
Cities Surround The Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China
Robin Visser
In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.
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About Robin Visser
Reviews for Cities Surround The Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China
Andrew Jones
Journal of Asian Studies
“[I]lluminating and rich in material. . . . Visser’s account of changing urban planning, especially the aesthetics of planning, is fascinating. . . . The book makes an important contribution to the contemporary cultural studies in China.”
Fulong Wu
Asia Pacific Viewpoint
“[T]his book is a strong intervention in our understanding of the key contributors to the urban art scene, and to formations of critique in China’s cities.”
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
The China Quarterly
“This is an important study of a global issue which applies particularly to China in this period of unprecedented development: how to manage and ‘survive’ in the cities as they expand and modernise.”
Michael Sheringham
Asian Affairs
“Visser’s study develops a new perspective on critical inquiry and urban culture in the postsocialist period by situating them within the tension between place and space in a rapidly changing urban environment.”
Alexander F. Day H-Urban
H-Net Reviews
“For a brilliant discussion of artistic insubordination in reaction to urban modernity in literature, performance and art, I keenly recommend Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside.”
Michael Sorkin
The Nation