Exhibiting the Past

Kirk A. Denton is professor of Chinese studies at The Ohio State University, USA.

出版者:University of Hawaii Press

作者:Kirk A. Denton

页数:360

出版时间:2013-12-31

价格:USD 59.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780824836870

图书标签:文化研究海外中国研究近代史历史记忆历史博物馆中国研究museum

During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present.

In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

用户评价

观点不是太有新意

关注点在于进入市场经济后中国博物馆叙事方式发生的变化，研究的对象很全面，尤其是对以改陈前后叙事方式的对比的关注。最初的各类展览都是受到国外尤其是苏联的影响，改革开放后展览叙述不仅受到政治因素的影响，同时也受到市场的影响。与同类型的书相比考虑了观众的主动性的层面，但是考虑的还是不太充分。

关注点在于进入市场经济后中国博物馆叙事方式发生的变化，研究的对象很全面，尤其是对以改陈前后叙事方式的对比的关注。最初的各类展览都是受到国外尤其是苏联的影响，改革开放后展览叙述不仅受到政治因素的影响，同时也受到市场的影响。与同类型的书相比考虑了观众的主动性的层面，但是考虑的还是不太充分。

could have been done much better

关注点在于进入市场经济后中国博物馆叙事方式发生的变化，研究的对象很全面，尤其是对以改陈前后叙事方式的对比的关注。最初的各类展览都是受到国外尤其是苏联的影响，改革开放后展览叙述不仅受到政治因素的影响，同时也受到市场的影响。与同类型的书相比考虑了观众的主动性的层面，但是考虑的还是不太充分。