Denise Y. Ho. Curating the Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China; Jie Li. Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Denise Y. Ho’s Curating Revolution and Jie Li’s Utopian Ruins provide a complementary pair of studies taking the reader through museums and exhibitionary culture in the Mao years (Ho) and of those years in the post-Mao era (Li). Individually, they are each a fine study—focused, richly documented, and explicitly engaged with earlier Chinese studies and a rich array of comparative studies, particularly of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Together they highlight the contributions of a younger generation of modern China scholars working in North America, reflecting the “grassroots” turn in recent historiography. Both bring to life the living materiality of museums, exhibitions, and objects—objects from workers or capitalists in the Mao period and documentary film exhibits of archival and personal records and physical ruins exhibited since 2000. Scholars of museum culture will find these studies engaging and comparable. For China historians, these studies offer a challenge to the totalitarian image of China.
Source: The American Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhab600
Author: Timothy Cheek
Institution: University of British Columbia
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4206375154