Nature, Contingency, and the Limit of Socialist Literary-Artistic Practice: A Review of Zhu Yu's Socialism and "Nature"

As a review of Zhu Yu's recent book on socialist literary-artistic practice,Socialism and"Nature,"this essay explores the cultural-political concems that underlie Zhu Yu's comprehensive discussion of socialist artistic genres.While Zhu Yu touches on the aporetic structure of the production of socialist artworks through examining different texts and contexts,his emphatic delineation of the problematic culminates in his illuminating reading of the artistic practice during the Great Leap Forward movement.Pushing Zhu Yu's argument to its extreme,the essay holds that,if the self-effacing and self-negating nature of the cultural-political radically of socialist artistic practice leaves a paradoxical trace in the history of socialist China,it is the impulse of attributing"meanings"to everything eventually leads this practice to its self-destruction.When the contingency of"everyday life"appears spectrally as"nature"that is both representable and un-representable,neither representable nor un-representable in socialist literature and art,we are one small step away from the motivation of cultural creations in the 1980s,which attempt to rehabilitate the so-called"authenticity"of everyday life through a wholesale critique and negation of the revolutionary"grand narrative."

Reshaping Nature:Humanism,Ethnicity,and Literary and Film Production of the Story of Daji

This article discusses the role that nature plays in ethnic literature and films in the Seventeen-Year Period(1949-66).It takes the story of Daji and Her Fathers as an example and investigates the ways in which nature features in the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the formation of a multiethnic nation as in the case of China.I will explore three aspects:first,the debate on humanism,which was closely related to ethnic minority film production at the time.A central issue of the debate then was the question of“humanistic”-that is,affective,emotional,subjective,and most importantly,natural-expression in literary and art works.Ethnic minority identity,with its unique status,was given some latitude for humanistic expression and“natural”understanding.Second,due to ethnic minority groups’special significance in China’s nation-building,a reconstruction of ethnic minority nature became imperative for the People’s Republic of China.This reconstruction involves mostly restructuring a“second nature,”or dialectic nature of minority under the socialist mandate.This dialectic nature demands something more than natural,immediate constituents and requires a socially and politically mediated ethnic minority nature that is aligned with multiethnic nationality.Third,this dialectic nature is to be formed following Marxist dialectical materialism,mainly through the means of social(ist)labor that changes nature.