Inactualités de la révolution néolithique

Abstract

In the last three decades, public parks in urban China have been appropriated as significant gathering places by retirees engaging in various collective activities, “for fun” ( wan’r or ziyu zile). This emphasis on playfulness deserves particular attention, especially in the context of activities devoted to the singing of propaganda songs from the Mao era. While these performances have been read as forms of political expression in recent academic works, such interpretations overlook what the ludic reframing of revolutionary singing does to the very literal, ideological meanings on which they rely. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2011 and 2014, this article highlights how the ludic frame produces a relation of non-coincidence between the nature of discourses and the aesthetics pleasures of performance as specific contexts of experience and forms of sociality. I discuss how the possibility of re-presenting without necessarily representing shapes the ways in which those who lived through the Mao era relate to that very past that these songs index.

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