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Museums in China: Power, Politics, and Identities . TRACEY L-D LU . London and New York : Routledge , 2014. xvii + 235 pp. £85.00; $145.00. ISBN 978-0-415-82855-0
Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao . MARZIA VARUTTI . Woodbridge, UK : The Boydell Press , 2014. xi + 190 pp. £60.00. ISBN 978-1-84383-888-3
Book Reviews
The first few months of 2014 saw the unlikely publication of three English-language books devoted to the history and politics of Chinese museums - the two books under review here, and my own Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. [Editor's note: see review in this volume.] Given that not a single such book had been published before 2014, this is quite remarkable. The sudden interest in museums in China is in part a reflection of the rapid proliferation of museums that has taken place there in the past three decades. It is also a product of the heightened scholarly concern with issues of historical memory following the political liberalizations of the post-Mao era.
The two books under review here are different in scope and approach. Whereas Lu's book has a broad historical sweep that begins with 19th-century missionary museums and ends with museums in present-day China, Varutti's book, like my own, focuses on museums after the Cultural Revolution. Lu is more sociological in approach, adopting terms such as "agents" and Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" to describe the various forces behind Chinese museum development. Varutti also considers the "actors" involved in shaping museums and their exhibits, but she favours "discourse analysis" of the display of objects and is more concerned with the political, particularly nationalist, implications of these narratives. Especially in later chapters of the book, Lu takes as a principal focus the impact of museums on local society, whereas Varutti has her sights set firmly on the display of objects. Whereas my book focuses on history museums, Lu and Varutti treat a broader range of museum types.
Lu's foci are the various "agents" who initiate and drive the formation of museums. In the early stage of Chinese museum development, discussed in chapter two, Western missionaries, such as the French Jesuit and zoologist Pierre Heude,...