With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late s and s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the s, 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. 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. 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.
Provide s well-thought- out discussions of the museum 's role in shaping national identity, historical memories, and public discourse. Denton's book analyzes with great clarity and focus the links between the state and the public maintained via museum space. In sum, Denton successfully exposes the nuts and bolts of the state propaganda machine and the collective hypnosis that is its goal. Introduction In March , after more than four years of renovation to its building on the east side of Tiananmen Square, the National Museum of China Zhongguo guojia bowuguan reopened with a new permanent exhibition of modern history titled Road to Revival Fuxing zhi lu.
The very existence of an exhibit on contemporary history suggests a party that feels more comfortable about itself, its accomplishments, and its historical legacy and political legitimacy. Opening at the same time and in the same museum was a temporary exhibition called The Art of the Enlightenment, which presented a history of the European Enlightenment through art works and artifacts borrowed from three participating German museums. The ironic juxtaposition of the propagandistic modern Chinese history exhibit and the Enlightenment exhibit, which ends with a sketch of Voltaire shining a lamp to an undetermined place beyond the frame, was not lost on some critics, who opined that this was an effort to co-opt for the party the Enlightenment values of intellectual autonomy, science, the liberation of the self, and the public sphere and to conceal its sordid history of totalitarian control.
One essay in the special issue focuses on the centrality of enlightenment values to the intellectual discourse of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. The answer should be negative. No matter what, MarxismLeninism did not itself constitute a fundamental reaction against the European Enlightenment.
