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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
In an age of mass politics, the imaginary projection of speaking in the people’s voice has been at the heart of left-wing intellectuals’ self-authorization as cultural and political vanguards who not only speak about and to the masses, but also speak for it, in its place and in its name. The radical imagination of the entanglement of the popular voice and the first-person voice has fascinated revolutionary poets not only in China but also across the globe. Focusing on early poems of Ai Qing, this paper tackles the paradox of voicing/silencing that lurks at the heart of modern intellectuals’ imaginings of popular voice.
I argue that while most of Ai Qing’s leftist contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s were preoccupied with producing literary works as a means of political mobilization and discovering how best the voices in their writings might reach the masses, Ai Qing found himself fascinated with a different problem: that of the multi-voiced self that hears itself speaking. In his early poems, Ai Qing’s imagination dwells on a poetic self that is astounded by the voices rushing out from its own vocal apparatus. Thereby, he at once resorts to and poignantly questions the intellectual fantasy of speaking in the people’s voice. This paper studies the figure of a multi-voiced self in Ai Qing’s early poems and examines the fleeting moments in his work when the poet problematizes the taken-for-granted, unmediated invocation of popular voice and dramatizes the uncanniness of immediacy and transparency.
Tie Xiao
Indiana University Bloomington