UC Berkeley

“New Era, New Media" shows how new and old media in early postsocialist China worked together to visualize new and desirable materialities and technologies, mediating China’s transition to postsocialism. In analyzing odd media hybrids like films “screened” on paper, that is, comic book adaptations of foreign blockbusters, or art films that echo the aesthetics of early digital piracy, I use my case studies to underscore the incongruities of transition and the unevenness of global media cultures. The newly mediated rhythms and sensoria of the 1980s emerged at a moment when changes in the textures of commodities and urban spaces—the introduction of synthetic fabrics, plastics, the vertiginous surfaces of skyscraper glass and reinforced concrete—transformed everyday life to create citizens schooled in navigating the aftermath of socialism. My account is not a teleological history in which old media and ideologies are simply replaced by new ones, but a postsocialist media archaeology that maps the relationship between outmoded and newly emergent media and their attendant ideologies. My conclusion points to how the media entanglements of early postsocialism, such as issues of piracy, audiovisual fidelity, and the mobile screen, reemerge in digital spaces to inform the euphoria and anxiety of China’s fraught digital media cultures today.