Browse

Contemporary Chinese voices approach the topic of happiness from many diverse positions and perspectives. Happiness, often represented by the Chinese character fu 福‎, is part of the visual propaganda campaign of the Chinese Dream, and raising levels of happiness has become an official government target. Much is written and said about happiness by the Chinese government, but also by authors of self-help books, by journalists, TV chat show hosts, pop psychologists and China’s netizens. This book is the first attempt at analyzing these various writings and related images to see what concepts and agendas inform this proliferation of happiness discourse. Through comprehensive analysis of text and images in multimedia formats, the essays in this volume reflect the diversity and pervasiveness of Chinese happiness discourse enacted by different social groups and actors. The aim of this volume is to analyse out what different social actors, different philosophical, psychological, cultural, political ideas bring to the subject of happiness in contemporary China. The authors bring a number of theoretical perspectives and conceptual approaches to this endeavour, resulting in a multidisciplinary and multi-methodological volume. The different chapters illuminate how the recent discourse of happiness encompasses both motifs of individual self-interest and collective socialist ethics. The volume shows that happiness has emerged as a culturally and historically specific and relevant topic for China’s population that resonates across class divisions. As such, the book make a significant contribution from the perspective of the Humanities to the understanding of individual and collective happiness in China today.

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programmes and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs and founding social activist networks. This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy.

This volume aims to restore laughter to its proper position in the Mao-era culture. The Mao era was actually a period when laughter was bonded with political culture to an unprecedented degree. Spurred by dynamic political exigencies, many cultural products sought to utilize laughter as a more pliable form of political expression. Laughter was used to highlight antagonisms or downplay differences, to expose and ridicule the class enemy, or to meliorate and conceal contradictions; it could be ritualistic or heartfelt, didactic or cathartic, communal or utopic. In Maoist culture, laughter became a versatile discourse that brought together the political, the personal, the aesthetic, the ethical, the affective, the physical, the aural, and the visual. Therefore, the art of laughter was carefully moderated and regulated for political ends. Maoist laughter reveals the diversity, complexity, dynamics, and inner contradictions in the cultural production and reproduction in Mao’s China.