Panel 36: Working History: Fiction and Narrative in the PRC

Chair: Xian Wang, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Yuzhe Li, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Rural Labor Intimacy: Socialist Cooperative Craftsmanship in Agricultural Collectivization Fictions of the 1950s China”

The collaboration between the blacksmith and the carpenter has long been a stable custom in Chinese craftsmanship history. However, a distinct picture is presented in the 1956 novella “The Blacksmith and the Carpenter” by renowned author Sun Li: the traditionally solid cooperation between blacksmiths and carpenters is disrupted during the agricultural collectivization movements in rural China. Similar to this novella, many 1950s agricultural collectivization fictions depict different aspects of cooperative craftsmanship. Through the prism of what I term “rural labor intimacy”—which describes the cooperative working intimacy against the backdrop of agricultural collectivization movements in rural China during the 1950s—this research paper examines two kinds of cooperative craftsmanship. The first one is about the emotional intimacy of rural craftspeople with their own tools and their professional craft skills; some fictions show this closeness, while others show craftspeople’s disinterest in handicrafting expertise and a “make do and mend” cooperative style against the backdrop of socialist transformation campaigns’ practiced frugality. The second is on the kinship intimacy among craftspeople, particularly the practice of converting the older generation of two families into the “parent-in-laws”of the younger generation by marriage, which is frequently entwined with the formation of mutual aid teams and cooperatives in villages. In this paper, I employ approaches including material culture, literary close-reading, and discursive analysis to examine these two kinds of cooperative craftsmanship in 1950s China in order to investigate larger pictures about China’s socialist modernization and cultural propaganda in the early Mao era.

Xian Wang, University of Notre Dame, “Taming Mountains and Rivers: Labor Glorification and Reshaping Socialist Landscapes in Chinese Arts and Literature, 1950s–1970s”

Taming mountains and rivers emerged as a prominent theme in Chinese arts and literature from the 1950s to the 1970s, in response to Mao Zedong’s call for “the war against nature.” This theme often coincided with the glorification of labor, which was depicted through the transformation of raw nature into a new socialist landscape by peasants and workers. Focusing on Zhou Libo’s representative novel Great Changes in a Mountain Village (1957), poetry from the Great Leap Forward, the film This Land So Rich in Beauty (1959, dir. Wang Ping), and new socialist landscape paintings, this paper explores the cultural and political connotations of transforming nature through labor in socialist China. The analysis reveals how these literary works highlighted the significant role labor played in shaping both the Chinese socialist ideology and landscape. I propose that these artistic expressions transcended mere landscape transformation. They formed a nexus between workers and peasants, and the radical reshaping of nature. This connection was crucial in constructing a new class consciousness and creating the new socialist person. Moreover, these artistic portrayals encapsulated a new vision for the Chinese landscape, paving the way for a fresh socialist aesthetic. The paper, therefore, posits that the glorification of labor, facilitated by the theme of taming mountains and rivers, was central to the conceptualization and execution of socialist transformations in China.

Lavinia Xu, Washington University in Saint Louis, “Gendered History of the Cultural Revolution: Women’s Troubled Memories in Tie Ning’s Novels”

Chinese literary scholar Yibing Huang challenges the approach of treating the post-socialist literature as something new, thus erasing the legacy of Cultural Revolution. He argues that the post-socialist writers’ search for the new subjectivity is implicated in the socialist past. My paper explores how post-socialist women writers’ novels on their coming-of-age experiences represent the impact of the Cultural Revolution on women’s post-socialist lives. More specifically, I examine Tie Ning’s novels Gates of Roses and The Bathing Women. In the analysis of both novels, I pay attention to how gendered violence the female protagonists engaged as children influence their identity formation
as women. In addition, I examine how narrative techniques of anachrony, analepsis, and stream of consciousness represent women characters’s troubled relation to the socialist past and their reflection on their participation in the gendered violence as children. Tie Ning’s novels ask how women writers can narrate and develop their gendered history of the Cultural Revolution given their status as unreliable witnesses of the past and their perspectives are often overlooked in the post-socialist Chinese society. I argue that Tie Ning shows that women’s voices about their implication in the Cultural Revolution is conflicted, contradictory and ambiguous. Their continuous returns to the past and the tension between the state and the self gives rise to their voice. Moreover, women’s gendered history of the Cultural Revolution resists the romanticization of the socialist past in post-socialist popular media. Additionally, it challenges the state-imposed amnesia of violence in the Cultural Revolution.