Revolution and Its Narratives

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

Author: Cai, Xiang; Karl, Rebecca E.; Zhong, Xueping
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822360544
eISBN Pdf: 9780822374619
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2016
Month: February
Pages: 480
Language: English

Caption

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.

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
A Note on the Translation
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the English Translation
- The Yan’an Talks: How to Narrate the Revolution in Socialist Literature
- “Liberal Revenge”: How to Erase China’s Socialist Literature after the Cultural Revolution
- What Happens Culturally the Day after the Revolution?
- Concluding Remarks
Introduction: Literature and Revolutionary China
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
Chapter 1. The National/The Local: Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination
- I. Narratives of Local Landscape and the Bewildered Reconstruction of Landscape
- II. The Local in Narratives of Mobilization and Reeducation [Gaizao]
- III. Escaping the City, On Location, and Preserving the Local, or the Transformation of Modernity
- Conclusion
Chapter 2. The Mobilization Structure: The Masses, Cadres, and Intellectuals
- I. The Structure of Mobilization
- II. The Masses
- III. The Cadres
- IV. Intellectuals
- Conclusion
Chapter 3. Youth, Love, “Natural Rights,” and Sex
- I. Youth, or the Politics of Youth
- II. Love, or Stories of Love
- III. Sex/Sexuality, or the Narration of Sex
- Concluding Remarks
Chapter 4. Renarrating the History of the Revolution: From Hero to Legend
- I. Ordinary Sons and Daughters, Collective Heroes
- II. Legends and the Travels of a Story
- III. The Reader and the Market
- IV. Why or How to Renarrate Revolutionary History
- Conclusion
Chapter 5. Narratives of Labor or Labor Utopias
- I. “The Land” (Diban): Political Debate and Rationalization of Law
- II. “Reeducation” (Gaizao) and Stories of Reeducation
- III. The Builders and Changes in the Concept of Labor
- IV. A Riot of Color Is Always Spring (Wanzi qianhong zongshi chun): The Liberation of Women or Gender Reconciliation
- Conclusion
Chapter 6. Technological Revolution and Narratives of Working-Class Subjectivity
- I. Weapons of the Weak, or the Artisanal Spirit
- II. “Speaking Cultural Bitterness” and Technological Reform
- III. Anti-Intellectualism or Anti-Expertism?
- Conclusion
Chapter 7. Cultural Politics, or Political Cultural Conflicts, in the 1960s
- I. Material Abundance and Anxiety about It
- II. Deterritorialization versus Reterritorialization
- III. Trivial Private Matters and Important State Affairs
- Conclusion: Why Did Literary Youth Reappear?
Conclusion: The Crisis of Socialism and Efforts to Overcome It
- I. What Is the Crisis of Socialism?
  - 1. Egalitarianism and Social Class Differentiation
  - 2. Bureaucratic Hierarchy and Mass Participation
  - 3. Political Society and the World of Everyday Life
  - 4. Internalization and Objectification
  - 5. Maintaining the Status Quo and Facing the Future
- II. Efforts to Overcome the Crisis
- III. The Intellectual Transition of the 1980s
- Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index

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Revolution and Its Narratives

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

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