Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution PDF Download

Author: Jing Meng
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888528467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution argues that films and TV dramas about the Cultural Revolution made after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 tend to represent personal memories in a markedly sentimental, nostalgic, and fragmented manner. This new trend is a significant departure from earlier films about the subject, which are generally interpreted as national allegories, not private expressions of grief, regret or other personal feelings. With China entering a postsocialist era, the ideological conflation of socialism and global capitalism has generated enough cultural ambiguity to allow a space for the expression of personalized reminiscences of the past. By presenting these personal memories—in effect alternative narratives to official history—on screen, individuals now seem to have some agency in narrating and constructing history. At the same time such autonomy can be easily undermined since the promotion of the sentiment of nostalgia is often subjected to commodification. Sentimental treatments of the past may simply be a marketing strategy. Underplaying political issues is also a ‘safer’ way for films and TV dramas to secure public release in mainland China. Meng concludes that the new mode of representing the past is shaped by the current sociopolitical conditions: these personal memories and micro-narratives can be understood as the defining ways of remembering in China’s postsocialist era. ‘Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution takes a comprehensive look at contemporary screen depictions of the Cultural Revolution. The book convincingly ties close readings of the works analysed with broader social and cultural phenomena that already are hot topics of study and debate, offering something original while also being closely engaged with existing scholarship.’ —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota ‘Breaking through the tired dichotomy between personal and collective narratives, individual memory and grand history, this refreshing book sheds much light on film memories of the Cultural Revolution in the post-socialist millennium. In a limpid and engaging style, Jing Meng probes memory’s nostalgia and imbrication with the collective destiny, and critiques the personal focus aligned with neoliberal economy and commodification.’ —Ban Wang, Stanford University

Author: Ban Wang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization.

Author: Sebastian Veg
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888390767
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The present volume provides an overview of new forms of popular memory, in particular critical memory, of the Mao era. Focusing on the processes of private production, public dissemination, and social sanctioning of narratives of the past in contemporary China, it examines the relation between popular memories and their social construction as historical knowledge. The three parts of the book are devoted to the shifting boundary between private and public in the press and media, the reconfiguration of elite and popular discourses in cultural productions (film, visual art, and literature), and the emergence of new discourses of knowledge through innovative readings of unofficial sources. Popular memories pose a challenge to the existing historiography of the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China. Despite the recent backlash, these more critical reflections are beginning to transform the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Public discussions of key episodes in the history of the People’s Republic, in particular the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, the Great Famine of 1959–1961, and the Cultural Revolution, have proliferated in the last fifteen years. These discussions are qualitatively different from previous expressions of traumatic or nostalgic memories of Mao in the 1980s and the 1990s respectively. They reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the authoritarian control over history exercised by the Chinese state, and often they make use of the new spaces provided for counter-hegemonic narratives by social media and the growing private economy in the 2000s. Unofficial or independent journals, self-published books, social media groups, independent documentary films, private museums, oral history projects, and archival research by amateur historians, all of which analyzed in this collection, have contributed to these embryonic public or semi-public dialogues. “An excellent guide to the independent journalism, cultural production, and amateur histories that are transforming the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Rich in detail and sound in analysis, these studies document the emergence of critical memory in Chinese society. A valuable resource for students and scholars.” —Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia; author of The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History “Popular memories of the Mao era are signposts of contemporary politics and culture. This volume features exciting new research by distinguished scholars. Extremely rich and readable, the chapters in this collection illuminate both China’s past and present. A timely and important contribution.” —Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania; author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

Author: Qian Gao
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9781433186455
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This book captures and examines some of the main modes of "romanticized" memories about the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that have appeared since the late 1980s and are drastically different from previous representations that focused on trauma. Drawing on some of the major literary, filmic and digital presentations, as well as examples from the cultural marketplace, this book devotes its attention to the memories that are eroticized, nostalgic, digitized and commodified. Situating these new mnemonic presentations against the backdrop of a persistently cautious political climate in China that has never favored open expressions about the Cultural Revolutionary past, and also against a global climate of prevailing (capitalist) modernity and nostalgic sentiments, this book examines the meanings, values and problems lying in these new mnemonic rewritings of the Cultural Revolution experience, as well as analyses some of the intricate conflicts and connections between these memories and the global influences. In its study, this book uncovers not only a strong resistance to the official suppression of critical articulations of the Cultural Revolution history, but also the ways in which such resistance is effected through Chinese intellectuals' inventive use of the market and the trends of commodification. By giving deserved credits to commodification for facilitating Chinese intellectuals in establishing channels of conversations and possibly a discourse on China's recent history and the politics of memory, this book hopes to provide some insights into history's path, especially in light of Chinese intellectuals' heated debate on the nature of the capitalist economy in China"--

Author: Ching Kwan Lee
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804758536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of contemporary memories of China's revolutionary epoch, from the time of Japanese imperialism through the Cultural Revolution. This volume examines the memories of a range of social groups, including disenfranchised workers and rural women, who have often been neglected in scholarship.

Author: Li Li
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004323554
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In this book, Li Li reveals complex connections between memory about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and representations of memory as a means of identity remapping, ideological reconfiguration, and artistic negotiation in a context of cross-cultural environment.

Author: Tania Branigan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783352647
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Tania Branigan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324051965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens. “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Author: Patricia M. Thornton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316604755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
China's convulsive Cultural Revolution was conceived in 1966 as a 'great revolution that would touch the people to their very souls'. How are we to assess its impact fifty years on? In this volume, leading social and political scientists, historians and anthropologists examine the long-lasting consequences of the political, social, economic and cultural upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong. Contributions from authors working within and outside the People's Republic of China consider the impact of this tumultuous mass movement from perspectives as diverse as market-based economic reform, clothing and fashion, the grassroots movements of late 1960s across the globe and the so-called 'lost generation' of sent-down youth. We find that collective and personal memories of the Cultural Revolution and its enduring institutional and social legacies continue to exert a profound effect on China and the Chinese people today.

Author: Xianlin Ji
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590179269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution remains a delicate topic, little discussed, but if a Chinese citizen has read one book on the subject, it is likely to be Ji's memoir. When The Cowshed was published in China in 1998, it quickly became a bestseller. The Cultural Revolution had nearly disappeared from the collective memory. Prominent intellectuals rarely spoke openly about the revolution, and books on the subject were almost nonexistent. By the time of Ji's death in 2009, little had changed, and despite its popularity, The Cowshed remains one of the only testimonies of its kind.