Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility

摘要

In Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films Rey Chow returns to a problematic first articulated in her earlier collection of essays on Chinese cinema, Primitive Passions (New York, 1995). That is, how can change in non-Western cultures be articulated except through the dialectic between modernization and primitivism? In other words, how can the experience of loss engendered by "first world" imperialism find expression except as the exhibition of "exotic" or "ethnic" cultures? The key to this dilemma presented in Sentimental Fabulations is the identification of a common trope or theme - the sentimental - which simultaneously challenges Western progressivism through its emphasis on compromise and endurance, while at the same time speaking cross-culturally to issues of self-reflection and compromise in the contemporary age. Sentimentalism and a "fraught ethics of human sociality" may arise within cinematic visions of non-Western community, but this does not mean that their connotations are without relevance for Western audiences.