Cinema and Desire

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Peking University, where she teaches women's studies, cultural studies and film. She is the author of Breaking Out of the City of Mirrors and Film Theory and Handbook of Criticism.Jing Wang is S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng's China.Tani E. Barlow is a historian of modern China and teaches in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Washington. She is the founding editor of positions: east Asia cultures critique and author of The Questions of Women in Chinese Feminism.

In these luminously powerful essays on Chinese cinema, women's literature, and contemporary popular culture, Dai Jinhua achieves a new historiography. She shows us how to rethink the great themes of nationalism, colonialism, consumerist capitalism, and modernity itself. Moving, inspiring, and absorbing from beginning to end, Cinema and Desire is a landmark work by a major cultural critic