Afterword

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
The Way

The afterword argues that it is the way that prose poetry makes prose visible that gives it such power and promise in contemporary China, as well as abroad. Recitation summons the voices of others into the present, and into the present speaker: when prose poetry recites prose assumed to contain and deliver truths, those claims are brought into a kind of laboratory in which they can be tested and transformed. This is especially crucial in contemporary China, where the power of the tradition of socialism floats in an uneasy vacuum. The afterword looks at writing by Xi Chuan and Mao Zedong in order to ask what it actually means to “make it new” in China, and how prose poetry authors confront and answer questions about how we speak the truth.

Newborn Socialist Things

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Coderre
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Contemporary China is seen as a place of widespread commodification and consumerism, while the preceeding Maoist Cultural Revolution is typically understood as a time when goods were scarce and the state criticized what little consumption was possible. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, both the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. In Newborn Socialist Things, Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Cultural Revolution to show how it paved the way for commodification in contemporary China. Examining objects ranging from retail counters and porcelain statuettes to textbooks and vanity mirrors, she shows how the project of building socialism in China has always been intimately bound up with consumption. By focusing on these objects—or “newborn socialist things”—along with the Cultural Revolution’s media environment, discourses of materiality, and political economy, Coderre reconfigures understandings of the origins of present-day China.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

What Is the Tradition of Chinese Prose Poetry?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Fourth Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines, rejects, and revises the traditional history of the genre of prose poetry. Through a reading of Agamben, it demonstrates that during the May Fourth period, writers called a wide variety of work by the name prose poetry, including lineated free verse, lyric essays, and even fiction. By contrast, the writers of the 1950s wrote generically coherent work, and in the 1980s those same writers produced the focused, meaningful genre definitions that we use today. Because contemporary prose poetry has its roots in the obedient socialist poetry of the 1950s, it is not an inherently subversive form; its acts of refusal often serve to humanize or personalize the dictates of state socialism. The end of the chapter finds that the greatest stylistic influence on early prose poetry were Bing Xin’s translations of Rabindranath Tagore, and the way she made his transcendental music into vernacular prose.

The Second Decade

2009 ◽  
Vol 200 ◽  
pp. 895-896
Author(s):  
David C. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
International Association ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
English Language Journal ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Great Scholar ◽  
Cultural Freedom

When I took over as the second editor, resigning from the British Diplomatic Service to do so and as an opportunity to work in my spare time on a PhD relating to modern China, The China Quarterly had already established itself as the leading English-language journal on contemporary China under its founder-editor, Rod MacFarquhar. Rod had done a superb job as the first editor and was moving on to play a role in British political life as a Member of Parliament and from thence to Harvard and academic distinction. The China Quarterly too was moving, from its earlier position as one of a group of journals funded by the International Association for Cultural Freedom, to coming under the wing of the newly established Contemporary China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. There, that great scholar on the life and political thought of Mao Zedong, Stuart Schram, had just been appointed Director.

On Chinese Pragmatism in the 1980s

1986 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 207-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucian W. Pye
Keyword(s):  
Policy Evaluation ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese Politics ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Deng Xiaoping ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Near Unanimity

The orthodoxy of the day is that Chinese politics is now pragmatic. The China that was once the ultimate in ideological politics in both the intensity of her passions and the follies of her principles has vanished as by the wave of a conjurer's hand. The primacy of ideology, the hallmark of Chinese Communism under Chairman Mao Zedong, has been replaced by the no-nonsense philosophy of Deng Xiaoping who does not care about the “colour of the cat” so long as it catches “the mice.” With near unanimity scholars of contemporary China welcome the change. It promises not only liberation for the Chinese people from the heavy hand of doctrinal politics but also the prospect that analysis of Chinese developments can emerge from the realm of murky esoteric interpretation into the fresh air of reasoned policy evaluation.

scholarly journals Gentlemen, Heroes, Real Men, Disabled Men: Explorations at the Intersections of Disability and Masculinity in Contemporary China

NAN Nü ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Dauncey
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Disability Culture ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
China Today ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
The Way

This article advances new perspectives on disability culture in contemporary China. Using gender – specifically masculinity – as an “intersection,” it addresses key questions that both help to explain, but also further trouble, the way in which the “impaired” male body is both represented and lived in China today. Although recent research across the disciplines is revealing more and more about pre-modern and contemporary understandings of, and responses to, disability in China, little is known about the way in which gendered identities intersect and interact with disabled identities. From “gentlemen” and “heroes” to “real men” and “disabled men,” this article examines dominant historical and contemporary images of masculinity and disability, and illustrates how they have come to frame the way in which disabled men have been viewed and view themselves. And, through the close reading of the memoirs of one young man, Zhang Yuncheng, it reveals the possibilities and limitations through which gendered behaviours are formed and enacted on an individual level when set against Chinese discourses of disability, normalcy, and gender.


Orthodox Prose Poetry

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Study Group ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter opens by studying the two most seminal prose poets of the 1950s, Ke Lan and Guo Feng. It shows that by faithfully ventriloquizing state socialism, they effectively subjectivize it, putting the words of the collective into the mouth of the individual. It demonstrates the way in which the political pressures of the 1950s provoked acts of definition and organization on the part of prose poets. The second half of chapter three reads the prose poetry community itself as a key text of orthodox art. It finds that an intentional modeling of prose poetry communities on the structures of the Communist Party has produced a set of dynamics that are hierarchical, inter-organizational, and self-reproductive. These dynamics influence the composition of prose poems through the interventions of educators, editors, and study group administrators, leading to the conclusion that many people participate in the writing of each orthodox prose poem.

Individuality, subjectivation, and their civic significance in contemporary China: The cultivation of an ethical self in a cultural community

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-349
Author(s):  
Lin Yi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Cultural Community ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
Coastal City ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Way

Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from fieldwork among a reading-based community in a coastal city over 10 years, and Michel Foucault’s notion of the cultivation of an ethical self, the primary aim of this study is to examine three issues: (1) how do middle-class citizens articulate and practise the cultural activities that they advocate?; (2) are their practices simultaneously individualized and totalized in the way that Foucault demonstrates?; and (3) do these internally oriented practices have civic significance?

Unorthodox Prose Poetry

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Way

This chapter follows contemporary poets whose work exists in formal or generic relationship to prose poetry, but who reject or elude categorization as prose poets. The chapter looks first at the poem “Hanging Coffin” by Ouyang Jianghe, which uses monumentality, rather than prose poetry’s traditional brevity, to engage with culture and history on a grand scale. The end of the chapter reads Bourdieu to track the way in which the avant-garde prose poet Xi Chuan fights against the identification of his work with the settled, more categorically cohesive genre as practiced by orthodox poets. In doing so, he returns to a core distinction between prose poetry and other literary forms and practices: instead of belonging to a fixed genre with a list of desiderata and taboos, Xi Chuan’s works of prose are acts that intervene in and shape the practice of prose.

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