Revolutionary Alchemy: Shanghai's "January Revolution" Reinterpreted

A talk by Yiching Wu, Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History.

The "January Revolution" in Shanghai in early 1967 remains one of the most important events in the Cultural Revolution. It has often been portrayed as a defining moment that opened up an entirely new political horizon, in which the establishment of new forms of political organization became possible. Based on both existing and newly available materials, Professor Wu will seek to reconstruct the key sequence of events, and will argue that a different interpretation of the events in Shanghai is possible. Yiching Wu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and assistant professor in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture, he is interested in popular social movements, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and resistance. He is currently working on a manuscript on the popular transgressions and radicalization within the Chinese Cultural Revolution.