MCLC: Socialist Culture Reconsidered--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Xiaobing Max Tang <maxtang at umich.edu>
Subject: Socialist Culture Reconsidered--cfp
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Call for Papers

Socialist Culture in China Reconsidered
An International Conference at the University of Michigan
October 25-26, 2013

With funding support from the University of Michigan Center for Chinese
Studies, this international conference will provide a platform for
scholars to examine multiple dimensions of socialist cultural production
in twentieth-century China.

There is no question that cultural products from the socialist period
continue to signify and serve many functions in contemporary China, even
though the mechanism for their production has been by and large dismantled
since the inception of the reform era.  There is also evident ambivalence
toward the socialist cultural legacy.

This upcoming conference will present multi-disciplinary studies of the
aspirations as well as constraints, successes as well as failures, of
socialist cultural production.  We seek to gain a better understanding of
not only a highly complex and experimental period of history, but also the
competing forces shaping contemporary Chinese society and culture.  We
want to situate the Chinese experience in the larger context of
³imagineering² modernity in the last century.
     
In addition to a wide range of cultural products, such as literature,
visual arts, cinema, theater, music, performance, architecture, fashion,
etc., we are interested in investigating the various institutions,
theories, practices, models, and global connections that sustained the
cultural production of the socialist period, a period far more extended
than the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

Interested scholars are invited to submit a proposal for consideration by
the deadline of March 15, 2013, to the conference organizer Xiaobing Tang
atmaxtang at umich.edu.