REDISCOVERING CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION:
Art and Politics, Lived Experience, Legacies of Liberation

Few events in modern history are more deserving of rediscovery than China ’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Few have so challenged traditional notions of what human society can be. Few have been as distorted and demonized.

This unique symposium, REDISCOVERING CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION, offers an opportunity to rediscover—or discover for the first time—what this “revolution within a revolution” in socialist China was really all about.

Hear from youth who went to the countryside to work and learn from the peasants...artists who set out to create revolutionary art....women who struggled against feudal tradition....people who look back at this period as some of the best years of their lives. And learn from scholars whose work brings to life a crucial and vital legacy of liberation.

The weekend includes a Friday night book event – The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village; two major panels on Saturday – “Art and Politics in the Cultural Revolution” and “The International Impact and Historical Significance of the Cultural Revolution,” and a discussion and guided tour of Poster Art in the Cultural Revolution.

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SCHEDULE:

Friday, November 6 [Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley]

5:00 PM - Art opening and guided tour - Poster Art of the Cultural Revolution [Wurster Hall Lobby (posters will be on exhibit through Monday)]

6:30 PM - Book Event: The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village with author Dongping Han*, [Wurster Auditorium]

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Saturday, November 7 [Berdahl Auditorium in Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley]

1:00 PM – Art and Politics in the Cultural Revolution: Bai Di, Ban Wang, Ann Tompkins & Lincoln Cushing

4:00 PM – The International Impact and Historical Significance of the Cultural Revolution: Dongping Han, Raymond Lotta, Robert Weil

7:30 PM - Benefit Banquet with Speakers: Call Revolution Books for Info

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Sunday, November 8 [Wurster Auditorium]

1:00 PM - Panels & Speakers TBA

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Panelists include:

Lincoln Cushing—Historian and archivist of social and political graphics, co-author Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Bai Di—Director of Chinese and Asian Studies, Drew University ; co-editor of Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up During the Mao Era.

Dongping Han—Professor of History, Warren Wilson College ; author of The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village ; farmer and manager of a collective village factory during the Cultural Revolution.

Raymond Lotta—Set the Record Straight Project; Maoist political economist; writer forRevolution newspaper; editor Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism.

Ann Tompkins– lived and worked in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and is co-author of Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Ban Wang - Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture, Stanford University, author of Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Robert Weil – Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute, author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of “Market Socialism”



SPONSORED by Revolution Books
CO-SPONSORED by Set the Record Straight Project (A program of International Humanities Center) and UC student club, Friends of Revolution Books