Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
First Person ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Autobiography, then, has the unenviable task of confronting, confounding, and even confirming the assumptions, impressions, and (mis)conceptions about the author’s or filmmaker’s identificatory positionings. —Alisa S. Lebow1 1.Alisa S. Lebow, First Person Jewish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xviii. Born after the Cultural Revolution, I began to know about that historical event from the odd line in a textbook and through occasional films and television dramas set in that period. To a large extent, filmic representations, be they memoirs or fictions, form the way I perceive and make sense of this historical period that I never experienced. The Cultural Revolution, though known to many people as ten years of turmoil and disaster, seems to me a distant, tough, and yet passionate era. My parents recount anecdotes of their schooldays, and they sometimes even express longing for the ‘good old days’ of innocence and carefreeness. In the 1995 film ...

scholarly journals Navigating New Approaches for Grassroot Community Theatre in a (Post-)Covid World

2021 ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Kerrie Reading
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The cultural revolution of 1968 paved the way for many artists to reconsider how and where theatre was made. Community theatre gained currency and one company who became prominent during this cultural shift was Welfare State, later Welfare State International. They were one of the theatre companies who focused not only on a community theatre aesthetic but a grassroot one. I examine the radicality of community theatre and consider the efficacy of the historical approaches to engaging with communities in a (Post-)Covid world. I acknowledge and explore the shifting understanding of communities and assert that a deeper engagement is needed to foster collectivity (Tannahill 2016; Fişek 2019; Weston 2020; Bartley 2021). To reconsider the role that theatre may play in the future, I focus on a grassroot approach to community-led work and posit that location will be a key component to how theatre is made as we emerge from a pandemic.

MA SICONG AND HIS ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHINESE MUSICAL CULTURE

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Luo Yuanyuan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Artistic Life ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Creative Life ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This article focuses on the life and creative activities of Ma Sicong, one of the most significant Chinese musicians of the mid-XXth century, a multi-talented and outstanding violinist who showed his prowess in various spheres of artistic life: performing, teaching, composing, musical and social activities. Ma Sicong contributed to each of these fields as a virtuoso soloist whose example was followed by his contemporaries, young musicians and as a teacher who trained numerous students retaining the most enthusiastic memories of their professor. The highly professional violin school he established, which continued Chinese and European musical traditions, became a fruitful source for the development of modern performing arts. Ma Sicong's creative life was not an easy one; periods of brilliant achievements and growth alternated with dramatic peripeteia, which led to his departure from China in the most difficult historical period for the country — the period of the "Cultural Revolution" (late 1950s — early 1970s ).

scholarly journals The Fragility of Identity and the Imagination of Otherness in Bai Hua’s novel The Remote Country of Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-91
Author(s):  
Tânia Ganito ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Chinese Author ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Drawing on The Remote Kingdom of Women (1988), the novel written by Chinese author Bai Hua (1930-2019), this essay examines how post-Mao China articulated the notions of memory and identity, as well as of belonging and othering, as an attempt to overcome the state of fragility caused by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the post-revolutionary growing influence of Western culture. It proposes to explore the way some of the literary works produced during this period were to promote an encounter between a fragmented yet hegemonic culture and the cultures of the internal ethnic Other, and how this encounter between majority and minority subjects was to highlight precisely the condition of fragility that underlies the very concept of identity. Keywords: China; Literature; Bai Hua; Identity; Majority; Minorities.

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.

Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Marketing Strategy ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
New Wave ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
Official History ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This book explores the way personal memories and micro-narratives of the Cultural Revolution are represented in post-2001 films and television dramas in mainland China, unravelling the complex political, social and cultural forces imbricated within the personalized narrative modes of remembering the past in postsocialist China. While representations of personal stories mushroomed after the Culture Revolution, the deepened marketization and privatization after 2001 have triggered a new wave of representations of personal memories on screen, which divert from those earlier allegorical narratives and are more sentimental, fragmented and nostalgic. The personalized reminiscences of the past suggest an alternative narrative to official history and grand narratives, and at the same time, by promoting the sentiment of nostalgia, they also become a marketing strategy. Rather than perceiving the rising micro-narratives as either homogeneous or autonomous, this book argues that they often embody disparate qualities and potentials. Moreover, the various micro-narratives and personal memories at play facilitate fresh understandings of China’s socialist past and postsocialist present: the legacies of socialism continue to influence China, constituting the postsocialist reality that accommodates different ideologies and temporalities.

scholarly journals Cultural Revolution as Method

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 718-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Chinese Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractThis paper treats the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means by which to open on to a more affective approach to the question of the political. It examines one piece of art-technology of that period and shows the way it intuitively worked within the fluidity of power to produce political intensity. This one technology is a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution notion of the political that was built around an attempt to channel and harness affective power towards revolutionary ends. Both because it attempts to direct the political through the affective dimension and because its methods of doing so resembled contemporary art practices, this paper opens on to the possibilities of a method based on an art rather than a science of the political.

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