Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination

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Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 - History - 243 pages
More than ever before, China is on the move. When the flow of people and images is fused, meanings of self, place, space, community, and nation become unstable and contestable. This fascinating book explores the ways in which movement within and across the national borders of the PRC has influenced the imagination of the Chinese people, both those who remain and those who have left. Travelers or no, all participate in the production and consumption of images and narratives of travel, thus contributing to the formation of transnational subjectivities. Wanning Sun offers a fine-grained analysis of the significant narrative forms and discursive strategies used in representing transnational space in contemporary China. This includes looking at how stay-at-homes fantasize about faraway or unknown places, and how those in the diaspora remember experiences of familiar places. She considers the ways in which mobility-of people, capital, and images-affects localities through individuals' constructions of a sense of place. Relatedly, the author illustrates how economic, social, and political forces either facilitate or inhibit the formation of a particular kind of transnational subjectivity.
 

Contents

Going Home or Going Places Television in the Village
21
Going Abroad or Staying Home Cinema Fantasy and the World City
43
Arriving at the Global City Television Dramas and Spatial Imagination
67
Haggling in the Margin Videotapes and Paradiasporic Audiences
91
Fantasizing the Homeland The Internet Memory and Exilic Longings
113
Eating Food and Telling Stories From Homeland to Homepage
137
Fragmenting the National TimeSpace Media Events in the Satellite Age
159
Chinese in the Global Village Olympics and an Electronic Nation
183
Toward a Transnational China?
211
Bibliography
219
Index
231
About the Author
Copyright

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Page 20 - On the road again: metaphors of travel in cultural criticism', Cultural Studies, 7, 2 (May 1995), pp.

About the author (2002)

Wanning Sun is lecturer in media studies at Curtin University of Technology, Perth.

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