Red Art in 1950s Southeast Asia: Locating the National in the International

The 1950s witnessed the height of "red art" throughout late colonial Southeast Asia. Writers and intellectuals across Southeast Asia, from Malaya to the Philippines, experimented with socialist realism, re-reevaluated the politics of culture and the role of literature in society, and incorporated left-wing ideology and aesthetics into their art. This was a decade of proletarian literary movements: the Angkatan Sasterawan 50 in Malaya and Singapore, LEKRA in Indonesia, and the Writers' League in the Philippines. This paper seeks to locate the internationalism of Southeast Asian red art within specific national contexts, by tracing the circulation, translation and influence in Southeast Asia of several Chinese proletarian texts and manifestos on art and society, including those by Mao Dun and Zhao Yang. How did proletarian literature reach Southeast Asia, how was it adapted and refashioned to local agendas, and what new visions of the nation did it engender? Despite its international orientations, Southeast Asian red art was beholden to nationalist imaginings, and ultimately, suffered a national fate. Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, it would be shut down by conservative national concerns, as Communist and left-wing movements were, by the 1960s, systematically and often violently eradicated.