<p>My dissertation, "The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present" draws on a range of visual cultural forms - cinema, documentary, and fashion - to track the cultural dimension of the emergence of the new middle class subject in China's encounter with global capitalism. Through cultural studies methodologies and critical theoretical practices, I explore the massive reorganization of national subjectivity that has accompanied the economic reforms since 1978. How, I ask, has the middle class replaced the proletariat as the dominant subject of Chinese history? What are the competing social forces that contribute to the making of the new middle class subject, and how do they operate? By considering these questions in terms of the cultural cultivation of new sensibilities as much as identities, I trace China's changing social formations through the realm of cultural productions. This project is organized into three parts, each of which attends to a particular constellation of middle class subjectivities and ideologies. In Part I (Introduction and Chapter 1), I explore how the Chinese middle class subject is shaped by historical, political-economic, and cultural forces. I show that the new social actor is structurally dependent on the national and transnational bourgeoisie and the post-socialist party-state. In Part II (Chapters 2-5), I focus on the relationship among fashion, media, and Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist eras. By engaging with films such as Xie Tieli's Never Forget (1964), Huang Zumo's Romance on Lushan (1980), Qi Xingjia's Red Dress is in Fashion (1984), and Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) and Useless (2007), I suggest that the representation of fashion and consumption in Chinese cinema, documentary, and new media is a privileged site for deciphering otherwise imperceptible meanings of class, ideology, and history in the formation of the Chinese middle class subject. In Part III (Chapter 6), I attend to the repressed underside of Chinese consumer culture: rubbish. This project reorients our understanding of socialist and post-socialist China, seeing them as underpinned by the contradictions emblematized in the Chinese middle class.</p> / Dissertation

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:20:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CarlosEF_DISSERT.pdf: 995177 bytes, checksum: 9410eaadcd9007008d6315880e77910d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-06-10 / Rogram relying on sociological interface between Economic Sociology, Sociology of Moral Theory of Socialization and Social Stratification, this dissertation research makes use of theoretical contributions Luic Boltanski, Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Lahire to problematize the generally about the physical and symbolic production and social reproduction of the type of "economic ethics" predominant in the new petite bourgeoisie Brazilian. In other words, the goal is to explain and analyze the objective conditions (economic needs and moral grammar) and intersubjective (modes of socialization and social networks) and update the social genesis and contextual transcontextual beliefs, biases, inclinations and cultural regularities observed the economic behavior of individual profiles for the fractions of the urban petty bourgeoisie and commercial upward Natal / RN. With regard to methodological strategies adopted in data collection will be conducted qualitative interviews (semistructured) and ethnographic notes. In turn, the analytical treatment of the collected empirical content is based on the approach dispositionalist (Pierre Bourdieu, Lo?c Wacquant and Bernard Lahire) that emphasizes the study of the past embedded agents and the different contexts of incorporation / activation / inhibition of "provisions" individual cultural / Se apoiando em programa sociol?gico de interface entre Sociologia Econ?mica, Sociologia da Moral, Teoria da Socializa??o e Estratifica??o Social, a presente pesquisa de disserta??o se serve das contribui??es te?ricas de Luic Boltanski, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu e Bernard Lahire para problematizar de modo geral a respeito das condi??es materiais e simb?licas de produ??o e reprodu??o social do tipo de ?tica econ?mica predominante na nova pequena burguesia brasileira. Dito de outro modo, o objetivo ? explicitar e analisar as condi??es objetivas (necessidades econ?micas e gram?tica moral) e intersubjetivas (modos de socializa??o e redes de sociabilidade) da g?nese social e atualiza??o contextual e transcontextual de cren?as, propens?es, inclina??es e regularidades culturais observadas no comportamento econ?mico de perfis individuais relativos a fra??es da pequena burguesia comercial urbana e ascendente de Natal/RN. No que se refere ?s estrat?gias metodol?gicas adotadas na coleta dos dados, ser?o realizadas entrevistas de tipo qualitativo (semiestruturadas) e anota??es etnogr?ficas. Por sua vez, o tratamento anal?tico do conte?do emp?rico coletado apoia-se na abordagem disposicionalista (Pierre Bourdieu e Bernard Lahire) que enfatiza o estudo do passado incorporado dos agentes e os diferentes contextos de incorpora??o/ativa??o/inibi??o das disposi??es culturais individuais