Writing to the Rhythm of Labor

Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-21932-7
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm

What does it mean to write in a socialist revolution? What defines labor in a communist society? In revolutionary China, writers were regularly dispatched to the countryside or factories with the expectation that, through immersion in the life of workers and peasants, they would be remade as “culture workers” whose writing could serve the communist project. Their cultural labor would not merely reflect or represent the process of building socialism—it would actively participate in it by excavating the contradictions and challenges of the ongoing reorganization of social relations.

Benjamin Kindler examines how writing transformed the Chinese Revolution even as the revolution remade what it meant to write. He argues that the revolution sought in unparalleled ways to overcome the basic division between those who write and those who work. This book combines close readings of a wide range of texts—from the works of established figures to the writings of amateur workers drawn from the factory floor—with analysis of Chinese socialist political economy. Far from being drab instances of state propaganda, these texts and cultural experiments were lively and inventive attempts to determine what a different, more equal society might look like. Offering new ways to understand cultural production as a material, embodied process, this book reconsiders the role of art and literature in radical politics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kindler, Benjamin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Learning to Write, Learning to Labor: The Yan’an Way and the Birth of the Culture Worker
2. Lazy Peasants, Productive Proletarians: The Developmental Logic of Cultural Labor and Uneven Development
3. Time for Communism: Mass Writing, Revolutionary Form, and “Bourgeois Right”
4. Reproducing Revolution: Cultural Reconstruction and the Aesthetics of Communist Heroism
5. In and Out of Petersburg: Soul and Writing Under Late Maoism
Thermidor (By Way of Conclusion)
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Benjamin Kindler is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.