Back to Events of Saturday 02nd November 2024

Wednesday
03
NOV

06:00 PM

Modular Socialism - Interior Design for Everyday Life in 1980s China

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Altehenger, Oxford University (UK), Faculty of History

In 1981, Furniture and Life magazine (Jiaju yu shenghuo) was first published in the city of Xi’an. Within a few years, the magazine became one of China’s most popular design and home-making publications, well-known for its DIY guides, advice columns, home stories, and close engagement with readers. Each issue discussed how to “beautify” homes and how to turn “socialist material civilization” into lived experience. Modular furniture was central to the magazine’s vision of a new everyday life and for many readers it soon became a material signifier of economic reform. This talk explores the colourful history of Furniture and Life, illustrating how writers, artists, designers, architects and engineers presented but also made the socialist modern during the 1980s.

Jennifer Altehenger is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at the University of Oxford and Merton College. She is the author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1989 (Harvard, 2018) and has also written on the history of propaganda, lexicography, and on China's exchanges with other socialist countries at venues such as the Leipzig trade fairs. Funded by the AHRC and the British Academy, her current work examines the history of materials and everyday industrial design in the PRC.

Homepage Event

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de/medien/lsm.html

Organizer

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS)

Homepage Organizer

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de

Contact

contact@cats.uni-heidelberg.de

Registration E-Mail

livingthesocialistmodern@gmail.com

Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Living the Socialist Modern: The Chinese Communist Party at 100—Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives ':

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. What did it mean to “live with the Specter”, to experience what one might call the making of the “Socialist Modern” that found a first point of culmination with the foundation of the CCP in 1921?

In a digital lecture series organized by the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies in Heidelberg (CATS), in cooperation with the ERC-funded research project READCHINA: The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China in Freiburg and the European Institute for Chinese Studies (EURICS) in Paris, we suggest unpacking the impact of this event on lives on the ground in a long century of Chinese and global history. Deliberately designed to offer alternative “histories” of the Chinese Communist Party, we will provide interdisciplinary views and experiences of the “Socialist Modern” and its many variants in a century now past, but also in the present and in the future, probing into different positions from not only from Political Science and Party History, but also from from Everyday History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and Sociology, Art History, etc.

Each lecture will focus on a specific time slot, marked by ten-year steps in the century of history that we are looking back to: 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, 2021. Lectures will begin on a particular date branch out, back and forth to the decades before and after so as to provide a long-term view of the situation at hand! We will encourage the use of a variety of different sources and global perspectives on the materials at hand.

Wednesday 14th April 2021, 06:00 PM

Young, Marxist, and Martyred: The First Movers of Chinese Communism

Wen-hsin YEH, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 21st April 2021, 06:00 PM

Plutarch and Transcultural Life Narratives: Analyzing Early CCP Leaders, Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan

Marilyn LEVINE (Central Washington University)

Wednesday 28th April 2021, 06:00 PM

Communist cosmopolitanism

Prof. Dr. Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge (UK), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Wednesday 05th May 2021, 02:00 PM

Living as a Cog in the Machine

Prof. Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Kyoto University (Japan), Institute for Research in Humanities

Wednesday 12th May 2021, 06:00 PM

Living the Socialist Modern in 1941

Prof. Dr. Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia (Canada), Department of History

Wednesday 12th May 2021, 06:30 PM

Creative Life in Yan’an

Prof. Dr. Ban Wang, Stanford University (USA), Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages

Wednesday 26th May 2021, 04:00 PM

1951 - A “Truth Regime” in the Making

Prof. Dr. David Wang, Harvard University (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Wednesday 26th May 2021, 04:30 PM

Singing, Recording, Promoting – New Sounds for New China

Prof. Dr. Andreas Steen, Aarhus University (Denmark), School of Culture and Society

Wednesday 02nd June 2021, 04:00 PM

Socialist Transformation of Man

Dr. Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Department of Chinese Studies, Paris (France)

Wednesday 09th June 2021, 06:00 PM

A Peripatetic Revolutionary in the 1950s

Prof. Dr. Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz (USA), History Department

Wednesday 09th June 2021, 06:30 PM

Performing New China through Campaigns and Consolidation: The View from 1951

Prof. Dr. Julia Strauss, SOAS, University of London (UK), Department of Politics and International Studies

Wednesday 16th June 2021, 06:00 PM

New Cultural Workers and their Self-Identities: The View from 1961

Prof. Dr. Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Wednesday 16th June 2021, 06:30 PM

Fighting against Mao with words

Prof. Dr. Anne Kerlan, L'Ecole des Haute Etudes ein Sciences Social, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 23rd June 2021, 06:00 PM

1961, a year of not enough significance?

Prof. Dr. Karl Gerth, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 23rd June 2021, 06:30 PM

Chinese Socialism after the Loss of the Communist Horizon

Dr. Puck Engman, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 30th June 2021, 04:00 PM

Echolocating the Social

Prof. Dr. Dayton Lekner, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Wednesday 30th June 2021, 04:30 PM

1971 - Listening to Enemy Radio in the Socialist Media Ecology

Prof. Dr. Jie Li, Harvard University, Cambridge / Massachusetts (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Thursday 01st July 2021, 04:30 PM

建党一百周年座谈会 — A ROUNDTABLE:

The Studying Party History Small Group

Wednesday 07th July 2021, 06:00 PM

The CCP Goes Global: International Legacies of Cultural Revolution Maoism

Prof. Dr. Julia Lovell, Birkbeck, University of London (UK), Department of History Classics and Archaeology

Wednesday 27th October 2021, 06:00 PM

Forms of Credibility, Patterns of Identification

Prof. Isabelle Thireau, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 27th October 2021, 06:30 PM

1981 - The Chinese Communist Party and the Search for Historical Justice

Prof. Dr. Daniel Leese, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Wednesday 03rd November 2021, 06:00 PM

Modular Socialism - Interior Design for Everyday Life in 1980s China

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Altehenger, Oxford University (UK), Faculty of History

Wednesday 03rd November 2021, 06:30 PM

Restoring the Food industry in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Francoise Sabban, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 10th November 2021, 06:00 PM

The Imprint of Maoist Socialism on Private Life in urban China - Shanghai in the 1980s

Prof. em. Dr. Deborah Davis, Yale University, New Haven / Conneticut (USA), Department fo Sociology

Wednesday 17th November 2021, 06:00 PM

Zhao Ziyang and the Voices for Reform

Prof. Dr. Klaus Mühlhahn, Präsident der Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen

Wednesday 17th November 2021, 06:30 PM

Radio Audiobooks in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Paola Iovene, The University of Chicago (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Wednesday 24th November 2021, 07:00 PM

The CCP Faces a Second Undulation of the Democracy Movement

Prof. Dr. Perry Link, University of California, Riverside (USA), Department of Comparative Literature and Languages

Wednesday 01st December 2021, 04:00 PM

Return to Communism? The Advent of the Xi Jinping Era in China

Prof. Dr. Steve Tsang, SOAS University of London (UK), China Institute

Wednesday 01st December 2021, 05:00 PM

Living in the Emergent Techno-Developmental State

Prof. Dr. Ya-wen Lei, Harvard Uniersity, Cambridge / MA (USA), Department of Sociology

Wednesday 08th December 2021, 06:00 PM

On the Edge - Feeling Precarious in China

Prof. Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford (UK), Faculty of Oriental Studies

Wednesday 15th December 2021, 06:00 PM

From Anti-Imperialist Coalitions of the Past to Today's Milk Tea Alliance

Prof. Dr. Jeff Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine (USA), Department of History