The Construction of the Image /Myth of a Martyr in the Cultural Revolution: An Interpretation/Demythicization of The Song of Ouyang Hai
Jin Jingmai’s novel The Song of Ouyang Hai was published in 1965 and became extremely popular in 1966 right before the launch of the Cultural Revolution. It can be regarded as a prelude to Cultural Revolution literature. The novel epitomizes the transition from the politically inclined “seventeen-year literature” (1949–66) to the highly politicalized “Cultural Revolution literature” (1966–76). It is also the perfect embodiment of the creation of the myth of a socialist martyr. In this article, I attempt to examine the features of socialist martyrs and decode the construction of the myth of such martyrs by exploring motifs such as diaries, letters, and the performative bodies in The Song of Ouyang Hai as well as related works and posters that feature revolutionary and socialist martyrs from the 1960s. The article also examines how the constant revisions of the novel driven by the political power struggles during and after the Cultural Revolution complicate and adumbrate the myth of the socialist martyr.
Print and Power in the Communist Borderlands: The Rise of Uyghur National Culture
This dissertation demonstrates that socialist cultural policies, implemented in Chinese and Soviet Central Asia in the middle decades of the twentieth century, enabled Turkic Muslim intellectuals in the small Sino-Soviet frontier community of Ili to transform their local culture into the new Uyghur national culture. The transborder Uyghur community, divided for much of the century between history’s two largest socialist states, provides a unique opportunity for mapping out a dynamic replicated in many areas of socialist Eurasia. Bringing Uyghur-language sources across multiple genres—archival documents, poetry, film, memoirs—into conversation with Chinese and Russian materials, this study explores how writers and intellectuals from Ili, a community long regarded by other Central Asians as a cultural periphery, mobilized socialist states’ emphasis on native-language mass printing in order to radically redefine cultural capital in the newly demarcated Uyghur nation, and to set the course for this nation’s relationship with China, another nation then in the process of redefinition. Ili’s rise was closely linked to its status as a transborder community, with Russian, socialist, and secular influences making earlier and deeper inroads in Ili than elsewhere in Xinjiang. As a result, when quasi-socialist, Soviet-aligned administrations were set up in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s, Ili intellectuals held highly influential positions and often monopolized the new state-run Uyghur-language printing presses. By the time the Chinese
The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives for Comparative Analysis
In religion, in art, in all spheres of culture and politics, the mass of mankind in all hitherto known societies have not, except for transitory interludes, been preoccupied with the attainment of an immediate contact with the ultimate principles implicit in their beliefs and standards. The directly gratifying ends of particular actions, the exigencies of situations, considerations of individual and familial advantage, concrete moral maxims, concrete prescriptions and prohibitions, preponderate in the conduct of the majority of persons in most societies, large and small. The systemic coherence and the deeper and more general ground of beliefs and standards only intermittently hold their attention and touch on their passions. Ordinary life in every society is characterized by an unequal intensity of attachment to ultimate values, be they cognitive, moral, or aesthetic, and an unequal intensity of the need for coherence. Ordinary life shuns rigorous definition and consistent adherence to traditional or rational rules, and it has no need for continuous contact with the sacred. Ordinary life is slovenly, full of compromise and improvisation; it goes on in the “here and now”.