Red Legacies in China
Douban
Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution
Jie Li / Enhua Zhang (Editors)
Overview
What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose red legacies as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts―red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows―the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.
contents
List of Plates and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Discerning Red Legacies in China [Jie Li]
I. Red Foundations
1. Making a Revolutionary Monument: The Site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party [Denise Y. Ho]
2. Building Big, with No Regret: From Beijing’s “Ten Great Buildings” in the 1950s to China’s Megaprojects Today [Zhu Tao]
II. Red Art
3. Ambiguities of Address: Cultural Revolution Posters and Their Post-Mao Appeal [Harriet Evans]
4. Socialist Visual Experience as Cultural Identity: On Wang Guangyi and Contemporary Art [Xiaobing Tang]
III. Red Classics
5. Performing “Red Classics”: From The East Is Red to The Road to Revival [Xiaomei Chen]
6. Red Legacies in Fiction [David Der-wei Wang]
7. Post-Socialist Realism in Chinese Cinema [Jason McGrath]
IV. Red Bodies
8. Mao’s Two Bodies: On the Curious (Political) Art of Impersonating the Great Helmsman [Haiyan Lee]
9. “Human Wave Tactics”: Zhang Yimou, Cinematic Ritual, and the Problems of Crowds [Andy Rodekohr]
10. Time Out of Joint: Commemoration and Commodification of Socialism in Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses [Carlos Rojas]
V. Red Shadows
11. Museums and Memorials of the Mao Era: A Survey and Notes for Future Curators [Jie Li]
12. Red Allure and the Crimson Blindfold [Geremie R. Barmé]
Contributors
Index