The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

displays of nostalgia but also between the varied representations of memory in literature and film, on the one hand, and personal reflections in memoirs and autobiographies, on the other. These affairs of memory thus require a new interpretive frame for close examination.

A new interpretive frame is necessary because memories are always constructed retrospectively and because their manifestation is always mediated through language. Such memory works are imitative representations, mimeses, of the imprints and traces of the directly and/or indirectly lived experiences left in our conscious and unconscious minds. The main purpose of this study is to frame close readings of different representations of memory in fiction and nonfiction works about the Mao era so that these expressions can be understood as testimonies made outside officially sanctioned parameters. Current studies tend to take these political campaigns as ones purely driven by political ideas and policies. My approach, coming from the discipline of literary criticism, will examine these issues from a new lens, one that will be different from disciplines in the social sciences, such as political science and history.

As a humanist, I seek to understand the human cost behind these political campaigns. How would our understanding of the Mao era be affected if we were instead to identify the succession of political campaigns as one long string of persecutions and suppression of ordinary citizens—whether done in the name of land reform, ideology manipulation, economic expediency, or class struggle? How would our understanding of this long series of events change if we were to place this series of killings into the same category as the Nanking Massacre, the ethnic cleansing of the Tibetan and Uyghur peoples, the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, Stalin’s ethnic and national purges, the Khmer Rouge mass killings in Cambodia, and other twentieth-century genocides across the globe? Which methodologies from studies of other genocides can we use to study the Maoist political campaigns? And finally, what is at stake if we do not take this humanist approach? How else are we to understand the private memories of individual survivors and their