Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China

by Margaret Hillenbrand

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478009047
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2020
Series:	Sinotheory
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Margaret Hillenbrand is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance and the coeditor of Documenting China.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Preface  xiii
Introduction. Staking Out Secrecy  1
1. Don't Look Now  45
2. Keeping It in the Family  89
3. Cracking the Ice  131
4. Ducking the Firewall  168
Conclusion. Out of the Darkroom  209
Notes  225
References  245
Index  277

What People are Saying About This

Andrew F. Jones

“Negative Exposures is a brave and revelatory book. With lyrical prose, nuanced argumentation, and a photosensitive eye, Margaret Hillenbrand limns the contours of China's contemporary cryptocracy, showing us how photographic images can work both to obscure and to bring the shadows of the historical past back into spectral presence.”

Chris Berry

“Negative Exposures is a boldly original book that analyzes cultural works based on photographs as objects that enable us to see and think through the unsayable in China. Margaret Hillenbrand contends that a culture of public secrecy, rather than censorship or historical amnesia, can explain how ordinary Chinese citizens fail or refuse to see and speak about difficult issues. This book is a powerful intervention that will be warmly welcomed and widely applauded.”

Editorial Reviews

Margaret Hillenbrand’s incisive and beautifully composed monograph takes...‘photo-forms’—repurposed historical photographs—and their circulation as the point of departure for her fascinating excursus of public secrecy in contemporary China…. Her work could not have come at a more opportune time.

China Quarterly - Patricia M. Thornton

Hillenbrand focuses on the medium of photography and its treatment of three key historical moments—the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Movement of 1989.... This is a beautifully conceived and nicely written book that is always interesting and thought-provoking.

MCLC Resource Center - Kirk A. Denton

Negative Exposures is a brave and revelatory book. With lyrical prose, nuanced argumentation, and a photosensitive eye, Margaret Hillenbrand limns the contours of China's contemporary cryptocracy, showing us how photographic images can work both to obscure and to bring the shadows of the historical past back into spectral presence.

Andrew F. Jones

One of the great contributions of the book is its intricate navigation across different disciplines and fields.... Filled with self-reflexive arguments, sophisticated analyses, and elegant prose, this engaging study is destined to be an important work.

Journal of Asian Studies - Kun Qian

How could I write a review that could possibly do justice to this eloquently written monograph?... Negative Exposures is thought-provoking reading for scholars and research students interested in culture and history, in creativity and politics, and in control and resistance, both in China and beyond.

China Review International - Yiu Fai Chow

This timely book by Margaret Hillenbrand...examines the mechanism of ‘secrecy’ as a main structuring force in contemporary Chinese society.... A courageous and revelatory work like this, also beautifully written, surely blazes new trails and opens up many questions.”
 

Chinese Literature - Mia Yinxing Liu

While sharply grounded in Chinese cultural history, Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures is a valuable addition to current studies on visuality…. Negative Exposures is an insightful account of media objects’ centrality within anthropological, art-historical, literary, historical and sociological modes of analysis, binding often disparate methodologies together.”

Critical Inquiry - Shaowen Zhang

Negative Exposures is a boldly original book that analyzes cultural works based on photographs as objects that enable us to see and think through the unsayable in China. Margaret Hillenbrand contends that a culture of public secrecy, rather than censorship or historical amnesia, can explain how ordinary Chinese citizens fail or refuse to see and speak about difficult issues. This book is a powerful intervention that will be warmly welcomed and widely applauded.

Chris Berry

Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures is a theoretically rich and provocative study that offers a new paradigm for thinking about Chinese cultural production under repressive governance.

The China Journal - Belinda Kong