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10 - What Gets Left Behind: History, Memory, and Image

from Seeds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2025

Dayton Lekner
Affiliation:
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
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Summary

What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.

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