Edwin Michielsen - Celebrating the Proletariat: May Day Strikes and Syntheses of Solidarity
Channel: Nathan Hill
Date: 05/03/2022

Edwin Michielsen (University of Toronto) - Celebrating the Proletariat: May Day Strikes and Syntheses of Solidarity
Friday 4 March 2022, 12-1pm

In the talk, I present my doctoral research that examines the theories and practices of proletarian international solidarity during the 1920s and 1930s in East Asia. Locating its arguments in concurrent proletarian theories of labor, linguistics, gender, and war as well as literary and art criticism, my dissertation argues that such theoretico-practical manifestations of solidarity did not merely follow a party and union allegiance based on unidirectional and monolithic forms of organization, but were assembled in constant-changing and multi-directional alliances.

To Illustrate the above, I will discuss praxes of assembling solidarity found in the intermedial cultural and literary production surrounding May Day, the International Workers’ Day. Celebrating the intimate relationships between political struggles through mass strikes and demonstrations against imperial capitalist oppression worldwide, proletarian writers and artists aimed to weave together innumerable spatial experiences into cohesive proletarian spacetimes. Proletarian artists stitched spatial gaps between proletarian sites of resistance through photographic collages and filmic montages, while simultaneously historicizing and critiquing the production of unevenness among these sites. May Day photographs, films, plays, and songs created through juxtaposition and adjacency a pastiche of proletarian resistance and struggles, synthesizing parts of social and material realities aimed to exceed the realm of artistic production by exercising among participants a mental perception and constitution of an interconnected and multifaceted world. Such attempts also found voice in literary practices. Murayama Tomoyoshi’s play Shōri no kiroku (Record of Victory, 1931) presents a narrative showing how proletarians in Shanghai try to form alliances for the celebration of May Day to overcome divisions in their resistance against imperial capitalism while situating their local struggles within the context of proletarian struggles worldwide.

Edwin Michielsen received his BA and MA in Japanese Studies from Leiden University and his PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2021. His dissertation “Assembling Solidarity: Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia” examines a literary and cultural history of proletarian arts across East Asia during the 1920s and 1930s and their investment in international solidarity. He is currently a course instructor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses in East Asian literature and history.