Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In these pages she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, lays bare Euro-American fantasies about the Sixth Generation of Chinese cinema auteurs, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese Diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyzes the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s' urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intricately intertwined.

“In these luminously powerful essays on Chinese cinema, women's literature, and contemporary popular culture, Dai Jinhua achieves a new historiography. She shows us how to rethink the great themes of nationalism, colonialism, consumerist capaitalism, and modernity itself, Moving, inspiring, and absorbinb from beginning to end.” … Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Peking University. She teaches women's studies, cultural studies, and film. She is the author of Breaking Out of the City of Mirrors and Film Theory and Handbook of Criticism.

Jing Wang is S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology. She is the author of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng's China. Tani Barlow is a historian of modern China and teaches in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, and is senior editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique.

288 pages

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