Revolution and Its Narratives : China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966
Cai Xiang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Research Institute for Contemporary Literature at Shanghai University.Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University and the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History, also published by Duke University Press.Xueping Zhong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Tufts University and the author of Masculinity Besieged?: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century, also published by Duke University Press.
The National/The Local: Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination
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Published:February 2016
2016. "The National/The Local: Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination", Revolution and Its Narratives : China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966 , Xiang Cai, Rebecca E. Karl, Xueping Zhong
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Taking up the vexed and fraught relation between the local and the national, Cai examines in this chapter the ways in which the socialist national had to cope with and absorb local inflections and local strategies of narrative social existence. Rejecting any simple binary conflict between the local and the national, Cai demonstrates how the local was appropriated and also preserved by the national in narrative form throughout the Maoist revolutionary years. Far from erasing local specificity, the national, while remolding social relations, also drew on existing relations to embed itself firmly into the everyday narrative structures of local life in all their contradictions.
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