Memoryscapes of Collective Suffering: Memorializing Natural Catastrophes in Contemporary China

• Applicants: Dr. Rui Kunze; Professor Dr. Marc Andre Matten
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404534127

The 2010s have witnessed increasing interactions between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China’s cultural industries in regulating the storytelling of the past and shaping public feelings. The coexisting master narratives of modernization and revolution are reproduced at the nexus of personalized experiences of the participatory consumer and the dominant historical discourses of patriotism and progress. How, then, can the CCP negotiate the “dark memories” of catastrophes into its success story? Existing research on "dark memories" has focused on political violence and social turbulences in twentieth-century China. Taking as the point of departure the relevance of controlling nature and solving ecological problems to CCP’s political legitimacy, this project investigates how natural catastrophes and their consequent human suffering have been named and narrated in the dynamic and diachronic process of memory-making under changing political, social, and technological conditions. Combining the methods of historical discourse analysis with media and literary studies, the project examines tourist sites as spaces of memorialization and addresses this central research question: What are the social and political dynamics and contingencies in the memorialization of natural catastrophes by China’s contemporary tourism? With the following two case studies, we foreground the "naturalness" of the catastrophic event as a constructed and contested issue: 1) Nature-based tourism at the historical site of the Huayuankou dike breach in June 1938, which led to the Yellow River flood (1938-1947); 2) Dark tourism memorializing the earthquakes in Tangshan (1976) and Wenchuan (2008), with erections and demolitions of memorials and monuments in both public and private settings. Confronting the idea of a monolithic and petrified "official historiography" of natural catastrophes, we delve into the interplay among different memory-making actors, changing landscapes of tourist sites, commemorative media, and public affects to investigate the continuous making of the memoryscapes of collective suffering. This project will make a critical contribution to our understanding of the social and political implications in the memorialization of natural catastrophes. It will enrich the fields of memory studies and affect theory with the case studies from contemporary China. More broadly, it joins the emerging interdisciplinary field of disaster studies, which approaches natural catastrophes as formative of history, whose social, political, and affective repercussions may last for generations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants