Culture and the market in contemporary China: Cinema, literature, and criticism of the 1990s

Chinese culture since the beginning of the 1990s is often said to be characterized by pluralization (duoyuanhua), in contrast to the centralized condition of culture under Maoism and even into the reform era of the 1980s. This dissertation explores the new state of pluralization as a product of the "marketization" (shichanghua) of the culture industry especially after 1992. The cultural logic of marketization leads to a new state of autonomy in areas of culture that were previously heteronomous state sectors, yet the new autonomy is relative insofar as it is generated by, and ultimately must adjust itself to, various market conditions, from the demands of domestic consumers to those of a global cultural market. The culture of the 1990s is therefore explored here in terms of two countervailing movements---a deterritorializing movement from heteronomy to autonomy in the relationship between cultural production and state institutions and ideology, and a simultaneous reterritorialization as culture is commodified and subjected to the market mechanism and the profit imperative. Through the exploration of key moments in the critical discourse, literature, and cinema of the 1990s, the marketization of culture emerges not just as a condition of production but as a historical horizon that is imagined and negotiated in various ways through individual works of art, from new genres of entertainment cinema and popular literature to renewed strategies of modernist negation and high cultural critique.