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
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.