By taking seriously the transnational impact of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung—a multilingual, pocket-sized publication that functioned as both inspiration and instruction to many a social movement and revolutionary insurrection around the world in the turbulent 1960s and beyond, Alexander Cook and his collaborators in this volume make a valuable contribution far beyond the field of Chinese studies. They remind us of radically different political imaginaries and demonstrate the need to account for their critical relevance in any meaningful narrative of the twentieth century. Presenting many fascinating episodes, unexpected intersections, and promising research, the fifteen chapters in the book are a rewarding read, even as they underscore the challenges of constructing a global history about or around one particular object. In the end, readers will realize the book deals with much more than Mao's Little Red Book (now little read too), and most of the chapters delve into uneven local histories that are yet to be reconnected or rethought conceptually.
As editor of the volume, Cook makes an eloquent case for the project. The “mass production, global circulation, and multifarious appropriation in multiple historical contexts” of the Little Red Book, he writes, “produced meanings that cannot be exhausted from any single perspective,” a situation that calls for and justifies collaborative efforts (p. xiv). Such collaboration necessarily entails a diversity of perspectives, given the differences in contributors’ ethnicity, experience, political sympathies, and disciplinary backgrounds that Cook notes. Yet how such subjective diversity in the present may either illuminate or overshadow the complex events and aspirations of the past remains a less than fully addressed methodological question, which, incidentally, is far from unique to this particular conference volume.
For instance, between a China historian's account of the emergence and spread of the Little Red Book in 1960s China and an American studies professor's tracing of the impact of Mao's writings on Afro-Asian radicalism in the United States from the late 1960s into the 1970s, we traverse much more than distinct political histories and sentiments. We also witness markedly divergent scholarly interests and investments. (I find Bill Mullen's telling of interactions between activists influenced by Mao and the rise of Black studies and Asian American studies in academe revealing on many levels.) A similar tension in approaches lies between a political scientist's assessment of the doomed tactics of the Maoist Shining Path in Peru and a cultural historian's extensive documentation of Soviet Russians’ (racially tinged) disgust with the Chinese Red Guards.
Cook is certainly right in reminding us that “[e]ach chapter may be read profitably on its own, but the value of each increases as it is read in conjunction with the others” (p. xv). What a reader appreciates in moving from chapter to chapter, however, may be the impossibility of assembling an overarching story, even, or especially, a narratable history of the Little Red Book in China and around the world. Indeed, the Little Red Book stands for many things in this volume and points to different narratives. It is frequently described as a highly charged and yet concrete artifact, a “textual flag” (Mullen) or “badge book” (Quinn Slobodian) that many groups passionately waved and wielded for many purposes. The mass production and systematic dissemination of this bright red, vinyl-covered book, its uses and abuses, lead to some microscopic case studies of the Cultural Revolution on the one hand, and to reflections on Chinese political culture in the mid-twentieth century on the other.
Once circulated beyond China, however, the book became “subject to the vicissitudes of ‘traveling theory’” (p. 225) and acquired broader (if also less peculiar) meanings. It turned into not only a primer on Maoism as a philosophical discourse, but also a handbook for youthful rebellion and revolutionary action in Europe. More often than not, it crystalized the Chinese Revolution as a viable model for transforming agrarian and underdeveloped Third World nations, while at the same time exacerbating tensions, geopolitical as well as ideological, among existing socialist countries. It is interesting to learn in this context that Mao was recorded as telling an Albanian delegation in 1967 that he regarded the packaged quotations as “worthless,” and that the Chinese experience should not be taken as universally applicable (p. 166).
As Mullen reminds us, the Little Red Book should be understood as a metonymy for various processes (p. 263). The real object of the proposed global history, therefore, ought to be the relationship and interaction among such uneven and disparate processes or movements. The ingenuity of the current volume lies in identifying an effective thematic thread and organizational device. It allows the volume to succeed in debunking claims of any facile global history, but, in my view, a refreshing and cogent commentary on key dimensions of the twentieth century is yet to emerge from the series of diverse case studies collected here. In trying to reach this objective, we cannot afford to equate the Little Red Book to Mao or the Chinese Revolution. Nor should we refrain from updating its dated, quaint, and (for many readers) translated expressions and nomenclature, so as to prevent a rich historical moment from sounding outlandish, ridiculous, and hopelessly irrelevant. This exercise in (re)translation may be particularly helpful when it comes to making sense of the Cultural Revolution and its global reverberations.
