Sinophone utopias : exploring futures beyond the China dream

This study examines the vibrant space of Chinese and Sinophone cultural negotiations between state and grassroots utopianist discourses and teases out both the declining and emergent visions for the future as embedded in the analyzed literary narratives and visual representations. It probes the cultural reverberations of pertinent utopian discourses and debates, asking which kinds of "existential utopias" are arising from the crisis-ridden realities in China and the Sinosphere-and how they are configured differently. The book investigates the aesthetic legacies of past utopian projects, illuminating the minor, hybrid utopian fantasies as grassroots responses, or echoes to the current, large-scale ideological refashioning project under Xi Jinping's leadership, and arguing that while they, too, engage with local and Western utopian discourses, in particular Confucianism, Daoist nature philosophy, Marxism, Maoism, Enlightenment thought, economic developmentalism, and science-based rationalism, their tactics are to fuse, subvert and intersect them with alternative concepts and values, thus staging critical interventions comprising local, environmental, posthuman, queer, or feminist orientations. This book delves into Chinese utopian thought by focusing on its reappearance, in multiple shapes, in contemporary cultural representations (art, performance, literature, film, garden concepts, rural reconstruction projects etc.) rather than on the philosophical and historical (utopianist) roots of Chinese modernity. It demonstrates where, and how, bottom-up engagement for a better future is flourishing in Chinese and Sinophone contexts, and studies in which aesthetically articulated ways the expectations of intellectuals, creative workers, and social activists reach out beyond the currently circulating, state-issued futurologies