Abstract
Although Fredric Jameson is a towering figure in theory and culture analysis in American academia and beyond, I am tempted to say that nowhere does he have more profound and overarching theoretical and intellectual influence as in post-Mao China. To many contemporary Chinese intellectuals who first exposed themselves to the post-Hegelian, post-Realist, and post-Philosophical discourse or what we call lilun (theory) today, terms like “critical theory,” “cultural criticism,” not to mention postmodernism as a theoretical discourse are either certifiable Jamesonian inventions, or else something thoroughly shaped and inspired by his theoretical presence. Ever since his 1985 visit to China, where he taught at Peking University during the entire Fall semester, Jameson as a text and his Literature Program at Duke have become a privileged place on an increasingly cosmopolitan intellectual map of new generations of Chinese students. Visiting scholars from the West, regardless of their intellectual background, academic specialization, and political persuasion have learned, sometimes uneasily, to anticipate questions from their stubborn Chinese students with persistent reference to Jameson’s work or the Jamesonian problematic.
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Notes
For a discussion of the correlations of a Marxist understanding of postmodernism and a critical analysis of the constructive elements of the postmodern condition in the emergence of a post-socialist sphere of everyday life that reflects the mixed mode of production of today’s China and coincides with the rationalization of the Chinese state-form, see Zhang (1999). A longer version of the essay is included in Dirlik and Zhang (eds) (2000).
For a self-reflection on his own mode of dialectic thinking and its coherence endowed by its object of negation, namely late capitalism as a totality, see Jameson (1998d), especially the sections “Marxism and Late Capitalism” and “Dialectical Thinking”.
See Kant (1991) especially “Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, and “To Answer this Question: What Is Enlightenment?”
The issue of the “constructiveness” of critical theory was raised first by Wang Xiaoming and his students at East China Normal University during a seminar discussion with Fredric Jameson in summer 2002. For the transcripts in Chinese translation, see the “Cultural Studies Web”, Centre for Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, directed by Prof. Wang Xiaoming at http://culture.online.sh.cr/asp/list3.asp?id = 65&writer = ‘j ameson’
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© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd
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Zhang, X. (2004). Modernity as Cultural Politics: Jameson and China. In: Homer, S., Kellner, D. (eds) Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523524_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523524_10
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