Proletarian Culture Research Articles

Koriak’s Cultural Critique

According to the author of the article, the content and directions of literary criticism of Volodymyr Koriak (1889–1937) were determined by the idea of proletarian culture. Its basic principle was the struggle between the bourgeois and proletarian world, formulated in the philosophy of Marxism. However, this concept was not sufficient to build the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature. In 1920s the most problematic for the critics was the choice of the criteria for identifying the literary text as a proletarian one. They had to take into account such non-textual factors as the author’s biography, national cultural forms, historical influences of Europeanism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, etc. Koriak’s works reflect the conflicts and compromises that the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature underwent during 1919 – 1934. Especially complicated were such topics as the history of Ukrainian Marxist-proletarian thought, the ‘Borotbyst’ narrative, the issues of proletarian style and bourgeois cultural influences. The Ukrainian ‘narodnytstvo’ became a major part of Koriak’s critique. As a result, the bourgeois legacy (namely modernism, ‘narodnytstvo’, ‘national literature’) in Koriak’s literary-critical discourse received a particular negative evaluation. Koriak’s literary work testifi es to the fact that the proletarian-Marxist criticism of his contemporaries is featured by the coexistence of the three schemes of constructing proletarian literature: proletarian literature as terra nova; proletarian literature as a continuation of the socialist ideas of the pre-October literary works; proletarian literature as a transformation of the past (bourgeois) qualities and their recombination with new proletarian ones.

УКРАЇНСЬКЕ ПИТАННЯ У ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ ПРОЛЕТКУЛЬТУ

The article highlights the social and political conditions under which the proletarian educational organizations of the 1920s functioned in the context of nationality issue, namely the study of political frameworks determining the status of the Ukrainian language and culture in Ukraine. The nationality issue became crucial in Proletkult activities – a proletarian cultural, educational and literary organization in the structure of People's Commissariat, the aim of which was a broad and comprehensive development of the proletarian culture created by the working class. Unlike Russia, Proletkult's organizations in Ukraine were not significantly spread and ceased to exist due to the fact that the national language and culture were not taken into account and the contact with the peasants and indigenous people of nonproletarian origin was limited.

Soviet Latvian Periodicals for Youth. 1920s — 1930s

The author analyses materials of the youth periodicals in Latvian “Jaunais komunists”, “Jauni cēļi”, “Mazais kolektivists”, “Darba bērni” published in 1920s—1930s. These periodicals are very interesting as sources on the history of the Latvian Diaspora in the USSR between two world wars, being an indicator of ideological education and of the specific fetchers of school education of young Latvians. These periodicals were intended for young people of different ages and were published in different years. “Jaunais komunists”, published in 1919—1921, was the periodical for Latvian members of the Young communist league, who took part in the Civil war, they intended to continue the world proletarian revolution and to establish Soviet power in Latvia. Periodical “Jauni cēļi” was published in 1925—1928, its readers were mainly schoolchildren — young communists and pioneers. Its content included materials that formed young people's public and political views within the framework of Marxist-Leninist ideology and urged teenagers to participate in the construction of socialism as helping communists to sovietize different layers of the Latvian population in the USSR. Besides, this periodical aimed young people to preserve their national identity, although focusing mainly on the proletarian culture. “Darba bērni” and “Mazais kolektivists” were published in 1930s. These periodicals were firstly intended as educational literature for Latvian schools and contained materials on various school subjects. Still, at the forefront was put Communist education of the schoolchildren, who had to be ready to participate in the “struggle” for building socialism. Besides, Soviet Latvian children had to be sure in the indispensable victory of the proletarian revolution in Latvia. The publication of youth periodicals in Latvian in the conditions of the natural process of assimilation of a part of Latvians living among Russian people, was carried out in the context of the Soviet national policy of preservation Latvians as a nation in the USSR, as they were considered by Communist leaders as the advance party of builders of socialism in Latvia after the victory of the proletarian revolution there. The beginning of Stalin's repressions and the change of national policy in the country were accompanied by the closure of all periodicals in Latvian in the USSR, including Latvian youth periodicals.

Sociological concept of Ukrainian literature by Professor KhINO V. Koryak

The article discusses the features of the concept of Ukrainian literature teacher and professor of KhINO, the head of the department of the history of Ukrainian literature (1933–1936) of the Kharkov University V. Koryak (1889–1937). His aesthetic views combined Marxism, sociological criticism and the ideas of building “proletarian culture”. The sociological concept of the dynamics of the national literary process and the interpretation of works of art reflected the Marxist approach to the analysis of writing and significantly influenced the Ukrainian literary criticism of the 1920s, as well as its further transformations during the period of “socialist realism”. V. Koryak taught at KhINO since 1925, and having defended his thesis, he first became the so-called “red professor”, from 1927 - a visiting professor, while continuing to teach the course of history of Ukrainian literature. He was also the head of the Soviet literature room at the T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature, and from 1933 to 1936, after the restoration of Kharkov University, he headed the department of the history of Ukrainian literature. The basic terms of the sociological concept of V. Koryak were made public in the textbook of Ukrainian Literature (1928), which was used to teach this subject. This course was the first attempt to synthesize the problematic issues of "Marxist literary criticism" to create an original concept of the history of Ukrainian literature based on the sociological method. Negative and positive features of V. Koryak’s literary-critical concept were reflected to the greatest extent in his interpretation of T. G. Shevchenko’s works. A significant amount of his extraordinary ideas can also be traced in the interpretation of the works of other Ukrainian writers.

The Cultural Legacy of Usher Chiter and Elyukim Maltz in the Context of the Development of Jewish Ethnography and Museum Practice in the Interwar Period

The article examines the interwar period in the life and work of two architects, Usher Chiter (1899–1967) and Elyukim Maltz (1898–1973), both graduates of the Odessa School of Architecture. During that time the architects were doing work for the Mendele Moicher Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Odessa. Based on documents and visual materials from a number of museums and archives located in Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as on private collections (including those of families of architects from Moscow, where Chiter and Maltz moved in the late 1920s),the author attempts to trace and reconstruct the two architects’ research expeditions across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement.A total of seven field trips were conducted in Podolia and the Soviet part of Volhynia – with the aim of collecting materials and exhibition items for the museum and of making nature drawings and watercolors showing Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries and residential buildings.This empirical approach exemplifies the method of preserving and representing disintegrating Jewish shtetls, commonly practised during the interwar period. The work of both architects is viewed through the prism of musealization of Jewish heritage in the early Soviet period which was closely connected to the formation of state ideology and its transition from «building of the national identity» to class paradigm and atheistic upbringing.

Bolshevik Engineering of the “New Man” in the Early Soviet Period: Theoretical Bases, Political and Ideological Priorities, Evolution of Approaches

The article examines theoretical preconditions, as well as the political and ideological priorities of Bolshevik efforts to engineer of the “New Man” in the early Soviet period. The author shows the Marxist origins of the Bolshevik project and their transformation in the works of V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. It describes the principal mechanisms and tools used to design the New Man, as well as practice of social mobilization and exposure to the political culture of Bolshevism. Emphasis is given to the role of the legacy of World War I in the Bolshevik institutionalization of social engineering, coercion and violence to create new human material . The article also shows disagreements among the Bolshevik leadership during the period from 1917 until the late 1920s regarding the ways of designing the New Man in the context of the proletarian culture, the role of the moral character concept for an ideal communist person as the builder of new society. Analysis is given to the gender aspect of the problem, the Bolshevik vision of the ways to design the New Woman and reshape the old way of life. The article traces the transformation of the Bolshevik leadership’s vision of the New Man and the New Woman throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The author singles out two stages in the Bolshevik engineering of the New Man in the early Soviet period (1917 - mid-1920s, late 1920s - mid-1930s), and describes the project’s evolution.

Red Golem: Criticism of Industrial Civilization in Soviet Culture and Misticism During the Civil War

.

“Working Class Music” in the Discourse of Early Soviet Sociology of Art

This research has a survey-analytical nature and uses the theoretical method of comparative historical analysis of texts. Through the selection and analysis of key works and archival documents, the conceptual basis for the sociology of music of the USSR during the 1920s is determined to form an academic project, developed in the frame of the record of state cultural policy. The transformation of the institutionalized academic domain music in a decade is described. The tasks involved in the sociology of music with the aim of state order for the formation of a proletarian music culture are reconstructed. It has been established that music was delegated the function of structuring daily occurrences, motivating labor activity, promoting cultural education, and supporting an aspiration to solidary, collective action based on the emotional acceptance of the ideological postulates of the time. The research also focuses on the transformation of the crucial characteristics of the central ideologists of the “proletarian culture” from the utopian romanticism directed toward the achievement of class solidarity to the distortion of basic humanistic ideals in favor of fixing the developed hierarchies of power.

Socio-philosophical grounding of the conception of proletarian culture

The currency of the research consists in the necessity if rethinking of the notion of culture in Russian contemporary thought in order to present more adequately the process of development of culture in a future. The paper aims to elucidate political origins of the movement of Proletarian culture that play the leading role in a creation of a new conception of culture. As a materials were used documents and archives, scientific paper of Russian and foreign researchers. As a maim method was used problematic-analytical reconstruction, explored in the framework of an enactive approach that allows to envelop the subject in its evolvement and to concentrate on concrete practical situations of its realization. Such reconstruction permits to accomplish the original interpretation of the problem. The authors focus in the pre-history of the movement. Analyzing the social-political context of the origin of the movement, the authors come to the conclusion about artificially created necessity of political enlightenment of the society by the revolutionaries. The paper demonstrates how agents of proletarian working circles manipulate by the public opinion of working class. As a result, the paper shows the process of formation the ideology of cultural movement revolutionary period and evaluates significance of ideological function in its realization. The authors produce critical evaluation of the history of the movement in original judgment about political grounding of culture.

The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies by Fabio Lanza

Reviewed by: The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies by Fabio Lanza Maggie Clinton Fabio Lanza. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 262 pp. $94.95 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). In what ways do the trenchant critiques generated by the 1968-founded Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) speak to our present historical moment? How did the activism of a "concerned" cohort of graduate students and junior faculty, galvanized by China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and US-wrought carnage in Vietnam, reshape the field of East Asian (especially China) studies in the United States? How did the efforts of these young activist-scholars to "take Maoism seriously" dovetail with those of their Maoist contemporaries in France, and what can the comparatively deeper French engagement with Marxism tell us about the limits of CCAS analyses? These are among the many questions raised by Fabio Lanza's provocative new book, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Lanza's thoughtful examination of the formation, dissolution, and afterlives of the CCAS and its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars sheds vital light on an important US New Left intervention and constitutes necessary reading for scholars of modern China and the global 1960s. The book's introduction and four chapters examine the decade-long existence of CCAS, from its 1968 founding through its 1970s demise amid the "Thermidor" of the Deng Xiaoping era and the waning of antiwar activism. To reconstruct the organization's history, Lanza carefully mined CCAS archives and publications; he also conducted interviews with former CCAS members, including John Berninghausen, Saundra Sturdevant, and Marilyn Young (Sturdevant and Young both passed away before the book was published). Each chapter illuminates a set of concerns articulated by these "concerned scholars" and relates them to the structuring conditions that rendered their articulation possible in the first place. Lanza makes clear from the start that "to both concerned scholars and French radicals, Maoism had configured itself as a theory that found expression and realization in localized practice, not as a set of rules to follow, nor as a model that could be exported and replicated" (27). He underscores that the era's Maoist sympathies should be attributed not merely to youthful naïveté or to an orientalism now dressed in revolutionary garb but to a newly shared political horizon. Maoism "traversed the sixties" as a means for reflecting on and transforming differing yet intertwined sets of historical circumstances (5). To understand the emergence and dissolution of CCAS (which was not a Maoist organization), Lanza insists that we must consider it in relation to the abrupt opening and then equally abrupt reconfiguration of this shared political horizon. Chapter 1, "America's Asia," examines how the graduate students who founded CCAS in 1968 linked the American war in Vietnam to the "ideological blinders" of reigning authorities in the field of Asian studies, that is, to professors including John King Fairbank under whose direction they were pursuing PhDs. McCarthyist purges of the 1950s not only had drained the field of critical thought but also had facilitated the rise to prominence of scholars seemingly unconcerned about the ways in which their scholarship lent itself to anti-Communist war making. CCASers came to insist that "new intellectual production based on a humane approach to Asian people (i.e., on the political foundation of equality) required . . . the dismantling of the assumption of objectivity and neutrality behind the existing structure of learning and the unveiling of the political character of that assumption, in the name of politics" (53). Lanza explores this "humane approach" from [End Page E-27] another angle in chapter 2, highlighting how this approach was enabled by "one of the perceived, declared, and probably unrealized possibilities of the 1960s: the capacity of the oppressed to speak for themselves, denounce their oppression, and subvert the mechanisms of domination" (70). Further emboldened by the ways in which China's Cultural Revolution was upending entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and power, CCASers confronted what they perceived to be gulfs between academia and activism in their contemporary US context. Here, Lanza also illuminates the sharp...

SOCIOPHILOSOPHICAL REASONS FOR FORMING A CONCEPTION OF PROLETARIAN CULTURE: REVOLUTIONARY ARMED ORIGINS

Actuality of the article consists in the fact that culture plays crucial role in contemporary Russian society. The authors address the origins of this tendency. The aim of the article is an analysis of the beginning of the proletarian culture. As the resources for the paper archive documents of revolutionaries, political articles of that period, scientific papers and books of foreign and domestic authors are used. Problematic-analytic reconstruction with the elements of enactive approach is applied as a main method. The method allows to present the subject in its development and to make an original socio-philosophical interpretation of culture. The paper accentuate a prehistory of proletarian culture movement. Analyzing early works of A. Bogdanov, one of the father of the movement, the authors came to conclusion that the conception of proletarian culture was emerged from agitational politics of Bogdanov, who called to revolutionary armed uprising. Therefore, first stage of proletarian culture was agitation and propaganda for preparation of revolutionary active elements of combative movement. The paper shows the evolution of Boganov’s thought about foundation of proletarian culture: starting from discussing on necessity of revolutionary armed actions, Bogdanov slowly came up with Marxist argumentation of his conception.

Literary system and proletarian culture in Los Libros

Los sesenta y los setenta en el campo político e intelectual argentino fueron los años de la modernización científica en las áreas de los estudios sociales y humanísticos, así como los años de la radicalización política. La revista Los Libros (1969-1976) fue la publicación en la que se puede observar mejor la tensión entre modernización y radicalización. El objetivo principal del presente artículo es examinar la producción crítica de Ricardo Piglia (1969- 1975) en la revista Los Libros. Su crítica se centró en la construcción de un sistema literario proletario y popular que estaba relacionada con una discusión central del período: la correlación entre una intervención política revolucionaria y la especificidad de la actividad intelectual. Tomando en cuenta ese objetivo central, se analizará la producción crítica de Piglia sobre la base de dos ejes: por un lado, la problemática de la especificidad literaria; por el otro, y como consecuencia de esta, la necesidad de construir una nueva forma de producción literaria. Ambas problemáticas encontraron su punto de cohesión en la particular lectura maoísta que realizara Piglia.

Culture and Revolution, or Politics of the Heart: A. Bogdanov and the Debate of Possibilities of the Proletarian Culture Revisited

러시아 혁명의 재기발랄한 이론가이자 실천가의 하나였던 알렉산드르 보그다노프는 소비에트 시대 동안 레닌의 적대자로 호명되며 이단적 사상의 소유자로 배척당해 왔다. 하지만 『경험일원론』이나 『사회주의의 제문제』, 『조직학』 등의 중요 저술들을 통해 그는 혁명의 과제가 단지정치적이고 경제적인 체제전환에 있지만은 않다는 점을 보여주었으며, 프롤레트쿨트를 창립하여 노동계급의 독자적 문화창설을 위해 매진함으로써 문화혁명의 근본적 중요성을 일깨워 주었다. 혁명기에는 레닌과 트로츠키에 의해 이론적이고 실천적으로 비판받았으나, 그의 프롤레타리아 문화론이 갖는 강력한 설득력과 사상적 근거는 다시금 조명될 필요가 있다. 마음의 문제는 우리가 프롤레타리아 문화론을 발생론적 맥락에서 재구성하기 위해 필요한 프리즘이다. 보그다노프에게 문화는 일상생활의 형식적 요소들의 묶음이 아니라 민중의 감각적이고 (무)의식적인 생활세계에 기반한 삶의 비가시적 형식에 해당된다. 그는 새로운 문화를 창설함으로써 민중이 미래 사회를 스스로 구성하고 살아갈 수 있는 주체적이고 집합적인 역량을 확보할 수 있다고 믿었다. 문화는 민중의 마음을 특정하게 조형하는 정치적인 것의 터전이기 때문이다. 따라서 프롤레타리아 문화론의 핵심은 마음의 정치학으로부터 재구성되어야 한다.

Editorial

Abstract

The “Radiofication” of the Soviet Union

Stephen Lovell, Russia in Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919- 1970. xi + 237 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 9780198725268. $59.95. Anyone who has ever traveled to Soviet Union and Russian Federation is used to more or less steadily playing radio in kitchen. After World War II, radio became most popular background medium of industrialized countries. Despite radio's global impact, our knowledge about its history is very uneven from a geographical standpoint. The trajectory of radio historiography after mid-1990s went from a national focus on radio as a central agent in building national communities to exploration of complex transnational interdependencies that not least included questions of Americanization and of the war of airwaves after 1945. (1) In his new book, British historian Stephen Lovell convincingly tells history of Soviet radio as a success story in long run. Although historians and media and communications scholars have already painted a vivid picture of national radios for some West European countries, United States, and Western foreign broadcasting stations during Cold War, there are only a few studies on Soviet radio. (2) Against this background, Stephen Lovell confidently claims to present the first history of Soviet radio in English. The investigations on Western radio cover a variety of topics ranging from radio technology, content analysis, entertainment and news programming, development of genres, and political propaganda to biographies of radio producers, audience research, and consumer practices. (3) Hence adjective full raises some expectations that book does not fulfill in end, as it would have been too challenging to examine all different aspects of media history. Still, Lovells book sets benchmark for any study in field of radio history, as it gives many insights on a bunch of these topics. The book is based on a broad and thorough archival groundwork from central and local archives. Lovell further refers to oral history interviews, which currently represent one of best sources to get information about daily life and listening practices of ordinary citizens. The author analyzes his materials in seven chronologically arranged chapters. The first three chapters explore birth of new technology, how it spread into Soviet society; how people handled new medium, gathered in front of receivers; how early radio producers conceptualized their programs; and how they spoke and addressed socially and culturally diverse Soviet audience. From beginning, radio exerted a high degree of fascination. It attracted enthusiasts of technology, revolutionary avant- garde of 1920s, Bolsheviks and many ordinary listeners. Focusing on these different groups Lovell highlights considerable extent to which any medium and attitudes toward technology are framed by people and social practices. Early on, author illustrates that technological progress is always promoted, as well as hampered, by competing perceptions and ideas. He convincingly explains Soviet radios development from a perspective of sociocultural and political interests, as well as economic opportunities. Language was an important issue, especially in early years of new medium, when it was still struggling for its place in hierarchy of arts, culture, and political communication. In 1930s, debates on appropriate style of speaking and broadcasting became very heated. Many observers requested that speakers' delivery should represent proletarian culture--whatever this meant. These uncertainties left radio announcers working on a shaky foundation, as potential pitfalls were ever-present but unfortunately not always predictable. To render a proletarian style of delivery compatible with regimes claims to make high culture accessible to all was as a complicated task as broadcasting ordinary voices by letting workers and farmers speak on air. …

Political, Interparty and Moral Crisis of the “War Communism” Policy in Kazakhstan 1920-1922

The article deals with the implementation of the complex of political and socio-economic measures of the Soviet state, called the policy of “war communism” in the cities of the Steppes and Turkestan in 1918-1921. Based on materials gleaned from various sources, the author endeavours to explore the processes of socialization and municipalization of private houses and dwellings, the nationalization of private property, which took place in the cities of the KazASSR and tassr; highlight some of the issues related to the subject policy of “war communism” in the cities of Kazakhstan. Various restrictive decrees and orders of the Soviet power in this period, aimed at limiting commodity-money relations and the prohibition of the right to private property put people into a rigid framework of survival. Approved in the sphere of public life, the ideology of “war communism” inevitably left its mark on the life of the city. This ideology was a special sociocultural phenomenon, strengthening other social psychology and ethics which propagandized the need to destroy the old “bourgeois” culture and create a new “proletarian culture”. “War Communism” as opposed to “bourgeois individualism” principles of the socialist community, broske vital foundations of society. A characteristic feature of this period is the legitimization of violence and its use as a universal remedy of solving all problems. Under the pressure of revolutionary changes the sense of justice in society underwent considerable transformation. The right to inviolability of private property was completely ignored. The ruling regime no longer recognized the existing legal mechanisms, replacing them with the amorphous concept of “revolutionary legality.”

Developing the Politics of the Trade Union Movement: Popular Workers’ Education in South Yorkshire, UK, 1955 to 1985

AbstractDrawing on evidence from research interviews, workers’ memoirs, oral histories, and a range of secondary sources, the development of popular workers’ education is traced over a thirty year period, 1955 to 1985, and is rooted in the proletarian culture of South Yorkshire, UK. The period is seen as an historical conjuncture of Left social movements (trade unions, the Communist and Labour parties, tenants’ movements, movements of working-class women, and emerging autonomous black movements) in a context of trade union militancy and New Left politics. The Sheffield University extramural department, the South Yorkshire Workers' Educational Association (WEA), and the public intellectuals they employ as tutors and organizers are embedded in the politics and actions of the labor movement in the region, some becoming Labour MPs. They develop distinctive programs of trade union day release courses and labor movement organizations (Institute for Workers' Control, Conference of Socialist Economists, Society for the Study of Labour History). Workers involved in the process of popular workers' education become organic intellectuals having key roles in local and national politics, in the steel and miners' strikes of the 1980s, and in the formation of Northern College. The article draws on the language and insights of Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci through the lens of social movement theory and the praxis of popular education.

Revolutionens morgenrøde. Kinesiske plakater i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

The Royal Library’s collection of Chinese posters was acquired by purchases in 1978, 2004–2007, 2010 and 2012. In 1998 the Danish society Friends of China donated to the library its collection of exhibits and the remaining items from its sales collection of Chinese posters from the years 1968 to 1978. The Royal Library’s collection of Chinese posters now consists of 458 different posters and 278 duplicates. Some of the posters are made up of several parts, which together form a continuous story. The collection has one item which consists of 24 posters. The oldest poster is from 1950 and shows a black and white portrait of the minister of state Zhou Enlai (1896–1976). The most recent items are from 1983 and one of these is a portrait of the rehabilitated president Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969). The best represented period is from the “Great revolution in proletarian culture”, with about 400 different designs.The collection comprises three types of poster art. The first type consists of a unique design, while the second type is a reproduction of an already existing image, such as an oil painting, aquarelle or a woodcut. The third type is made by adding a text to a photograph.Nearly all of the posters have a title or accompanying text. Mostly these are placed outside of the image, but in some cases one or more short texts constitute part of the visual motive. The posters are for the main part in colour, even the photographs may be shaded blue or green to make them more visually arresting.The motives can be divided into four main groups:1. Politically important persons, where especially Mao Zedong (1893–1976) dominates2. Political agitation, a theme which is very obvious in the period of “cultural revolution”3. Campaigns, particularly for socialism4. I nformational and instructional posters, where the aim is to provide practical information, e.g. about all the products that one can make from a pigApart from the instructional posters, the posters are designed to convey a political wish of the ruling elite. This should be so clear and plain that the viewer is left no room for misunderstanding. All the motives are therefore naturalistic and convey their message together with a title, which usually takes the form of a slogan, e.g. “Long live the socialist proletariat”. The motives of the posters allow one to follow political developments from the first optimistic years before the “cultural revolution”, through the aggressive and hectic years of the “cultural revolution” itself, to the ostensibly idyllic times after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. The posters also illustrate the place of women in socialistic China from the proclaimed equality to their actual role as servants of a maledominated society.

Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde by Samuel Perry (review)

Reviewed by: Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde by Samuel Perry Richard E. Torrance (bio) Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde. By Samuel Perry. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2014. xii, 228 pages. $49.00. This volume is an admirable effort to rehabilitate the proletariat cultural movements affiliated with the Communist Party in pre–World War II Japan. [End Page 412] Samuel Perry’s main argument is: “proletarian culture in Japan was as rich and diverse as were the social experiences of its many participants, and it came into being within a history that gave a particular shape to its evolving aesthetic forms, critical consciousness, and social practices in Japan” (pp. 8-9). Perry purposely avoids discussion of the artistic canon of the proletariat arts movement—the substantial novels of Hayama Yoshiki or Tokunaga Sunao; the films of the Prokino group; or plays by Kubo Sakae or Fujimori Seikichi. Instead, he foregrounds three “marginal” aspects of the broader proletarian cultural movement: “proletarian practices involving children, the revolutionary genre of ‘wall fiction,’ and works of literature about Koreans” (p. 5). Perry emphasizes the constructive role, often overlooked, of the Japanese Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. These “marginal activities” probably reached a broader audience of working-class men, women, and children than the canonized proletarian literature and theory usually studied by scholars, and they bring to light new perspectives on the party’s opposition to Japanese imperialism, colonialism, and wars of aggression. After an introduction that suggests several of the leading lights of the proletarian literary movement—Nakano Shigeharu, Yamamoto Senji, and Sata Ineko—were unconsciously enacting Leon Trotsky’s idea that the proletariat was establishing a culture built on the past that would dissolve itself in favor of a socialist future (p. 11), chapter 2 takes up the creation of an alternate revolutionary children’s culture. The impetus for the revolutionary education of children appears to have been the founding of the Kizaki Village Proletarian Farmers’ School in 1926 in Niigata Prefecture. After extended disputes between the local union of tenant farmers and landowners, the tenant farmers, distrustful of the prefectural and state authorities, with the assistance of leftist university students and Christian clergy, established schools to educate their children. Perry locates this short-lived experiment as the beginning of the effort to create a pedagogy that addressed “the practical needs of proletarian children, whose transformation into socialist adulthood represented for revolutionaries a hope for transformed humanity” (p. 68). Perry describes the critiques of existing “nationalist” and “liberal” modes of education in Japan. Makimura Kusurō, Murayama Tomoyoshi, Kusaka Susumu, and others in organs such as the Hataraku fujin (Working women, 1932-33), Shōnen senki (Boys’ battle banner, 1929-31), Musansha shinbun (Proletarian news, 1925-32), and Shinkō kyōiku (New education, 1930-32) countered the romantic notions of the “purity and innocence” of children by authors such as Ogawa Mimei and Suzuki Miekichi, contrasting this bourgeois ideal with the lived conditions of working-class children. There was also criticism of the militarization of Japanese schools and of the idea that innate genetic abilities accounted for differences in academic achievement and thus for the status quo of social stratification. [End Page 413] Perry notes foreign influences on Japanese children’s stories, but his main focus is children’s fiction by authors associated with cultural organizations associated with the Japanese Communist Party. His discussion of the stories and poetry of Maruyama Kazuko expands on their revolutionary content, tending to overread the political content of a simple poem about a walking, talking potato: In the playful juxtaposition of the bulbous brown root and the dandy’s self-conscious attention to sartorial detail, Murayama offers a parody of the bourgeois subject that at the same time attempts to welcome its child readers/listeners into a particular way of seeing, and perhaps questioning, the world around them. (p. 28) The study examines fiction with more explicit political content created for older boys. The ABCs of writing for boys in Shōnen senki has the following injunctions: Russia is a fine country, a free country; monks are tools of...

Shakespeare's American Proletarian Cultural Authority

As a result of being constantly appropriated and re-appropriated, Shakespeare has become a sort of cultural super-creation. Throughout a range of historical epochs, different cultural spheres, and ...