Dean of the College Presents
Robert Culp, Associate Professor of History
7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk aims to complicate our understanding of propaganda during the early People’s Republic through analysis of book production at Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company from 1949 to 1965. Once the most successful capitalist publishing companies in post-imperial China, these two presses successfully negotiated the transition to public-private joint management (gong si heying) companies after 1954 with their editorial personnel and institutions largely intact. During the early Maoist period, they played a vital role in socialist cultural production through publication of series (congshu), reference books, and classical reprints, much as they had prior to 1949. Drawing on newly available archive and diary materials, as well as plentiful memoirs and contemporary publications, I analyze book production at both presses. Case studies focused on the History Small Series (Lishi xiao congshu) and Knowledge Series (Zhishi congshu), the punctuated 24 Dynastic Histories, and the revision of Cihai, reveal that publishers and party and state cultural administrators participated in a negotiated form of cultural production in which editorial staff had significant input into publishing plans and the content of product lines. Although cultural administrators vetted and assessed plans and products, ultimately holding veto power over them, they depended in large part for book production on the content knowledge and publishing expertise of old publishing hands and the academics and writers in their networks. The PRC state’s effort to go beyond being a propaganda state that shaped citizens’ political consciousness to being a pedagogical state that cultivated scientific and cultural knowledge for socialist construction provided the basis for the partnership between publishing companies, state publishing bureaus, and party propaganda offices.
Please join us for a reception prior to the event at 6:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102