Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Propaganda
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Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge - The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult (Paperback)
Loot Price: R895
Discovery Miles 8 950
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Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge - The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult (Paperback)
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Total price: R915
Discovery Miles: 9 150
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"Strangely moving. . . . While in China, Schrift] discovered a
subculture of people who collected buttons bearing portraits of the
Great Helmsman: thousands of varieties had been manufactured from
the Cultural Revolution, when they served as one of the few
permitted forms of personal adornment or aesthetic display. . . . I
found reading the book a surprisingly emotional
experience."-Newsday; Newsday Long Island "A wonderfully rich and
riveting account, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge represents an
important contribution to our understanding of the Cultural
Revolution and its place in Chinese culture. Schrift provides an
informative examination of the Mao cult's recent transformation
into its present form of pop cultural campiness." -William
Jankowiak, author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City
"An excellent study of symbolism and factionalism in Maoist China.
Schrift shows how mundane objects were transformed into sacred
icons of revolutionary ideology. This book offers new insights into
the dynamics of the Cultural Revolution."- J. L. Watson, author of
Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia With the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, the regime of Chairman Mao
Zedong launched a propaganda campaign aimed at disseminating
inspiring images of the chairman to a skeptical populace. Thus was
born the "Mao badge," a political icon in the form of a pin that
was widely distributed to create, sustain, and inflate the Mao
personality cult during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Scholars estimate that over two billion Mao badges, featuring over
fifty thousand different designs and themes, were produced. As
China now enters an era in which people can more openly express
their views about the Cultural Revolution, these icons have taken
on new meanings, and people are wearing and talking about them in
subversive ways. Melissa Schrift suggests that the badges developed
"lives" that far surpass the intentions of their creators, as the
Chinese ironically commodified them, both during the Cultural
Revolution and today. During the Mao years, people wore the objects
to symbolize their unquestioned loyalty to Mao. Yet even then many
Chinese subverted the badges' symbolic meaning. Using them in
socially approved rituals, they gained a measure of political
credibility that masked their practice of prohibited customary
rites. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge is a work of cultural
history that contributes to our understanding not only of Chinese
society but, more generally, of strategies people employ in
responding to and transforming the meaning of propaganda campaigns
and symbols. Melissa Schrift is an assistant professor of
anthropology and sociology at Marquette University.
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