques of contemporary pop culture, Chinese Cinema Culture: A Scene in the Fog presents Dai Jinhua's multiple theoretical moves toward writing difference into the Euro-American discourses current in China today; it is an account of both her interrogation of mainstream Western theories and her eventual flight from them. She searches for a theoretical strategy that enables her to narrate critically the intellectual and gendered film history and culture of the post-Mao and post-Deng eras without sacrificing it to the orientalizing gaze of the West. Her work demonstrates brilliant insights into China's cinema tradition that is inseparable from both the political legacy of Maoism and current postcolonial order of cultural knowledge. This book includes 11 essays organized in three parts and one dialogue on Chinese cinema culture as the afterword.