Revolution and Its Narratives

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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Cai Xiang is a self-reflexive and capacious thinker. His dialectical approach to unresolvable tensions and contradictions within Chinese socialism is extremely valuable for scholars who take the lived experience of socialism seriously. This timely translation will help English-language readers reassess their received views about China's socialist past and its postsocialist present, allowing them to better appreciate why conflicting stories about the Chinese revolution continue to shape China's self-understanding and its position in the world."
(Lydia H. Liu, author of The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making)
"A groundbreaking study, Revolution and Its Narratives presents a series of sympathetic and penetrating analyses that helps us better understand the cultural and social legacies underlying contemporary China. Since its publication in 2010, Cai Xiang's book has been widely recognized as a landmark achievement in Chinese socialist culture and history scholarship. This timely translation ought to have a deep impact on the study of modern China in the English-language world."
(Xiaobing Tang, author of Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts)