Locating Generation X: Taste and Identity in Transitional South Africa

Abstract

The blood of the 1989 Tian'anmen Square massacre cannot be erased from history. This tragedy served as a watershed in China between the cheerful 1980s and the pessimistic 1990s, the transition period from which China's Generation X emerged. Beijing-based film scholar Dai Jin- hua offered an insightful contrast of the first two post-Mao decades. During the 1980s, explains Dai, various discourses supported the optimistic goal of China reaching for the outside world and earning the right to knock on the gates of the 21st century. This objective was initiated by a cultural sense of crisis, a feeling of loss in historical continuity, and the subsequent use of allegories related to death and rebirth. The 1990s was marked by the loss of a clear goal and the coexistence of heterogeneous motives and wishes, getting underway cultural dissents, the fall of the arts, a reformulated postmodernism, a post-Cold War ideology, and postcolonialism (Wuzhong 380–82). Indeed, the 1980s was a time for deliberation and experiments. The state-engineered, market-driven transformation started to show its most visible impact on Chinese cities. The decade saw drastic demolition of the old cityscape for the rebuilding of the new and testified to the state-monitored growth of a state capitalism that shattered the older ways of urban life. The 1990s were a politically reticent era when dissident voices were curbed. The decade was marked by tensions between economical loosening and political tightening, both for the sake of ushering in the market. A cynicism marked by keeping one's mouth shut to get rich was the goal of the day. 1

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