New Socialist Realisms
New Socialist Realisms
This chapter considers the legacies of socialism in realist genres and political visions. It explores the relationships between official and unofficial visual cultures by tracing the links between three contemporary genres of realism—art test prep realism, avant-garde realism, and official/academic realism. Following on from the work of scholars who have argued for the persistence of socialist ethics in postreform China, this chapter shows how all three genres represent icons of the working classes and express a postsocialist form of class recognition and an ethics of inequality. Here, the transition from moving bodies to passive faces reveals a shift in models of history, from Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to Deng–Jiang–Hu's developmentalist socialism—models of history in which labor and the role of the worker have profound (and profoundly different) significance.
Keywords: realist genres, political visions, visual cultures, realism, art test prep realism, avant-garde realism, socialism, working classes, class recognition
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