Disenchanted democracy
Subtitle: Chinese criticism after 1989
By: Ben Xu
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
Subjects: Criticism -- Political aspects -- China; Political culture -- China; Intellectuals -- China -- Political activity; China -- Politics and government -- 1976-2002
Description: "Disenchanted Democracy offers a critical mapping of the unknown waters of Chinese cultural criticism in the politically disenchanted 1990s. It focuses on the theoretical debates of post-Tiananmen Chinese intellectuals, relates those debates to the international context of theory and power, and prepares the ground for further discussions on many important theoretical and political issues.".

"This book approaches democracy, in the context of cultural criticism, less as a series of abstract propositions than as a site or space in which practices of change and good society, pluralism and consensus, knowledge and power, and citizenship and humanity come into sharper focus.

Through analyses of the 1990s humanist-spirit discussion, new Chinese national studies, and postmodern-postcolonial theory in China, this book reveals how notions of modernity, enlightenment, orientalism, and national and cultural identities are contested in Chinese cultural discussion after 1989." "Disenchanted Democracy will be of interest to students and scholars working on modern and contemporary Chinese cultural and theoretical discourses."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of contents: title: The crisis of national identity and the decline of unitary culture; title: Retreating from the public into the profession; title: The postmodern-postcolonial stimulus and the rise of Chinese post-ist theory; title: The anxiety of cross-cultural theorizing; title: Remembering intellectual activism in the postsocialist-postcolonial condition