The East Asian Studies Center, Center for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, and Center for Historical Research are collaborating to offer a new course in Spring 2022, "The Golden Age of Dead Media: Modern China, Nostalgia, and the Futures of Media’s Pasts" (33880 graduate class no. / 33881 undergraduate class no.). The course will be taught by Dr. Julia Keblinska on Wednesdays and Fridays from 12:45 - 2:05pm in University Hall, Room 066.

Course Description: Polaroid vibes, glitch effects, and Stranger Things--contemporary media culture seems to be in the grips of "retromania." In this "golden age of dead media” the electronic screens of our new media, it seems, are haunted by memories of old, obsolete, dead technologies. The old has a strong purchase on our self-fashioning in a new digital world. Contemporary China too is in the grip of mediated nostalgias, created both by users and engineered by the state. In Chinese cinema, we see state-sponsored mega-productions of period pieces that cast a painterly "golden glow" on Chinese history. On the small screens of smartphones, in turn, we see stickers that revel in the incongruity of socialist and "traditional" aesthetics become playful, ironic memes. Instagram has become an archive of Chinese vernacular photography through the Beijing Silvermine Project. Back-to-basics streaming star Li Ziqi seduces viewers with the pastoral pleasures. But experiencing nostalgia through new media platforms is not itself new--mediating newness through recourse to old materialities and aesthetics has played a key role in the dramatic historical and technological changes of the last century. The birth of "modern China" in the early 20th century saw the development of a vibrant popular culture that embraced the aesthetics of the late imperial visual culture as much as it reveled in the magic of new technologies. After victory in 1949, Chinese communists fervently reminisced about the romance of early revolution, filming the revolutionary canon in living, breathing color. More recently, the totalitarian state has mobilized “Red Nostalgia” on the cinematic screen, in digital mobile culture, and on the propaganda playing back on big urban screens to mobilize a spiritually dejected populace facing an uncertain future. 

This class will explore the strong pull of the past throughout China's encounter with new media technologies. Beginning with the canonical texts of Lu Xun, tracing the contours of popular Maoist culture, and exploring how postsocialism reconfigures Chinese history and memory, we will map the terrain of modern Chinese media cultures through the lens of nostalgia. Rather than reading nostalgia as a potentially conservative pathology or a simple palliative, we will look to moments of media and historical change to ask how media nostalgia re-conceptualizes history, either in the service of the state or the people, allowing us to better understand the powers of the nostalgic affect. Though our focus will be mainly on China, we will explore nostalgia in other socialist and postsocialist contexts. Students who wish to develop a research project that is theoretically informed by our class texts but that engages in comparative study of other socialist cultures or other periods of Chinese cultural history are welcome.

This course is supported in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.