<p>This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.</p> / Dissertation

Ma Shouzhen (1548-1604) was a cultured courtesan who lived in the famous pleasure quarter along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). She was talented in dance and music, painting and poetry, and surprisingly for her time, she was also a playwright. Although she was a celebrity of the prolific Nanjing cultural milieu and there is a good corpus of extant material by and about her, the particular contribution of Ma Shouzhen - her character and her work - have been marginalised, or even neglected, by the previous scholarship. This thesis is a cross-disciplinary study of Ma Shouzhen and is the first in-depth scholarly investigation into the entirety of her activities. It employs material and methods traditionally pertaining to the disciplines of sinology, history, art history, literary and drama studies. The thesis has a dual aim: first, to provide a nuanced understanding of the courtesan, her cultural production and social practice; second, to reclaim the agency and legacy of her character within the cultural milieu of late Ming Nanjing and beyond. These aims will be achieved through two main research objectives: (1) recovering and re-evaluating visual and written sources by and about the courtesan; (2) investigating those sources in order to comprehend her modes of self-representation and strategies of self-fashioning, analysed especially through the lens of gender. The main body of the thesis is composed of an introduction, five core chapters, and an epilogue; the chapters are structured so as to provide as complete a picture of Ma Shouzhen as possible. Chapter Two explores the space of the pleasure quarter, Ma’s biography and its entwinement within the complexities of the historical moment. Chapter Three focuses on her painting, Chapter Four considers her poetry, and Chapter Five explores her theatre practice; Chapter Six extends the investigation to focus on the construction of Ma’s historical character in later decades. In its content and aims, this thesis contributes to women’s and gender history, as well as to studies in visual culture and literature.