ABSTRACT
If Maoist propaganda culture provides parkgoers with a material and a framework for togetherness, its reframing as “wan’r” reveals their creative intervention in (re)inventing modes of relations that accommodate plurality and distance. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, parkgoers routinely (re)create the possibility for emotional intimacy through collective singing, across former lines of class and despite potentially unresolved tensions. If this allows members of the generations who lived through that past to be “in one piece,” the potential for reparation mainly lies in the casualness of these forms of sociality, where the modes of bonding remain open-ended. If singing together is a product of a Maoist “regime of the ‘we’,” it also contradicts the latter by unthematizing joint action.
