Organizer and Chair: Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa
Discussants: Bin Yu, Wittenberg University; Rae Wang, Dickenson University; Wenjun Xing, The Dalton School; James L. Watson, Harvard University; Jun Jing, City University of New York; Mao Chen, Skidmore College
Chinese intellectuals who came of age during the Cultural Revolution have attempted to come to terms with the chaos and fury of those years in diverse ways. This round table brings together an eclectic group of scholars and writers to explore how members of this generation view and evaluate their Cultural Revolution experiences from the vantage point of the 1990s.
The participants-five Chinese and one American, whose backgrounds encompass an unusual range of experiences and expertise in the arts, journalism, business, the military, and academia-will reflect on the meaning of the Cultural Revolution in terms of modern day strategies for remembrance and sense making. They will consider attitudes ranging from rejection to nostalgia, approaches ranging from dispassionate intellectual analysis to entrepreneurial co optation, and modes of expression ranging from political activism to humor and "camp," often combined in ambiguous and ambivalent mixtures. On the basis of personal experience and observation as well as scholarly study, they will discuss how individuals have reinterpreted the period through memoir; grappled with its pervasive legacy in the course of academic research; employed its lessons in the worlds of business and politics and attempted to resurrect its atmosphere in quasi mythic form at "Cultural Revolution" restaurants.
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