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Author: Laurence Coderre Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478021616 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
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.
Author: Laurence Coderre Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478021616 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
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.
Author: Laurence Coderre Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Whereas contemporary postsocialist China is typically depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Mao era––and especially the apogee of Maoist fervor, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76)––is normally cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution landscape of things has been strangely stripped of the mundane: with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, the material culture of the Cultural Revolution is most notably characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption sprang fully formed. This dissertation instead examines how interactions between individuals and things during the Cultural Revolution were themselves intertwined with the circulation and consumption of ‘socialist commodities.’ I focus on objects associated with the yangbanxi, or ‘model performances,’ as a critical part of ‘real existing’ Chinese socialism, with which individuals interacted on a daily basis. Hailed as the pinnacle of socialist artistic production, the yangbanxi repertoire of Beijing operas, ballets, and orchestral works was intended to act as vanguard in the revolution in the performing arts. Objects promoting the yangbanxi were therefore produced spanning every conceivable form. I focus here on paraphernalia in three ‘media’: recorded sound, porcelain statuettes, and amateur bodies. Interactions with these instances of yangbanxi remediation, I argue, constituted a critical way in which revolutionary subjects and socialist commodities produced themselves as such. Moreover, this dissertation ultimately contends that, in this way, socialist commodity consumption made the consumer subjectivities of the postsocialist period possible. I begin by focusing on the theorization of the socialist commodity and its role as articulated in Chinese political economic texts of the Cultural Revolution. I argue that these works, intended to counteract the enchantment of commodity fetishism through the popularization of Marxist political economy, were themselves fetishistic in their privileging of discourse over materiality. A similar predicament arises with the notion of the ‘newborn socialist thing’ (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu) as well, supposed herald of the transition to commodity-free communism. Too often the relational nature of newborn socialist things meant that they were not really things at all. I ask how we might nonetheless benefit from thinking about the yangbanxi—quintessential newborn socialist things in their own right—as relationally complex, systems of remediation and, furthermore, how those systems’ economies of signification mirror the workings of the socialist commodity. As I argue in my second chapter, the production and organization of revolutionary space was enmeshed with a complex topography of consumption in which persisting pre-revolutionary notions of (bourgeois) domesticity played an enduring role. Drawing on vinyl records, flexi-discs, and published photographs, I examine the positioning of the citizen-subject as an aural consumer of yangbanxi in a ‘public’ soundscape, which was nonetheless facilitated by that most ‘domestic’ of recorded sound technologies, the record player. The home itself remained a crucial site of socialist consumption, and in my next chapter, I consider the importance of yangbanxi porcelain statuettes, as components of politically au courant home decoration, in emplotting subjects in socialist time as well as a temporality very much reminiscent of the always-already passé postsocialist commodity. Moreover, these pieces of home decor also constituted idealized, prescriptive models for the sculpting of bodies and subjectivities, particularly for amateur performers of yangbanxi, the focus of my final, full chapter. Implicated in a highly (re)mediated system, the performer’s very body is ultimately rendered as exchangeable and consumable as the record or ceramic tchotchke. I close the dissertation with a coda, in which I analyze contemporary discourse on collecting Cultural Revolution memorabilia and what I read as a continued longing for an alternative to the—now explicitly capitalist—commodity-form.
Author: Nathan J. Robinson Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 1250200873 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
A primer on Democratic Socialism for those who are extremely skeptical of it. America is witnessing the rise of a new generation of socialist activists. More young people support socialism now than at any time since the labor movement of the 1920s. The Democratic Socialists of America, a big-tent leftist organization, has just surpassed 50,000 members nationwide. In the fall of 2018, one of the most influential congressmen in the Democratic Party lost a primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old socialist who had never held office before. But what does all this mean? Should we be worried about our country, or should we join the march toward our bright socialist future? In Why You Should Be a Socialist, Nathan J. Robinson will give readers a primer on twenty-first-century socialism: what it is, what it isn’t, and why everyone should want to be a part of this exciting new chapter of American politics. From the heyday of Occupy Wall Street through Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, young progressives have been increasingly drawn to socialist ideas. However, the movement’s goals need to be defined more sharply before it can effect real change on a national scale. Likewise, liberals and conservatives will benefit from a deeper understanding of the true nature of this ideology, whether they agree with it or not. Robinson’s charming, accessible, and well-argued book will convince even the most skeptical readers of the merits of socialist thought.
Author: Lawrence W. Reed Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1684516617 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
"If anyone was ever a socialist, it was Jesus."—Kelley Rose, Democratic Socialists of America Economist and historian Lawrence W. Reed has been hearing people say "Jesus was a socialist" for fifty years. And it has always bothered him. Now he is doing something about it. His new book demolishes the claim that Jesus was a socialist. Jesus called on earthly governments to redistribute wealth? Or centrally plan the economy? Or even impose a welfare state? Hardly. Point by point, Reed answers the claims of socialists and progressives who try to enlist Jesus in their causes. As he reveals, nothing in the New Testament supports their contentions. Was Jesus a Socialist? could not be more timely. Socialism has made a shocking comeback in America. Poll after poll shows that young Americans have a positive image of socialism. In fact, more than half say they would rather live in a socialist country than in a capitalist one. And as socialism has come back into vogue, more and more of its advocates have tried to convince us that Jesus was a socialist. This rhetoric has had an impact. According to a 2016 poll by the Barna Group, Americans think socialism aligns better with Jesus's teachings than capitalism does. When respondents were asked which of that year's presidential candidates aligned closest to Jesus's teachings, a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" came out on top. Sure enough, the same candidate earned more primary votes from under-thirty voters than did the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees combined. And in a 2019 survey, more than 70 percent of millennials said they were likely to vote for a socialist. Was Jesus a Socialist? expands on the immensely popular video of the same name that Reed recorded for Prager University in July 2019. That video has attracted more than four million views online. Ultimately, Reed shows the foolishness of trying to enlist Jesus in any political cause today. He writes: "While I don't believe it is valid to claim that Jesus was a socialist, I also don't think it is valid to argue that he was a capitalist. Neither was he a Republican or a Democrat. These are modern-day terms, and to apply any of them to Jesus is to limit him to but a fraction of who he was and what he taught."
Author: Ivan Franceschini Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1839766344 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1149
Book Description
In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This will be achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century. Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo renlund Srensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, Jonathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chlo Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.
Author: Elizabeth J. Perry Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520271890 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
“This book is classic Perry -- elegantly and clearly written, based on rich and previously unexplored source material, full of human detail on political actors at the local level, presenting a gripping narrative and a clear analytical thrust. Perry’s account of Anyuan is fresh and original, making a convincing case for the area’s enduring contribution to the revolution.” - Joseph W. Esherick, UC San Diego, author of Ancestral Leaves
Author: Tobie Meyer-Fong Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804785597 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury, What Remains opens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.
Author: Annette Dumbach Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1786074214 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
A SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY EDITION TO COMMEMORATE 80 YEARS SINCE THE EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS OF 1943 Sophie Scholl and the White Rose tells the gripping true story of five Munich university students who set up an underground resistance movement in World War II. The thrilling story of their courage and defiance, brought to life in the Oscar-nominated film Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, is beautifully told in this special 80th anniversary edition of Annette Dumbach & Jud Newborn's critically acclaimed work. Acclaim for Sophie Scholl and the White Rose: 'The animated narrative reads like a suspense novel.' New York Times 'Powerful and compelling... Among the indispensable literature of modern political culture.' Hans-Wolf von Wietersheim, Das Parlament 'A dramatic story of courage during the darkest period of the 20th Century... And it's a story with new chapters unfolding. This book is a fundamental resource and a memorable read.' Toby Axelrod, author and reporter
Author: Laurence Coderre
Author: Laurence Coderre
Author: Arnaud Joseph Wilson
Author: Laurence Coderre
Author: Nathan J. Robinson
Author: Lawrence W. Reed
Author: Ivan Franceschini
Author: Elizabeth J. Perry
Author: Tobie Meyer-Fong
Author: 
Author: Annette Dumbach