Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Maoist Performance Culture in Beijing’s Public Parks
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- ISBN 9789463725392
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
- Publication City/Country: NL
- Product Form: Hardback
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Over the past thirty years, China's public parks have been turned into stages for amateur performances of socialist anthems by self-organized retirees who lived through the Mao era (1949-1976).
Challenging previous interpretations in terms of political expression or nostalgia, Casual Assemblies explores the seeming paradox of displaying political messages in the heart of the capital city while framing these gatherings as fun or self-entertainment – merely wan’r, in the language of parkgoers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, this book takes these claims to non-seriousness seriously. For at stake in these gatherings is the possibility of being non-literal and reclaiming the sensuous pleasures of performing old tunes from “politics” (zhengzhi). This book theorizes casualness as a mode of engagement predicated upon the irrelevance of the correspondence between action and referential meaning. Through the making-casual of a cultural form once supposed to produce revolutionary commitment, parkgoers enact new experiences of being-in-public, togetherness, and shifting relationships to the Maoist past.
This book will be of value to readers with a keen interest in China, scholars and students in anthropology and Asian Studies, as well as travelers who have witnessed these phenomena firsthand.
Dr. Lisa Richaud is currently Research Fellow at the Paris Institute for
Advanced Study, and will join KU Leuven as Assistant Professor in
Anthropology. Her latest articles can be found in Ethos and HAU: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory, where she edited a special section on the politics
of negative affects in post-Reform China. She is also a former fellow of
the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden) and the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research.
