Reseña del libro "Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (en Inglés)"
Red Creative brings together multiple strands of debate around the cultural creative industries and contemporary capitalism, Chinas position in global capitalism, the future of modernity and new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy. It is about China, but it is also about a China as seen by the West, with its self-image as harbinger of a universal modernity. The book stages this encounter through an exploration of the contemporary cultural economy in China, and in particular its economic powerhouse and exemplary creative city, Shanghai. Taking this as an entry point, the book takes a long-term historical perspective and raises some fundamental issues around culture, creativity and the idea of modernity. By cultural economy we refer to the cultural and creative industries, the creative city and the wider innovation agenda proposed under the rubric creative economy. The book takes a critical political economy perspective, examining the institutions, regulations, interests, markets and imaginaries that underpin the Chinese cultural economy, and the strategic position of Shanghai within it. But this is not simply a case study of Chinas cultural or creative industries, nor Shanghai as a creative city. Unlike a growing number of such books, this one seeks to place China, and Shanghai, in a longer historical context, raising questions as to the nature of contemporary capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity. This book investigates the historical development and current impact of the creative industries approach/agenda in China today. In doing this, it sweeps in three narratives: the Chinese civilizational project, derived from Confucian outlook and traditions; cultural Modernism, its processes and values; and the political economy of neo-liberalism that provides the ground and possibly much more for the creative industries discourse both in the West and globally today. The book achieves its aims through two main means. First, it provides exhaustive discussion of the literature on the cultural industries, the creative industries, neo-liberalism, and Chinese culture and its history. Second, it furnishes a case study of Shanghai Modern by way of exploring how these ideas impact in practice in cultural policy-making at very points in Chinas post-colonial development. The whole book offers an important overview of the limitations of major bodies of western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture and society, with particular emphasis on the way concepts of culture and creativity have been mobilized over the last 20 years.
