Richard King (ed.): Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, 1970s, art, art history, ballet, china, cultural revolution, opera, painting, politics, sculpture
The Cultural Revolution was a massive social and political upheaval resulting from a battle for supremacy within the ruling Chinese Communist Party, set in motion by the party’s chairman Mao Zedong. It was also a time of both brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts, the effects of which still resonate today.
Forty years after the Cultural Revolution, Art in Turmoil revisits the visual and performing arts of the period — the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet. Probing deeply, it examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age.
Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution decode the rhetoric of China’s turbulent decade. The many illustrations in the book, some familiar and some never seen before, also offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.
Edited with Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng, and Scott Watson
Publisher UBC Press, Vancouver/Toronto, 2010
Contemporary Chinese Studies series
ISBN 0774815426, 9780774815420
282 pages
review (Stefan R. Landsberger, The China Beat)
Comment (0)Leslie T. Chang: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · china, labour, migration
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.
China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.
As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
Publisher Random House Publishing Group, 2008
ISBN 0385520174, 9780385520171
432 pages
review (John Gittings, The Guardian)
review (Justin Hall, The Independent)
review (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times)
interview with the author (China Beat)
author on writing the book
author’s talk (video, Authors@Google)
PDF (EPUB)
Comment (0)Octavio Kulesz: Digital Publishing in Developing Countries (2011) [English/French/Spanish]
Filed under report | Tags: · africa, china, e-book, india, latin america, middle east, publishing, russia
E-books, print on demand, online sales sites, the boom in mobile phones… new technologies are profoundly transforming the way texts circulate. Developing countries, however, which face serious limitations in infrastructure, have a considerable challenge ahead of them.
What new actors are emerging in the countries of the South, outside of the powerful platforms already existing in the US, Europe and Japan? Is it conceivable that there may be an autonomous evolution of digital publications in developing countries, entirely independent of the richest nations? What support policies could be implemented to promote the growth of this new industry and accompany traditional actors in the process of adapting to the changes involved?
The digital experiences undertaken in the South suggest that new technologies represent a great opportunity for developing countries – particularly in terms of diffusion –, but on the condition that local entrepreneurs seek out original models adapted to the concrete needs of their communities.
This study was carried out by Octavio Kulesz (Editorial Teseo and Digital Minds Network) in October 2010, and commissioned by the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, with the support of the Prince Claus Foundation.
ISBN 9782951974760 [EN]
156 pages
via Marcell Mars
Download PDF, EPUB, MOBI [English]
Download PDF, EPUB, MOBI [French]
Download PDF, EPUB, MOBI [Spanish]