Ban WANG (Stanford University)

This talk considers the debate on the national form and world literature in Yan’an. With the national defense literature shifting to Lu Xun’s idea of a mass literature of revolutionary war, the national form was updated and wedded to Western progressive culture. Rather than primarily nationalistic, the focus was on the nation as constituted by working people. The idea of national form thus favored narratives of working European people combatting the ruling regime and affirmed a realism that cut across to the popular masses of all nations seeking independence. Embedded in the everyday, inherited life-worlds of the common people (laobaixing 老百姓) in rural China, this idea of national form fueled the reinvention of folk and rural arts, gesturing toward socialist internationalist communication between working people around the world.