On the Raymond Williams Society blog this month, Virginia L. Conn shares some of her fascinating research on lian huan hua. Virginia approaches these Chinese ‘comics’ as works which operate within the ‘parameters of science fiction’ in order to engage with and construct notions of utopia and futurity. Such concepts were also addressed by Williams in his writings on similar subjunctive tendencies, notably in the essay Utopia and Science Fiction, for Science Fiction Studies, and collected in Tenses of Imagination. Here, Virginia, who recently spoke at the RWS Annual Conference, explains how, within the context of the Cultural Revolution in China, a range of fictional and visual practices were deployed as both propaganda and pedagogical tools during attempts at state modernisation and technological development.
Virginia writes…
Labour was a complicated issue in socialist countries, conceptualized both as a necessity of every citizen but also a hardship from which the populace could be freed by further technological progress, allowing them to live a life of unburdened luxury. Before such a post-scarcity future could be achieved, however, states required the mass participation of their citizens, working both individually and together, to physically labour for the benefit of the body politic. In mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, for example, Mao Zedong claimed that to strengthen the nation would require curing ‘the first four illnesses’: ignorance, poverty, selfishness, and weak physiques. Each of these would be addressed and improved through manual labour, thus imposing legitimacy upon the national call for the populace to work at the limits of their physical capacities. To do so, however, required that the people be mobilized in the first place to contribute towards this shared vision of futurity; it was a difficult proposition given the relative isolation of many communities during the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) coupled with widespread illiteracy and a lack of access to contemporary mass entertainment culture. Continue reading Communism, Comics, and Cultural Revolution