Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People's Republic of
China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from
proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today.
Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into
being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an
avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative
way to understand China's unprecedented political-economic, social, and
cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate,
produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity.
Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of
fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture
contributes to China's changing social relations through the cultivation
of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of
fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to
disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing
with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic
narratives, such as a factory worker's desire for a high-quality suit in
the 1960s, an intellectual's longing for fashionable clothes in the
1980s, and a white-collar woman's craving for brand-name commodities in
the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of
consumption--exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they
manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its
disposal--revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory
workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.
A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with
masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative
rethinking of the emergence of China's middle-class consumer culture.
