Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History

This dissertation charts the path by which an idealized understanding of the Soviet Union aided the transformation of Marxism from a counter-hegemonic to a hegemonic discourse within China over the course of the four decades from the 1917 October Revolution until Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 “Secret Speech.” It probes previously unexamined commercial, political, and student presses, as well as organizational records, to detail ways by which the “image” of the Soviet Union was employed by separate groups to critique domestic political forces during China's Republican era (1912-49), challenge capitalism and international imperialism, and secure popular support during the early years of the People's Republic (1949-). Such inquiry sheds light on the conflicting ways in which Chinese imagined themselves and their world, and reveals an alternative conception of modernity that promised to bridge “East” and “West.” Chapters One, Two, and Four through Six provide a chronological reading of the “Soviet Union” in Shanghai and Beijing presses. As China experienced the consecutive pangs of revolutionary upheaval, state consolidation, foreign invasion, and civil war, the “meaning” of the Soviet Union also changed. Activists in the 1920s viewed the October Revolution as the opening salvo of a growing international movement against all forms of oppression. Over the following decades, however, “modernization” eclipsed “internationalism” as the USSR's chief selling point. The Soviet Union came to be portrayed as an industrialized nation with high rates of economic growth, able to provide for its citizens, and withstand foreign aggression. By depicting New China as the “younger brother” of the modern USSR, the Chinese Communist Party upon taking power implied that it would be able to replicate Soviet successes domestically. Chapters Three, Seven, and Eight examine organizations that defined their respective eras: the proletarian women's movement of the 1920s, and Shangh (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Reed (Advisor); Ying Zhang (Committee Member); David Hoffmann (Committee Member); Judy Wu (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; History; Mass Media; Modern History; Political Science; Russian History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, History of Art

Russian Constructivist artists rejected the “elitist” medium of painting and instead set about redesigning the objects of everyday life under socialism in a devastated and “closed” economy. This dissertation expands the conventional art historical narrative by arguing that Constructivism adapted, rather than failed, in the 1920s. In so doing, I identify an alternative Constructivist strain that developed a tactic of recycling and re-appropriation in response to factory shortages and lack of raw materials. I examine how the former Imperial era's debris became both the physical and ideological building material for its class enemies' society, and the repository of lost Constructivist ideals. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, I show how his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”— illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and Russian artists on the margins that deployed a wide range of clever “make-do” tactics. I show how specific examples of existing porcelain “blanks,” clothing, film footage, and architecture from the newly requisitioned “collective stock” underwent transformation. For example, at Paris's glamorous international exposition of industrial and decorative arts in 1925, a former Russian dressmaker to the Imperial Court received a grand prize for a flapper dress sewn from household table linens. Similarly, while the Soviets had to import Western “capitalist” films to compensate for the shortage of raw film stock in the 1920s, filmmaker Esfir Shub recycled Imperial-era film footage, creating Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, a masterpiece of Soviet propaganda and first feature-length compilation film. St. Petersburg's Winter Palace, a symbol of Imperial rule and splendor, became a shifting stage for performance, government offices, a museum of the revolution, film set, and at the end of the 1920s, auction house. Similarly, leftover Imperial porcelain dishes, with marks from three previous tsars on t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Myroslava M. Mudrak (Advisor); J. Ronald Green (Committee Member); Aron Vinegar (Committee Member); Patricia A. Cunningham (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Economic History; Film Studies; Russian History; Slavic Studies; Theater