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Introduction: The Avant-Garde and the Popular
- University of Michigan Press
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7 Introduction The Avant-Garde and the Popular This book reveals avant-garde performance as an important political force shaped by, and in turn shaping, popular culture in modern China. It examines the multiple relationships among avant-garde performance, national politics, and popular culture in twentieth-century China with a focus on their shared internationalist visions and cosmopolitan aspirations.1 I undertake an examination of the aesthetics and politics of the historical Chinese avant-garde in dialogue with important scholarship in the West,2 with a focus on one of the key representatives of the Chinese avant-garde, the artist and activist Tian Han (1898–1968). Understanding Tian Han in his time sheds light on a new generation of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists who, half a century later, are similarly engaging with both national politics and popular culture. In her study of modernism and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris, Mary Gluck connects the self-presentation of the modern artist and the emergence of the modernist aesthetic to the changing forms of popular culture . She finds that the modern artist, in the roles of melodramatic hero, urban flâneur, female hysteric, and tribal primitive, creates an expressive, public, and popular modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive bourgeois culture .3 My own research into twentieth-century Chinese culture reveals a parallel to this Parisian matrix, that is, a sustained and dynamic conversation transpiring between avant-garde experiments and popular culture. Rather than a landscape of alienated avant-gardists resisting institutional control, on the one hand, and a top-down, monolithic revolutionary culture on the other, we find in twentieth-century China a cultural milieu comparable in many ways to the “popular bohemia” of nineteenth-century Paris, where the avant-garde engaged creatively with popular forms and where both the avant-garde and the popular converged on political engagement. 8 The Avant-garde and the popular in modern china Avant-Garde, Popular, and Propaganda Avant-Garde In the Chinese context, the term avant-garde (usually xianfeng with regard to literature and qianwei with regard to the arts) has often been applied rather unreflectively to refer to the post–Cultural Revolution art movements that arose in reaction to the politicization of art during the socialist era, seeking to reclaim art from politics.4 This use, however, represents an inversion of the original meaning of the term, which denoted art as deeply entwined with political purpose and aspiration. The Chinese term xianfeng can be found in the Hanji (Record of Han), written as early as in the second century CE, where it denotes a military leader who serves as the vanguard on the battlefield.5 Tian Han spoke of Peking University students as the avant-garde (xianfeng) of the “Chinese renaissance” in a letter to a friend on May 12, 1919, possibly one of the first usages of the term in the twentieth century to designate both a military vanguard and a cultural forerunner.6 The use of qianwei, however, appears much later in the history of the Chinese language. The first entry in Hanyu dacidian (A Grand Dictionary of the Chinese Language) points to an eighteenth-century record referring to the front guard of the imperial army during the Mongol Yuan dynasty.7 Tian Han also used qianwei to refer to the cultural vanguard, this time in the context of the Japanese military threat in 1936. Tian proclaimed that the wartime propaganda effort must be based on the taste of “the avant-garde among the populace,” so as to both propagandize and educate.8 Similarly in the English language, the term avant-garde has been Anglicized from the French to describe the foremost part of an army, or the “vanguard,” since the fifteenth century, and it only gradually acquired the meaning of artistic innovation in the first half of the twentieth century. In this book, I realign the term avant-garde with its historical roots to refer to literature and art that aspired to political engagement with society throughout the twentieth-century Chinese revolutions. That is to say, I am restoring the Chinese artistic avant-garde to its alliance with the political vanguard. In doing so, I define the avant-garde not only in terms of its cultural artifacts but also in terms of the cultural matrix and the modern mediasphere out of which those artifacts were constructed. In contradistinction to the Western association of [54.146.97.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:44 GMT) Introduction 9 the avant-garde...