Chapter 5 examines Ottoman ideological reactions to Sudanese Mahdism, discussing how the movement differed from other Mahdi proclamations that the Ottomans only saw as uprisings and responded to them merely as political challenges. I argue that the printing press, which fell into the hands of Mahdists who looted it from the Ottoman–Egyptian government in Khartoum, saved the Mahdi rebellion from just being an uprising and allowed it to survive through the ideas of the self-proclaimed Mahdi after his death. The letters, sermons and creeds of the Mahdi were printed and disseminated quickly to distant lands. Also, the Ottoman ideological reaction was voiced through the printing press in the form of pamphlets declaring the illegitimacy of the Mahdi’s claims. Regarding the globalization of the Mahdi movement, I examine telegraphed reports that spread Mahdist ideas as far abroad as America and India. Also, I claim that the telegraph made it possible for Ottoman rulers to learn about Mahdi claims in every corner of the empire, and they were recorded in the capital city. This created an “age of the Mahdis”, which is a reference to the numerous Mahdi proclamations in this period.

How should we measure the time of a Maoist campaign? What is the legacy for its authors and for China today? This concluding chapter reviews the major themes of the book. It also explores the tensions between linear and circular conceptions of time, how they shaped the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns, and what this watershed period in modern Chinese history can tell us about the agency of the writer in contemporary China and the role of literary circulation in the perpetual reimagining and rewriting of the Chinese state.

Can individual writers change the national climate? Following Mao’s comments on the “poetry case,” Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe took divergent paths in dealing with the local literary establishment and finally with the shift from Hundred Flowers to Anti-Rightist campaign. Their strategies in response to the unfolding campaigns reveal that the year 1957 marked a critical transformation in the way Chinese writers perceived the relationship between their own use of language and the social reality of which, and into which, they wrote. The “poetry case” also taught Mao and the Party leadership that a liberal policy toward literary production and loosened censorship did spur creativity but fostered the growth of linguistic and social networks that they could neither mediate nor compete with in kind.

The final chapter looks at how Sino-North Korean relations changed after the Cold War. Both sides continued to find the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship useful even as they went in very different political and cultural directions during the 1970s and 1980s.

Images played a seminal role in constructing the new Counter-Reformation notions of sanctity, and the increasing regulation of sacred art, and of saints’ images in particular, impacted the development of the visual culture of sanctity in a distinct way. This chapter demonstrates that even as artists had to negotiate changing sets of religious and artistic norms in order to create visual proposals for sacred subjects that would also conform to new Tridentine regulations, they also created alternative visual forms for representing aspiring sanctity.

In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

The introduction focuses on the transformations of the age of steam and print. Modern technology brought unprecedented change, reshaping both human interaction with nature and the function of art and craftsmanship. The shift from agrarian life to the industrial age created a radically new world that demands careful attention. The most visible changes appeared in transportation and communication, where journeys once lasting months could now be completed in days, and news circulated within minutes. This revolution enabled rapid movement of people, ideas, and information, profoundly altering knowledge and perception. Although connections among different regions existed earlier, the nineteenth century introduced extraordinary speed and continuity, turning isolated settlements into globally interconnected spaces. Steamships, railways, telegraphs, and the printing press were the key instruments of this transformation. The circulation of newspapers and printed works fostered unprecedented awareness of distant lands and gave rise to new concepts such as the “Islamic world” or âlem-i Islam in Ottoman literature. These inventions not only expanded imagination and ideologies like Pan-Islamism but also reshaped the Ottoman outlook.

Chapter 7 covers the Ottoman political measures implemented with regard to the published works of the two movements. After discussing the censorship policies of the state, which were used in all the provinces, I explore the role of the ulema in terms of censorship policies through the biographical details of scholars based in Istanbul. The selected cases demonstrate that the published works of peripheral ulema were swiftly echoed in the centre and that the central ulema not only censored works spreading “dangerous” ideas but also directly refuted the thoughts of peripheral scholars. In this chapter, I emphasize the fact that censorship was a political means of curbing the circulation of ideas via printed books by providing details from Wahhabi and Mahdist publications. This chapter shows how the Ottomans actively tried to stop “pernicious” publications from entering Ottoman lands and limit their spread in the territories through telegraphed orders sent from the centre to all the provinces.

Where did these flowers come from? They have been traced back to the poet Allen Ginsberg and his November 1965 call for “Masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to be arranged at the frontline of protests. But ten years earlier, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the power of flowers had already been put to work. In fact, it was the potency of the flower in China, its ability to do things, to move, and to move people, that not only foreshadowed but had helped inspire Ginsberg and his movement. And it was Mao, not Ginsberg, who Hoffman cited in the last sentence of the quote above. In China, in the years 1954–58, floral arrangements, motifs, illustrations, fashion, and even architectural decoration, were to be found in virtually every sphere and level of society. Flowers decorated the stage as Chairman Mao spoke to the political elite; they appeared not only in newspaper headlines, in the decorative illustrations of magazines and journals, in cartoons, in song, and in poetic paeans to the young nation, but also in private diaries and letters and in poetry and big-character posters (dazibao 大字報) expressing dissent and anger. Where did these flowers come from?

What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.

The Hundred Flowers movement marked a turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China. How did it begin? While Mao has been credited with sole authorship of the Hundred Flowers, this chapter exposes the plural and deep roots of the blooming of 1957. It traces the gradual coalescing of the political and literary fields, as “let a hundred flowers bloom” spread from a nineteenth-century novel to a twentieth-century campaign slogan. From 1949 to 1956, before they were Mao’s, the Hundred Flowers were captured and appropriated by a growing field of writers, philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians. In the process, a literary trope became a central term in political discourse and political discourse became a field of creative play. This chapter argues that practices of literary circulation shaped and powered the birth and transformation of the Hundred Flowers.