The Forsaken Generation, to which the filmmakers and artists discussed in this book belong, were the youngest children of Maoism. Due to the paradigmatic shift in China from Maoism to a hybrid form of postsocialism, in which economic reforms are still anticipating a corresponding political change, this generation, as the transitional era's direct yet also neglected agents, detect in their experience a significantly spectral relationship to the past, as well as the present. This sense of spectrality – the invisible yet felt shape of a disappearance, a status of being both present and absent and also a desire for realisation and materialisation – characterises both the apparent irrelevance of past ideological values and the felt indefiniteness of the generation's place as the problematic yet creative carriers of memories of a particular historical world once saturated with those values. Their mission to understand their position on the map of a modernising and postsocialist China is inseparable from the task of remapping that past (and also the present) in relation to their unique coordinates. This is why, as seen across a number of examples discussed in this book, these filmmakers and artists demonstrate a particular interest in, and insight into, the exploration of subjectivity and spatiality in images and narratives, behind which, I emphasise, we can detect a highly inspiring sensitivity to issues of structure and agency in historical repre-sentation. Besides fate and chance – such as the unpredictability of one's birth into a particular moment and space – there is room for critical understanding and responsible agency so that pains might be understood, wrongs could be addressed and things would become better, however slightly and gradually so.

In working through this spectral experience of history and the self, the Forsaken Generation necessarily needs to counter the sense of alienation and obscurity with strategies of making concrete and analysable what remains vague or general. Taking history personally and taking the personal historically are the two sides of their epistemological coin, which is also applicable to their approach to issues of representation. The various alternative narratives, self-conscious subjectivities, meaningful cinematic spaces and visibly embodied performances that we have witnessed across the chapters are among the most representative efforts made in that direction.