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The Making and Remaking of China's "Red Classics": Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture

Rosemary Roberts

Li Li (ed.)

This book brings together research on China’s “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to their re-emergence in the reform era. It critically investigates the changing nature and ... More

This book brings together research on China’s “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to their re-emergence in the reform era. It critically investigates the changing nature and significance of China’s “red classics” at each point of their (re/)emergence in three key areas: their socio-political and ideological import, their aesthetic significance and their function as a mass cultural phenomenon. The book is organised in two parts in chronological order covering the Maoist period and post-Cultural Revolution respectively, and includes a representative range of genres including novels, short stories, films, TV series, picture books (lianhuanhua), animation and traditional style paintings (guohua). The book illuminates important questions such as: What determined what could and could not become a “red classic”? How was the real revolutionary experience of authors shaped by the regime to create “red classic” works? How were traditional forms incorporated or transformed? How did authors and artist negotiate the treacherous waters of changing political demands? And how did the “red classics adapt to a new political environment and a new readership in new millennium China? While most of the chapters focus primarily on one of the two periods under consideration many also follow the fate of their subject through both periods, creating overall a highly coherent overview of the changing phenomenon of the “red classics” over the seventy-five years since the Yan’an Forum and in the process simultaneously tracing the changing dynamic between the CCP and these classic narratives of the communist revolution.Less

Moving Figures: Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

Corey Kai Nelson Schultz

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining ... More

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.Less