Richard King (ed.): Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (2010)

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)

publisher
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Alain Badiou: The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2011–)

“Testing the winds of history blowing from the Arab revolts.

In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers—regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses—despite the attempts of the ‘international community’ to neutralize its power.

Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.”

Originally published as Le Reveil de l’histoire, Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2011

Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2012
ISBN 1844678792, 9781844678792
126 pages

Reviews: Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover (Los Angeles Review of Books), Daniel Tutt (Platypus), Anindya Bhattacharyya (Socialist Review).

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PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)

Richard Wolin: The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (2010)

“Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. French student leftists took up the trope of “cultural revolution,” applying it to their criticisms of everyday life. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France’s leading cultural figures, influencing Sartre’s “perfect Maoist moment”; Foucault’s conception of power; Sollers’s chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; as well as Kristeva’s book on Chinese women–which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding.

Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 0691129983, 9780691129983
400 pages

Video interview with the author: Platypus.

Reviews: Scott McLemee (The National), Julian Jackson (The Guardian), David Gress (The Wall Street Journal).

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PDF (updated on 2023-4-25)