Cinema and Desire

Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China’s most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist her literary film and TV commentary has over the last decade addressed an expanding audience in China Taiwan and Hong Kong.<i>Cinema and Desire</i> presents Dai Jinhau’s best work to date. In it she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals establishes Huang Shuqin’s <i>Human Woman Demon</i> 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 analyses 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 intertwined.