Writing to the Rhythm of Labor : Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976

What does it mean to write in a socialist revolution?What defines labor in a communist society? In revolutionary China, writers were regularly dispatched to the countryside or factories with the expectation that, through immersion in the life of workers and peasants, they would be remade as “culture workers” whose writing could serve the communist project.Their cultural labor would not merely reflect or represent the process of building socialism-it would actively participate in it by excavating the contradictions and challenges of the ongoing reorganization of social relations. Benjamin Kindler examines how writing transformed the Chinese Revolution even as the revolution remade what it meant to write.He argues that the revolution sought in unparalleled ways to overcome the basic division between those who write and those who work.This book combines close readings of a wide range of texts-from the works of established figures to the writings of amateur workers drawn from the factory f