Lingchei Letty Chen's insightful and illuminating book interprets the aesthetics and politics of coming to terms with the Maoist past—especially the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—in three keys: memory, excavation, and representation. Memory, whether individual or collective, permitted or tabooed, in print or online, “is not only treated as a theoretical concept but also taken as an empirical artifact” (p. 1). Excavation showcases the profession and disposition of a humanist archaeologist “whose mission is to discover or unearth testimonies buried in words, the story lines, fictional characters, or politics of the day” (p. 17). Representation takes in manifold and interconnected forms of literature and politics, history and historiography, film and art. Located at the nexus of close reading, theoretical approach, and multimedia inquiry, Chen's significant and wide-ranging study turns the spotlight on the ongoing recollection and reflection of the Mao years, evidenced in literary trends, political campaigns, artistic manifestations, consumer markets, and Sinophone and Anglophone memoirs and postmemory of the traumatic past.
The ambitious and erudite introduction, “The Use and Abuse of Memory,” attempts to choose and apply keywords, discourses, and methodologies of memory and trauma theories and Holocaust studies to shed new light on the understanding of historical catastrophes in the Maoist time from the 1950s to the 1970s: Amos Funkenstein's anamnesis, Susan Rubin Suleiman's affair of memory, Andreas Huyssen's palimpsest trope, Marc Augé's memory's shores, W. G. Sebald's scraps of memory, Marianne Hirsch's postmemory, and, most importantly, Paul Ricoeur's interpretation of the use and abuse of memory in three levels and types—blocked memory (pathological), manipulated memory (practical), and obligated memory (ethicopolitical). In doing so, the introduction forcefully offers a timely and thought-provoking framework to scrutinize the various forms of memory and countermemory in fiction and nonfiction works dealing with the Maoist past from the immediate post–Cultural Revolution years to the twenty-first century.
The subsequent five chapters, which contain individual and related case studies, proceed in a well-structured chronological order. Chapter 1, “Literary Memory and Postmemory of a Traumatic Past,” situates the generational memories of adult survivors (the first generation) and child survivors (the 1.5 generation) in the larger context of the Scar, the Root-seeking, the Reflection, and (post-) avant-garde literature (including leading writers such as Can Xue, Ge Fei, Mo Yan, and Su Tong), and understands literary narratives as post-Mao witness and testimony to the political calamities.
Chapter 2, “Confronting Specters of the Past: Remembering Perpetrators,” explores themes of perpetration, guilt, confession, and retribution in representative works by the woman writer Dai Houying (a first-generation survivor and her Humanity, O Humanity!) and the avant-garde author Yu Hua (a 1.5-generation child-witness and his classic stories “1986” and “The Past and the Punishments”).
Chapter 3, “Where Documentary Proof and Memory Intersect: Remembrance of the Great Famine,” probes the cultural responses to the Great Famine from three perspectives and representations: filmmaker Zou Xueping's oral and documentary testimonies (The Starving Village and The Satiated Village), journalist Yang Jisheng's banned yet acclaimed reportage and investigation (Tombstone), and short-story writer Yang Xianhui's intricate narrative strategies (Chronicles of Jiabiangou and other works).
Chapter 4, “History's Doppelgänger: Allegorized Memory and Its Moral Imperative,” focuses on veteran and rebel writer Yan Lianke, an outstanding heir of Lu Xun, and his mythorealist writing, in particular The Four Books, as a personal and allegorical witness to the Great Famine catastrophe. Chapter 5, “Palimpsests of Identity: Memory-Lite Writings of the Cultural Revolution,” bifurcates into two entangled worlds: female writings in the Anglophone world and related identity crisis and formation (Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, and the edited volume Some of Us by Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di), as well as the problematic memory-lite production and consumption (popular, commercial, and even superficial memory works) in mainland China.
Indeed, Holocaust studies can serve as an entry point and provide an analytical frame to explore the complicated palimpsests of the aesthetical and political investigation of the Chinese calamities. Chen's succinct “Epilogue: Toward an Ethics of Remembrance and Criticism” envisions a possible and promising direction of bridging global Holocaust studies with her study of remembrance of the Maoist past, which strengthens the reflections of human tragedy and political violence and brings an important addition to the existing scholarship of literary and cinematic criticism on the Maoist legacy and its discontents, such as Xiaobing Tang's Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, Yomi Braester's Witness against History, Ban Wang's Illuminations from the Past, David Der-wei Wang's The Monster That Is History, Michael Berry's A History of Pain, Kirk A. Denton's Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, and Jie Li's Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, among others.Footnote 1
In my view, while a more critical reflection on memory boom, trauma theory, and Holocaust studies might be welcome, Chen's thorough and powerful reading of remembering, forgetting, and representing the Mao years teases out the multilayered reflection on literature and film as testimonies; the aesthetics and politics of trauma, amnesia, and amnesty; the entangled connections among victim, perpetrator, collaborator, and bystander; and the moral and ethical issues of recollection and articulation.
