Chinas unlimited
making the imaginaries of China and Chineseness
This book is about the ways Chineseness has been represented over the past hundred years or so. Much of the book discusses the Orientalizing and crude racist ideologies that have formed the foundations of the way white people have both popularly and scientifically imagined China. But the book also discusses how Chinese cultural producers in China, and in exile, have imagined China, sometimes challenging and sometimes reproducing nationalist narratives of Chineseness. Thus the book takes as its texts both elite literary representations, such as the Duoduo's story "Going Home", and popular cultural texts including Chinese television "soap" serials and MTV, and British popular cultural media such as the songs of George Formby and, that very British performative medium, the pantomime.
