MCLC: Exhibiting the Past

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Exhibiting the Past
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I hope everyone will excuse me for this shameless self-promotion. My book
on museums in China has finally been published by University of Hawaii
Press. As I write in my Acknowledgements in the book and would like to
reiterate now, "I also thank the members of the MCLC LIST community who
responded, over the years, to my many queries."

See details on the book below.

Kirk 

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Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in
Postsocialist China
Kirk A. Denton
University of Haiwai'i Press, 2014
360 pages, 75 illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth 978-0-8248-3687-0, $59.00
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9120-9780824836870.aspx

“In Exhibiting the Past Kirk Denton tells an important and unfamiliar
story filled with tasty and satisfying cultural nuggets. Through his
exploration of how Chinese museums capture and represent the past—the
result of massive reading and extensive travel—he helps us understand the
current political cultural moment.”—Richard Kraus (author of The Party and
the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture)

"Exhibiting the Past is an illuminating survey of China's most notable
museums and memorial sites. By painstakingly analyzing museum exhibits and
artistic representations, Kirk A. Denton reveals sharp tensions between
Communist ideology and market economy, state domination and local
interests, commanding official narratives and alternative historical
memories. This well-researched book is a timely and informative
introduction to a topic in China's modern-day culture"—Chang-tai Hung,
author of Mao's New World: Political Culture in the Early People's
Republic)

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. 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.