Iconic Mao – A Biography in Images

CSC International Research Webinars: This study of Mao Zedong focuses on one hyper-visible protagonist of the twentieth century – master choreographer of his image – to ask how this flesh-and-blood man has been transformed into a globally recognizable “bio-icon”.

The book argues that looking at – rather than through – images (literary, visual, musical, filmic etc.) can fundamentally alter the trajectory and indeed the terms of a historian’s work: images are constitutive rather than merely reflective of the histories that produce them. By showing how images of Mao have been read in different times and by different people in China and beyond, I am able to draw connections between his (visible) imaged body, picture power and its (invisible) emotional, experiential, sensual effects on the personal, national and global scale.

At a moment when histories of global or transcultural Mao-ism are just beginning to appear, I am taking these as my point of departure, trying to understand how Mao (and others) invested his body and performative gestures with special symbolic meaning, how his charismatic image was manufactured and how it plays out, successfully, in his own constituency and elsewhere.

This talk will make visible some of the lasting shapes that Mao has assumed in the memory cultures of the present, and illustrate how his iconic image has affected and animated others, as reflections of how his ideas have been understood and applied. In reading his images intertextually, as visual biographies, so to speak, I am probing into how he is remembered and enshrined, or, put differently, how he lives on in people’s minds.

About the speaker

Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at CATS, the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University which she helped co-found in 2019. She has spent time as fellow/visiting professor in Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, at Harvard, Stanford and, most recently, the EHESS in Paris. Her research focuses on the politics of cultural production in (greater) China covering a range of topics from music to visual and historical print media in China’s long modernity.

Among her book-length publications are Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China since 1949 (Harrassowitz 1997); A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in China’s News-Media, 1872-1912 (Harvard University Press, 2004); A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Why China Did Not Have a Renaissance and Why That Matters – An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (de Gruyter 2018), co-authored with Renaissance historian Thomas Maissen. She has recently concluded a book-length study on women’s magazines, Portrait(s) of a Trope: Making New Women and New Men in Chinese Women’s Magazines, 1898-2018, and is currently working on a study on music: “And there is only one Lang Lang…” – Chinese Musicians on the Global Stage: a Transcultural Perspective as well as her visual biography of Mao, The Art of Reading Mao: The Making of a Global Icon.

Image credit: "Flying dragon"(2012). Courtesy of Li Tianyuan.

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