Studies of China and Chineseness Since the Cultural Revolution - Volume 2: Micro Intellectual History Through De-Central Lenses

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution affected everyone's lives. People openly gave away their identities to adopt revolutionary roles and duties. However, people who lived with different self-understandings and social relations inevitably acquired and practiced revolutionary identities, each in their own light. Scholars of the Cultural Revolution encountered emotional and intellectual challenges as they cared about the real people who owned an identity resource that could trigger an imagined thread of solidarity in their minds. In volume 2 of the series of two books, the authors plunge into the contexts of these concerns to seek different relations that reveal the Revolution's different meanings. They were quintessentially personal in nature. The Revolution's magnitude and pervasive scope always resulted in individualized engagements that have significant and differing consequences for those struggling in their micro-context and yet impact a future with unpredictable collective implications in terms of ethnicity, gender, memory, scholarship, or career. The Cultural Revolution is, therefore, an evolving relation beneath the rise of China that will neither fade away nor sanction integrative paths.