Publisher's Synopsis
"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 grass-roots 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,
