The growing political conflicts unfolded in China provides an opportunity for rethinking the cultural politics of affect. Although the political formations in the region can be laden with a multitude of emotions, they tend to be poorly understood. This book explains why affect and emotion matter to Chinese politics from the Mao Zedong to thr Xi Jinping era. It makes a &nbsp;unique contribution by investigating why and how affect matters to politics through a series of in-depth case studies of various art forms. It studies&nbsp;the dynamics of political passions and the contexts from which emotional subjects engage in hegemonic struggles through the creation of various cultural forms. Topics discussed include the mobilisation of revolutionary emotions in political movements, the desire of nationalism, the virtual affective space created by antagonistic identity politics, the subaltern body as a surface of emotion work, and the blurring of public-private divides on social media. This book finds that cultural feelings and emotional experiences are salient to understanding political life, action and order. It concludes that the formulation and reconfiguration of the affective space are essential to political struggle.

Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China

Politics & Social Sciences

Shi, Wei

Liu, Shih-Diing

Politics & Government

Edinburgh University Press

Politics of People, The: Protest Cultures in China (SUNY series in Global Modernity)

History

Asia

State University of New York Press

Explores the cultural dimensions of protest and dissent in China, focusing on dramatic forms of bodily, spatial, strategic, and artistic performativity. Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square occupation, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau have experienced an increase in and persistence of mass gatherings, demonstrations, and blockades staged as a means of protesting the ways in which people are. In this book, Shih-Diing Liu argues that these popular protests are poorly understood, because they are viewed through the lens of protests and occupations globally, with insufficient attention given to their distinctively local aspects. He provides a better account of these distinctively Chinese-style occupations by describing, contextualizing, and analyzing a range of relevant recent case studies. Liu draws on theoretical concepts developed by Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and other contemporary critical theorists and shows the the importance of considering bodily, spatial, and visual dimensions of these protests. By seeing them as staged, contentious performances, the author demonstrates how these precarious populations mobilize their bodies and symbolic resources offered by the Chinese government to open up temporary spaces of appearance to articulate their grievances, and argues that this kind of embodied and performative analysis should be more widely conducted in studies of popular politics worldwide.

The Politics of People: Protest Cultures in China (SUNY Series in Global Modernity)

State Univ of New York Pr

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