On 9 October 2024 at 11:00 - 12:30, ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen will deliver a talk titled “Of Eyebrows, Moustaches and Revolutionary Spirit” as part of the Sociology Seminar Lecture Series at the School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh. The talk will be held at the Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building and online.

To register for the hybrid in-person and online talk, please book your space via Eventbrite.

Abstract:

Lu Xun is seen as the founding father of modern Chinese literature; thanks to the propagandistic efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, he was posthumously framed as a revolutionary fighter wielding his pen for the sake of the nation, and the revolution. This (re-)framing rested on political speeches appropriating the famous intellectual, on depictions of the author on propaganda posters, as well as on adaptations of his person and his works into Chinese comics (lianhuanhua连环画). In my presentation, I will sketch this process and argue that comics, as a medium combining text and image, were particularly well suited to this end, quite literally framing Lu Xun and his works from different viewpoints. As adaptations, lianhuanhua represent distinct readings of famous literary works – and as a genre of “pulp fiction”, they reached massive audiences, thus impacting how large parts of the Chinese population would read Lu Xun. I will show how lianhuanhua had their part in the styling of Lu Xun into a devoted revolutionary. Yet, time and again, lianhuanhua moved beyond the narrow reading of the CCP’s Luxunology, thus demonstrating that as a genre it is particularly well-suited to move beyond the narrow frames of official ideology, and that the texts of Lu Xun themselves defy easy readings and appropriations through Party ideology. Core to this are the ambivalences inscribed into the texts of Lu Xun, as well as the depictions of his eyebrows and moustache.