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At the end of October I went to hear Prof. Alex Cook of the History Department give a talk on "Chinese Uhuru: A Maoist Reading of the Congo Crisis."
The fact that I didn't immediately understand to which Congo crisis the title was referring, I suppose, shows my youth as much as anything else--it's not even called the Congo anymore, anyway, and until I was 12 it was Zaire--but apparently the Congo Crisis was the Spanish Civil War of its day; Che Guevara even led a squad of guerilla forces through the jungle for a while. Prof. Cook situated the Chinese interpretation of the crisis, which was touched off in 1960 almost as soon as independence was declared. In the context of the widening Sino-Soviet split, in which China essentially threw in its lot with the "Third World" and embraced the epithet of underdevelopment, the Congo Crisis seemed like a tailor-made opportunity to show the world that the Maoist conception of world revolution by peasant insurgency had legs. Certainly the 1965 play "War Drums on the Equator," performed in Beijing by an entirely Chinese cast and crew, simultaneously offered the Chinese perspective on the Sino-Soviet split (i.e. Cold War superpower hegemony was leading to a new and more dangerous imperialism) and articulated a rhetoric of true friendship and true freedom between oppressed subalterns founded on mutual interest, under the recognition that "The sun has already risen in the east" and that, while Maoism offered the true path to uhuru or freedom, it was only obtainable by a long and protracted guerilla struggle. At the same time, elements of the play look forward to the Cultural Revolution which was looming on the horizon of 1966.
It was a compelling talk, and I'll be very interested to read Cook's book when it comes out--as of now it has a working title of "Three Worlds Apart," we're told. Doing history of non-Western places that isn't all about their interactions with the West is definitely something that needs to happen more often, and I wasn't really surprised to be reminded, in its foregrounding of a popular play in China by way of introduction of a subaltern-subaltern discourse, of Rebecca Karl's Staging the World.
The fact that I didn't immediately understand to which Congo crisis the title was referring, I suppose, shows my youth as much as anything else--it's not even called the Congo anymore, anyway, and until I was 12 it was Zaire--but apparently the Congo Crisis was the Spanish Civil War of its day; Che Guevara even led a squad of guerilla forces through the jungle for a while. Prof. Cook situated the Chinese interpretation of the crisis, which was touched off in 1960 almost as soon as independence was declared. In the context of the widening Sino-Soviet split, in which China essentially threw in its lot with the "Third World" and embraced the epithet of underdevelopment, the Congo Crisis seemed like a tailor-made opportunity to show the world that the Maoist conception of world revolution by peasant insurgency had legs. Certainly the 1965 play "War Drums on the Equator," performed in Beijing by an entirely Chinese cast and crew, simultaneously offered the Chinese perspective on the Sino-Soviet split (i.e. Cold War superpower hegemony was leading to a new and more dangerous imperialism) and articulated a rhetoric of true friendship and true freedom between oppressed subalterns founded on mutual interest, under the recognition that "The sun has already risen in the east" and that, while Maoism offered the true path to uhuru or freedom, it was only obtainable by a long and protracted guerilla struggle. At the same time, elements of the play look forward to the Cultural Revolution which was looming on the horizon of 1966.
It was a compelling talk, and I'll be very interested to read Cook's book when it comes out--as of now it has a working title of "Three Worlds Apart," we're told. Doing history of non-Western places that isn't all about their interactions with the West is definitely something that needs to happen more often, and I wasn't really surprised to be reminded, in its foregrounding of a popular play in China by way of introduction of a subaltern-subaltern discourse, of Rebecca Karl's Staging the World.