Kirk A. Denton

Exhibiting the past : historical memory and the politics of museums in postsocialist China

During the Mao era, Chinas 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 states 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 Chinas 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.

The Columbia Companion to modern East Asian literature

Part 1: General Introduction by Joshua S. Mostow, General Editor 1. The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature2. Modern Literature in East Asia: An OverviewPart 2: Japan by Sharalyn Orbaugh, Associate Editor Thematic EssaysAuthors, Works, SchoolsPart 3: China by Kirk A. Denton, Associate Editor Thematic EssaysAuthors, Works, SchoolsPart 4: Korea by Bruce Fulton, Associate Editor Thematic EssaysAuthors, Works, Schools

Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping

This book opens up three new topics in modern Chinese literary history: the intimate lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping as a couple; real and imagined love-letters in modern Chinese literature; and concepts of privacy in China. The scandalous affair between modern Chinas greatest writer and his former student is revealed in their letters to each other between 1925 and 1929. Publication of the letters in a heavily edited version in 1933 was intended partly to profit from a current trend for literary couples to publish their private letters, but another reason was to assert control over their love story, taking it away from the gossip-mongers. The biographies in Part I, based on the unedited letters, reveal such hitherto neglected information as Xu Guangpings early tendencies towards lesbianism; her gender reversal games and Lu Xuns willing participation in them; Xu Guangpings two early attempts at suicide; and Lu Xuns attempts to play down Xu Guangpings political activism and to impress readers with his own militancy. Part II shows how Lu Xun chose to publish their edited letters in the context of current Chinese epistolary fiction and love-letters published by their authors. Part III provides unique evidence on the nature of privacy in modern China through a comparison between the unedited and edited correspondence. Textual evidence shows their intimate secrets about their affairs, their bodies, and their domestic lives; their fear of gossip; their longing for a secluded life together; and their ambivalent attitudes towards the traditional conflict between public service and private or selfish interests. Although it has sometimes been claimed that Chinese culture lacks a sense of privacy, this study reveals the contents, functions, and values of privacy in the early twentieth century.