8 - Village Drama

Summary

This chapter turns to the nature and application of Maoist narrative in its formative years. It explores village theater, one of the main entry points for Maoist messaging into rural life, in the region of Yan’an in the 1940s. Through stage drama village politics were cast into new frames, models of village activism and trials were showcased, and power relations based on education, gender and other factors were overturned in performative ways. Revolutionary storytelling and drama at Yan’an promised to empower and enable the downtrodden to participate in and live with dignity in their communities. At the same time, as this chapter shows, it denied the past viability of those same communities, gutting them of collective or cooperative potential in the absence of the party-state. In this way, the Maoist metanarrative – Mao’s total history – was a logical development of May Fourth-New Culture narratives of deinscription. Following on the corpus of revolutionary memory of the recent past, Mao’s social prototypes at Yan’an could lock into place as self-evident truths. Ultimately, this chapter explores how Maoist discourse provided a constellation of signs through which people would navigate and reconfigure the social world up to and through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.