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READING 2
Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Resistance, Revolution, and
New Global Order/Disorder,” in In the Balance: Themes in Global History
(Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 840, 877-880.
Abstract: This essay explores the ways that popular forms were used in a
variety of contexts to resist imperialism or to promote revolutionary ideas.
From revolutionary literature in China to resistance literature in the AfroCaribbean world, it demonstrates the ways that literary styles were borrowed
and adapted to serve the cause of resistance. In addition, music and dance
forms frequently advocated change through words or movement, and
sometimes empowered people by mocking those in power.
When reggae music legend Bob Marley (1945–1981) sang “Get Up Stand Up,”
it was a call to arms. Reggae had become the anthem of resistance in Jamaica,
a former British colony where color, class, and capitalism churned in an
urban crucible of poverty and underdevelopment. The song’s lyrics rang true
for many people far from the Caribbean:
Get up, stand up,
Stand up for your rights,
Get up, stand up,
Don’t give up the fight.
In its Jamaican homeland, reggae was linked to the Rastafarian religion, an
African-derived philosophy that combined Christian biblical teachings with
beliefs rooted in the historical crowning of the last Ethiopian Emperor Haile
Selassie I (r. 1930–1974) as the living god of black people. Freedom songs
were “songs of redemption.” Emerging from Jamaican folk traditions and
embracing multiple musical styles from local and imported sources, reggae
music was also rooted in historical consciousness. Marley’s song “War” was
taken almost entirely from a speech by Haile Selassie. Other music sang of
histories silenced by those in power; through the lyrics in “Buffalo Soldier,”
about the forgotten African American soldiers who were freedom-fighters in
the United States, Marley reminded his listeners that “If you’d know your
history, then you would know where you’re coming from.”
Marley’s artistry attracted the attention of Jamaica’s political establishment,
who were forced to take seriously the poor, mostly black underclass on the
island. But reggae’s message transcended political and religious boundaries.
Bob Marley sang to the hopes and aspirations of the downtrodden and a new
generation of young people and revolutionaries searching for alternative
philosophies to challenge the status quo. He called for personal freedom
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through revolution. His songs hit the music charts in every part of the world
and came to be associated with the struggles for black political independence.
In 1980 Bob Marley was invited to Zimbabwe to perform at the African
nation’s independence ceremony. Although Marley died the next year, the
political authenticity of reggae music provided a model for revolution and
resistance beyond Jamaica in the 1970s.
Forms of Cultural Resistance and Revolution
Resistance remained a continuous thread in the fabric of European hegemony
and in the post colonial world. Colonial governments controlled not only
people but also language and history. The history of resistance to slavery,
colonialism, and imperialism was often not recorded and sometimes was
even silenced by those in power. If the responses of slaves and other
oppressed peoples were not always part of the official history, they often did
become part of rituals, oral traditions, and narrative fiction and film. Among
the most powerful weapons of resistance are what might be called the rituals
of rebellion. Forms of culture, including sports, music, dance, and the visual
arts, all help create the solidarity of nationalism, incite revolution, and
document the subtle, complex, and even unspeakable acts and events of the
human experience.
The Literary Revolution and Revolutionary literature in China
In twentieth-century China, literature became a tool of revolution that drew
on Western models and used these models to critique Chinese society. By the
late nineteenth century, Chinese translations of Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy,
Dickens, Cervantes, Ibsen, and other European authors began to appear, and
their form and content influenced young Chinese writers in the early
twentieth century.
Lu Xun
Lu Xun (1881–1936) was educated in the classical literary tradition but
exposed to Western ideas in China and later as a medical student in Japan.
There Lu Xun became deeply conscious of the weak Chinese response to
humiliation by Western powers, which led him to abandon medicine in favor
of writing. Lu Xun believed that the souls of China’s people needed “curing”
far more than their bodies and that the pen was more effective an instrument
than the scalpel. His most famous stories are “Diary of a Madman,” and “Our
Story of Ah Q,” both of which are deeply ironic portraits of Chinese culture in
the midst of rejecting its past and looking for its future. In “Diary of a
Madman,” the narrator suffers from severe paranoia, but it becomes evident
that the cannibalism he fears is a metaphor for the hypocrisy of Confucian
culture that has destroyed human lives as surely as if they had been eaten
alive. The character of Ah Q is a metaphor for the Chinese nation, which Lu
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Xun portrays as living in a fantasy of its own superiority even as it is
subjected to relentless degradation and humiliation.
Ba Jin (b. 1904) created his pseudonym from the first syllables of the names of
the two famous Russian anarchists, Bakunin and Kropotkin, as a symbol of
rebellion against his gentry family background. Like many other young
intellectuals of the May 4th era, he studied in France. His most famous novel,
drawn on his personal experience, is Family (1931). This novel presents the
conflicts between generations in a Chinese gentry family as the sons come of
age in a period of social and political upheaval. Age, gender, and class each
play a role in the oppression of people portrayed in this novel. Even the most
privileged characters, the sons in the family, are not free to follow their hearts
or minds but must be slaves to the dictates of Chinese family tradition. Some
rebel, but some do not.
Ding Ling
The most famous woman writer of early twentieth-century China was Ding
Ling (b. 1907). The vicissitudes of her career as a writer and her political
fortunes—for the two were closely linked—mirrored shifts in Communist
Party policies toward writers and the arts. She was influenced by European
literature, and her early stories, such as “Miss Sophie,” are shaped by
romanticism and individualism. She joined the Communist Party in 1931 after
her husband was executed by the Nationalists. But her independence caused
her to come into conflict with the Communist Party at Yan’an in 1942, the
year Mao Zedong made his famous speech on art and literature that he
defined the role of artists and writers as a fundamentally political one.
Writers and artists were exhorted to live among the people to absorb and
grasp the nature of society and only then create their works, which should
serve the interests of revolution.
Ding Ling’s novel Sun Shines over the Sang-kan River (1948) was a Stalin Prize
in 1951. It describes land reform in a way characteristic of socialist realism,
the Soviet-inspired literary theory that aims to realistically, but positively,
depict the lives of workers, peasants, and other building socialism. In the
mid-1950s Ding Ling became involved in the government-sponsored
Hundred Flowers Movement to elicit criticism of the Communist Party from
intellectuals, writers, and artists. When the government halted the campaign,
many of those who had dared to express criticism were attacked. Both Ding
Ling and her husband were accused of being “rightists” during the AntiRightist Campaign.
Literature largely stayed within Party-dictated confines until the relaxation of
the late 1970s and early 1980s. A “new realism” appeared in the works of
writers who published novellas and stories in that period. Many of these
writers were women, and many of the works dealt with the particularly
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difficult roles of women in the new society, where they were expected not only
to shoulder full work responsibility, like men, but also to conform to traditional
roles of responsibility for household work and child care. Marriage and family
were still the defining characteristics of women’s lives, more than a generation
after the revolution had declared them equal members of society and free from
the traditional constraints imposed by the old culture. Writers in the 1980s
explored previously forbidden topics, such as romantic love, earlier labeled
“bourgeois idealism” by the political authorities.
A distinctive new kind of literature arose during this period of
experimentation and liberalization. Called “reportage” (baogao wenxue), it was
a slightly fictionalized, cross between muckraking journalism and fiction. The
most well-known example of this genre is the work by Liu Binyan entitled
“People or Monsters?” This damning indictment of official corruption is
based on a real case that was typical of the abuse of position by Communist
Party members. Literature was a means of expressing resistance both to the
old society and to the oppressive power of the revolutionary state and its new
elite, the Communist Party members.
Literature and Resistance in the African-Caribbean World
In colonized parts of the worlds, such as Africa and the Caribbean, European
languages had initially represented an opportunity—through the use of a
common language—for solidarity and unity leading to independence, but
they also symbolized the continuing neocolonialism and cultural dependency
experienced even after independence. In Jamaica the writer Louis Bennett
brought street talk and African-derived patois along with oral storytelling
devices to literary heights, empowering a new generation of writers and
rappers.
Writing in the vernacular, the Jamaican poet Andrew Salkey (1929–1996) used
the African-derived spider folk hero Anancy to express outrage over a brutal
dictatorship in Guyana. Anancy takes on the garb of freedom-fighter and
works his magic in Salkey’s short book The One, by avenging the murder of
the Caribbean historian and political activist Walter Rodney (1942–1980).
On the African continent Ngugi wa’Thiongo reverted to writing in his first
language, Kikuyu, rather than the English language of the colonizer, because
he believed the language itself colonized the mind. By contrast, the Nigerian
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinke used not only the English language, but
particularly Shakespearean English, to ruminate on the twentieth-century
Yoruba experience in Death and the King’s Horseman, a book that few
Nigerians can buy or even read today because the Nigerian government
prohibits it.
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The African writer Frantz Fanon suggested that the literature of the former
colonial world first passes through a cultural nationalist phase that
romanticizes the precolonial past. The trend among African novelists in the
late twentieth century is away from romanticism and toward realism and
even surrealism (beyond or above realism) to describe their late–twentiethcentury worlds.
Resistance in Motion: Ritual and Dance
Dance and ritual, in parts of the world where they are integral parts of
cultural politics, have also played a significant role in resistance. In ritual and
in dance movements, bodies say what cannot be spoken. Responses to
colonial rule ranged from the successful armed rebellions to forms of cultural
resistance to active collaboration. African resistance to colonialism sometimes
took the subtle and complex path of mimicry.
The Hauka Movement of West Africa
Beginning about 1925 the Hauka movement of West Africa embodied colonial
resistance in the rituals and dances of spirit possession that European
colonizers were mocked. Members of dance troupes traveled around the
countryside of Niger proselytizing and spreading messages of derision and
rebellion. The dancers dressed like European soldiers and imitated their
colonial behaviors. By appropriating the European style and form of body
movement, Hauka members hoped to empower themselves in opposition to
the French administration of their territory.
Historical Memory and Dance
Today the bodies of dancers also speak of their own complex history through
the motions of samba, a singularly unique dance form that mixes
Amerindian, African, and European dances in Brazil. The samba’s threecount, between-the-beat, intricate movement of swaying hips and feet
resisting the contrary two/fourth beat became a metaphor that celebrates the
fusion of separate traditions. In Brazil, African (Kongolese) and Amerindian
(Cariri Indian) syncopation and rhythm work against the strong beat. A kind
of layering of movements allows one rhythm to resist and alternatively
silence the others in the syncretic samba form. After the abolition of slavery in
1888, though some written historical documents pertaining to slavery were
destroyed in attempts to eradicate a painful past, the stories have lived on in
such forms as the samba.
In twentieth-century Brazil and other parts of the African-Caribbean world,
the politics of resistance came to be performed as art and ritual just as they
had under slavery. Dance and other performance arts were resistance in
motion. The oppressed used religious expression to empower individuals,
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invert the social order, and sometimes even transform political identity.
Whether in the danced rituals and other ceremonies of the African-derived
religion known as candomble, the rituals and dance steps of carnival in
Trinidad, the Brazilian martial arts form called capoeira, or in samba, which
became the popular “national” dance of Brazil, elements of resistance and of
cultural expression survived as intertwined cultural memories.
Dance steps and musical instruments had multiple meanings in a history of
resistance. The Brazilian berimbau, a single-stringed bow with a resonating
gourd attached, was played as an instrument and according to one musician,
“in the hour of pain, it stops being an instrument and becomes a hand
weapon.” Candomble, a syncretic faith combining Catholic elements and
Yoruba deities, originated in the violent cultural encounters of the Atlantic
world. But it also emerged in the context of community and collective action.
As creative expression dance was not only relevant to resistance, it remained
at the core of historical identity. According to dance scholar Barbara
Browning, “the insistence of Brazilians to keep dancing is not a means of
forgetting but rather a perseverance, an unrelenting attempt to intellectualize,
theorize, understand a history and a present of social injustice difficult to
believe, let alone explain.”
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