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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
193179
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| Summary/Abstract |
‘Nei Juan (内卷)’, translated as ‘involution’, was the ‘buzzword’ in Chinese social media in the year 2020. With ‘involution’, two more phenomena widely known as the ‘Sang Wenhua (丧文化)’, loosely translated as the ‘culture of dispiritedness’ and ‘Tangping Zhuyi (躺平主义)’, loosely translated as ‘lying flat-ism’, gained currency. If ‘involution’ is the issue the urban youth of China is facing in a commercialised and competitive China of today, then ‘dispiritedness’ seems to be its symptom, and ‘lying flat-ism’ its cure being adopted by the ‘dispirited’ youth. As a result, a few questions naturally arise. Is ‘involution’ a new issue that the Chinese urban youth is encountering today? Or is ‘involution’ in itself yet another symptom of a larger issue, ‘alienation’? My inquiry into these questions makes me turn towards films. To find the answers, I take up the works of Jia Zhangke, the central theme of whose works I describe as ‘the desultory wanderings of the alienated souls’. I argue that a critical and close reading of his ‘Hometown Trilogy’, will present us with such youth, who in the face of the rapid changes brought by the post-1979 economic reforms, were filled with a sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement, all forms of alienation as proposed by Melvin Seeman. I also look into the genesis of ‘involution’ and its manifestation to argue that the Chinese urban youth experiencing ‘involution’ and thereby ‘dispiritedness’, are experiencing the same subjective feelings of alienation as experienced by the youth in the Jia’a ‘Hometown Trilogy’.
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| 2 |
ID:
113705
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Civil society seems to be a dead issue in China because its formal aspects of mobilization and institutionalization are so tightly regulated by the party-state. This article looks to activities in and around the Shanghai World Expo (2010) to rethink the meaning of civil society and political action in China. Through an analysis of the Expo's national, theme, and corporate pavilions, it shows how Beijing is planning a harmonious future for China and the world. Yet alongside this unified future, it examines how Shanghai's citizen intellectuals - filmmaker Jia Zhangke, artist Cai Guoqiang, and blogger Han Han - are creating alternative futures. This multiple decentralized view of the future is an integral part of building alternative notions of civil society in China. The article thus has two goals: (1) to contrast official constructions of a unified harmonious future with citizen intellectuals' multilayered views of Shanghai's past-present-future; and (2) to explore how citizen intellectuals are creating a new civil society that can build alternative futures.
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| 3 |
ID:
173002
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines the duration of time in everyday life as depicted in Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 second feature film, Platform 站台 (Zhantai) (2000). In light of the Bergsonian notion of time and Deleuze’s creative application of this notion in the realm of cinema, it demonstrates how the duration of time – the core of the experience of waiting depicted in the film – is brought out in the film’s narrative structure, cinematic devices, and acting style. Fundamental to the film’s creative endeavour is the attempt to capture the resistance of the present moment against the weight of its own virtual double, which is to say, to unearth the gaps and lacunae that lie beneath the temporal continuum assumed in our habitual way of living. On the basis of this particular vision of time, the film offers a critique of everyday life as the very site where the platitude of existing norms of culture is laid bare and where the unbearable pressure of time forces us to question the value of all existing possibilities.
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