“Selling Out” Post Mao: Dance Labor and the Ethics of Fulfillment in Reform Era China

  • Emily E. Wilcox
Chapter
Part of the Culture, Mind, and Society book series (CMAS)

Abstract

As the papers in this volume show, any exploration of the individual in China must attend critically to the notion of the individual as a conceptual analytic. In the context of the Reform Era (1976 to the present), experiences and understandings of the individual exist in relation to, and often in contrast with, the ideological and social legacies of Chinese socialism that were developed in the Republican Era (1911–49) and in the Mao Era (1949–76). The individual of Reform Era China thus is genealogically related to the individual of Chinese socialism, and the latter formation persists in the Reform Era as both an historical inheritance and a constructed memory. It is only with a critical understanding of the genealogical and historical development of the individual in Chinese modernity that one can reflect meaningfully on Reform Era China’s rise of the individual in all its particularity as a social and cultural phenomenon.

Keywords

Cultural Worker Material Pursuit Artistic Practice Spiritual Civilization Professional Dancer 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Andrew B. Kipnis 2012

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  • Emily E. Wilcox

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