Reviews for The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize

The average rating for The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-29 00:00:00 Sid Morrison How odd, I seem to be the first person to write a review here on GR. Well, it is a rather obscure book -- but what it's about obsessed many people for many years, and at various points irritated (tens of?) millions of people, even if only briefly. There is some irony there, surely. Hmmm, I don't think I can do justice to this book, or the myriad thoughts it set off in my mind. So, I will just throw out some grumpy things at this point in lieu of a proper review... Well, for starters you can definitely tell this was based on JL's PhD. It has been softened and matured, but it still has that flavour pretty strongly. So it was rather sweeping in places and rather obscure and academicesey in others. But her introduction to various ideas of 'world literature' and political undercurrents and Eurocentrism were interesting, as was what she had to say (albeit largely based on a couple of books by Swedish scholars) about the occasionally murky history of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the various contradictions swirling about its founding charter and its practical outworking and the seemingly inescapable condescension that is shown or at least perceived by some whenever it goes to anyone outside the Anglophone (and possibly Francophone) literary worlds. For the main, how sad, how sad, how sad. So much ink spilled over pride and various forms of nationalist anxiety. Laid out for the reader with sometimes concealed contempt on the part of JL. And then in the end how pathetic (in every sense of the word) that once Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize his work was definitively banned in China and no public discussion was permitted of him, his work or the prize. Just let that sink in for moment... whatever the merits and demerits of his works and of whether or not or to what extent he could or could not be considered to represent what sort of China on a world literary stage (and is that even an important question for grown-ups?), and whatever the motivations and biases in the decision of the Nobel Committee in 1999-2000, some muppet decided that if you are in the PRC you are not allowed to talk about that. That's how much they worship their bizarrely constructed self-image. So JL's friends and contacts were kept anonymous in her work when they gave their reactions to the prize. Yes, a literary prize. Afraid to speak openly about a literary prize being given to a citizen of another country (Gao is French, though born in China and lived there till his 40s, so it's hard to say he's not 'Chinese') by people from yet another country (Sweden). Good grief, I don't even know if any English person since Kipling has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I'm not sure I care. (Though I will go and look on wikipedia in a minute.) But how very sad. Public discourse here in China is so obsessed with itself. How exhausting it all is. And how slightly annoyed I am with JL raking through it, and yet grateful for the record being there. Well, most of academia is about raking through stuff that's not all that important or interesting, I suppose. For dessert, I was not convinced by all of JL's criticism of Gao Xingjian's work, in particular her pigeonholing of Soul Mountain as "Romantic". She certainly didn't back up the claim with quotations that were convincing. Maybe I am just a bit dim. I wasn't a big fan of Soul Mountain myself, as my review on GR will testify, but JL's rather rushed lit crit bits didn't really seem fair.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-20 00:00:00 Marcy Hagen I can't claim to have read this anthology in its entirety - but I hold it as a valuable resource in my classroom, and this particular collection served my high-school students well in postcolonial literature projects. Chaudhuri excellently composes this collection to reflect varied linguistic, religious, literary/genre, and ethnic perspectives, adequately complexifying a contemporary, multiethnic nation.