Dear all,
Eldon Pei (Ph.D Candidate, Art History, Stanford) and I (Ph.D Candidate, History, Berkeley) are proposing a panel for AAS Toronto 2017, tentatively titled “If I Took Those Words Away: Reading Maoist Media Culture Beyond the Printed Page.” A description of the panel is below. If you are interested in joining us, please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) to Eldon (eldonpei@stanford.edu) and me (hartono@berkeley.edu) by July 25. We welcome abstract submissions from all fields and from scholars at all stages.
Best,
Paulina Hartono <hartono@berkeley.edu>
Ph.D Candidate,History
UC Berkeley
Like elsewhere in the postwar world, the cultural landscape of Mao’s China encompassed a range of increasingly ubiquitous and interconnected media for carrying out the large-scale reproduction and dissemination of texts, images and sound. While early core research focused upon tracing how media institutions were forcibly assimilated to party-state propaganda goals and re-described the manifest content they transmitted within prescriptive ideological categories, recent scholarship has revealed that even the most authoritatively sanctioned domains of media production and reception were in fact less homogenized and univocal than previously imagined—or that homogenization and univocality led to unexpected consequences.
Our aim is now to venture a step further by freeing our understanding of Maoist media systems and representations from remaining constrained by received notions about how meaning is constituted through words. This panel’s title, “If I Took Those Words Away”, gestures toward a need to grasp historical media practices as more than ultimately just equivalent to verbal discourse. Correspondingly, it expresses a desire to investigate technical mediation in ways that incorporate but also exceed methods of thematic, discursive and institutional analysis traditionally used to interpret written and printed texts.
For example, how did different media formats create constellations of meaning by redefining medium-specific codes and conventions or by capitalizing upon emergent inter-medial possibilities? How did sound function in this media landscape over and above (or perhaps against) the transmission of intelligible speech and dialogue? How did media’s material culture shape and become shaped by the politics of their day? Can we attribute expressive or symbolic functions to unintentional artifacts of technical processing or instances of redundancy, noise, distortion and system overload? Are there cases where official media praxis did not simply serve to propagate ideological messages but also inadvertently precipitated their short-circuiting? How can ‘new’ and networked media technologies help us to rethink the logic(s) of mass communication in Mao’s China, and vice versa?
In short, we are interested in identifying new approaches for “reading” PRC media in ways that transcend the page and the printing press (although a study of the mimeograph’s role in the Cultural Revolution would be received with enthusiasm).