Illuminations from the Past
Douban
Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China
Ban Wang
overview
This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization.
contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Memory and History in Globalization
PART 1: TOWARD A CRITICAL HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
1. Tradition, Memory, and Hope: Lu Xun and Critical Historical Consciousness
2. Tragic Vision, Traumatic Visuality, and the Montage of History
PART 2: POSTREVOLUTIONARY TRAUMA AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY
3. Postrevolutionary History in a Traumatic Key
4. Temporality, Memory, and Myth in Wang Anyi's Fiction
5. Traumatic History Against Melodrama: Blue Kite
6. From Historical Narrative to the World of Prose
PART 3: GLOBALIZATION, NOSTALGIA, RESISTANCE
7. Reenchanting the Everyday in the Global City
8. Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Memory, and Commodity in Contemporary Chinese Literature
9. Remembering Realism: The Material Turn in Chinese Cinema and Street Scenes of Globalization
Notes
Chinese Names and Terms
Bibliography
Index
