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Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution

Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution

By (author) Alfreda Murck

£30.00

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  • An interesting case study on how symbols are constructed by politics, which explores Chairman Mao's Mangoes' reverberations throughout Chinese culture for years to come
  • Presents around fifty artefacts from the Alfreda Murck Collection at Museum Rietberg Zürich
  • Accompanies the exhibition Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich from February to May 2013
Full Description

In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao with a crate of mangoes. Apparently, Mao immediately sent the mangoes, a fruit unkown so far in China, as a gift to the”Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams” deployed into Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards and occupy the campus, with the implicit political message that workers were now made managers of education. The exotic fruit were then distributed over the following weeks to various factories. Thus the mangoes, perceived as coming from Chairman Mao, transformed from mere fruit into near-divine symbol. They were celebrated by the workers as tokens of Mao’s love and compassion and worshipped as a kind of religious relic. The Golden Mango powerfully symbolised the slogan “The working class must be the leaders in everything”, and soon appeared on all kinds of household products. The new book Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution illustrates how factory workers tried to preserve Chairman Mao’s precious gift, how the mango transformed into a religious symbol, and how the political spectacle of the 1968 National Day Parade featured the mango. Contents: Albert Lutz – Introduction Zheng Xiaowei – Narrative of the Incident
Wang Xiaoping – Golden Mangoes: Recollections of a Factory Worker Alfreda Murck – Designing a Spectacle: The National Day Parade of 1968
Carma Hinton – Golden Mangoes: Recollections of a Student
Alfreda Murck – Symbolism of Edibles in Chinese Literature and Painting Adam Y Chau – The 1976 Movie The Song of the Mango
Alonzo Emery – The Status of Workers Then and Now

About the Author

Alfreda Murck received her Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. She has been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 1978-91. She lives and works in Beijing as an independent scholar.

Specifications
Publisher
Scheidegger & Spiess
ISBN
9783858817327
Published
4th Mar 2013
Binding
Hardback
Territory
World excluding Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, United States, Canada, and Japan
Size
240 mm x 170 mm
Pages
248 Pages
Illustrations
100 color, 50 b&w
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