Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

Sinotheory

by Margaret Hillenbrand

When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures , Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.

Genres: China, Academic, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

Published March 6, 2020

Reviews

[jq · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only is this book excellently argued and an example of sustained and careful art-historical scholarship, but Hillenbrand clearly loves her job; she takes pleasure in constructing sentences and crafting her arguments, and as a result, reading this book was deeply enjoyable.

[SY · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 stars] Great introductory chapter, but I found the rest of the book a bit thin on artwork citations that further / give shape to her narrative, by which I mean that the narrative didn't come out of the works themselves, but works were dotted along the path towards a narrative as totems and signposts. The quality of the works that she did bring into the discussion are of varying quality, the most convincing example for me was Zhang Dali's exceptional series of photographs "the second history," which didn't come until the concluding chapter, but there it did serve to make very vivid the copendent conditions of concealment and exposure. This is not necessarily a problem with the scholarship, but more a matter of differences in taste perhaps.

Where this book falls short on artwork close reading it more than make up for in its insightful commentary. The author presented a highly informative and up-to-date account of the state of political affairs in China when it comes to censorship, and as such, it is a great resource for China watchers everywhere.

[Alexander Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

ditto re: interview