| My dissertation examines the ways in which "everyday life" was conceptualized by prominent leftist intellectuals and culture workers in their quest to define a democratic present and future from the 1919 May Fourth Movement to the Japanese invasion in 1937. Drawing upon archival collections of journals and magazines in China and the United States, I investigate how radical leftists, who were not directly affiliated with the Communist Party but who espoused leftist democratic sympathies, thought about everyday life in ways that distinctly differed from the thinking of the Marxist-Communist and the Nationalist Party activists who dominated China's interwar political scene. My study situates the relationship of everyday life and radical leftism as it emerged during the interwar period in a transnational arena by calling attention to the concurrent political configurations of "everyday life" and "the masses" in Euro-America and Japan. Ultimately, my study challenges prevailing interpretations of intellectual concern for everyday life in 1920s/30s China by demonstrating how its significance to Chinese leftists as an important local form of politics and activism informed their struggles against global fascism, imperialism, and for a democratic future of human emancipation.;This intellectual-cultural history project not only considers the writings of well-known leftist activists, but also those of anonymous Chinese citizens who analyzed and mobilized against exploitation, fascism, state-party domination and the impending Japanese invasion. My dissertation begins by assessing how these figures emphasized the importance of everyday life to overcoming feudal-, imperialist-, and capitalist-imposed structural impediments to the realization of a democratic polity. Diaries, short stories, and visual works such as cartoons, woodcut print, and photographs by ordinary Chinese compiled in the 1936 project "China's One Day" form the basis of chapter one. I evaluate how systematic, locally-organized social movements to transform everyday life sought to foster a simultaneously global and national project of mass revolution against imperialism, fascism, and patriarchy. I further draw upon previously-neglected publications to show how radical democratic values--equality, human rights, freedom and mass politics--became the foundation of leftwing emancipatory activism and the basis of mobilizing the masses for a non-party democratic form of politics. |
