Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy

by Joshua Neves

Overview

Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic. In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the “fake” and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China. Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Neves shows how piracy and fakes are manifestations of what he calls underglobalization—the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales. By tracking the rise of fake politics and transformations in political society, in China and globally, Neves demonstrates that they are alternate outcomes of globalizing processes rather than anathema to them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478009023
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	62 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Joshua Neves is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Film Studies at Concordia University and coeditor of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. After Legitimacy  1
1. Rendering the City: Between Ruins and Blueprints  33
2. Digital Urbanism: Piratical Citizenship and the Infrastructure of Dissensus  61
3. Bricks and Media: Cinema's Technologized Spatiality  94
4. Beijing en Abyme: Television and the Unhomely Social  120
5. Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection  150
6. People as Media Infrastructure: Illicit Culture and the Pornographics of Globalization  169
Notes  169
Bibliography  227
Index  245

What People are Saying About This

Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offense - Laikwan Pang

“Through a meticulous and multivalent study of the many discourses and practices around the fake, Joshua Neves provides us a kaleidoscopic and fascinating view of the sociality and media culture of contemporary Beijing, China, Asia, and the world. This truly interdisciplinary work draws resources from many fields and many cultures, and it demonstrates vividly how the logic of development densely infiltrates our mentality and ways of living.”

Dilip P. Gaonkar

“Joshua Neves treats the transformations of Beijing's cityscape as an experienced physical reality, an imagined construct in popular culture and art, and representative of what is happening in China. By disclosing what is distinctive and elusive about China's seemingly triumphant developmental nation-building project, Neves makes a provocative intervention at the nexus of several interdisciplinary subfields, from urban media studies and Asian developmental studies to postsocialism studies and global subaltern studies.”

Editorial Reviews

"Neves has written a meticulously sourced analysis of the cultural transformation of societies, focusing on the appearance of fakes and forgeries in China. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and faculty researchers."

Choice - S. C. Hart

Joshua Neves treats the transformations of Beijing's cityscape as an experienced physical reality, an imagined construct in popular culture and art, and representative of what is happening in China. By disclosing what is distinctive and elusive about China's seemingly triumphant developmental nation-building project, Neves makes a provocative intervention at the nexus of several interdisciplinary subfields, from urban media studies and Asian developmental studies to postsocialism studies and global subaltern studies.

Dilip P. Gaonkar

"The experience of reading Joshua Neves's Underglobalization is a bit like watching an experimental film.… Bringing an innovative approach to media that focuses on forms, technologies, practices, and infrastructures, Neves has produced a captivating account that challenges the methodological complacencies of much scholarship at the intersection of China, media, and globalization."

Film Quarterly - Fan Yang

Through a meticulous and multivalent study of the many discourses and practices around the fake, Joshua Neves provides us a kaleidoscopic and fascinating view of the sociality and media culture of contemporary Beijing, China, Asia, and the world. This truly interdisciplinary work draws resources from many fields and many cultures, and it demonstrates vividly how the logic of development densely infiltrates our mentality and ways of living.

Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offense - Laikwan Pang