Centenarian memoirs and vernacular history

Abstract

This article examines centenarian memoirs as a popular cultural phenomenon and through it the promises of post-reform vernacular history. The argument posits that these memoirs are a genre that has been commercially successful through their transformation of self and historical narratives in the People's Republic of China, in particular, the transformation of these memoirs from vestiges of state-cultivated intellectual confessions to vernacular cultural memories in the popular print market. Focusing on celebrated centenary memoir writers centring on Yang Jiang, the study develops Chen Sihe's conception of the vernacular, emphasising its shifting intersection with the political-institutional and the intellectual elite. The popular historiography emerging from these trans-generational memory "fevers" reveals vanishing modern Chinese intellectual values percolating through the vernacular ethos in the cultural industries of the early twenty-first century. The vernacular has been the post-reform locus for contesting and retaining critical intellectual traditions.