ANTH 3020 Representation and Power of Contemporary China
This course looks into contemporary Chinese society and culture, along with recent debates in social theory and theories of representation. It critically examines the construction processes of categories and assumptions we bring to the study of contemporary China, how they affect and reshape Chinese society, and how we might rethink them. In this class, student will explore a wide range of topics, including the conceptualization of "class" in Chinese modern history, the creation of the social concept of "fu nu" (woman), the "birth" of middle-class subjectivity, the varied modes of nostalgia about the socialist past, the discourse of "quality" (suzhi) as a marker of modernity, the constitution of gendered identities, the commodification of the body, and so on. Overall, students in this class will study the complicated politics of representation in relation to China's consistent pursuit of modernity and drastic social transformation in the past few decades.