Content area
Full text
Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity
Marc Andre Matten (ed.), Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Iden- tity, Leiden, Brill, 2012, 285 pp.
In the past two decades, interest in collective memory studies has rapidly grown and has inspired debate among historians, anthropologists, and sociologists with regard to both theoretical issues and methodological tools.(1)This emerging field stretches beyond the borders of the "West," and scholars with different backgrounds are turning their attention to the analy- sis of non-Western contexts, where the interplay between collective mem- ory and the making of modern nation-states in post-colonial settings opens the gate to this previously uncharted and stimulating research domain.
The authors of Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity, edited by Marc Andre Matten, provide the reader with seven case- based critical analyses of the relationship between the historical past and the present identity of the "Chinese world," encompassing sites in the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Moving along different temporal and spatial coordinates, each chapter is well balanced in the presentation of data, interpretative analy- sis, and theoretical reflection and contributes to defining how the entangle- ment of politically-oriented actions and publicly shared memories creates, deconstructs, and regenerates "places of memory." In doing so, the book is cohesively organised within Pierre Nora's interpretative frame of lieux de mé- moire. A place of memory, according to Nora, constitutes a symbolic entity that relates the physical place to the collective memory of the community, a place "where (cultural) memory crystallizes and secretes itself" (p. 5).(2)
In the introductory first chapter, the editor convincingly shows that in the Chinese context, the creation of places of memory first arose in response to the crisis of identity prompted by the collapse of the Qing Empire and the quest for a modern nation-state identity. Afterwards, in the post-socialist era, the essence of Chinese identity has been sought in the reconnection with common cultural roots and the rearrangement of history into the celebration of the advancement of Chinese civilisation. Thus, places of memory devoted to the "aesthetic history" embodied by the terracotta army (Chapter 2) or to "red tourism" (chapters 4 and 8) or to the remembrance of China's "na- tional wounds" (chapters 6...