Revolution and Its Narratives: China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966 - Hardcover

Cai, Xiang

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822360543 ISBN 13: 9780822360544

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

Published in China in 2010, Revolution and Its Narratives is a historical, literary, and critical account of the cultural production of the narratives of China's socialist revolution. Through theoretical, empirical, and textual analysis of major and minor novels, dramas, short stories, and cinema, Cai Xiang offers a complex study that exceeds the narrow confines of existing views of socialist aesthetics. By engaging with the relationship among culture, history, and politics in the context of the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society and arts, Cai illuminates the utopian promise as well as the ultimate impossibility of socialist cultural production. Translated, annotated, and edited by Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, this translation presents Cai's influential work to English-language readers for the first time.

 

 

About this title

About the Author

Cai Xiang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Research Institute for Contemporary Literature at Shanghai University. 

 

Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China.

 

Xueping Zhong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Tufts University and the author of Masculinity Besieged?: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century, also published by Duke University Press.

 

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Revolution and Its Narratives

China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966

By Cai Xiang, Rebecca E. Karl, Xueping Zhong

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6054-4

Contents

A Note on the Translation, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction to the English Translation Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, 
INTRODUCTION Literature and Revolutionary China, 
CHAPTER 1 The National/The Local: Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination, 
CHAPTER 2 The Mobilization Structure: The Masses, Cadres, and Intellectuals, 
CHAPTER 3 Youth, Love, "Natural Rights," and Sex, 
CHAPTER 4 Renarrating the History of the Revolution: From Hero to Legend, 
CHAPTER 5 Narratives of Labor or Labor Utopias, 
CHAPTER 6 Technological Revolution and Narratives of Working-Class Subjectivity, 
CHAPTER 7 Cultural Politics, or Political Cultural Conflicts, in the 1960s, 
CONCLUSION The Crisis of Socialism and Efforts to Overcome It, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE NATIONAL/THE LOCAL

Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination

When I use the word local here, it is a spatial concept that I counterpose to the centralized power of the national state. Of course, this concept cannot be delimited by the position of a local administrative entity, nor can it be contained in some naturalized geographical description. Rather, my interest is more on the multiple elements that comprise this space, such as systems, mores and customs, social groupings, the disposition of the population and its languages (or dialects), as well as those deep accumulated cultural modes that are hidden in the heart of these spaces. It is these multiple elements and their inner cultural modes that comprise what we will call the local or even local knowledge.

Naturally, one could unconsciously evoke the local as if it were a self-regulated or self-sufficient space; but I rather tend to see the national and the local in relations of mutual constitution. For the nation-state not only deploys myriad forms — as well as systemic methods — to effectively incorporate into itself local knowledge (for example, the ancient system of collecting folk songs); but at the same time, it deploys different methods to deeply implant its own political vision, its own quest for power, and its own forms of knowledge into the local (for example, the form of traditional storytelling). This is so much the case that the nation-state has become a sort of dominating ideological form.

It is precisely because of the complex interactive relationship between the state and the local that, in the process of China's modernization, the transformations in China's ruling power have never been simple substitutions of one kind of power for another kind. Rather, at the same time, these transformations have always also implied changes in the nation-state structure and its ideologies. It is precisely because nation-state ideology is in an instructional position with relation to the local that the disintegration of older national ideologies usually spreads to the local, even producing great instability and disorder in the local order. In certain historical descriptions — for example, in Zheng Chaolin's Memoir (Zheng Chaolin huiyilu) — we can see that popular disorder in Xiangping villages began only four or five years after the Xinhai Revolution [of 1911]. In these four or five years, "in order to express certain differ

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360543
• ISBN 13: 9780822360544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Karl Rebecca E., Zhong Xueping