Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:57:46.664Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Maoism and Postmodernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2015

Alfred Hornung
Alfred Hornung*
Affiliation:
Department of English & Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009 and the merging of the two leaders into Chairman Obamao or Comrade Maobama, which can be read as the end of ideological contrast between the two countries for the sake of creating a system of political interdependence for the 21st century, a postmodern prefiguration of a coming ChinAmerica.

Type
The Image of China in the West
Information
European Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 261 - 272
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Chang, J. and Halliday, J. (2007) Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Vintage), F. Dikötter (2010) Mao's Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing).Google Scholar
2.Cf. Jinping, Xi, South China Morning Post, 19 November 2013.Google Scholar
3.Shelley Fisher Fishkin has collaborated with Gordon Chang at Stanford University in the ‘Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project’ to collect documents of the many thousands of Chinese labourers in the US and China.Google Scholar
4.Longxi, Zhang (1999) Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 44. Pound’s publication of Cathay in 1915, a volume of poems that he allegedly translated from the Chinese, are now considered ‘modernist scandals’ for he was not proficient in the Chinese language. See J. R. Williams (2009) Modernist scandals: Ezra Pound’s translations of ‘the’ Chinese poem. In: S. Sielke and C. Kloeckner (eds), Orient and Orientalism in US-American Poetry and Poetics (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang), pp. 145–165.Google Scholar
5.See for an extensive discussion, Jian, Guo (1999) Resisting modernity in contemporary China: the cultural revolution and postmodernism. Modern China, 25(3), pp. 343–376; 345ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6.Jian, Guo (1999) Resisting modernity in contemporary China: the cultural revolution and postmodernism. Modern China, 25(3), p. 345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7.Dal Lago, F. (1999) Personal Mao: reshaping an icon in contemporary Chinese art. Art Journal, 58(2), pp. 46–59; 50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8.See Hsiao-peng Lu, S. (1997) Art, culture, and cultural criticism in post-new China. New Literary History, 28(1); Cultural Studies: China and the West, pp. 111–133; 125, 127.Google Scholar
9.Cf. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, 1979 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). See also S. Hsiao-peng Lu (1997) Art, culture, and cultural criticism in post-new China. New Literary History, 28(1); Cultural Studies: China and the West, p. 130.Google Scholar
10.Wolfe, T. (1970) Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux).Google Scholar
11.Wong, J. (1996) Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now (New York: Doubleday), pp. 16, 25.Google Scholar
12.Barmé, G. (1996) Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), p. 47.Google Scholar
13.Cf. Barmé, G. (1996) Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), p. 8. See also F. Dal Lago (1999) Personal Mao: reshaping an icon in contemporary Chinese art. Art Journal, 58(2), p. 47.Google Scholar
14.Weiwei, A. (2007) Light as a feather. In: P. Wise (ed.), Andy Warhol in China 1982 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited), p. 5.Google Scholar
15.DeLillo, D. (1991) Mao II (New York: Penguin), pp. 162–163; 176–178.Google Scholar
16.Kissinger, H. (2011) On China (New York: Penguin), pp. 335–336.Google Scholar
17.See Dal Lago, F. (1999) Personal Mao: reshaping an icon in contemporary Chinese art. Art Journal, 58(2), p. 56.Google Scholar
18.See Jian, Guo (1999) Resisting modernity in contemporary China: the cultural revolution and postmodernism. Modern China, 25(3), S. Hsiao-peng Lu (1997) Art, culture, and cultural criticism in post-new China. New Literary History, 28(1); Cultural Studies: China and the West. See also the special issue of boundary 2, 24(3), (1997) on ‘Postmodernism and China’, edited by J. Arac.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19.Xianting, Li (1993) Major trends in the development of contemporary Chinese art. In: V. C. Doran (ed.), China's New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart T. Z. Gallery), p. xxi.Google Scholar
20.Dirlik and Zhang Xudong attribute the transnational reach of Chinese postmodernism to the proliferation of these products among Chinese in- and outside of the People's Republic of China, Dirlik, A. and Xudong, Zhang (1997) Introduction: postmodernism and China. boundary 2, Special issue on ‘Postmodernism and China’, 24(3), pp. 1–18; 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21.During my seven-month guest-professorship at Peking University in 2009, I could closely follow in many lectures on Barack Obama’s autobiography to capacity crowds of students at different Chinese universities, the reception of the new American president among the young generation of Chinese. At the beginning of Obama's second term the uninhibited fascination has worn off.Google Scholar
22.See my article Hornung, A. (2012) ChinAmerica: intercultural relations for a transnational world. In: U. Hebel (ed.), Transnational American Studies (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag), pp. 13–30. Some of the arguments in this essay are based on this earlier publication.Google Scholar