Guest Editor's Introduction: Proletarian Arts in East Asia

Abstract

The proletarian arts movement was an international politico-arts movement that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Like other modernist movements, the proletarian arts movement sought to redefine the form and function of literature and art; and like other modernist movements, it held that capitalism was fundamentally changing the ways that people related to each other and to the world in which they lived. But, in contrast, the proletarian arts movement -no matter how much writers disagreed over the details -held that class-based struggle was necessary because capital was controlled by the few at the expense of the many. The essays in this volume remind us of the anguish and optimism that made proletarianism seem not only possible but crucial. As the important Korean literary critic Yoon-shik Kim writes in his essay in this volume, "Literature was no longer to be a sentimental pastime, positions 14:2 positions 14:2 Fall 2006 252 but an active participant in the development of society and the unfolding of history."Despite the awkwardness of the term to some ears today, self-titled "proletarian" organizations existed throughout the world during the first part of the twentieth century. 1 Michael Denning writes: "The turning point was the world upheaval of 1917 -1921. In the wake of the European slaughter, regimes and empires were challenged: there were revolutions in Czarist Russia and Mexico, brief lived socialist republics in Germany, Hungary and Persia, uprisings against colonialism in Ireland, India, and China, and massive strike waves and factory occupations in Japan, Italy, Spain, Chile, Brazil and the United States." 2 The boom in proletarian literature of the late 1920s and 1930s had been put into motion a decade earlier by tremendous social change and by the organizations formed to deal with that change. As Denning writes: