ARI Working Paper Series

To what extent is the political integrated into the aesthetic in the nationalist discourses of contemporary China? How do we understand the historical significance of the publicly manifested postsocialist relations of the state and the society? In what ways does the aesthetics, encompassing the temporalities of modern and premodern, socialist and postsocialist, articulate the nation as a collectivization of subjectivity that accentuates and deviates from the political rationalities of both the Party-state and the mass consumers? This paper grounds the nationalist discourse of a recent mainland Chinese film American Dreams in China in existing critical literature on these questions, and project a tangible future for the study of postsocialist Chinese mass nationalism at the conjuncture of literary criticism and cultural studies.