Cultural Revolution memoirs written and read in English: Image formation, reception and counternarrative

Cultural Revolution Memoirs Written and Read in English: Image Formation, Reception and Counternarrative, analyzes the significant roles a particular genre---Cultural Revolution memoirs written by Chinese immigrants or expatriates in the English language---played in the imagination and historical representation of post-1949 China. These memoirs recount personal or family members' ordeals in the Cultural Revolution, their struggle to escape to the West, and often conclude with expressions of appreciation of the newly found freedom in their adopted land. In addition, these memoirs frequently link the Cultural Revolution era with post-Mao political developments such as the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and the crackdown on the Falun Gong.;My thesis argues that the popular Cultural Revolution memoirs successfully create a dark age narrative by creating gripping and sometimes dramatized accounts of the political persecutions and oppressions of the Cultural Revolution period. This portrayal of the period plays into the anti-communist sentiments and social forces. In addition, it feeds into the existing stereotypical images of Communist and Orientalistic China. In turn, its conceivable political message, in combination with the genre's literary appeals, generates favorable reception in the West. In doing so, the Cultural Revolution memoirs not only negate the Decade of Chaos itself, but also serve as a challenging voice to the legitimacy of the Communist rule in the entire post-1949 era.;The dissertation also analyzes several alternative memoirs that aim to complicate and complement the dominant imageries of the Cultural Revolution era. Largely created as a response to the presumed deficiencies of the popular Cultural Revolution memoirs, these counternarratives give more attention to the areas that are largely neglected in the popular memoirs such as undisrupted daily lives, the apolitical populations and the positive political initiatives and changes coming out of the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. However, published by academic presses, these alternative memoirs have received little notice from the general public.