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Home 2013-2014 Undergraduate College Catalog Course Offerings Anthropology Courses ANTH 3020: Representation and Power of Contemporary China (3 cr.)

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ANTH 3020: Representation and Power of Contemporary China (3 cr.)

This course looks into contemporary Chinese

society and culture, along with recent debates in

social theory and theories of representation. It

critically examines the construction processes of

categories and assumptions we bring to the study

of contemporary China, how they affect and

reshape Chinese society, and how we might rethink

them. In this class, student will explore a wide

range of topics, including the conceptualization

of "class" in Chinese modern history, the

creation of the social concept of "fu nu"

(woman), the "birth" of middle-class

subjectivity, the varied modes of nostalgia about

the socialist past, the discourse of "quality"

(suzhi) as a marker of modernity, the

constitution of gendered identities, the

commodification of the body, and so on. Overall,

students in this class will study the complicated

politics of representation in relation to China's

consistent pursuit of modernity and drastic

social transformation in the past few decades.

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