Screening China : critical interventions, cinematic reconfigurations, and the transnational imaginary in contemporary Chinese cinema / Yingjin Zhang.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 383-420) and index.

Part I. Critical Interventions: history, politics, methodology -- 1. Introduction: Screening China at the Fin de Siecle -- 2. Chinese Cinema and Transnational Cultural Politics: Rethinking Film Festivals, Film Productions, and Film Studies -- 3. The Rise of Chinese Film Studies in the West: Contextualizing Issues, Methods, Questions -- 4. Cross-Cultural Analysis and Eurocentrism: Interrogating Authority, Power, and Difference -- in Western Critical Discourse --- Part II Cinematic Reconfigurations: Nation, Culture, Agency -- 5. From "Minority Film" to "Minority Discourse": Negotiating Nationhood, Ethnicity, and History -- 6. Seductions of the Body: Fashioning Ethnographic Cinema in Contemporary China -- 7. The Glocal City of the Transnational Imaginary: Plotting Disappearance and Reinscription in Chinese Urban Cinema -- 8. Conclusion: Entering the New Millennium.

"Yingjin Zhang guides the reader through the development of Chinese film criticism, pointing out that Western critics have studied a comparatively small number of films from a much larger body of work, often with a unidirectional Eurocentric bias. The result has been that the few have influenced the many, perpetuating a cycle of production of films from China that bow to the Western notion of "Chineseness." As a corrective, the author introduces readers to a much larger canon of film and proposes a multidirectional model of film studies, one that allows for a Western reading of Chinese film yet also recognizes Chinese cinema's own voice."--Publisher's description.